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Today, we're talking about Steven Spielberg, specifically his aliens.
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Because across seven decades of filmmaking, Spielberg has returned again and again to the same question.
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What are those things in the sky?
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And what the hell do they want from us?
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And tracking how his idea of the extraterrestrial has shifted across his lifetime tells us something revealing, not just about Spielberg, but about all of us.
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Because the alien in Spielberg's hands has never really been about what's out there.
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The alien has been a mirror, and the face of reflects is ours.
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In 1964, 17-year-old Spielberg spent$500 making a film in Phoenix about lights in the sky.
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He shot it on weekends with his high school drama club.
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He composed the score himself on clarinet.
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He screened it at the local theater to 500 people and made exactly$1 profit.
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The film was called Firelight.
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In it, a UFO researcher tries to convince the CIA that strange lights appearing over a small Arizona town are real.
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Animals vanish, people disappear.
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And the lights themselves?
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Spielberg described them recently in Empire magazine as like a lethal oval plasma that you could almost see through, flying around the sky, that could melt a tank.
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Not a ship, not a creature, something between matter and light.
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Something between the physical world and somewhere else.
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Beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
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With Firelight, Spielberg was asking, What are those things and what do they want from us?
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And those questions defined the next seven decades of his creative life.
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Thirteen years after Firelight, Spielberg returned to the same questions, but this time with a multimillion dollar budget.
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And he produced Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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In it, Roy Neary is a nobody.
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An Indiana power company lineman with a wife who doesn't quite see him, kids who don't need him, a life that fits him like a shirt that's slightly the wrong size.
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One night, Roy's truck stalls on a dark road, a light passes over him, and something is burned into his mind and onto his face that will not let him rest.
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He starts sculpting it out of shaving foam, out of mashed potatoes, out of the dirt in his own garden.
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He is, by any clinical measure, losing his mind.
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Except he isn't.
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He's being called.
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And that is the film's most radical idea, not the aliens, but who they choose.
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Spielberg's original outline for Close Encounters, written in the shadow of Watergate, was a political thriller.
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It followed a military officer working on Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official UFO investigation, who becomes a whistleblower on the government cover-up.
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Spielberg was meticulous about the real-world research behind what the film became.
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J.
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Alan Hineck, the astronomer who spent years as the Air Force's official UFO skeptic before becoming one of its most serious investigators, was a technical advisor for the film on set, and he even makes a cameo in the film.
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The Close Encounters classification system that gives the movie its title was created by Haineck himself.
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And then there's the Lacombe character, the French scientist played by Francois Truffaut, the one who arrives already certain that something genuine is happening and refuses to let the military bury it.
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Lacombe is widely described as being based on Jacques Valet, the French computer scientist and Polymath, who is arguably one of the most rigorous thinkers in the UAP field.
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Spielberg actually built the character from Valet's books before the two of them had ever met.
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The character preceded the friendship.
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Note the pattern already being established here.
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The military evacuates Devil's Tower with a fake nerve gas story, quarantines the witnesses, and tries to control an event it fundamentally cannot control.
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The government, in Spielberg's universe, is always playing catcher.
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It's always managing perception.
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It's never ahead of what's actually happening.
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Could that be true in the real world too?
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And then there's what Close Encounters did to the culture at large.
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Before this film, the great alien, the large-headed, black-eyed, spindly-limbed figure that now saturates every corner of popular culture, was not a universal image.
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It existed in fringe literature, in isolated reports, in the testimony of people who were mostly not believed.
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Spielberg put it on the biggest screens in the world and gave it a face that billions of people immediately recognized, similar to Whitley Strieber's infamous communion book cover.
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The gray as we know it, curious, luminous, and almost childlike in its proportions, was crystallized here.
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Spielberg brought real-world testimony to life and gave it a form the mainstream could hold.
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A melody, a greeting.
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What follows is cinema's greatest first contact sequence.
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And it works because Spielberg understood that the most radical thing isn't the technology, it's the communication.
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The aliens don't speak.
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They answer light with light, color with color, rhythm with rhythm.
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In a call and response that feels less like diplomacy and more like play.
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Roy Neri walks into the light.
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He's not taken, he is invited with open arms and accepts.
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This is the most optimistic vision of contact ever Ponon film.
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The alien, here, is the answer to the loneliness that humanity feels.
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In E.T., a botanist alien is accidentally left behind by his crew on Earth, and a lonely 10-year-old boy named Elia finds him in the garden shed.
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What follows is perhaps one of the most emotional films Spielberg ever made.
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The similarity with Close Encounters is important.
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In that film, the alien chose Roy Neary from a crowd of millions.
