I've Been Waiting for Disclosure Day My Whole Life

For those who are not yet aware, Disclosure Day is a 2026 science fiction thriller film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg. This is his highly anticipated return to the UFO and extraterrestrial genre. Remember E.T.? The film features a screenplay written by his longtime collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) and features a massive ensemble cast.

After all, it was in Great Falls in the 1950s that the first film footage of a UFO was captured by Nick Mariana, the general manager of the local minor league baseball team. The footage, now widely known as the Mariana footage, remains one of the most studied pieces of UFO film evidence ever recorded. Then there is the Echo Flight incident of March 1967, when all ten Minuteman nuclear missiles in the wing went offline simultaneously within seconds of each other for no apparent reason, while security personnel reported observing a glowing red orb hovering above the launch control facility east of Great Falls. A similar-looking orb, by the way, my mother also witnessed while driving from Missoula to Great Falls in the 1990s.

I grew up on a farm in the middle of those missile fields. There was a nuclear missile silo about a mile from our house. UFO stories weren’t all that uncommon for people in that part of the country. On September 11, 1969, the Great Falls Tribune ran an article about two UFOs spotted above my grandparents’ farm. And when author Joan Bird came to Choteau, Montana, to collect first-hand accounts for her book Montana UFOs and Extraterrestrials: Extraordinary Stories of Documented Sightings and Encounters, she put out a newspaper announcement inviting people to the library to share their stories, and the room was overflowing with farmers and ranchers ready to share.

And I have my own story, too, which has made this a lifelong interest of mine.

I saw a UFO. That’s right. I said it. It was August of 1990, the last day of summer before the first day of my 4^th grade year. I was lying on the big trampoline in our yard on that final summer break night, and my older siblings, Bob and Jenny, were already asleep beside me. And then I saw it. Coming over our house from the north. It was a massive metallic, perfect sphere, larger than our two-story, seven-bedroom home in Fairfield, Montana, flying quietly and directly over my head at no more than two hundred feet above. As I gazed up at the slowly moving metallic orb, I was frozen with terror. I was too frightened to reach over and wake my siblings. I just watched as it continued south and disappeared.

From that day on, I’ve been on a quiet quest to understand as much as I can about the UFO phenomenon. Not just what they are and who they are, but how they fit into the human story.

So when Disclosure Day appeared in theaters, I was there opening night to see what Spielberg had made, and I was grateful for how he treated the subject. In my observation, the film is well-informed by accounts from across the historical record, from Roswell in 1947 to the stories of government collaboration with extraterrestrials to the manner in which some witnesses have described abduction experiences. It seemed to be a well-presented amalgamation of what I and other thoughtful UFO researchers would say are common themes about the phenomenon over the past eight decades.

But what I appreciated most was how the film handled the sensitive relationship between religious faith and UFO disclosure. In my judgment, the film demonstrates that a biblical worldview can coexist with the reality of non-human sentient beings interacting with our planet and humanity. It’s an idea that hasn’t always been central to my thinking, but the more I consider it, the more it rings true to me.

The question of whether UFOs exist in our skies is no longer worth debating. We are beyond that. The footage is there. The congressional hearings are there. The statements of military pilots, intelligence officials, defense officials, governors, and cabinet secretaries are there, not to mention the accounts of thousands upon thousands of credible, honest, hardworking people around the world. The questions now are: what are the origins of these craft, and who or what is commanding them?

I’ve pursued those questions in earnest through my own research, including traveling across the country to meet personally with people working at the edge of this subject. I’ve sat in the living room of Nick Pope, the UK Ministry of Defence’s version of Fox Mulder, who passed away in April of this year, and had a heartfelt conversation about the implications of disclosure for people of faith. I visited with Pastor Bobby Brewer, a witness to the famous 1997 Phoenix Lights experience and the author of UFOs: 12 Things Everyone Should Know (A Christian Perspective). I even emailed Harvard’s Avi Loeb years before he became a well-known name in these circles. Beyond those conversations, I’ve read dozens of books, watched every serious documentary I could find, and spent years trying to be a thoughtful and honest researcher on the subject.

As a Christian, much of my consideration has involved trying to understand the UFO phenomenon through a biblical lens. The more I study it, the more convinced I am that it is entirely and beautifully possible for the two to coexist. Disclosure of craft that do not originate from this planet need not be a faith-shattering event. If you see Disclosure Day, I think you’ll find that Spielberg arrives at something close to the same conclusion. Though the movie does cause the viewer to consider the dissonance that might be introduced into the faith paradigm, it also presents a picture where the biblical paradigm is large enough to capture the UFO phenomenon.

One more thing worth noting. The film’s release is landing with curious timing: the Pentagon released its third tranche of declassified UAP files yesterday, including more than seventy documents and six videos. Coincidence? I personally don’t think so. Something is happening right now, and these are genuinely interesting times to be paying attention