In 2017, The New York Times published an article bearing the headline: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.”
The piece written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean took a closer look at a top-secret $22 million slice of the Defense Department’s $600 billion budget, set aside for something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. As the name suggested, the program identified and investigated strange aerial phenomena, be it strange lights in the sky or objects that move in ways that defy known engineering principles.
The investigative deep-dive into the world of UFOs and UAPs piqued the interest of Steven Spielberg, who found himself inspired to revisit the topic of extraterrestrial life in what would become Disclosure Day.
Why Steven Spielberg wanted to make another alien movie with Disclosure Day
“There was a FLIR [forward-looking infrared] video that a whistleblower had given to the Times that came from a Navy jet,” Spielberg recalled in an interview for Empire’s latest issue. “It was an incident that happened in 2004 when Navy pilots, including David Fravor, flying from USS aircraft carrier Nimitz, observed a 40-foot-long oblong maneuvering without any visible propulsion off the coast of San Diego.”
“When that New York Times article was published and the Fravor footage was released to the public,” he continued, “it rekindled my interest in telling a story about total disclosure.”
That led to an original story, which ultimately became the screenplay written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds).
Spielberg already had a good amount of background on the government’s efforts to study strange occurrences in the sky, having consulted with J. Allen Hynek (head of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book and creator of the “Close Encounter” hierarchy) while prepping his initial foray into the big cosmic question: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
“I’ve been following this for a long time and, of course, there are documentaries that have been made ever since The New York Times published the story, which are available on almost every streaming platform,” he told Empire. “There is an interesting 72-episode documentary called The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch, which I binged through every season a number of years ago.”
When will Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day be released?
Disclosure Day arrives exclusively in theaters Friday, June 12. Tickets are not yet on sale.
The film will be released by Universal Pictures, where the director got his start with The Sugarland Express and Jaws.