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In E.T., it chooses Elia, a lonely child whose parents have just divorced.
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And once again, the government is reactionary, playing catch up while trying to contain and study what they don't understand and cannot control.
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What Spielberg understood is that Elliot and E.T.
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are the same being in different skins.
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They're both lost, they're both trying to find a home.
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They're both learning through their friendship what home actually means.
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Home isn't a location, but a feeling of being known and knowing.
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E.T.
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learns English from Saturday morning cartoons and a six-year-old's game of dresser.
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He eats Reese's pieces and gets drunk on beer and falls in love with a story about a princess.
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He becomes one of us, not by losing what he is, but by showing us that what he is and what we are rhyme in ways we couldn't have predicted.
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But almost nobody talks about where E.T.
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came from.
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In 1980, Spielberg had been developing a horror film called Night Skies.
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The script was about a family terrorized on a remote Kentucky farm by a group of extraterrestrials, methodical, cold, and without mercy.
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The lead creature was named Scar, but there was another one in the group, Buddy.
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Buddy was drawn to the family's disabled son, and they began a budding friendship.
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When Spielberg read the draft, something shifted.
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He didn't stop thinking about their connection.
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So Night's Guys was shelved, Buddy the Alien became E.T., and the horror became a fairy tale.
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23 years separate E.T.
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from Spielberg's take on War of the Worlds.
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The Waterman doesn't run through here.
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Well, there's something down there and it's moving.
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The film follows Ray Farrier, played by Tom Cruise, a dark worker and absent father picking up his kids for a weekend, when the ground split open and vast tripod machines emerge and begin systematically wiping humankind from the planet.
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The aliens in War of the Worlds are not curious.
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They share no DNA with the beings of Close Encounters or E.T.
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They come without mercy, harvesting us.
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We are not an enemy, per se, we are a resource.
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Spielberg has been careful not to make the 9-11 parallel too explicit in interviews.
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But he doesn't need to.
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The ash that rains down on Tom Cruise's face in the opening act is not metaphor.
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The way crowds flow through the streets away from the danger is collective memory given form.
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Spielberg's governments are always scrambling to manage what they can't contain.
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But here, for the first time, the inadequacy has lethal consequences.
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Ray Ferrier is a bad father.
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The aliens don't change who he is, but they do strip away every layer of distraction until all that remains is the animal fact.
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These are my children, and I will not let them die.
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The wonder is gone from Spielberg's universe in this film, but love is not.
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Here it's just more fierce, more desperate, more primal than anything in the earlier films.
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And in the end, that love is what matters.
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Between the wonder of E.T and the terror of War of the Worlds, Spielberg made a TV show that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.
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Take 'em is arguably his most ambitious alien project.
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A 10-episode miniseries spanning multiple generations of families, beginning at Roswell and ending with the birth of Allie Keys in the modern day.
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Ali is a hybrid child, half human, half alien, and the culmination of a decades-long extraterrestrial breeding program.
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The show even won an Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries.
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In Taken, the alien is doing something to us without our consent.
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People are abducted from their beds, from aircraft, from ordinary moments in ordinary lives.
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Implants are placed in their skulls, tracking devices that also manipulate memory, erasing what the subjects experience.
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But here's what makes Taken genuinely strange and fascinating.
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The aliens don't appear as themselves, they wear disguises.
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They manipulate perception so completely that humans see other humans where a gray alien actually stands.
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The alien understands that the human mind cannot process what they are.
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So they present something that the mind can manage and empathize with.
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A handsome face, a familiar form.
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They deceive not out of cruelty, but out of necessity, because the truth of what they are would simply not compute.
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The shadowy US government UFO project, led by the ruthless Colonel Crawford, does exactly the same thing as the alien.
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They manipulate, they deceive, they plant false memories, they destroy evidence, and silence witnesses for their own gain.
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Both the aliens and the government are operating from the same desperate motive.
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Control over something they don't understand and cannot afford to lose.
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And yet, even here in the darkest corner of Spielberg's alien mythology, the alien impulse is not simply cruelty.
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What the breeding program is designed to produce is empathy.
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These are beings of pure intelligence, pure energy with no emotional core.
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They perceive this as a deficiency, so they're reaching across generations, across the stars toward what we have: the capacity to feel and the capacity to care.
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Here, the alien wants to become us.
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It wants our interiority, our grief and love and longing.
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Allie Keys, the hybrid narrator of the show played by a young Dakota Fanning, is their only hope.
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She has both the alien capacity and the human heart.
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She's what Contact was always reaching towards.
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Not destruction, but emerging, a transformation of both the invader and invaded in the name of survival.
