🛸 disclosure day dispatch 🛸

join me as i speculate about aliens, extra dimensions, and spielberg's new UFO movie

I feel like we’re not excited enough about the new STEVEN SPIELBERG ALIEN MOVIE coming out in a few months. And by “we” I mean everyone who isn’t me and the 500 alien conspiracy theorists I have become well acquainted with in the last few months because WE, unlike YOU, ARE excited about the new STEVEN SPIELBERG ALIEN MOVIE (!!!!!!!). Unfortunately, these people are probably deeply unwell, and therefore maintaining my curiosity without turning my YouTube algorithm into Q-Anon-A-Go-Go has proven a little dicey. But because I am big and brave and willing to travail the dark corners of Internet brain rot for the plot - and because I went to journalism school and therefore have enough media literacy to distinguish horse shit from real shit (I hope???????) - I am deep down the Disclosure Day rabbit hole and I’m here to bring you with me 🫡

Here’s what you need to know: the alien people do not think Disclosure Day is just a movie. They are pretty convinced Spielberg knows what’s really going on behind-the-scenes with aliens and that the film is a covert way of introducing the ~truth~ disguised as “entertainment”. The term “disclosure” is already well-known among the I Want to Believers, and the disclosure movement has been active since the 1990s. For all of the seeming hullaballoo around the term, the idea is pretty simple: a lot of people believe that the government knows more than they’re letting on about aliens/UFOs and that at some point someone will spill the beans to the public. The day this happens will be 🛸Disclosure Day🛸.

But of course nothing is actually that simple and these people have a lot of bizarro thoughts about how things will shake out. Probably the most interesting thing I’ve learned in my time among the Believers is that a lot of them don’t think aliens are beings from another planet but more likely… beings from another ~dimension~ (!!!) or time travelers from the future (!!!). (Some also subscribe to the Nope school of thought that UFOs are lifeforms, not machines, that are indigenous to Earth’s atmosphere.) I won’t get into the many many many theories and hypotheses and general crackpottery that comprise the spokes of the disclosure movement, but there’s a lot to sift through should you find yourself titillated.

Now, if you’ll allow a girl to get a little Mulder for a minute, while I more or less operate under the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ rule when it comes to Earth’s many mysteries (i.e. I think it takes an incredible amount of hubris to think our earthbound brains could ever know for certain the truth about concepts like god and life beyond), I do kinda like the “time traveler” theory. And so does Spielberg!!! This theory¹ posits that aliens are actually humans from the future coming back in time to warn ourselves about global catastrophes so we can prevent them, like nuclear detonations and the like. In the book Conversations with Mark Frost, Frost mentions a discussion he had with Spielberg during the first season of Twin Peaks regarding Spielberg’s work with J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer and UFOlogist who served as an advisor on Project Blue Book, during the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg hypothesized that the “us from the future” thing tracks because of how regularly UFO sightings have happened above nuclear testing facilities.

But more interesting than the time travel theory is Spielberg’s association with Hynek in general, because Hynek was a purporter of the EDI theory of UFOs, which refers to extra-dimensional intelligence vs. extra-terrestrial. Originally a skeptic, Hynek started flipping script in the 1960s after years on Project Blue Book, the code name for the U.S. Air Force’s investigation into the UFO phenomenon. As a consultant, he was able to easily debunk the vast majority of alleged UFO encounters - but there were a few he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, and these started to haunt him. It started with radar events, where highly trained officials would spot inexplicable flying objects on radars and be able to match them to other reported sightings; the alignment of tech and witness observations were too peculiar to dismiss. In 1966, he attributed UFO activity in Michigan to “swamp gas”, saying that locals must have inhaled natural gases that made them hallucinate. This explanation was largely mocked, but it also caused Hynek to publicly break from Air Force and request from them a more transparent study of UFOs. Hynek felt the that his dismissals were starting to sound more illogical than the possibility that extra-terrestrial life actually existed. As he explored more and more cases, he saw and heard many things that defied easy categorization: witnesses who reported stalling car engines, experienced missing time, were burned or physically marked, dealt with poltergeist-like activity after abductions or encounters, and developed telepathic communication or other psychic abilities. These stories coupled with physical evidence had Hynek wondering if there was some mixed-phenomena happening here. Sure, maybe the UFO panic largely stemmed from panic around atomic weaponry, but maybe there were other other inexplicable things happening that were being lumped in with the broader investigation - way weirder, more ~dimensionally~ ooky things.

