“Disclosure” has become a cult word. It shouldn’t be, since all it means, technically, is to reveal something. But the new wave of alien conspiracy theorists have made “disclosure” into a teasingly passive-aggressive code word. They will say: We’re awaiting disclosure — which means the day the U.S. government bows down and releases all its files and hidden information, its secrets, relating to UAPs and alien visitations. (Or the day a whistleblower does it.) I agree that the government should release all this stuff. Let’s see it, put it out there, finally clear the air about what’s up in the skies.

But if “disclosure” simply meant “Let’s see what’s in those files,” it wouldn’t have that self-righteous 1960s edge, that weaponized sense of asking for The Truth that The Man refuses to show you. What “disclosure” really means, in today’s everything-is-a-conspiracy world, is: We demand…that you disclose…the revelations we know you’re hiding. The evidence of spaceships! And aliens! And all the good stuff you’ve gotten to see that we haven’t! In 2026, to believe in “disclosure” is to believe the Deep State is hiding the truth, and that the day of reckoning is upon on. Because we the people demand it! 

All of that is wired into the attitude of the new alien-conspiracy theorists, who are a lot like the old alien-conspiracy theorists, though with a key difference. In the ’70s and ’80s, alien-conspiracy theorists were mostly seen as crackpots. They were on the fringes, and the building blocks of their belief system – crop circles, grainy 8mm footage of lights in the sky, tales of alien abduction — were like the “clues” to the more out-there conspiracies of the era, from Paul Is Dead to the theory that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing.   

Today, however, cover-up and conspiracy is the air we breathe, whether it’s Donald Trump peddling his stolen-election scenarios to the MAGA faithful or those of us on the opposite side of the political spectrum feeling — knowing — that the truth is out there…in the Epstein files. (How about a disclosure day for them?) What we’re all searching for, in this age of maximum corruption and minimum transparency, is the Hidden Information That Will Set Us Free. It’s an understandable impulse, but it’s also one that’s turning into a religion.

It first became a religion, at least for some, in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, when the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have acted alone — and that the government we trusted was therefore a hotbed of treachery — became a yardstick of faith, even as the very thing we were spurring ourselves to believe in was (ironically) the loss of faith. We believed, with holy fervor, in our new lack of belief in America. It’s as if a reverent cynicism about the malfeasance of the government replaced the old reverence toward government. We now believed in conspiracy as fervently as we’d believed in the institutions the conspiracy was designed to take down.

“Disclosure” is a lot like that, though with an added layer of fanboy wonder; that’s part of what makes it cultish. It’s people saying to the government, “You are liars. You have hidden this reality from us for 79 years. But now, you shall reveal it. The power has shifted to us. The power of disclosure now trumps the power of your secrecy. And in the process, we will get to learn that ‘Star Wars’ was real! Which will be totally fucking cool.”

Whatever you think of it as a movie, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is designed to lend credible resonance to these thoughts and emotions. You might say that “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 49 years ago, did the same thing. As I argued in my review of “Disclosure Day,” “Close Encounters” had a more profound impact than many realize in shaping our dreams of extraterrestrial visitation. All the sci-fi alien movies before it (the 1953 “The War of the Worlds,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) just looked like stodgy backlot fantasies with ancient FX hardware. But “Close Encounters” was a vision, and the image of the extraterrestrial at the end of it helped set the template for the alien-abduction ’80s.

But back in 1977, you could love “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” without thinking it was real. “Disclosure Day” has a different vibe. It’s presenting itself as an imaginary docudrama of what it would look like if all the alien fanboy conspiracy theorists had their wet dream of disclosure come true. And Spielberg, in the interviews he’s done to publicize the film, has suggested that he believes in all this stuff — though watching him closely, I don’t actually think he does. I think he knows it’s hokum, but that he’s tapping into the “reality” factor of it all to lend gravitas to his movie.

“Disclosure Day” surfs the wave of the new credibility that surrounds alien encounters, which was given a shot in the arm by last year’s po-faced documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” which featured scientists and U.S. military higher-ups — official white men with titles! — testifying that they’d seen shit that would blow your mind. (They had seen the real “Star Wars!”) Spielberg’s movie includes all the theories, trendy and otherwise, about what is being covered up and how: that the first landing was at Roswell in 1947, that we have alien bodies and possibly live aliens in our possession, that we’ve reverse-engineered alien technology, and that private corporations are leading the way (because they’re now more sinister than the government). Spielberg’s older alien movies (“Close Encounters” and “E.T.”) both featured government cover-ups, but the difference is that “Disclosure Day” doesn’t present itself as the new “Close Encounters” — more like the new “Erin Brockovich.”

I would probably have no objection to this if the movie had more of a compelling otherworldly heft to it. Powerful art is its own reward. But when you see “Disclosure Day,” it feels like Spielberg is just recycling the conspiracy “evidence” that’s already out there. On the one hand, there’s a lot of evidence — at least, of mysterious spacecraft in the sky. I watch footage of it every day on social media. Yet this isn’t 50 years ago. We now live in a society that’s laced with surveillance cameras, where everyone in the world has a camera on their phone. I persist in asking the question I did when I reviewed “The Age of Disclosure”: If these really are alien spacecraft, and the aliens have truly arrived, why don’t we have a single definitive image of that taken by some random citizen? Why is the evidence only in the top-secret files?

Maybe the truth, if revealed, would turn out to be a lot more down to earth. Yet in the yearning that has made “disclosure” into a serious political slogan and maybe a movement (now given added credibility by a prestige Hollywood movie), we have elevated the belief in aliens into a cutting-edge “political” issue, as if this were Watergate or Iran-Contra or the JFK files or the Epstein files. We have turned magical thinking into “scientific” reality. In doing so, it’s legitimate to ask whether we’re aiding and abetting the forces of unreality.