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Hello, Allie.
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Legend says that a crystal skull was stolen from unmythical lost city in the Amazon.
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Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull is probably the most dismissed film in Spielberg's catalogue.
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But look past the cultural baggage and something genuinely strange comes into focus.
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Spielberg reportedly didn't want to include conventional aliens in the film at all.
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So he pushed to make the being something else entirely.
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What ended up on screen is the result of that creative itch.
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The beings at the film center are described as existing between dimensions, not from another planet, but not from another plane either.
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A space that exists alongside and outside of ordinary reality.
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The ancient civilizations didn't worship them as gods from the sky, but as something that has always been present at the edges of our perception.
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This is one interpretation of the interdimensional hypothesis, a framework developed by Jack Vallet and J.
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Alan Heinek as an alternative to the simple, but not really supported by data, extraterrestrial model.
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The idea that the phenomena is not primarily a question of spacecraft and propulsion, but reality itself.
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The irony is that in trying to move away from the standard grey alien, Spielberg moved closer to the heart of what serious researchers may actually believe the phenomena represents.
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It's though our imagination, trained on little gray men and flying saucers, simply can't stretch far enough to incorporate what this thing might actually be.
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The Crystal Skull mentioned in the film's title is shown as a library of knowledge left by beings who predate human civilization, and it's perhaps the most honest representation of the phenomena Spielberg ever committed to film, precisely because it refuses the easy answer.
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It's worth asking at this point a question the films themselves really invite.
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How does Spielberg know what he knows?
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Does he have secret knowledge?
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Has he been read into some UFO legacy program?
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Spielberg has been careful to say that he has no special government access.
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He's received no classified briefings and has no inside track on recovered craft or non-human intelligence programs.
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He presents himself as a serious civilian researcher, someone who reads the literature and takes the question seriously.
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But the network he moves in is extraordinary by any measure.
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Hayneck was a genuine collaborator on close encounters.
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Vallet, who has a character based on him in the movie, has spoken about in many conversations.
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John Mack, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who risked his entire career to take the abduction phenomena seriously, was also part of Spielberg's world.
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These are not people that Spielberg admired from afar.
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They were his intellectual companions.
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A who's who of the most serious minds ever to engage with this question.
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And then there's the aerial score.
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In September 1994, 62 children at a primary school in Rua, Zimbabwe, reported watching silver disks descend from the sky during their morning break.
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Creatures emerged, beings.
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Several children described receiving a telepathic message about damage being done to the earth.
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Don't get too technologised, the visitors told them.
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John Mack flew to Zimbabwe and declared it amongst the most credible mass sighting incidents he has ever encountered.
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Documentary filmmaker James Fox first learned about Ariel, not from news reports, but from Steven Spielberg himself.
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Fox has described it publicly.
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He was attempting to get an interview with Spielberg for his first UFO documentary in the mid-90s.
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Spielberg declined the meeting, but he did pass a message back to Fox.
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He told Fox that he should look into a landing case at a school in Africa.
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Spielberg was already tracking it.
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He was one of the first people outside the research community to flag it as significant years before it became the landmark case the field now considers it.
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He says he has no special knowledge from government and he might be telling the truth.
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But he has something arguably more valuable: a lifetime of relationships with the people who have dedicated their lives to understanding this mystery and the intelligence to take what they tell him seriously.
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Look at what Disclosure Day is showing us.
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There are ships, vast, physical, undeniable objects in the sky above populated areas.
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This is the Close Encounters inheritance, the luminous presence too large to explain away.
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But there's also something being done to people's minds and a connection to nature itself.
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Characters shown in states of altered consciousness, seeing things that others can't, receiving information through channels that have nothing to do with the five senses that we know.
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This is the taken inheritance, the crystal skull inheritance, the suggestion that whatever these beings are, their interaction with humans happens as much inside the witness as outside of them.
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Ships and minds.
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The physical and the dimensional, the thing in the sky and the person looking at it.
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Disclosure Day seems like Spielberg's attempt to weave every thread he has been pulling on since 1964 into a single film.
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He spoke to Embiid Magazine about what making this film means to him.
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He said, I have seven solid decades of a vast personal interest in what lies beyond our atmosphere, in the cosmos, and what is within our atmosphere, right here on planet Earth.
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The question has always remained for me: are we alone on our own planet?
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That question has not only haunted me, but it has inspired me.
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But I think it has now resolved itself to my satisfaction in Disclosure Day.
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Spielberg isn't claiming certainty here, and he isn't saying that he has the answer.
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He's saying he believes he has found a story, a set of images, and a way of holding the question that satisfies him after seven decades of circling it.
