Steven Spielberg Confirms He Believes Aliens Are Real, Active, and Already on Earth

Steven Spielberg has said during an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in New York on 6 June that he believes aliens 'have been here, and they are here', as he promoted his new film Disclosure Day. The 79-year-old director linked the remark to decades of thinking about UFOs, UAPs and the wider question of whether humans are alone.

Spielberg has been circling the subject for nearly half a century through films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and War of the Worlds.

'I Absolutely Think That They Have Been Here, And They Are Here'

Asked directly on Sunday Morning whether he thought aliens had visited Earth and might still be here now, Spielberg did not hedge or hide behind the usual 'I want to believe' stuff.

'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 said. 'And who knows, maybe they've always been here.'

The remark came after he cheerfully admitted that, despite a lifetime of making films about extraterrestrials, he has never had a paranormal experience himself.

'Isn't that terrible?' he laughed. 'I deserve that! I deserve a sighting. Ben, I need a sighting. I mean, I'm an ambassador to these guys, and they haven't shown themselves to me? I don't get that.'

How 'Disclosure Day' Turns His Obsession Into A Thriller

The new film, Disclosure Day, is Spielberg's latest attempt to imagine what full‑blown contact would do to us. He has called it a kind of bookend to Close Encounters, which ends with the arrival of benevolent visitors. This time, the premise is that someone decides to blow the lid off a vast, decades‑long cover‑up.

'"Disclosure Day" is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what's been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once?' Spielberg explained in the CBS interview. 'And the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening, that is basically the core of this chase movie.'

He describes it as part chase film, part 1970s political thriller and part big‑tech conspiracy, built for an age of low trust in institutions.

The story follows Josh O'Connor as a whistleblower on the run from government officials after threatening to release proof of alien life, and Emily Blunt as a Kansas City meteorologist whose life is upended by unexplained abilities and otherworldly communication.

'The movie takes the position of the believers, or the curious, the ones that have been deeply affected by this,' Spielberg said.

He also leans into the religious shockwaves such a revelation might cause, asking on CBS: 'Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there's civilisation and intelligent life, and even developing life?'

A Lifelong Fascination That Began Under A Meteor Shower

Spielberg has been circling these questions since childhood. He traces his fixation on the sky to a night in New Jersey, around the age of five or six, when his father woke him in the middle of the night and drove him to a park to watch the Perseids meteor shower.

'I remember how shocked I was,' he said. 'But I also remember seeing these points of light darting across the sky. And I just remember thinking that was one of the most extraordinary things I had ever seen.'

At home, the bathroom was famously piled high with science‑fiction magazines. 'Oh my God, because that is what my father read! Galaxy, Analog, and Amazing Stories, those three periodicals – and our bathroom was piled high ... this high with these magazines!' he recalled to CBS.

His mother, Leah Adler, pushed him to think beyond Earth. 'She always said, "Let's not be conceited to think that we're the only intelligent life in the universe," ' he told USA Today. When he protested that humans were 'pretty smart', she would shoot back: 'No, there's got to be a lot more we can learn if we open up our hearts and minds.'

'Ultimately, my mom was a champion of encouraging me to probe the unknown,' he said.

From 'Science Speculation' To A World Drowning In UFO Footage

When Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he says he needed 'a lot of imagination.' He believed there was other life out there, but was not sure it had ever visited Earth. He categorised that film not as science fiction but 'science speculation.'

Half a century on, his language has shifted. Since the early 2000s, he argues, the explosion of camera phones and online sharing has changed the landscape. 'There's been more and more access to the actual visual truth,' he told USA Today. 'We're able to confirm our belief by showing what we shot on our devices to other people. It's just become overwhelming to me that we're not alone in the universe.'

He also thinks audiences are more ready than ever for a story like Disclosure Day. 'I can't speak for the entire audience, but there are certain things that unite us,' he said.

'One of the things that unites us, one of the places we can find common ground, is our united belief that the extraordinary is possible, and the impossible is possible. And I think UAP, UFO, the whole phenomenon is something that everybody across any spectrum – culturally, politically – can agree on,' he added.

Steven Spielberg has spent nearly 50 years putting alien life on screen, from the wonderstruck family drama of Close Encounters in 1977 to the darker invasion story of War of the Worlds.

In recent interviews with CBS and USA Today, he has been revisiting that back catalogue while promoting Disclosure Day, which opens in cinemas on 12 June and imagines what would happen if definitive proof of extraterrestrial life was suddenly dumped online for the entire world to see.