Above all else, Flowers says he appreciates how the film focuses on characters who try to blow the whistle on government knowledge. “I don’t know wha
Above all else, Flowers says he appreciates how the film focuses on characters who try to blow the whistle on government knowledge. “I don’t know what the truth is, but I take the whistleblowers who have come forward to testify under oath in front of Congress seriously,” he says, adding that he hopes viewers take a message of hope and empathy from the film. “And the sense that the damage done from fear and secrecy is far worse than any short-term challenges we might face by having the courage to accept the truth.”
For Paul Gutjahr, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies American popular religion, Disclosure Day leaves no question that Spielberg is a “believer” in extraterrestrial life. But he also thinks the character of Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), a former nun who left her convent after a crisis of faith, speaks to Spielberg’s ambitions beyond simply making the case for aliens. Gutjahr notes that the Catholic Church in particular has already made great strides in confronting how its theology might accommodate the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In 2014, Pope Francis said he would even baptize an alien—if the alien asked.
“The film puts different frameworks for understanding our place in the universe into dialogue, whether that be technology and science or religion or UFO community,” Gutjahr says. “Spielberg wants people to ask the question: what is your view on our place in the universe? Where does that view come from? What could unsettle that view? How committed are you to that view?”
Still, he also sees the movie as a bit of a missed opportunity. In his upcoming book, Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life, Gutjahr writes about the profound impact that belief in aliens has already had on religion and theology in the US. “There are religious traditions in the United States that are absolutely convinced there is extraterrestrial life, and those traditions probably give us clues about how people would respond,” he says.
The American fear of aliens—the ones from space—and UFO sightings date back at least to the beginning of the Cold War. For decades, the quest for real proof of extraterrestrial life seemed antiquated and conspiratorial, a product of the tinfoil hat crowd rather than solemn thinkers. This notion has shifted over the last decade as public figures like Joe Rogan have helped the UAP community make inroads with a younger generation of seekers. Along with more oddball speculation about alien influences on old technology, Rogan has frequently featured relatively mainstream experts on the subject on his show, The Joe Rogan Experience. Last year, he helped to promote the documentary The Age of Disclosure, which tells the story of a handful of whistleblowers who helped change the government’s approach to public release of UAP information.
So far, Rogan hasn’t commented on Disclosure Day—but some of his former guests have, and their reaction to Disclosure Day has not been uniformly positive. Computer scientist Jacques Vallee, a past guest of Rogan’s podcast, tells Vanity Fair that he hadn’t seen the movie yet, but it has been a “big topic” in his three UAP research groups. He adds, “The reactions I’ve heard were all over the map, so I’m eager to see for myself!”
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