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That is what Disclosure Day is to him.
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And here's what is remarkable.
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When you stand back and look at the whole arc, every single one of these works, from the five-note greeting at Devil's Tower to E.T.
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learning the word ouch, from the ash on Tom Cruise's upturned face to Ali Keys flying away into wherever she came from, is ultimately not about the alien at all.
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Close Encounters is about a man who finally feels chosen.
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E.T.
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is about a lonely child finding friendship that costs him everything and gives him everything.
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War of the Worlds is about a father who discovers that he is capable of a love he didn't know he had.
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Taken is about generations of ordinary people caught between forces they cannot comprehend.
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Crystal Skull is about the mystery that precedes us and will outlast us, and the strange comfort of knowing we were never as alone as we thought.
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The alien is always a mirror in Spielberg's movies.
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In every film, it reflects back something we couldn't see in ourselves without it.
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The wonder we carry and can't quite justify.
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The love we discover only when it's threatened, the longing to be known.
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Almost every category the real-world research has ever documented, Spielberg is put on film.
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Not as folklore, but cinema, the closest thing we have to a shared visual language for something that, by its nature, resists being looked at directly.
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So the alien in Spielberg's hands has never really been about what's out there.
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It's about what it is to be conscious, to be mortal, to reach towards something beyond yourself and feel against all reason that it might reach back.
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In other words, Spielberg's entire filmmaking career has been spent thinking about what it means to be human.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Spotify or on your chosen platform.
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It helps us find our tribe.
00:21:16.319 --> 00:21:24.240
If you'd like to support the show and get access to a one-hour live chat each month, and early ad-free access, you can find us at Patreon.
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Just follow the link in the show notes or at our website, to be humanshow.com.
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And feel free to reach out via the contact page or email at hello at tobehumanshow.com.
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As always, remember to be curious.
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The universe is bigger than we know.
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What it means to be human is a double barrel production.
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This week's episode was produced by Ros Mugford and Dan Zetterstrom.
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Sound post production by Parker Mosley, with technical support from Dale Mugford.
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Our theme music is by Thunderbird.
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Today, we're talking about Steven Spielberg, specifically his aliens.
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Because across seven decades of filmmaking, Spielberg has returned again and again to the same question.
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What are those things in the sky?
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And what the hell do they want from us?
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And tracking how his idea of the extraterrestrial has shifted across his lifetime tells us something revealing, not just about Spielberg, but about all of us.
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Because the alien in Spielberg's hands has never really been about what's out there.
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The alien has been a mirror, and the face of reflects is ours.
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In 1964, 17-year-old Spielberg spent$500 making a film in Phoenix about lights in the sky.
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He shot it on weekends with his high school drama club.
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He composed the score himself on clarinet.
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He screened it at the local theater to 500 people and made exactly$1 profit.
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The film was called Firelight.
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In it, a UFO researcher tries to convince the CIA that strange lights appearing over a small Arizona town are real.
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Animals vanish, people disappear.
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And the lights themselves?
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Spielberg described them recently in Empire magazine as like a lethal oval plasma that you could almost see through, flying around the sky, that could melt a tank.
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Not a ship, not a creature, something between matter and light.
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Something between the physical world and somewhere else.
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Beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
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With Firelight, Spielberg was asking, What are those things and what do they want from us?
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And those questions defined the next seven decades of his creative life.
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Thirteen years after Firelight, Spielberg returned to the same questions, but this time with a multimillion dollar budget.
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And he produced Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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In it, Roy Neary is a nobody.
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An Indiana power company lineman with a wife who doesn't quite see him, kids who don't need him, a life that fits him like a shirt that's slightly the wrong size.
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One night, Roy's truck stalls on a dark road, a light passes over him, and something is burned into his mind and onto his face that will not let him rest.
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He starts sculpting it out of shaving foam, out of mashed potatoes, out of the dirt in his own garden.
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He is, by any clinical measure, losing his mind.
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Except he isn't.
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He's being called.
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And that is the film's most radical idea, not the aliens, but who they choose.
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Spielberg's original outline for Close Encounters, written in the shadow of Watergate, was a political thriller.
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It followed a military officer working on Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official UFO investigation, who becomes a whistleblower on the government cover-up.
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Spielberg was meticulous about the real-world research behind what the film became.
00:03:08.560 --> 00:03:08.719
J.
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Alan Hineck, the astronomer who spent years as the Air Force's official UFO skeptic before becoming one of its most serious investigators, was a technical advisor for the film on set, and he even makes a cameo in the film.
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The Close Encounters classification system that gives the movie its title was created by Haineck himself.
