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Disclosure Day pits aliens against religion. But faith leaders are ready to believe.

What Steven Spielberg’s new alien movie reveals about our UFO obsessions.

With his new film Disclosure Day, filmmaker Steven Spielberg is returning to the subject that helped make him one of the most successful directors in the world: extraterrestrials (or ETs).

But his movie also focuses on a second topic that has long preoccupied Spielberg and other sci-fi directors: faith. It’s a story about believing in something — whether it’s religious doctrine or UFO brain downloads — and the tensions that could arise between different kinds of prophecy.

“The movie takes the position of the believers, or the curious, the ones that have been deeply affected by this,” Spielberg said in an interview with CBS News. “And the movie also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?”

He’s not the only one making this connection. The film arrives at a time when our collective obsession with aliens has reached a fever pitch: The Trump administration has made a big show of releasing a trove of government files related to the UFO phenomenon. Even members of Congress are teasing reality-altering secrets, and talking about possible links to stories from the Bible.

But while the Pentagon’s gradual release of classified material on UFOs has elevated the conversation, religious thinkers have contemplated life outside of Earth for generations — and they’re surprisingly open-minded about what we might find. Pope Francis even said he would baptize an extraterrestrial.

Meanwhile, as the congregations for older faiths have shrunk over the years, belief in UFOs has been described as a new kind of secular religion.

Tzvi Freeman, a rabbi who has written on the subject of extraterrestrial life, told me that in a way, people are returning to a more ancient way of thinking about our place in the cosmos. Millennia ago, shepherds would lay out in the wilderness and look up at the stars.

“The way most people made sense of it was that we’re here at the bottom of everything. This is the pits,” he said. Space, on the other hand: “That’s up there. That’s huge. That’s big.”

Disclosure Day may not tell us much about the reality of ETs visiting our planet — but UFOs and their parallels with millennia-old religious traditions can still tell us something about ourselves.

How the world’s religions really feel about extraterrestrial life

In Disclosure Day, the head of a far-flung conspiracy to control the narrative about extraterrestrials warns of a worldwide collapse of order if the truth is revealed. But a sympathetic character, a person of faith, also is fearful of........

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