In his theorizing, Hynek began noticing patterns in close encounter reports that didn’t behave like straightforward spacecraft sightings. Around the same time, other researchers - including scientist and UFO investigator Jacques Vallée - were comparing UFO encounters to older folkloric traditions and noticing similar patterns. A lot of alleged alien encounters sounded similar to stories of faeries, demons, angels, ghosts, etc. Sightings of these types of paranormal specters often came with similar side effects to alien abductions, like distorted time and psychic connection. Some researchers began wondering whether these experiences might represent the same underlying phenomenon, like maybe this is all the same thing presented to humans in different packaging depending on culture, location, time, etc. / maybe they are all different versions of inter-dimensional beings trying to communicate with us. This idea is similar to Vallée’s belief that aliens and UFOs function like a regulatory mechanism on the human belief system, a phenomenon that seems to mirror human expectations and cultural fears. In medieval Europe, people feared angels and demons within a religious worldview; in the 1950s, post-WWII, they feared invaders with dangerous weapons.

But what do we fear in 2026? In the tech age, our paranoia has largely shifted to the nature of reality itself. The internet has blown our dang brains apart, and with it our ability to access unprecedented amounts of information. But the information stops at a certain point, obvi. We know a lot - but we don’t know everything. What we do know is that the government hides a lot from us. They were hiding the Epstein files and then boom, here they are. What else are they sitting on? The rise of conspiratorial thinking stems from this, of course. And it loops right back around to aliens and Hynek and Vallée and anyone else who can’t really reckon with the behavior associated with all of these theories. Because if aliens are beings from another planet, how are they affecting our material reality the way they do in many of these reported encounters? Sure, advanced tech could explain some of that away, especially if it’s a species millions of years older than ours. But it doesn’t totally stack up, and that’s why EDI theory is such a popular “explanation”.

In EDI thinking, “aliens” aren’t little critters from another planet, or time travelers from the future, but extra-dimensional beings that don’t behave by the rules of physics as we understand them. That’s why they can alter perception, change form, telepathically control, affect consciousness, erase time. Abduction functions differently under this hypotheses, too. It isn’t aliens taking humans aboard a spaceship and doing tests on them but rather humans experiencing a consciousness event: they weren’t taken anywhere, but something “arrived” in them instead.

BUT WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH STEVEN SPIELBERG AND DISCLOSURE DAY????? you ask. A whole lot, I think!!! This has all been a lot of la-da-da background to get us to what I really wanted to do here today, and that’s THEORIZE, baybeeeeeee. I’m gonna get speculative about the potential plot of this movie, so if that’s not your kinda thing, or you’re worried about even theoretical spoilers, you are class dismissed from attending the rest of this worm-brained seminar. And to be very clear, I do not know if any of this is true!!! I am just a dork who likes alien shit and wants to write on this Substack more often and this is today’s little neurodivergent research dump!!!² I’ll also attempt to tie in a lot of what we just discussed in the interest of cohesion :)

Let’s start with the first trailer. In the interest of not making this post 500,000 words long (bet), I will break my observations into bullet points in chronological order as they happen. Also, just FYI, I am choosing to view this all through the lens of the aforementioned EDI theory where this is a story about beings from another DIMENSION because that’s what’s FUN to me.