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And then there's the Lacombe character, the French scientist played by Francois Truffaut, the one who arrives already certain that something genuine is happening and refuses to let the military bury it.
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Lacombe is widely described as being based on Jacques Valet, the French computer scientist and Polymath, who is arguably one of the most rigorous thinkers in the UAP field.
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Spielberg actually built the character from Valet's books before the two of them had ever met.
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The character preceded the friendship.
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Note the pattern already being established here.
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The military evacuates Devil's Tower with a fake nerve gas story, quarantines the witnesses, and tries to control an event it fundamentally cannot control.
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The government, in Spielberg's universe, is always playing catcher.
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It's always managing perception.
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It's never ahead of what's actually happening.
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Could that be true in the real world too?
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And then there's what Close Encounters did to the culture at large.
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Before this film, the great alien, the large-headed, black-eyed, spindly-limbed figure that now saturates every corner of popular culture, was not a universal image.
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It existed in fringe literature, in isolated reports, in the testimony of people who were mostly not believed.
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Spielberg put it on the biggest screens in the world and gave it a face that billions of people immediately recognized, similar to Whitley Strieber's infamous communion book cover.
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The gray as we know it, curious, luminous, and almost childlike in its proportions, was crystallized here.
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Spielberg brought real-world testimony to life and gave it a form the mainstream could hold.
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A melody, a greeting.
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What follows is cinema's greatest first contact sequence.
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And it works because Spielberg understood that the most radical thing isn't the technology, it's the communication.
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The aliens don't speak.
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They answer light with light, color with color, rhythm with rhythm.
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In a call and response that feels less like diplomacy and more like play.
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Roy Neri walks into the light.
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He's not taken, he is invited with open arms and accepts.
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This is the most optimistic vision of contact ever Ponon film.
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The alien, here, is the answer to the loneliness that humanity feels.
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In E.T., a botanist alien is accidentally left behind by his crew on Earth, and a lonely 10-year-old boy named Elia finds him in the garden shed.
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What follows is perhaps one of the most emotional films Spielberg ever made.
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The similarity with Close Encounters is important.
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In that film, the alien chose Roy Neary from a crowd of millions.
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In E.T., it chooses Elia, a lonely child whose parents have just divorced.
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And once again, the government is reactionary, playing catch up while trying to contain and study what they don't understand and cannot control.
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What Spielberg understood is that Elliot and E.T.
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are the same being in different skins.
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They're both lost, they're both trying to find a home.
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They're both learning through their friendship what home actually means.
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Home isn't a location, but a feeling of being known and knowing.
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E.T.
00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:20.240
learns English from Saturday morning cartoons and a six-year-old's game of dresser.
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He eats Reese's pieces and gets drunk on beer and falls in love with a story about a princess.
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He becomes one of us, not by losing what he is, but by showing us that what he is and what we are rhyme in ways we couldn't have predicted.
00:07:37.120 --> 00:07:39.439
But almost nobody talks about where E.T.
00:07:39.600 --> 00:07:40.240
came from.
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In 1980, Spielberg had been developing a horror film called Night Skies.
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The script was about a family terrorized on a remote Kentucky farm by a group of extraterrestrials, methodical, cold, and without mercy.
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The lead creature was named Scar, but there was another one in the group, Buddy.
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Buddy was drawn to the family's disabled son, and they began a budding friendship.
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When Spielberg read the draft, something shifted.
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He didn't stop thinking about their connection.
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So Night's Guys was shelved, Buddy the Alien became E.T., and the horror became a fairy tale.
00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:24.560
23 years separate E.T.
00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:27.199
from Spielberg's take on War of the Worlds.
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The Waterman doesn't run through here.
00:08:29.519 --> 00:08:31.680
Well, there's something down there and it's moving.
00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:47.919
The film follows Ray Farrier, played by Tom Cruise, a dark worker and absent father picking up his kids for a weekend, when the ground split open and vast tripod machines emerge and begin systematically wiping humankind from the planet.
00:08:53.519 --> 00:08:56.639
The aliens in War of the Worlds are not curious.
00:08:56.879 --> 00:09:00.720
They share no DNA with the beings of Close Encounters or E.T.
00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:04.480
They come without mercy, harvesting us.
00:09:04.720 --> 00:09:09.039
We are not an enemy, per se, we are a resource.
00:09:09.679 --> 00:09:14.799
Spielberg has been careful not to make the 9-11 parallel too explicit in interviews.
00:09:14.960 --> 00:09:16.399
But he doesn't need to.
00:09:16.639 --> 00:09:21.120
The ash that rains down on Tom Cruise's face in the opening act is not metaphor.
