From “Close Encounters” to “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg’s extraterrestrials have a lot to say about humanity.

Steven Spielberg and aliens: Tracing a decades-long obsession

From "Close Encounters" to "Disclosure Day," Spielberg's extraterrestrials have a lot to say about humanity.

By Randall Colburn

Randall Colburn

Randall Colburn is a writer and editor at **. His work has previously appeared on The A.V. Club, The Guardian, The Ringer, and many other publications.

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June 12, 2026 8:30 a.m. ET

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'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'; 'E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial'; 'War of the Worlds'.

Steven Spielberg’s *Disclosure Day* isn’t just the master filmmaker’s return to the summer movie season after a decade-long break. It’s also a return to what, aside from maybe World War II, is his favorite subject: aliens.

His first extraterrestrial exploration, 1977’s *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, was an Oscar-nominated smash. In the decades that followed, Spielberg made no fewer than five films that feature aliens in some form, so it’s no wonder that a sixth — 2001's *A.I.* — includes beings that are frequently mistaken for otherworldly visitors.

Spielberg’s aliens tend to look similar across his films, but the roles they play are drastically different. Only one of them, *E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial*, counts an alien as one of its central characters, and even then the titular creature's fellow aliens are shrouded in light and shadow.

Sometimes, the filmmaker's visitors come in peace; sometimes, they arrive with terrifying hostility; and sometimes, they’re more or less unknowable. No matter the context, they’re always connected to humans, whether embodying our desires, fears, or how we engage with the mysteries of the universe.

Spielberg's obsession isn't just an artistic one. Speaking with ** ahead of Disclosure Day, he discussed his firm belief that humans are not alone. "Based on a preponderance of visual evidence and testimony, I have no doubt that we have been visited by off-world species since Roswell in 1947," he said. "I was less a believer [before] because I always said, 'I've got to see one to believe one,' but now there's too much circumstantial evidence."

Read on as we take a chronological trip through all varieties of Steven Spielberg’s aliens over the past half-century.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'.

Just six months after the release of his pal George Lucas’s laser-blasting, arm-chopping *Star Wars*, Spielberg swooped in with a gentler, more awestruck take on extraterrestrials – and one that manages to keep them offscreen for the majority of its runtime.

Yet in some ways, *Close Encounters* is more harrowing than *Star Wars*, as it so closely puts us in the headspace of Roy Neary (early Spielberg avatar Richard Dreyfuss), an electrician who sees a UFO and becomes obsessed with learning more about this mysterious phenomenon. By the end, he's alienated (sorry) his wife and children, among others.

Spielberg’s wondrous depiction of the UFOs (and their memorable five-tone communication melody) makes Roy’s obsession understandable. In the end, he essentially abandons his family to join the aliens on their mothership. It was a decision the filmmaker identified with at the time, but he would later walk that back in a 1997 making-of documentary: "I would never have made *Close Encounters* the way I made it in '77, because I have a family that I would never leave," he said.

He elaborated in a 2011 interview with EW. "I’ve always said I wouldn’t do it if I was making the movie from scratch today, because I have seven children," he said. "I had no hesitation writing that and directing that then, but I had no dependents in my life at that time."

Yet the movie still feels intensely personal. James Lipton once pointed out that Spielberg’s parents were a musician and a computer scientist, which lends weight to the scenes in which scientists use music to communicate with aliens.

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E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982)

E.T. in 'E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial'.

After shooting *around* alien bodies for most of *Close Encounters*, Spielberg went the other way with *E.T.*, a smaller-scale movie where the alien not only has a name and personality, but a lot of active screen time thanks to some remarkably lifelike puppetry that brings to life an adorably homely, long-necked, squash-faced visitor.

Separated from his ship, E.T. crosses paths with Elliott (Henry Thomas), a lonely 10-year-old struggling in the aftermath of his parents’ divorce. He and E.T. become unlikely friends in a sci-fi story that nonetheless qualifies as one of Spielberg’s most quietly observational films.

Up close and personal with an alien for the first and, really, only time in his filmography, Spielberg uses E.T.’s otherworldly powers sparingly but effectively — a series of magic tricks that gradually get bigger until he’s lifting a whole fleet of kids’ bikes off the ground in a truly exhilarating sequence.

A.I. (2001)

A mecha with Haley Joel Osment's David in 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence'.

Technically speaking, there are no aliens in *A.I.*, which arrived nearly 20 years after the release of *E.T.* The sci-fi epic centers on a lifelike robot child named David (Haley Joel Osment) who has been programmed to love his human mother, and goes on an obsessive, *Pinocchio*-inspired quest to become a real boy. Explaining *why* this misconception about aliens has perpetuated over the years involves major last-act spoilers for the movie. So if you haven’t seen it, go watch it; it’s one of Spielberg’s weirdest, most devastating, and all-around best movies. Once you have, read on.

