Tuesday Brunch: Spielberg's UFO dream has curdled into a right-wing grifter fantasy
Plus the latest news and research on psychedelic safety
Founders Club this Saturday at 5pm UK time - I’ll send an email out to Founders with the zoom link
Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, hit theatres last week. It’s the fifth film he’s made about UFOs, going all the way back to Firelight, a film he made when he was 17. He made two films - ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind - which defined how generations imagined aliens. So powerful was the public impact of Close Encounters that UFOlogists were worried it would fan the public’s imagination leading to a lot of spurious UFO sightings. One UFOlogist speculated that the film might be a secret government plot to prepare Americans for disclosure.
When ET was released in 1982, it was likewise accused of being a plot trying to make aliens seem friendly, either a government plot, or an alien plot, or possibly both. A great Substack on these Spielberg conspiracy theories at The Observer writes:
The LA Times interviewed eight experiencers for their reactions to E.T. Most of the group believed that the movie was meant to prepare the world for Disclosure, seeing the film “as part of a much broader effort—involving Spielberg, the government, perhaps even extra- terrestrials themselves—to acquaint people with the likelihood (some say certainty) of alien visitation and to avert global panic when such a visit occurs.”
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, most Americans confined their UFO experiences to movie theatres - they were kooky semi-possible events to wonder over and laugh about rather than genuinely, seriously believe in. That’s changed over the last 15 years. Now, a majority of Americans believe in UFOs, and most think the powers-that-be are hiding the truth.
Yet although a majority of Americans now believe in aliens, this has not brought them closer together, as was the hope of many liberal-progressive UFO movies, Disclosure Day included. As with psychedelic experiences, Americans seem capable of opening their mind to extraterrestrials, while keeping them firmly closed when it comes to folks who vote for the other party.
If anything, it feels like the MAGA populist right has made more hay from UFO-mania than the Democratic Party. Voters are baying for Disclosure Day, and Trump has artfully tapped into that, suggesting that, while evil previous governments hid things from the people, he’s going to be the Great Discloser. ‘We’re going to be releasing a lot of things that we haven’t’, Trump said last month. ‘I think some of it’s going to be very interesting to people.’
The entire ‘disclosure’ movement of the last few years seems to have turned into a long, drawn-out grift-fest, taking place amid such a glut of spectacle, fraud and outrage that it’s hard to tell what is going on.
Given this cultural context, I found I couldn’t help but watch Disclosure Day as a sort of MAHA mushroom-mom fantasy.
The film begins with a shadowy corporate cabal which works with the government to prevent the public accessing alien artefacts. Josh O’Connor , a young hacker who works for the cabal, escapes with some of the materials and with all the government’s UFO secrets, which he plans to disclose to the world.
Meanwhile, in Kansas City, there is a weather woman played by Emily Blunt. She has no kids, a schlump of a boyfriend, she is dissatisfied and restless and yearns to be taken seriously. A bird flies into their apartment, Emily has a spiritual epiphany, and suddenly she can speak Russian. She drives to work, gets stopped for speeding, but suddenly she can read the cop’s mind, she is hyper-empathetic, and the bewildered cop lets her go. She goes on air to read the weather, but instead goes into some alien glucking. She can speak alien!
In MAHA terms, she’s a struggling influencer who takes too many mushrooms, decides she is a Starseed and thinks she has extraordinary magical powers - she’s an empath, an indigo child. Naturally her schlump of a boyfriend doesn’t understand her new powers - he needs to be dumped before he can call a psychiatrist. Floating on a cloud of her cosmic significance, Emily becomes the most important person on the planet - the person aliens are communicating with, the person evil Deep State forces are trying to silence.
By the end of the film, the entire world is listening to her and paying her attention. This is every New Age Instagram influencer’s fantasy. ‘Listen to me! The Galactic Federation is sending me downloads. We are about to jump timelines. Lionsgate portal is open. Trump is a lightworker. Sign up now for my Arcturian workshop.’
That’s what’s happened to the UFO culture that Spielberg did so much to create. That’s what it’s curdled into, and it’s not his fault at all, but it’s strange that Disclosure Day is so innocent of it.
After the paywall, should politicians be given ibogaine before they decide whether to commit state funds to it, or is that unethical? SpaceX IPO a bonanza for psychedelic philanthropists; four deaths from Amanita Muscaria poisonings. Plus some great new psychedelic safety papers.
