Do Aliens Exist? Steven Spielberg Believes They Do

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Rachel Abrams** (0:17)
Do you want to check any shots?

**Steven Spielberg** (0:19)
Do you want to check your shots?

**Rachel Abrams** (0:20)
If you, if you, Steven Spielberg, want to take a look, I...

**Steven Spielberg** (0:23)
Let's see your shot.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:25)
How do, oh, there, okay, so what do you think of that?

**Steven Spielberg** (0:27)
It's a good shot. I mean, it's like a nice framing.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:29)
Does it convey seriousness, like serious journalists?

**Steven Spielberg** (0:31)
Yes. I like seeing all of this. Oh, you don't have meat like that, do you ever? Push back.
What was that great line in Tootsie? You know, how far back do you have to go to make it look good? What about Cleveland?

**Rachel Abrams** (0:49)
From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily on Sunday.
Steven Spielberg. The name is synonymous with big Hollywood blockbusters, just to rattle off a few of them.

**Steven Spielberg** (1:04)
Jaws.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:05)
You're going to need a bigger poach.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:07)
ET.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:07)
ET phone home.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:09)
Indiana Jones.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:10)
That belongs in a museum.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:12)
Jurassic Park.
This week, he's got a new movie out. He's 35th. It's called Disclosure Day, and it returns to questions that Steven Spielberg has picked at throughout his entire career. Do aliens exist? And if they do, how will we react to them? What are you going to do?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:35)
Full disclosure.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:37)
To the whole world.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:38)
All at once.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:41)
Steven Spielberg is here with me today to talk about Disclosure Day, his fascination with aliens, and what he is watching on Instagram. It's Sunday, June 14th.
Steven Spielberg, welcome to The Daily. Thank you so much for joining us.

**Steven Spielberg** (1:57)
Thank you.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:58)
So congratulations on your new film, Disclosure Day. I won't give too much away, but it is a movie about the government's efforts to hide information about aliens from the public.
It was inspired, as I understand it, by reporting, at least in part, in the New York Times about a secret government program that studied what people might refer to as UFOs.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:19)
The New York Times is out this morning with new details about an upcoming and long-awaited report from the US government.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:24)
A shadowy office in the Pentagon that ran from 2007 to 2012 According to the New York Times, it examined so-called anomalous aerial vehicles. The Pentagon...

**Rachel Abrams** (2:34)
Everybody and their dentist must be pitching you a movie idea. So what was it about this article in this moment that made you think, I have got to make a movie about this?

**Steven Spielberg** (2:43)
Well, long before that story, and it was a great story in 2017, I believe, there had been so many more videos backing up eyewitness testimony and creating more credibility among the witness base. Once the smartphone came into real existence with the iPhone, everything kind of changed. There was just a lot of information. People were starting to come forward. And the witnesses have been coming forward ever since Roswell. So, it's not that everything started in 2017
I guess when Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Keene wrote their story, all of a sudden, because it was the New York Times, because they gave the story such prominence, everybody suddenly started to wake up from the National Choir sensationalized reportage about UFOs. Suddenly, this was an august paper, perhaps one of the greatest papers, giving us this information.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:49)
We prefer the greatest, but thank you, yes.

**Steven Spielberg** (3:50)
Yes, the greatest. But I really feel that things started to get into the mainstream, and then after that, there was a lot of documentaries are being made, and I saw all of them, every doc made about this.
And you can't make a doc unless people come forward. Now, it's not under oath, but a lot of people from Congress, from the military, started coming forward.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:15)
Well, to that point, there are some very famous whistleblowers that have come forward, as you're saying. There was one actually in Helene Cooper's story that you mentioned. And I did wonder, in addition to watching all these documentaries, and it sounds like coming to the belief that aliens were real, perhaps more so than when you made earlier alien films. Did you actually talk to any of those whistleblowers in preparation for this?