00:09:21.519 --> 00:09:26.399
The way crowds flow through the streets away from the danger is collective memory given form.
00:09:26.639 --> 00:09:30.639
Spielberg's governments are always scrambling to manage what they can't contain.
00:09:30.799 --> 00:09:35.600
But here, for the first time, the inadequacy has lethal consequences.
00:09:35.840 --> 00:09:37.840
Ray Ferrier is a bad father.
00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:46.159
The aliens don't change who he is, but they do strip away every layer of distraction until all that remains is the animal fact.
00:09:46.399 --> 00:09:49.919
These are my children, and I will not let them die.
00:09:50.720 --> 00:09:55.519
The wonder is gone from Spielberg's universe in this film, but love is not.
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Here it's just more fierce, more desperate, more primal than anything in the earlier films.
00:10:00.720 --> 00:10:03.360
And in the end, that love is what matters.
00:10:09.039 --> 00:10:16.879
Between the wonder of E.T and the terror of War of the Worlds, Spielberg made a TV show that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.
00:10:17.200 --> 00:10:21.440
Take 'em is arguably his most ambitious alien project.
00:10:21.679 --> 00:10:30.559
A 10-episode miniseries spanning multiple generations of families, beginning at Roswell and ending with the birth of Allie Keys in the modern day.
00:10:30.879 --> 00:10:38.399
Ali is a hybrid child, half human, half alien, and the culmination of a decades-long extraterrestrial breeding program.
00:10:39.120 --> 00:10:43.120
The show even won an Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries.
00:10:43.759 --> 00:10:47.759
In Taken, the alien is doing something to us without our consent.
00:10:47.919 --> 00:10:53.039
People are abducted from their beds, from aircraft, from ordinary moments in ordinary lives.
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Implants are placed in their skulls, tracking devices that also manipulate memory, erasing what the subjects experience.
00:11:00.720 --> 00:11:04.879
But here's what makes Taken genuinely strange and fascinating.
00:11:05.120 --> 00:11:08.480
The aliens don't appear as themselves, they wear disguises.
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They manipulate perception so completely that humans see other humans where a gray alien actually stands.
00:11:15.679 --> 00:11:20.000
The alien understands that the human mind cannot process what they are.
00:11:20.159 --> 00:11:23.759
So they present something that the mind can manage and empathize with.
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A handsome face, a familiar form.
00:11:26.320 --> 00:11:33.440
They deceive not out of cruelty, but out of necessity, because the truth of what they are would simply not compute.
00:11:33.600 --> 00:11:40.960
The shadowy US government UFO project, led by the ruthless Colonel Crawford, does exactly the same thing as the alien.
00:11:41.519 --> 00:11:47.840
They manipulate, they deceive, they plant false memories, they destroy evidence, and silence witnesses for their own gain.
00:11:48.080 --> 00:11:53.279
Both the aliens and the government are operating from the same desperate motive.
00:11:53.600 --> 00:11:58.080
Control over something they don't understand and cannot afford to lose.
00:11:58.320 --> 00:12:06.159
And yet, even here in the darkest corner of Spielberg's alien mythology, the alien impulse is not simply cruelty.
00:12:06.240 --> 00:12:09.840
What the breeding program is designed to produce is empathy.
00:12:10.080 --> 00:12:14.480
These are beings of pure intelligence, pure energy with no emotional core.
00:12:15.120 --> 00:12:25.519
They perceive this as a deficiency, so they're reaching across generations, across the stars toward what we have: the capacity to feel and the capacity to care.
00:12:26.480 --> 00:12:29.279
Here, the alien wants to become us.
00:12:29.440 --> 00:12:33.679
It wants our interiority, our grief and love and longing.
00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:40.320
Allie Keys, the hybrid narrator of the show played by a young Dakota Fanning, is their only hope.
00:12:40.559 --> 00:12:43.759
She has both the alien capacity and the human heart.
00:12:43.919 --> 00:12:46.799
She's what Contact was always reaching towards.
00:12:47.039 --> 00:12:53.360
Not destruction, but emerging, a transformation of both the invader and invaded in the name of survival.
00:12:53.600 --> 00:12:54.720
Hello, Allie.
00:12:56.559 --> 00:13:02.639
Legend says that a crystal skull was stolen from unmythical lost city in the Amazon.
00:13:03.360 --> 00:13:08.720
Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull is probably the most dismissed film in Spielberg's catalogue.
00:13:08.879 --> 00:13:14.159
But look past the cultural baggage and something genuinely strange comes into focus.
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Spielberg reportedly didn't want to include conventional aliens in the film at all.
