Steven Spielberg Is Full Believer in Alien Life Now
"I don't know more than any of you do, but I have a very strong, sneaking suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth.”
For someone who’s made as many alien movies as he has, you’d think Steven Spielberg would be a full-on tinfoil-hat believer. But the director of such sci-fi classics as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was never that forthcoming about his beliefs about life out in the cosmos. Until now.
At a keynote interview at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival on Friday, to promote his upcoming sci-fi film Disclosure Day, Spielberg revealed that he fully believes aliens live among us. “I don’t know any more than any of you do, but I have a very strong suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now,” Spielberg said. “And I made a movie about that!”
So what inspired him to believe? And what pushed him to make his first true-blue UFO movie since Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Spielberg revealed it was actually the publication of a New York Times article in 2017 written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, which described an incident in which an F/A-18 took off from the USS Nimitz and encountered, per the airmen who witnessed it, "an object that accelerated like nothing I've ever seen."
This article, and the ensuing documentaries it inspired about similar inexplicable encounters, are what drove Spielberg to dream up the story for Disclosure Day, which he took to his friend and longtime collaborator David Koepp, who penned several of his most lauded classics, like Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds. “He had written a treatment, a story outline, which was very good and long... very detailed,” Koepp recalls to Inverse. “And he said, ‘What do you think of this?’
Spielberg and Koepp worked on the story over the course of two years, in what Koepp describes as “probably the most intense writing experience I've had with him.”
“I think, because it was his story, but also he knows he has done storylines with UFOs before,” Koepp says. “Each one with a strikingly different tone. If you look at Close Encounters, ET, and War of the Worlds, those are three very different genres even. And this one is different too, and he wanted it to be different and he wanted it to be perfect. So it was a very demanding process.”
It was during post-production for Disclosure Day that another piece of news pushed Spielberg further into the realm of true-believer. In January 2026, former President Barack Obama went viral for declaring that aliens are “real,” to which Spielberg had an immediate reaction: “Oh, my God, this is so great for Disclosure Day!” he joked.
Even though Obama walked back those comments pretty immediately, Spielberg still held true to his beliefs that aliens do exist. “He stepped it back to to say what he believed was in life in the cosmos — which, of course, everybody should believe in,” Spielberg said. “Because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe. So I’ve been thinking as a kid that we were not alone. So that just goes without saying. The big question is: Are we alone now? And have we been alone over the last 80 years? Have we been alone over the last few thousand years?”
But despite now being a firm believer, Spielberg said he isn’t afraid of aliens. “I have no fears about that whatsoever. I think our movie does take into consideration that social dislocation that could occur. If it was announced there is interaction [with aliens] that have been going on for decades, it’s going to cause a disruption in a lot of belief systems. But I don’t think it is a lethal disruption at all.”
However, he wouldn’t be opposed to an actual encounter joking, “I made a movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind — I haven’t even had a close encounter or the first or second kind!” he said. “Why haven’t I seen anything? Half of my friends have seen UFOS or UAPs. Where’s the justice of that? If you’re listening out there...”