• The trailer opens with Josh O’Connor and Eve Hewson in a dilapidated house, looking out the window at a field of deer who are staring back at them. I have been pretty disappointed with how many big movies have horrendous CGI deer in them these days and this is no exception! However, deer (and animals in general, as we’ll get into) are pretty common in alien abduction narratives. In many UFO cases, deer are reported as stopping and starring at the activity. Animals are also good at detecting environmental anomalies. Are Josh and Eve actually human? Or does Josh have something inhuman on him?

• We also see a deer enter a little girl’s bedroom accompanied by a cardinal that lands on its antlers. Right after, we see a different scene of Emily Blunt encountering a cardinal that flies through an open window and lands in front of her. I feel like this little girl is Emily Blunt in a flashback (they look similar) and the cardinal is signifying something that happened in her childhood… like an abduction mayhaps??? Cardinals are symbolically linked to death - they are said to represent dead loved ones returning to us as messengers from the beyond. Maybe here they are messengers from another DIMENSION?!?!

• The most notable set piece from this trailer is Meteorologist Emily Blunt being suddenly “controlled” by something unseen that speaks through her, while also manipulating the weather map behind her. It seems like the phenomenon (I’ll refer to them as aliens henceforth for the sake of simplicity tho) is using Blunt as a human transmitter for some kind of larger message, and it seems to be getting the message across because we see people all over the world watching and reacting. If we’re choosing to the whole “people aren’t abducted but arrived into” thing, that could be what’s happening here. Or maybe they “arrived” into her long ago and this is a sleeper cell activation.

• Blunt is a reporter for KXCE 4 in Kansas City. Why Kansas City? The midwest/Great Plains is a hotbed of UFO activity, Kansas especially - so much so that there are UFO museums in the area. Pretty good setting for a UFO movie imo.

• I’ve seen a lot of fuss over Josh O’Connor’s line, “People have a right to know the truth - it belongs to 7 billion people.” But… the global population is currently 8 billion. HMMMM. This seems to posit that the film is taking place in the past (2010-2015) or that 1 billion “people” on Earth are not really people but maybe… extra-dimensional beings pretending to be humans?????

  

  Universal Pictures

• Emily Blunt looking spooked by cardinals again. Are they reminding her of her abduction??? Her arrival??? Being confronted with the reality that maybe she is NOT HUMAN and is from ANOTHER DIMENSION???

• I will admit I did not recognize Colin Firth the first few times I saw this trailer, I don’t know why!!! He looks all fancy and governmental and suit-like and maybe that is just an unfamiliar presentation of Colin Firth for me? But he is possibly the most intriguing figure in this trailer - we see him strutting around this big techy facility full of screens and we also see him wear a headset device that makes his brown eyes turn blue as he “controls” Eve Hewson, whose blue eyes turn brown before she starts mimicking his movements. My guess is that the “aliens” are able to control people this same way and these folks are developing tech that either allows them to do the same thing because they are tech goons who want big profit, or they are trying to communicate with these beings and this is the best way to do it. Either way, my money is on them doing it for The Wrong Reasons.

• Josh O’Connor stands in the middle of a field while a crop circle manifests around him. INTERESTING. We don’t see a UFO causing this to happen, or aliens bending the stalks, which lines up with this extra-dimensional hypotheses. If they are from another dimension and capable of manipulating Emily Blunt’s voice, surely they can also manipulate nature and shit!

• In the same tech facility place, we see Colin Firth talking to a woman as a guy walks by, sort of like he’s observing a demonstration. When he passes behind the woman, suddenly the woman turns into… Emily Blunt!!! This supports my hypothesis that Emily Blunt was abducted or isn’t real or that her personhood is somehow being mimicked by the aliens and/or these mystery dudes. Why? Whomst knows!

  

  Universal Pictures

• The little girl who might be Kid Emily Blunt³ reaches for the hand of what appears to be a boy, if gender stereotypical color coding is to be believed. Who is this?? Josh O’Connor as a kid?? Someone else we haven’t seen yet?? Are they being abducted together?? This shot kinda mimics Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam hand-God detail, which lines up with the religious stuff also mentioned in the trailer.