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So he pushed to make the being something else entirely.
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What ended up on screen is the result of that creative itch.
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The beings at the film center are described as existing between dimensions, not from another planet, but not from another plane either.
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A space that exists alongside and outside of ordinary reality.
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The ancient civilizations didn't worship them as gods from the sky, but as something that has always been present at the edges of our perception.
00:13:48.320 --> 00:13:54.240
This is one interpretation of the interdimensional hypothesis, a framework developed by Jack Vallet and J.
00:13:54.399 --> 00:14:00.720
Alan Heinek as an alternative to the simple, but not really supported by data, extraterrestrial model.
00:14:01.279 --> 00:14:08.559
The idea that the phenomena is not primarily a question of spacecraft and propulsion, but reality itself.
00:14:09.039 --> 00:14:20.000
The irony is that in trying to move away from the standard grey alien, Spielberg moved closer to the heart of what serious researchers may actually believe the phenomena represents.
00:14:20.320 --> 00:14:29.679
It's though our imagination, trained on little gray men and flying saucers, simply can't stretch far enough to incorporate what this thing might actually be.
00:14:30.240 --> 00:14:47.440
The Crystal Skull mentioned in the film's title is shown as a library of knowledge left by beings who predate human civilization, and it's perhaps the most honest representation of the phenomena Spielberg ever committed to film, precisely because it refuses the easy answer.
00:14:47.759 --> 00:14:52.320
It's worth asking at this point a question the films themselves really invite.
00:14:52.559 --> 00:14:54.639
How does Spielberg know what he knows?
00:14:54.879 --> 00:14:56.080
Does he have secret knowledge?
00:14:56.159 --> 00:14:58.720
Has he been read into some UFO legacy program?
00:14:58.960 --> 00:15:03.200
Spielberg has been careful to say that he has no special government access.
00:15:03.360 --> 00:15:09.759
He's received no classified briefings and has no inside track on recovered craft or non-human intelligence programs.
00:15:09.919 --> 00:15:16.799
He presents himself as a serious civilian researcher, someone who reads the literature and takes the question seriously.
00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:21.360
But the network he moves in is extraordinary by any measure.
00:15:21.600 --> 00:15:25.519
Hayneck was a genuine collaborator on close encounters.
00:15:25.840 --> 00:15:31.039
Vallet, who has a character based on him in the movie, has spoken about in many conversations.
00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:40.080
John Mack, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who risked his entire career to take the abduction phenomena seriously, was also part of Spielberg's world.
00:15:40.240 --> 00:15:43.360
These are not people that Spielberg admired from afar.
00:15:43.519 --> 00:15:45.840
They were his intellectual companions.
00:15:46.240 --> 00:15:50.720
A who's who of the most serious minds ever to engage with this question.
00:15:50.960 --> 00:15:53.039
And then there's the aerial score.
00:15:53.200 --> 00:16:03.279
In September 1994, 62 children at a primary school in Rua, Zimbabwe, reported watching silver disks descend from the sky during their morning break.
00:16:03.600 --> 00:16:05.679
Creatures emerged, beings.
00:16:05.840 --> 00:16:10.879
Several children described receiving a telepathic message about damage being done to the earth.
00:16:11.120 --> 00:16:13.840
Don't get too technologised, the visitors told them.
00:16:14.080 --> 00:16:21.200
John Mack flew to Zimbabwe and declared it amongst the most credible mass sighting incidents he has ever encountered.
00:16:21.440 --> 00:16:29.279
Documentary filmmaker James Fox first learned about Ariel, not from news reports, but from Steven Spielberg himself.
00:16:29.679 --> 00:16:31.600
Fox has described it publicly.
00:16:31.840 --> 00:16:36.960
He was attempting to get an interview with Spielberg for his first UFO documentary in the mid-90s.
00:16:37.200 --> 00:16:40.960
Spielberg declined the meeting, but he did pass a message back to Fox.
00:16:41.200 --> 00:16:45.039
He told Fox that he should look into a landing case at a school in Africa.
00:16:45.200 --> 00:16:47.279
Spielberg was already tracking it.
00:16:47.440 --> 00:16:56.080
He was one of the first people outside the research community to flag it as significant years before it became the landmark case the field now considers it.
00:16:56.240 --> 00:17:00.240
He says he has no special knowledge from government and he might be telling the truth.
00:17:00.399 --> 00:17:13.200
But he has something arguably more valuable: a lifetime of relationships with the people who have dedicated their lives to understanding this mystery and the intelligence to take what they tell him seriously.
00:17:15.440 --> 00:17:17.920
Look at what Disclosure Day is showing us.
