Is Disclosure Day real? What's true in Spielberg's film, and where real UFO disclosure stands

Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist in Kansas City, suddenly starts speaking an unknown language in the middle of a live broadcast. Meanwhile cybersecurity specialist Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) steals an alien artifact and "the Archive" from Wardex, a secretive US government contractor: decades of documents and footage of extraterrestrial encounters going back to Roswell. The company's CEO (Colin Firth) hunts them, while a group of former Wardex employees led by Colman Domingo's character wants to broadcast everything to the world. Spielberg has described it as a bookend to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977): what if the aliens never left, and their presence was covered up?

David Koepp ("Jurassic Park," "War of the Worlds") wrote the screenplay from Spielberg's story, and John Williams scored it, his 30th collaboration with the director. The film premiered in Paris on June 2, 2026, opened in the US on June 12 and has taken about $248 million worldwide.

"The characters and the events in the film are fictitious, of course," Spielberg himself said in a June 2026 interview with CBS Sunday Morning. There is no company called Wardex, no such Archive, and no meteorologist has spoken an alien language on air. The language was invented too: Emily Blunt has said she created the sounds herself and performed them in a single four-minute take.

And the alien footage? Everything in the film's Archive is part of the story, created by the visual effects houses Digital Domain, Storm Studios and Wētā FX. If a clip reaches you labeled "real footage from Disclosure Day," it is a scene from the film or the trailer, or AI. Here's how to check a UFO video.

Spielberg has said what pulled him back to the subject was The New York Times story of December 16, 2017, which revealed the Pentagon's secret UFO program. He wrote the story outline in the summer of 2023, the summer David Grusch testified to Congress about recovered non-human craft. Koepp has said the script avoids the word "aliens," using terms such as "non-human biologics," the phrase from Grusch's testimony. One character is named Nathan Twining, after General Nathan Twining, who wrote in a September 1947 Air Force memo that the phenomenon reported was "something real and not visionary or fictitious."

Spielberg doesn't hide his own view. "I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here," he told CBS, adding that "the movie is built on a foundation of truth, in my humble opinion." That is a director's personal belief, not evidence. It has a history: "Close Encounters" had as its consultant astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who devised the close encounter classification that gave the film its title, and who even made a brief appearance in it.

"Disclosure" is the US term for the push to make the government release what it knows about UFOs. That push has produced a lot in recent years, but no confirmation of aliens:

The real-world version of a disclosure day is a law. The UAP Disclosure Act from Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds, introduced in 2023 and modeled on the law that released the JFK assassination records, would gather all government UFO records at the National Archives, presume they should be public, and give an independent review board the power to decide what stays secret. Only a weakened version became law, in December 2023.

On July 22, 2026, the House passed the full version as part of the 2027 defense bill. The Senate has not voted on it, and the outcome will be settled in the final bill, expected around December. Even if it passes, it would force the release of records, not a declaration that aliens exist. Every congressional UFO hearing so far.

A real disclosure would look nothing like a movie: an official statement from the President or from a body such as the Pentagon, NASA or the intelligence community, saying plainly that non-human intelligence exists, backed by evidence that independent scientists can examine. A film, a podcast, a leak or an anonymous "senior source" doesn't count. We don't know whether such a day will come, or when.

If it does, our tracker Has the US government confirmed aliens? will update first, with running coverage on our live news page. Every official step so far is in our disclosure timeline.