What Steven Spielberg Is Really Disclosing Today
Is his faith in Harmonialism, an old time religion in America
Disclosure Day, Stephen Spielberg’s new film, will not reveal the truth about extraterrestrials. Early reviews describe a ‘mystery box’ plot that disappoints expectations of extraterrestrial disclosure. Spielberg is instead disclosing his own faith journey with extraterrestrials in his new film, which is possibly his last.
Spielberg believes ‘they’ are here, and he believes he can “hurry” the day of disclosure along with this movie. Our screen magician is attempting to work a spell on us that will deliver “ontological shock” to make us question the foundations of our faith. The result, he says, will be a harmonious humanity. This idea is turning out to be a little bit controversial.
Spielberg’s comments have some Christians bracing for a perceived offense to their beliefs. The script apparently only touches on Christianity without examining the effect of extraterrestrials on other religions. This tension over what I call ‘Space Jesus’ crystallizes the fraught relationship of Harmonialism (‘New Age’ religion) and Christianity. It makes up a theme of my book draft, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer.
UFOs are a ‘way of knowing’ among moderns, so Jesus can ride with aliens, or be an alien himself. Christians do in fact object to Jesus being placed in equality with Ascended Masters, Saint Germain, and the rest of the undifferentiated heavenly beings of the Harmonialist imagination.
Spielberg was raised in Judaism. However, his film career is filled with Harmonialist themes. Close Encounters of the Third Kind borrowed heavily from the latter-day Theosophy of Spielberg’s youth through the use of color and sound to communicate with aliens.
Now he is bookending Close Encounters. There is a line in this trailer which mentions a “79-year cover up”. Born in December 1946, Steven Spielberg is 79 years old. It is a useful coincidence that he was born at the cusp of the very first UFO ‘flap’. Obvious self-reference is obvious.
I suggest the dating matters, and not simply because Spielberg has reached the median age of mortality for his demographic. During Spielberg’s first year on earth, Kenneth Arnold reported seeing chevron-shaped metallic objects emitting or reflecting light as they flew. Arnold later experienced a series of paranormal events. This is a pattern to Harmonialism that is reflected in the film trailer.
Emily Blunt seems to experience a paranormal event in a television studio, apparently ‘channeling’ an alien language. This would be a spiritual practice of Harmonialist religion. UFO cults are replete with examples of mediumistic transmission like this. ‘Remote viewing’ is another popular psychic power among Harmonialists. The attempt to combine scientific and psychic is a key trait of Harmonialism.
Wait. Who are these Harmonialists?
As religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom wrote in his encyclopedic description, Harmonialism characteristically seeks to harmonize science with the occult. The result is always a pastiche of incomplete evidence glued together by faith. Paranormal becomes normal. Absence becomes evidence.
Harmonialism must include Christianity, and explain Christianity, in order to encompass the universe of possibility. This is where Harmonialist texts can cross boundaries with Christians.
Harmonialism also departs from reality at the beginning of its story about itself. The month after Arnold’s sensational story in 1947, a US Army balloon crashed to earth at Roswell. This incident has become a falsified narrative origin-point for the flying saucers of Harmonialism.
Ufologist Christopher Lambright is the only researcher who ever asked the famous Roswell eyewitness, Jesse Marcel, “if there was anything in what he saw or found that made him think it was part of a flying saucer or crashed disc”. Marcel’s answer was “an unambiguous ‘No’.”
In The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know, Kal Korff conclusively shows that the material recovered at Roswell perfectly matches a US Army balloon radar target made by a toy company in New York.
Spielberg prefers to believe a different story. Disclosure Day starts at Roswell. My book shows that Harmonialism is two centuries older than Roswell. Believers were contacting aliens through astral projection, automatic writing, and other psychic means throughout the 19th century.
Flying saucers are icons of faith that descended from Harmonialist heavens. Roswell is an article of faith, not history, so Spielberg’s film is a religious epic. Harmonialists have no Ben Hur, no Ten Commandments, no Passion of the Christ. Disclosure Day seems meant to be that kind of a film for Harmonialism.
Spielberg says that he is “much more inclined now” towards belief in extraterrestrials than he was when he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I believe him. At his age, that kind of reflection is pretty universal.
Spielberg and Harmonialism
In my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer, Spielberg is mentioned five times. His work has formed a mimetic feedback loop in American culture for decades, profoundly shaping the public imaginarium of the extraterrestrial.
