With his new film Disclosure Day, filmmaker Steven Spielberg is returning to the subject that helped make him one of the most successful directors in the world: extraterrestrials (or ETs).
But his movie also focuses on a second topic that has long preoccupied Spielberg and other sci-fi directors: faith. It’s a story about believing in something — whether it’s religious doctrine or UFO brain downloads — and the tensions that could arise between different kinds of prophecy.
“The movie takes the position of the believers, or the curious, the ones that have been deeply affected by this,” Spielberg said in an interview with CBS News. “And the movie also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?”
He’s not the only one making this connection. The film arrives at a time when our collective obsession with aliens has reached a fever pitch: The Trump administration has made a big show of releasing a trove of government files related to the UFO phenomenon. Even members of Congress are teasing reality-altering secrets, and talking about possible links to stories from the Bible.
But while the Pentagon’s gradual release of classified material on UFOs has elevated the conversation, religious thinkers have contemplated life outside of Earth for generations — and they’re surprisingly open-minded about what we might find. Pope Francis even said he would baptize an extraterrestrial.
Meanwhile, as the congregations for older faiths have shrunk over the years, belief in UFOs has been described as a new kind of secular religion.
Tzvi Freeman, a rabbi who has written on the subject of extraterrestrial life, told me that in a way, people are returning to a more ancient way of thinking about our place in the cosmos. Millennia ago, shepherds would lay out in the wilderness and look up at the stars.
“The way most people made sense of it was that we’re here at the bottom of everything. This is the pits,” he said. Space, on the other hand: “That’s up there. That’s huge. That’s big.”
Disclosure Day may not tell us much about the reality of ETs visiting our planet — but UFOs and their parallels with millennia-old religious traditions can still tell us something about ourselves.
How the world’s religions really feel about extraterrestrial life
In Disclosure Day, the head of a far-flung conspiracy to control the narrative about extraterrestrials warns of a worldwide collapse of order if the truth is revealed. But a sympathetic character, a person of faith, also is fearful of disclosure: She makes the case that humans “will stop believing in God” if they’re presented with evidence of superior beings in space to compete with the superior beings evoked by religion. “People can’t handle both,” she warns.
Spielberg’s not the only filmmaker to ponder how people of faith might react to the revelation of otherworldly life: In the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film Contact, a fundamentalist suicide bomber with a hatred of scientists destroys Earth’s plans to communicate with a cosmic messenger.
But religious leaders here in reality tend to sound much more chill about aliens. The Vatican has acknowledged the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe and affirmed its consistency with Catholic theology. Jewish rabbis have contemplated ETs and reached the same conclusion, as have Muslim scholars who see textual evidence that life could exist out in the vastness of space. Buddhists believe that their sacred traditions anticipate that life on earth is part of a much grander cosmic community.
On the other hand, those are theologians, trained scholars. What would ordinary believers do if we found incontrovertible proof that we’re not alone? I posed the big question to Ted Peters, a distinguished research professor of systematic theology and ethics at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and one of the leading scholars on religious attitudes toward the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
“Will religions collapse if they have to share the universe with other intelligent creatures?” Peters told me. “My answer is pretty categorically no. Because if you ask religious people, that’s what they’re going to tell you.”
Peters conducted a landmark survey on the question in 2008. He asked more than 1,300 people of varying religions about how they would respond to the disclosure that extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist. When asked whether they would experience a crisis of faith, more than 80 percent across different faiths — Catholics, both mainline and evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, even the non-religious — said they would not.
No matter their belief system, there was a consistent message. “The Word of God was written for us on Earth to reveal the creator,” said one evangelical Christian. “Why should we repudiate the idea that God may have created other civilizations to bring him glory the same way?”
Or as one follower of Islam put it: “Only arrogance and pride would make one think that Allah made this vast universe only for us to observe.”
When it comes to the big question Spielberg is posing with Disclosure Day, it seems many believers have already decided: Yes. Our god can be the god of a vast and populated universe. (Spielberg appears to have done his homework: A nun played by Elizabeth Marvel expresses the same sentiment almost word for word at one point in the film.)
There was one other finding, though, that struck me in Peters’s study. I asked him whether institutions might be more susceptible to disruption from disclosure than individual believers. And he noted that many respondents said that, while they themselves would not be rattled by the revelation of ETs, they worried their faith community’s leaders might be.
