Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is a movie in which characters argue about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be a threat to religion, something that a great many people have decided to argue about since the Pentagon started releasing tranches of U.F.O.-related files.
The film’s formal perspective, not surprisingly given that Spielberg has always been both alien-obsessed and friendly to religious ideas and motifs, is that extraterrestrial encounters need not be a threat to faith in God. A nun who asks why a divinity would “make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us” seems to be speaking for the film itself.
But the story also illustrates why one of the popular conceptions of extraterrestrial encounters is a potential challenge to organized religion, with aliens stepping into the role that’s traditionally occupied by popes and prophets and mystics, angelic messengers or the Holy Spirit.
“Disclosure Day” draws on the existing U.F.O. mythos in multiple ways. For instance, in Spielberg’s story the cover-up of extraterrestrial encounters is being managed by a government-affiliated contractor rather than the Pentagon, which is something that various would-be whistle-blowers have suggested could be true in our reality. (A U.F.O.-curious Republican congressman, Eric Burlison, recently wrote that “my investigation is following the trail into RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corp., M.I.T. Lincoln Labs, and the Northrop Grummans of the world.”)
But when it comes to the nature of the aliens themselves, the movie deliberately draws on U.F.O. encounter stories that evoke the supernatural, from William James’s varieties of religious experience to folk tales about what happens when you meet a fairy in the woods.
This is literally how one of the main characters remembers meeting aliens — in a fairy-tale environment, in childhood, where they appear disguised as friendly beasts. And the experiences that prove the truth of her encounters are straight out of religious mysticism: She speaks in foreign tongues, she reads other people’s thoughts and the implication is that the aliens are using her to help humankind to become spiritually mature.
Which means that if God exists in the movie’s universe, the alien race seemingly stands in a closer relationship to the deity than human beings, and they’re here to act as the divinity’s interpreters and agents. And that idea — again, a commonplace one in certain circles of U.F.O. discourse — is in pretty obvious tension with the belief that an existing scripture or teaching authority is the surest guide to faith and morals. (Indeed, a natural implication of the events in “Disclosure Day” is that many past religious revelations were probably mediated by an alien race, as in Erich von Däniken’s 1960s-era book, “Chariots of the Gods.”)
This is where some of the Christian anxiety about U.F.O. disclosure comes from: the talk of demonic influence from religious figures — talk that recently got a Washington exorcist sacked by the city’s cardinal archbishop, in one of this story’s many weird subplots. It’s not the fear that extraterrestrial intelligence would somehow prove God’s nonexistence (for all we know it might confirm it), but the fear of a particular kind of extraterrestrial encounter, where supposed brothers from another planet offer themselves as shepherds of our souls and we have to decide whether it’s a revelation or a grand deception.
Such an offer is not apparent in the waves of files released by the Trump administration, which so far confirm that the government has a lot of mysterious data from the skies, going back to the late 1940s, without offering any obvious unifying interpretation or evidence for the stronger, wilder whistle-blower claims.
Before those whistle-blowers started appearing, I was content with a spiritual interpretation of the U.F.O. landscape, in which claims of encounters belong to the category of “weird religious experiences interpreted through modern sci-fi-influenced cultural conditions” and we shouldn’t expect spaceships to actually descend. And I will be content with it once again if the administration takes the step that many figures involved in the disclosure push are now urging, and issues formal protections for anyone who comes forward with material evidence of secret programs and nonhuman technologies.
When I interviewed Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida (one of Congress’s leading U.F.O.-secrets believers), on my podcast a week ago, this was her explanation for why we have so many claims without confirmatory evidence: The people who have the proof fear prosecution or retribution.
I like to think that if I had the kind of evidence that drives the plot of “Disclosure Day,” I’d take some pretty substantial risks to be the person who revealed it to the public.
But talk from journalists is cheap. So I’ll just say that the administration officials who are so enthusiastic about hyping anomalous videos should be equally enthusiastic about whistle-blower protections — which, if they don’t yield anything except more hearsay, will let us hand the God-and-aliens debate back to Steven Spielberg and William James.
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