So at the end of *A.I.*, David sinks to the bottom of a flooded New York City, where he waits in vain for the statue of the Blue Fairy from *Pinocchio* to turn him into a real boy. As century upon century passes, the oceans freeze over and he is retrieved by what look like skinny, spindly aliens — not too unlike those briefly seen throughout pop culture, including in other Spielberg films.

This is just one of many things about *A.I.*’s crucial epilogue that has thrown some viewers into anger or confusion: the feeling that a whole other movie is starting up just when you're expecting the credits to roll.

But while these entities are confusing at first, Spielberg is knowingly playing with his past imagery. David isn’t rescued by aliens but highly evolved “mechas” — robots many generations more advanced than his own human-imitating model.

The mechas want to study David and his uncanny human qualities; within him, in a sense, is the last remnant of the long-dead human society. The otherworldliness of these robots, then, seems fully intentional, as they are as far removed from humans as any alien being would appear to us now. Again, Spielberg uses an alien-like figure to reflect our humanity, though in a far more heartbreaking way, as David’s fondest wish is temporarily granted as a sort of deathbed vision for the entirety of the human race.

War of the Worlds (2005)

An alien machine in 'War of the Worlds'.

For roughly the first three decades of his career, Spielberg tended to take a fairly sanguine view of aliens, refusing to succumb to the disaster-movie framework of aliens attacking terrified Earthlings. That changed in a big way after 9/11, when Spielberg made a couple of Tom Cruise-starring sci-fi blockbusters grappling with a changed world.

One was *Minority Report**,* which* *was actually in production well before the 2001 terrorist attacks. The other was *War of the Worlds*. Spielberg’s retelling of the H.G. Wells story uses explicitly 9/11-inspired imagery — “Is it the terrorists?” a little girl cries when the destruction starts — to create some of his most horrifying sequences.

Notably, the aliens laying waste to Earth in *War of the Worlds* are just as mum about their intentions as those in *Close Encounters*; no great explanation is ever provided for their hostility. That ambiguity feels appropriate to the War on Terror era in which the film was made, evoking not just terrorist attacks but, arguably, the broader anxieties and moral ambiguities of the period.

Spielberg uses the occasion to depict yet another wayward dad (Cruise) stepping up for his family. But in a sort of funhouse-mirror inversion of *Close Encounters* — where a father's wonder and curiosity supersede his loyalty to his family — there isn't much Ray can do beyond trying to protect his children as best he can.

Despite its nontragic resolution, it's no more a family-reunification movie than Spielberg's earlier, more peaceful film.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

An alien — sorry, an inter-dimensional being — in 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'.

The addition of flying saucers into the Indiana Jones lore struck some fans as a bridge too far — a second “nuke the fridge” moment in a movie that already unwittingly coined another phrase for “jump the shark.” These people are, frankly, no fun at all; whatever the faults of this fourth Indiana Jones adventure, bringing Indy into the 1950s with an alien-inflected plot reflecting B-movies of the era sure isn’t one of them.

Because Spielberg occasionally collaborates with his buddy George Lucas, Indy (Harrison Ford) isn’t encountering any straightforward aliens from another world during the film’s loopy climax. They’re actually inter-dimensional beings capable of conferring knowledge that will literally melt humans' minds. Consider them conduits for the franchise's recurrent theme of hubris in the face of an unknowable supernatural power.

If anything, *Crystal Skull* should have leaned *further* into its sci-fi trappings. It’s the movie’s jungle-bound material that feels the most like a creaky, overpopulated retread of past glories. The aliens, as ever in Spielberg’s work, are allowed to represent something newer and more mysterious, here with some lingering *War of the Worlds *menace in their promise of omniscience — or something like it.

Disclosure Day (2026)

'Disclosure Day'.

In some ways, *Disclosure Day* feels like a belated reinterpretation of *Close Encounters* by way of the* **X-Files*-obsessed ‘90s, when alien stories went hand-in-hand with government conspiracies. (Even the rah-rah alien disaster movie *Independence Day* features some abduction and cover-up shtick.)

Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is working to expose some sort of extraterrestrial secret, while fate (or is it a sixth sense?) draws him into the orbit of Margaret (Emily Blunt), an ambitious weather reporter who suddenly finds herself imbued with mysterious abilities.

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Yet *Disclosure Day* also feels as much like an answer to Spielberg’s own *War of the Worlds *as his 1977 classic — and not just in the heedless forward momentum of its chase-heavy staging, recalling a bravura bit of highway speeding from the 2005 film.

While the latter project captures a moment of geopolitical paranoia, the new film finds the planet inching toward the brink of destruction without any outside help. It’s a dazzling, sometimes odd, and ultimately earnest crossing of that *Close Encounters*-style curiosity with hints of *War of the World*s-style apocalypse, relentlessly focused on what the discovery of alien life forms might mean for the human race as a whole. Is it our last chance at unity, or have Daniel and Margaret arrived far too late?

That Spielberg sees fit to ask this question at this juncture in his career — returning to a subject he has managed to refresh and reframe yet again — is deeply touching. It also speaks, as all of these films do, to the *why* behind our questions about being alone in the universe.

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