“In the Christian groups, lay people thought of themselves as more open-minded than the clergy would be,” he told me.
That suspicion of earthly authority is another consistent pattern in ufology — and also helps explain why so many of us continue to find the idea of alien contact to be so attractive, whether in the movies we watch or even possibly here in the real world. Salvation seems hard to find on this planet. Perhaps it will come from another.
What our UFO obsession reveals about us
From the start, there have been religious connotations to alien obsessives. Even as many enthusiasts of the 1950s and ’60s UFO craze focused on the nuts-and-bolts explanations of what these flying craft could be, the occult Theosophist movement was trying to fit them into a more overtly spiritual cosmology.
If you parse the general themes of ufology, it starts to look like a new-age religion of its own.
D.W. Pasulka, a professor of religion and author of American Cosmic, has argued that it performs many of the same functions as traditional faiths. As she put it recently: “It organizes communities of belief, creates narratives of revelation, offers cosmological meaning and establishes interpretive frameworks through which people understand mysterious experiences and humanity’s place in the universe.”
The specific appeal of belief in aliens, in this telling, is that it’s a response to the scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. Over the last hundred years, humanity attained the ability to destroy itself, whether by the atomic bomb or environmental catastrophe. Whereas we once looked to the gods in the heavens for deliverance from evil, UFO watchers look to more advanced sentient life from the stars to save us from ourselves.
“We have this enormous tension: How can we control science so that it will do good rather than evil?” Peters, the theologian, said. “So a myth develops, and the myth is that these extraterrestrials are more highly evolved than we are. They’re more highly advanced in technology than we are. And even Carl Sagan, the atheist, said, ‘[they’re] more moral than we are.’ Because they invented nuclear weapons and did not kill themselves. Therefore, they know how to live in peace with this science.”
These existential fears remain potent and new ones are joining them; artificial intelligence promises yet another means by which humanity might invite its own extinction. (And AI was the subject of a different Spielberg film that probed elemental questions of what it means to be a person.) As Freeman put it to me, he interacts every day with a quote-unquote “alien intelligence” that seems to challenge our conception of what it means to be sentient.
“There’s something here that’s smarter than me, and I’m just talking with it. Is it a person? What is a person?” Freeman said. “Our materialist reductionism is really, really failing us here. We’ve hit a phenomenon that we can’t explain [with] the terms we were given in school. I think this puts us really at a crossroads where our only way out is to return to concepts of a soul, a non-material being.”
We are living in a world that feels imperiled and people yearn for a grander narrative to make sense of it. It is, I think, an important framework by which we can understand what’s happening in the world right now — in everything from President Donald Trump’s political movement to the broad interest in UFO disclosure.
After the 2024 election, New York Times columnist (and Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein hosted former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, whose work focuses on information ecosystems and how people use media to build narratives, on his podcast. Their exchange on how people seem to crave something more mystical and mythical after the technocracy of the Obama era has stuck with me.
“Having lived through the ’60s, there was that sense of mysticism, of a connection to something beyond everyday life, that there must be something more to it than this,” Gurri said. “There’s a huge hunger for that right now… It’s impossible to measure empirically, but I profoundly believe that.”
It is a phenomenon in tune with our times, in which so many people are searching for something bigger to be a part of.
One data point, perhaps, is our current obsession with UFOs — as reflected in Spielberg’s decision to return to the subject, and in this specific way. His 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was concerned more with an individual awakening than society-shifting disclosure. ET was a parable awash in a grounded humanism. War of the Worlds, which came out four years after 9/11, treated the aliens as intergalactic terrorists launching a surprise attack on civilization.
But now Disclosure Day arrives, promising answers for why the world is the way it is. Space, UFOs, and the belief in extraterrestrial life offer people a connection to the same kind of grand narrative that could make more palatable the conundrums and crises of modern life.
“Height, distance, infinity. These are crazy experiences that evoke a sense of the sacred within us,” Peters said. “Space has a religious valence to it.”
Religion has long promised to help humans make sense of the world, its many contradictions and its dangers — and to offer a pathway to salvation. The UFO narrative has done the same in recent years. The truth may be unknowable, but we need some kind of faith to keep us afloat in a world in crisis.