• That “religious stuff” comes from all of the nuns we see, including one who asks, “Why would He make such a vast universe yet save it only for us?” Great question, girl.

• We got Colman Domingo and car chases and a TRAIN SEQUENCE and I don’t have anything much to speculate about here except to say that this stuff all looks awesome as fuck and very SPIELBERG in a way I don’t feel like he’s been GOAT Daddy Stevie for a while (not that he has ever slagged, I just mean in the big! action! set piece! way I once fully associated with him) and that alone makes this the movie event of the year for me personally :)

• Ok so my personal favorite little nugget from the trailer comes at the very end, when we see [Probably] Kid Emily Blunt and her woodland creature friends walking towards a house that looks like something out of storybook. In folklore, people being led by animals to fantastical places is a BIG OL’ THEME, which loops back to the theory that aliens are a form of folkloric tradition. In Celtic fairy lore, there are motifs of animals or other strange beings leading people to sidhe mounds that appear seemingly from nowhere. Time behaves strangely within these fairy dwellings and when people emerge, they are years older. In these stories, it’s usually children being led by forest animals or music. There are the Appalachian/Cherokee “little people” tales, which often tell of animals leading children into the woods, and houses appearing out of nowhere, and things seemingly occurring out of sync with time. These stories mostly existed to scare kids so they wouldn’t wander off alone, but similar accounts exist in abduction narratives, too. In 1961, Betty and Barney Hill described being “led” through a luminous environment and interacting with beings in a small and structured space. In the Pascagoula incident of 1973, two men described being paralyzed and “led” toward an alien spacecraft. In both of these accounts, there was time loss and mind control, too. But creepier than that, many alleged abductees describe stories involving “screen memories”, when the witnesses experienced seemingly harmless imagery that was actually masking something more sinister. Many have described encountering figures like clowns, owls⁴, and even cartoons during their abductions that they later feel were actually aliens the memory was disguising to make them feel safe. (Personally, I’d rather see an alien than a fucking CLOWN if I were getting poked at in an extra-terrestrial medical lab.) Feels pretty likely the house in Disclosure Day is NOT a real house and is in fact an ALIEN SPACESHIP where Kid Emily Blunt is being led by ALIENS not ANIMALS to her mysterious destiny. But the reason I’m extra hype about this is because it reminds me very much of another abduction scene from another Steven Spielberg project: the much-forgotten Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Taken. Take a looksie below and tell me if that doesn’t look a wee bit familiar!!!

I know that’s a LOT of garbage speculation from yours truly, and I know this post is already long as shit. But fear not, because I have even MORE thoughts because there is another trailer for Disclosure Day that played during the Super Bowl and this one has even more fun stuff to speculate about. I’ll keep this shorter because most of the trailer is the same as the teaser, but there are a few little things I’d like to pick apart to support my theory that isn’t really a theory but is mostly just Things I Noticed :)

• In this one, Josh O’Connor shows Liv Hewson something on a laptop that leads her to ask, “Are they… people?” and leads him to respond, “No.” Nothing new to report here but it kind of backs up the “maybe these are aliens in disguise” thing.

• We see more news footage, including a TV screen saying that North Korea is “prepared to defend itself.” So whatever is happening here is also threatening in some kind of militaristic sense, it would seem???

• Ok the main reason I want to share this trailer is because there are two very interesting things I noticed this time around. 1) There is a moment around the 45-second mark where we see water on the street as a bunch of cars come crashing through. At first it looks like they are just driving through a big puddle, but if you slow it down you’ll notice that the water actually appears to be moving on its own and hurling itself at the cars - I think anyway? Are the “aliens” doing this - manipulating the physical world to either disrupt or assist the govt guys? Or have the govt folks figured out alien tech and are using it to stall the good guys? But even more interesting is: 2) If you look at the background behind Colman Domingo at second 50 you’ll see that he appears to be on some kind of… set. A movie set? Or, and hear me out because this is my silliest speculation yet, but what if Colman Domingo is actually a movie director? What if his speech in the first trailer about how people keep “encountering” the unknown and are starved for the truth is because he’s a filmmaker who’s been studying aliens for decades as he makes movies about them? And what if he stumbled onto the truth in the process and is making a movie to reveal it to everyone…

I mean, IT COULD BE, right?????

