Steven Spielberg has made six alien movies, he’s clearly a believer

When Steven Spielberg was five or six years old, his father shook him awake in the middle of the night.

They were living in New Jersey and the young Spielberg was bundled into the car with the promise of a “surprise”. That treat turned out to be the Perseid meteor shower, which the father-and-son watched from a large park along with scores of others.

“My dad found a place, spread the blanket out and we both lay down. He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower,” Spielberg recalled in a biography of his life, to writer Joseph McBride.

“All these incredible points of light were criss-crossing the sky. It was a phenomenal display, apparently announced in advance by the weather bureau. My dad had really surprised me – actually he frightened the hell out of me! At the same time, though, I was tremendously attracted to the source, to what was causing this.”

That mixture of being scared and fascinated has been pervasive throughout Spielberg’s many films that looked to worlds beyond our atmosphere.

A dozen or so years after that meteor shower, a 17-year-old Spielberg made his first feature film in 1964, Firelight.

Even though Spielberg has called it one of the five worst films he’s ever made, and very little of it has ever been made public or survives, Firelight is instructive in the arc of the filmmaker’s career given its subject matter: aliens who want to transport an entire American town to their home planet to create a human zoo.

Across three dozen films, Spielberg has remained captured by the idea of extra-terrestrial life, from that very first film to his most recent release, Disclosure Day.

Disclosure Day opened in cinemas this past weekend, grossing $US92.9 million worldwide. The story is centred on a group of whistleblowers who are attempting to release decades of video evidence of alien life on Earth. It stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo and Colin Firth.

It’s not just a return to blockbuster filmmaking for a director who has dabbled across genres, but also to one of his favourite topics.

After Firelight, it would be another decade and change before he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which cemented him as an exciting sci-fi filmmaker, a genre that up until then, was more likely to be goofy (Plan 9 From Outer Space) than serious (2001: A Space Odyssey).

With its interconnected stories of alien abduction, Close Encounters fed into the still-bubbling off-screen conversations and conspiracies about extra-terrestrial contact, which in the US really came to the fore in the post-WWII era. Roswell, anyone?

For the film, Spielberg had consulted the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who had coined the term which Spielberg borrowed for the title, with the third kind in Hynek’s tier to denote human observance of aliens. Hynek even had a cameo in the film. It grossed $US300 million, a huge box office for 1977.

With E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982, Spielberg made a very different film to Close Encounters. The focus here was emotional, the friendship between Elliott, a 10-year-old human boy, and E.T, an alien who has been stranded on Earth.

E.T. was a family adventure that, four decades later, remains a childhood favourite for many.

Spielberg’s next alien film wouldn’t eventuate for another two decades, not until 2005 with War of the Worlds, an alien invasion movie based on H.G. Wells’ famous story. An action extravaganza, War of the Worlds is, arguably, the Spielberg alien movie of extra-terrestrials at their most destructive and threatening, albeit ultimately vulnerable to, like, the common cold.

The filmmaker then couldn’t help but include a little alien action at the end of the fourth Indiana Jones movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The extra-terrestrial twist is a divisive one, much like the movie itself.

With the release of Disclosure Day, the question, inevitably, turned to Spielberg’s belief in aliens and where it sits now. Even for a filmmaker who has been working for six decades and has made dozens of films, six alien movies that aren’t part of a single franchise are a lot.

Especially as Disclosure Day contends that evidence of alien life on Earth have existed for decades, and the truth has been obscured from the public.

The filmmaker is clearly a believer.

“Based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I’ve gathered throughout my whole life, everybody I’ve listened to and every documentary I’ve ever watched and all the testimonies in Congress that I’ve heard, I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here,” he told CBS recently.

“And, who knows, maybe they’ve always been here.”

First, it’s hard to prove a negative, but there have also been high-profile proponents of the idea that humans have already made contact with beings from other worlds.

Barack Obama recently triggered a frenzy after he said on a podcast that aliens were “real” but added that he hadn’t seen them – nor evidence of any Area 51-esque conspiracy and cover-up.

He later had to backtrack and said that the odds were “low” that aliens had visited Earth but that statistically, the chances are that there is life out there in the cosmos.

Spielberg said at the London premiere of Disclosure Day that his views on human-alien contact had evolved over time, and he is now optimistic that not only will discovery be imminent, but such a revelation had the power to bring humanity together.

Despite his life-long interest in alien life, the one thing he has been denied is a personal encounter.

“I deserved a sighting, and I need a sighting,” he told CBS. “I mean, I’m an ambassador of these guys and they haven’t shown themselves to me. I don’t get that.”

Disclosure Day is in cinemas