This is normal in Harmonialism, which borrows freely from science fiction, while science fiction frequently takes inspiration from Harmonialism.
Close Encounters cemented the archetype of the alien-visitor-abductor in the public mind: small, gray humanoids with black eyes and nostril slits instead of noses. The now-familiar ‘grays’ were based on the final form that extraterrestrials took in the evolving descriptions of Betty Hill.
At first, Hill described the aliens as having prominent noses. Under the influence of hypnotic regression and Harmonialist religion, however, the aliens progressively lost their noses in further retellings.
Spielberg has been associated with major Harmonialists for his entire career. Two advisers on the 1977 film, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, are venerated figures in ufology. In fact, Vallée inspired the scientist character Claude Lacombe played by renowned French actor François Truffaut.
Lacombe is the scientist who remains open-minded while listening to Richard Dreyfuss describe his spiritual experience with the cinematic aliens in Close Encounters.
Whereas Hynek and Vallée are legitimate scientists, they stop being scientific when they delve into metaphysical questions. That is where Harmonialism happens. Vallée is a year older than Spielberg, but he remains a prominent figure in the UAP ‘disclosure community’.
He also has a government background, as do most of the Harmonialists in the UAP disclosure movement. In fact, the ‘deep state’ seems to be a natural habitat for Harmonialism. Harmonizing science and faith requires secret knowledge, so it is reasonable that classified government jobs attract a fair number of Harmonialists.
More problematic and revealing however is the role of Richard C Doty, a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s 2002 alien abduction mini-series, Taken. Doty is the living embodiment of the unreliable narrator, a red flag of falsehood.
During his time with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, Doty conducted multiple disinformation campaigns within the ufology community that left it divided by controversy.
On at least one occasion, Doty’s pretextual story of extraterrestrial contacts with the federal government clearly borrowed from Close Encounters. One year after Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Doty approached a victim of his psywar with a story about an extraterrestrial abiding on earth before returning home.
Like the character played by Colin Firth in Disclosure Day, Doty is a recognizable Man In Black, a sinister figure from UFO folklore who violates truth boundaries. Doty says that he did it all to protect the human race. Humans “cannot accept what we know”, Firth’s character says in the trailer.
Rather than a cover-up by the government, my research reveals that Harmonialists in the government, including Doty, have used secrecy as a veil of illusion to imbue their prophecies of imminent disclosure with gravitas and drama. The ‘hidden’ flying saucers and autopsied aliens are another mystery box.
The “mystery box” problem is a modern storytelling approach popularized by J.J. Abrams, the co-creator of Lost, a show that infamously exemplifies the trend. Writers pile layer upon layer of enigmatic questions, secrets, and plot hooks to keep audiences engaged and theorizing.
Too often, show writers fail to deliver satisfying, coherent, emotionally resonant, or logical resolutions that satisfy expectations — like the latter seasons of Lost. Harmonialism does the same thing. The ‘disclosure movement’ is a mystery box plot.
Spielberg is using a mystery box. According to Chris Gore at Film Threat, about 80 percent of the film is chase scenes to get to the mystery box. As a moviegoer, this is what really frightens me.
Disclosure is the plot device
Great secrets have been kept from us. Humanity is not ready to know, but humanity deserves to know. This conflict drives the plot of Disclosure Day. Spielberg wants us to believe this moment of disclosure is immanent, a transcendence unfolding in the real world. It is supposed to be spooky, frightening, Judgment Day stuff.
We are meant to fear for our beliefs. Christian belief is apparently questioned, but only with nuns. Anti-Catholicism is common in early Harmonialism. While Harmonialists have tried to incorporate kabbalistic Judaism, anti-Semitism was also a common comorbid symptom of Theosophy, which suffered disasters by trying to incorporate Hinduism. Harmonialists have attempted to incorporate Islam in the past, but there is little of that activity these days.
Perhaps the reader has already noted which dog does not bark, here. From its beginnings as a spiritual movement, Harmonialism was largely a Protestant movement drawing upon Protestant roots. Disclosure Day is a substitute for the Protestant Day of Judgment: souls ascending, angels descending, cosmic justice.
Repent, ye sinners!
Being a Spielberg film, however, the ending will encourage belief. Ideally, we are meant to leave the theater believing even more strongly than we did before. This is the Spielberg form, and it will be in form with Harmonialism.