Anyway who the hell knows. I’ve seen a lot of loser shit in my research escapades - lots of dumb dumbs on YouTube who livestream mumblecore alien “news” at all hours of the day, who are frothing at the mouth about what this movie is going to do to our ~understanding of reality~ and ~trust in the government~ (as if anyone still does that). I’ve also seen some guesswork that this is a stealth sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, given the similarities of the ship seen at the end of trailer 2 and the fact that some of this extra-dimensional stuff lines up with that movie, too: people plucked out of time and brought back the same age they were decades ago, etc. It could also be about human hive minds or maybe it’s all a big-ass misdirect and this is really a movie about AI. I know the conspiracy boys and girls will be plugged in and waiting to tell us how all of this is the Truth, Actually. I don’t think any of this is true and I think UFOs are, if anything, some fucked up tech we’re building to spy on enemies and ruin the world, but again I say:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The reason I like the EDI theory for this movie is because of how nicely it serves as a metaphor of the times. Like I mentioned above, the scariest threat to the world right now is the loss of objective reality - with the rise of AI, the possibility of state-run media, elected officials lying to us about things we can plainly see in video footage, constant coverups and denials and pardons… it’s hard to know what the fuck is going on ever. The EDI interpretation of Disclosure Day is cool because little grey men aren’t scary in the 21st century, but the the idea of an intelligent phenomena overlapping with our reality and interfering with our perception and identity, maybe even our consciousness… that hits different!!! It may not be ~us from the future~ but it’s a radical departure from the traditional alien/UFO film and so I wants it to be true. Give us something great, Stevie!!

Whatever the case, I hope you enjoyed this completely random, stupid, and obsessive deep dive. (Real “do you think a depressed person could make THIS” energy.) I used to get PAID to do this kind of thing⁵ and now I’m doing it for FREE so please enjoy :) Aliens are a lovely distraction from the hellish real world. Unless of course they are part of our hellish real world, or are extra-dimensional beings layered on top of our real world, in which case: come save us please!!!!!!!!!!⁶

1. The time travel theory also aligns with one of my personal favorite alien encounter stories: the Ariel School UFO Incident. In 1994, at a private school in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, 62 students ages 6 to 12 allegedly witnessed a silver craft descend from the sky and land in a nearby field. After landing, figures dressed in black emerged from the craft and telepathically communicated with the students, warning them about the dangers of technology and climate change. KINDA SPOOKY, NO? As with all things UFO, there are truthers and naysayers, but I’ve always found this to be one of the more convincing accounts given the sheer number of witnesses, all of whom had similar stories (including multiple kids who said the aliens looked like 1990s-era Michael Jackson 💀) and many of whom seem pretty damaged by it to this day. That said, kids are obviously susceptible to mass hysteria and false memories, so again I stick to my personal ethos of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2. Although, in the interest of, ahem, DISCLOSURE, I will admit that I know a couple of very little things about this movie, but nothing major and nothing whatsoever about the nature of the aliens or UFO or the deeper plot. More like a couple of anecdotes. When the movie is out I will report back with what I did know and you will all probably laugh.

3. I’m realizing now she could also possibly be Kid Eve Hewson?

4. “The owls are not what they seem” from Twin Peaks… very much in line with this.

5. By the grace of god, the very mentally ill breakdown of set photos I did for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for /Film like six years ago has dissipated into the internet ether.

6. Stuffing this into a footnote to say: I’ve already failed my posting goals for the year but I am choosing not to care and am choosing to just see to it that I post at least once a week and post a paid subscribers post at least once a month. It’s the little wins right now, folks, and the fact that I’m posting at all: little win.