00:17:18.160 --> 00:17:24.079
There are ships, vast, physical, undeniable objects in the sky above populated areas.
00:17:24.319 --> 00:17:29.599
This is the Close Encounters inheritance, the luminous presence too large to explain away.
00:17:29.680 --> 00:17:34.079
But there's also something being done to people's minds and a connection to nature itself.
00:17:34.319 --> 00:17:43.759
Characters shown in states of altered consciousness, seeing things that others can't, receiving information through channels that have nothing to do with the five senses that we know.
00:17:43.920 --> 00:17:56.240
This is the taken inheritance, the crystal skull inheritance, the suggestion that whatever these beings are, their interaction with humans happens as much inside the witness as outside of them.
00:17:59.759 --> 00:18:02.079
Ships and minds.
00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:08.640
The physical and the dimensional, the thing in the sky and the person looking at it.
00:18:08.880 --> 00:18:17.200
Disclosure Day seems like Spielberg's attempt to weave every thread he has been pulling on since 1964 into a single film.
00:18:17.440 --> 00:18:21.279
He spoke to Embiid Magazine about what making this film means to him.
00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:32.559
He said, I have seven solid decades of a vast personal interest in what lies beyond our atmosphere, in the cosmos, and what is within our atmosphere, right here on planet Earth.
00:18:32.720 --> 00:18:36.640
The question has always remained for me: are we alone on our own planet?
00:18:36.799 --> 00:18:40.559
That question has not only haunted me, but it has inspired me.
00:18:40.799 --> 00:18:46.240
But I think it has now resolved itself to my satisfaction in Disclosure Day.
00:18:46.480 --> 00:18:51.200
Spielberg isn't claiming certainty here, and he isn't saying that he has the answer.
00:18:51.359 --> 00:19:00.799
He's saying he believes he has found a story, a set of images, and a way of holding the question that satisfies him after seven decades of circling it.
00:19:01.119 --> 00:19:03.920
That is what Disclosure Day is to him.
00:19:04.160 --> 00:19:06.160
And here's what is remarkable.
00:19:06.400 --> 00:19:13.920
When you stand back and look at the whole arc, every single one of these works, from the five-note greeting at Devil's Tower to E.T.
00:19:14.079 --> 00:19:25.440
learning the word ouch, from the ash on Tom Cruise's upturned face to Ali Keys flying away into wherever she came from, is ultimately not about the alien at all.
00:19:26.160 --> 00:19:30.079
Close Encounters is about a man who finally feels chosen.
00:19:30.400 --> 00:19:30.799
E.T.
00:19:31.119 --> 00:19:37.119
is about a lonely child finding friendship that costs him everything and gives him everything.
00:19:37.440 --> 00:19:43.359
War of the Worlds is about a father who discovers that he is capable of a love he didn't know he had.
00:19:43.680 --> 00:19:49.759
Taken is about generations of ordinary people caught between forces they cannot comprehend.
00:19:50.079 --> 00:19:58.480
Crystal Skull is about the mystery that precedes us and will outlast us, and the strange comfort of knowing we were never as alone as we thought.
00:19:58.799 --> 00:20:02.079
The alien is always a mirror in Spielberg's movies.
00:20:02.240 --> 00:20:07.359
In every film, it reflects back something we couldn't see in ourselves without it.
00:20:07.599 --> 00:20:10.880
The wonder we carry and can't quite justify.
00:20:11.119 --> 00:20:16.720
The love we discover only when it's threatened, the longing to be known.
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Almost every category the real-world research has ever documented, Spielberg is put on film.
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Not as folklore, but cinema, the closest thing we have to a shared visual language for something that, by its nature, resists being looked at directly.
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So the alien in Spielberg's hands has never really been about what's out there.
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It's about what it is to be conscious, to be mortal, to reach towards something beyond yourself and feel against all reason that it might reach back.
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In other words, Spielberg's entire filmmaking career has been spent thinking about what it means to be human.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Spotify or on your chosen platform.
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If you could like, share, or subscribe, that would be very much appreciated.
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It helps us find our tribe.
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If you'd like to support the show and get access to a one-hour live chat each month, and early ad-free access, you can find us at Patreon.
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Just follow the link in the show notes or at our website, to be humanshow.com.
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And feel free to reach out via the contact page or email at hello at tobehumanshow.com.
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As always, remember to be curious.
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The universe is bigger than we know.
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What it means to be human is a double barrel production.
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This week's episode was produced by Ros Mugford and Dan Zetterstrom.
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Sound post production by Parker Mosley, with technical support from Dale Mugford.
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Our theme music is by Thunderbird.
