Disclosure Day: What Spielberg’s Film Gets Right About God

Steven Spielberg's latest visit with little green men has landed in theaters, and it carries the same classic themes that made his films ET and Close Encounters cultural phenomena. Like its predecessors, Disclosure Day follows a handful of rebels protecting alien life from cruel and obtuse government agencies and a frightened public. And as always, someone insists that the existence of alien life must, for the good of the people, be kept absolutely secret.

But Disclosure Day adds a new twist: a religious one. In the opening scene we meet Dr. Daniel Kellner, a former hacker turned cybersecurity specialist at WARDEX, a shadowy corporation with deep government ties. He steals advanced alien technology and classified files that expose decades of secret human-extraterrestrial contact, including events like Roswell. Overnight he becomes a whistleblower, determined to reveal the cover-up while staying one step ahead of the people hunting him. It's exciting stuff.

Her fear is that the awe of an alien intelligence will dethrone God as sovereign of the universe.

Kellner has a girlfriend, Jane Blankenship, a former nun pulled into the chaos after the theft. When Daniel tells her the truth—that aliens are real and the government has hidden it for decades—she balks at his plan to tell the world. Her fear isn't the mass hysteria that might follow. It's something deeper: that awe of an alien intelligence will dethrone God as sovereign of the universe. The aliens, she worries, will become literal idols. Humanity's whole sense of itself and of reality will be shaken to its core.

Jane spends most of the film helping Daniel anyway but her misgivings linger until a pivotal conversation with her old mentor, Sister Maura, Abbess of the Monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn. Asked whether alien life could exist, the wise and broad-minded sister explains that Genesis calls humans the pinnacle of life on Earth—but says nothing about anywhere else, leaving the rest of the universe wide open. "Why else would God have made it so big?" she asks.

It's a good question, and one Jewish thinkers have wrestled with for centuries. The Book of Judges contains a strange, almost cinematic line: "Curse Meroz... curse bitterly its inhabitants." Who was Meroz? The Talmud preserves a striking opinion—that Meroz was not a town at all, but a star, a whole world whose inhabitants failed to come to Israel's aid. The 18th-century Sefer HaBrit takes this and runs with it, affirming that other planets may well be inhabited.

He's in good company. Centuries earlier, Rabbi Chasdai Crescas devoted a chapter of his Ohr Hashem to arguing that nothing in the Torah rules out life on other worlds, citing "Your kingdom is a kingdom of all worlds" (Psalms 145:13) as a hint that God reigns over more than one. The Zohar, Judaism’s chief mystical text, speaks of "worlds without number" and links the stars to separate inhabited realms.

So Sister Maura, it turns out, is on solid ground.

There simply isn't hard evidence for alien life, whatever we make of its implications. The Pentagon's own declassified files admitted as much: these remain "unresolved cases," with the government "unable to make a definitive determination."

So for now, the cosmos is silent. And here's the twist Jane never saw coming. She feared that some great intelligence out there would dethrone God—that people would trade their awe of the Creator for awe of His creatures.

But the silence cuts the other way. Look up at that vast emptiness. The awe Jane feared doesn't go away—it just lands somewhere else, on God Himself.

There may be no alien mind running the stars, but there's good reason to believe in the Creator who made them, and the dark between them, and the one tiny blue planet where someone looked up at the cosmos, filled with awe at the disclosure of a universe that points to God.