It’s quietly become a trendy new genre in Hollywood: The serious UFO movie.
An invasion of projects across the narrative and documentary space are exploring the topic of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), including prestige films from Steven Spielberg and Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski.
While movies about spacecraft and aliens are as old as filmmaking, this wave is heavily influenced by a perhaps unprecedented level of media, lawmakers and public interest in videos and discussion of “UAPs” that has included congressional hearings on the subject, the emergence of government whistleblowers, and the release of much-debated Navy footage of objects some claim defy the laws of physics.
The truth, in other words, has gone from being “out there” to feeling just around the corner.
The latest project in the mix: Producer and podcaster Bryce Zabel (Dark Skies, Taken) has just packaged a film with UTA that’s billed as “the most grounded, historically anchored” look at the 1947 Roswell incident yet. Sylvain White (The Boys, Fargo) is attached to direct.
Titled Unidentified, the fact-based tale moves across three timelines: The infamous 1947 incident where the U.S. Air Force announced — then quickly retracted — that it had recovered a “flying disc,” a 1990s narrative focusing on Roswell investigators racing to secure testimony from witnesses and a present-day murder mystery looking into mysterious deaths related to the incident. The film focuses on nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and author Donald Schmitt, who endeavored to figure out “the truth” behind the story. The film is partly based on Witness to Roswell, which Schmitt wrote with Thomas Carey.
“Roswell no longer feels like folklore — it feels like unfinished business,” says Zabel, who just launched an iHeart podcast on the UAP topic titled Sound, Light & Frequency. “Instead of seeing Roswell as pop culture, our whole package — script, director, IP — treats it like a crime scene. This isn’t a movie about little green men. This is about what happens to ordinary people when the impossible crashes into their lives. These two researchers are American heroes who never gave up and found hundreds of witnesses to this event.”
And then there are the heavy hitters wading into this: Spielberg has his Universal film Disclosure Day, about the global panic and societal upheaval when humanity receives undeniable proof that aliens exist. While Jerry Bruckheimer is producing a UFO disclosure thriller for Apple Original Films, directed by Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), that’s been described as a “UFO-themed All the President’s Men.” Congressional UAP whistleblower David Grusch is attached as a consultant on the Kosinski film. There’s even a new reboot of The X-Files in the works for Hulu with Sinners writer-director Ryan Coogler.
“This topic is fascinating and it’s been fun to find people who are really into it, because it’s a hole you can disappear into when you’re talking to the people who are in the middle of it,” Kosinski tells The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s so much information that is not public yet about various things. This movie is going to blow people’s minds.”
To some extent, minds have already been a bit blown — or at least perplexed — by real-world events. Last year, a buzzy documentary, filmmaker Dan Farah’s The Age of Disclosure, contained interviews with 34 current and former government officials discussing UAPs. The film reportedly broke Prime Video’s VOD record for its highest-grossing documentary of all time when it dropped in November.
And in the last two weeks, Barack Obama made global headlines for casually saying aliens are “real” — before clarifying he meant aliens likely exist somewhere in the universe. His remarks spurred Donald Trump to raise eyebrows by claiming Obama had revealed classified information, and the president then announced on Feb. 20 he would declassify and release files related to UFOs/UAPs.
“The zeitgeist of our moment right now is the UFO, UAP reality issue,” Zabel says. “I think we are seeing more and more projects come forward because people are now becoming aware for the first time that this is a serious thing and it’s not crazy. You couldn’t have two presidents that are more different than Obama and Trump, and yet both of them are entertaining the possibility that this is real. And with Obama, it’s very similar to the Roswell thing — you tell the truth and then you have to buy it back.”
Next up is Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, which drops June 12. Spielberg has been fascinated by the UFO topic his whole career, with his 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind still considered by many to be the most compelling dramatization of the subject. In a behind-the-scenes video discussing Disclosure Day, Spielberg said, “People’s questions about what is not only going on in our skies but what is going on in our worlds, in our realities, has reached a critical mass of people’s complete fascination with: Are we alone, or are we not alone? And if someone knows we’re not alone, why have we not been told?”
Spielberg’s film has been generating some conspiracies online given its tagline (“All Will Be Disclosed”) and its title’s similarity to The Age of the Disclosure documentary. Put simply: Some believe the documentary and Disclosure Day are part of a coordinated government-Hollywood movement to prepare humanity for the near-term disclosure of alien life. The fact that Farah was a producer on Spielberg’s Ready Player One has added fuel to this, and the narrative has gone into overdrive since Obama and Trump’s viral comments. It’s unclear if such confusion over Spielberg’s film will help or hurt its box office potential (Universal declined to discuss its marketing for the film).
To be clear, there have been plenty of reports pushing back on the UAPs-as-aliens narrative, though they tend to get less attention than the “it’s aliens!” claims. A Wall Street Journal story last June reported that the Pentagon has seeded and encouraged UFO myths as a way of providing cover for real top-secret test flights of cutting-edge aircraft. The Pentagon has also resolutely maintained they have found no sign of alien life in reported UFO sightings going back decades. Similarly, new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently told The New York Times he has not seen any evidence — secret or otherwise — that his agency has encountered proof of alien life.
There are UFO believers who blend these two seemingly conflicting ideas: That most orbs and crafts and lights in the sky are indeed not-yet-revealed U.S. military technology, which has been reverse engineered from (you guessed it) retrievals of crashed alien spacecraft — like the one at Roswell.
For Farah, who says he was firmly convinced by his Age of Disclosure documentary participants, the real-world disclosure movement and the pop cultural side naturally travel hand in hand.
“Film has always helped usher in cultural transformation and accelerate change,” Farah said. “We wouldn’t be living through this extraordinary time without the cultural impact Steven Spielberg made with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. We’re now seeing multiple films about the existence of non-human intelligent life being covered up by the U.S. Government because we are living in the age of disclosure—the moment in history in which we learn we are not alone in the universe and that the truth has been kept from us for 80 years.” — Beatrice Verhoeven contributed to this report.