Steven Spielberg’s latest big-budget adventure, Disclosure Day, came and went earlier this summer. Like Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the film predicted a day in the not too distant future when the cover-ups and conspiracies surrounding alleged extraterrestrial life have ended — when the world would finally possess undisputed proof that human beings were not the only intelligent life in the universe.

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Alas, few cared. Though generally praised by critics, the movie flopped, making less than $116 million in the United States to date. The movie is now available to stream on Amazon Prime and other platforms. Anyone who did bother to show up in a movie theater saw the story of a heroine (Emily Blunt) fighting off government officials desperate to prevent said disclosure, lest a society ill-prepared for alien revelations rend itself to panicked, insane, smoldering wreckage.

Is it possible the movie passed like a flying saucer in the night because the subject matter is no longer compelling? Could it be that if Americans no longer questioned if those strange lights in the sky really exist or wondered what’s controlling them, they wouldn’t stop paying taxes, start stockpiling Chef Boyardee, or turn to worshiping Cthulhu?

We can largely credit the paranoid expectation of ET-induced societal collapse to the 1960 Brookings Report. Commissioned by NASA and officially titled “Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs,” the 250-page tome compiled by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., offered Congress and the White House “the implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life.” 

While only a small part of a report that explored everything from space commerce to aircraft design to the weather, that one speculative section discussing the pros and cons of withholding proof of ETs drove decades of arguments that the U.S. government already had........

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