The Truth About Steven Spielberg's Alien Obsession

Steven Spielberg has spent fifty years telling stories about aliens, but the paradox is that you barely see them in his films. In Close Encounters, the extraterrestrials communicate with lights and music, but they always remain in the shadows, almost hidden behind a curtain. In E.T., the little alien is a fish out of water, but his world remains invisible: no one ever enters his spaceship. Even in War of the Worlds, the invaders are mostly a menacing shadow, always covered by their weapons, almost as if Spielberg were afraid to really show them. Yet the new Disclosure Day goes even further: here, the aliens are only glimpsed in grainy footage, disguised as wild animals, and they appear in the flesh only in the final minutes. It's as if Spielberg uses aliens to tell a completely different story — and in fact, his real obsession is not extraterrestrials, but human beings. The common idea is that his films are classic science fiction, with invasions or friendships from space. In reality, they are laboratories for understanding what it means to be human: aliens are just a pretext for investigating our limits, our desires, and our deepest fears. Take Roy, the protagonist of Close Encounters: the aliens give him visions that lead him to leave his family, almost suggesting that curiosity can be a force as powerful as it is destructive. In E.T., Elliott physically feels every emotion of his alien friend — as if Spielberg were telling us that true empathy only arises when the boundaries between self and other are broken down. And in War of the Worlds, Ray, a separated father played by Tom Cruise, finds himself understanding the invaders only when he begins to understand his own children — and here the alien threat becomes a metaphor for emotional distance in the family. Behind the scenes, Spielberg often had to hide the aliens due to technical limitations: like the famous shark in Jaws, the extraterrestrials in Close Encounters also couldn't fly as planned. But over time, this shortcoming has turned into style: fewer monsters, more mystery, more room for the imagination to work. A detail that few know: when discussing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Spielberg only accepted the "interdimensional beings" when Lucas proposed treating them as deities of an ancient civilization, not as mere special effects. In Disclosure Day, aliens even become teachers: the film uses them to push humans to reflect on empathy, memory, and faith, as if the real lesson comes from the very idea of the other, not from physical contact. Spielberg takes aliens seriously, treating them as something sacred, while the rest of pop culture reduces them to jokes or the obsessions of conspiracy theorists with tin foil hats. The real turning point, however, comes when you realize that for Spielberg, the question "Do aliens exist?" is less interesting than the question: "What can we learn from what we don't understand?". In War of the Worlds, the threat is annihilated by something tiny: microbes. And here too, the real lesson is not about the invaders' technology, but about the humility of those who think they know everything and instead find themselves vulnerable. Some might see only special effects and chases in his films, but Spielberg always circles around the same point: the real mysteries are within us, and aliens are just the mirror. And now a perspective that almost no one considers: Spielberg, in his own way, tells us that the unknown serves more to unite than to divide. Instead of frightening us, the unknown forces us to look for connections, to invent new languages — like the musical notes in Close Encounters or the finger that touches E.T.'s. After all, his aliens are the best excuse to ask ourselves questions about ourselves. In the end, it all comes down to this: Spielberg's films are about aliens, but they serve to understand humans. If this story has changed your perspective, you can mark it on Lara Notes with I'm In — choose whether it's an interest, an experience, or a belief. And if tomorrow you tell someone that Spielberg's aliens are just a way to talk about us, you can mark it on Lara Notes: Shared Offline is the way to say that conversation mattered. This Note comes from The Atlantic and saved you 12 minutes.