In his stories that depict extraterrestrials in a positive or neutral light, Spielberg shows us that rapport with the cosmos — being in tune with universal vibes — can do magic. Spiritual power derived from this relationship to the cosmos can work miracles, such as E.T. healing a bloodied fingertip. Spielberg is Harmonialist in his optimism.
In his darker takes, such as War of the Worlds and Taken, Spielberg admits that cosmic forces can be disruptive, invasive, insidious, a poison hidden inside a promise of pure, harmonious benevolence. The motives of our ‘space brothers’ become muddied, their behavior inhumane. Comet-riding ‘Luciferians’ of the Black Lodge are an original trope of Harmonialist religion. Even War of the Worlds managed to have a positive continuity, a faith in the family.
The word for this sort of story, where the aliens arrive and that is good or bad or even both at the same time, is ‘apocalypse’. Disclosure Day is meant to be an apocalypse.
Harmonialists love doomsday: earthquakes, lost continents, interplanetary conflict, Younger Dryas impact scenarios, and ancient nuclear wars abound in their texts. Positive Harmonialism is a narrative of faith in continuity, though it is disrupted by upheaval and change. Darker Harmonialism disrupts the pacifistic promises and good intentions.
It is all very protean, like the Book of Genesis, or the myth of Prometheus.
The “ontological shock” of the shared experience of seeing this movie is supposed to unite humanity in a new understanding of ourselves as connected beings. Talk about marketing to the global box office.
Spielberg wants to “remind us of our capacity for empathy and remind us there is something bigger than us”, he says. Something. It could be God, or gods, or a galactic high council. Notably, he does not say what that something is. But it was aliens.
The call to Harmonialism is presented as a revised version of Pascal’s wager, the proposition that it is safer to believe in God and be wrong than reject God and be wrong. The universe is so big, the argument goes, that we cannot possibly be all alone in it. It is safer to believe in the aliens and be wrong than to disbelieve in the aliens and be wrong.
We should therefore have faith that we are not alone, the movie preview suggests. It is the Harmonialist gospel. I have found iterations of this argument in every Harmonialist text I have examined. The obvious problem with Pascal’s wager is that it also applies to the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Odin, Baal, or Baphomet. At some point, empirical probabilities demand respect.
Harmonialists always try to strike a perfect balance of belief and evidence, and always fail, eventually. Every Harmonialist text is dated, aged, in need of updating. They all suffer from the relentless progress of real scientific understanding.
Spielberg disclosed
Harmonialism is an eclectic faith movement that anyone can join. Jews can be Harmonialists. Catholics and Muslims can become Harmonialists. Spielberg does not have to make a public confession of Harmonialism to be in harmony with the universe.
That is a very attractive feature of the faith movement for a great many liberal-minded people. I am certainly not ascribing a narrow religious perspective to Steven Spielberg. On the contrary, he is fundamentally a humanist. His Harmonialism is not grounded in sectarian allegiance. It is a product of his liberal artistic values.
Spielberg told SXSW in March that the 2017 New York Times coverage of alleged UFO sightings “reinvigorated” his belief in extraterrestrials. This is an important topic covered in my book because the ‘news’ story was a sensational propaganda project.
Two of the three authors of that headline story are Harmonialists. They write Harmonialist books. The most prominent of the three is a practicing spiritual medium.
Imagine Helena Blavatsky writing headlines for the newspaper of record, reporting pronouncements from the Lords of the Flame on Venus, because that is more or less what the ‘disclosure movement’ did in 2017. A new UFO flap was at hand. Belief in extraterrestrials was at an all-time high.
My book identifies Steven Spielberg as a bricoleur. He makes new stories out of older material, forming a collage of beliefs. Disclosure Day is a bricolage, or mash-up, of Harmonialist beliefs, and some of these are much older than Spielberg, or the first flying saucer flap. The 2017 NYT story was also a bricolage by bricoleurs.
Death is not a new religious question. It is the original religious question, and Harmonialism has offered answers in every new creative collage that it presents us. Spielberg is near the end of his life, pondering the ascent, and calling on us to watch the sky. Mortality has made this movie.
Reader, see the movie if you want to. Enjoy the popcorn. But do not hold your breath waiting for the day of actual disclosure in the film title. Like Roswell, the day of disclosure is an article of faith. Spielberg may be disclosing his religious values to the world, but the mystery box is all we can ever expect to witness.
Which is not to say I don’t have faith in Spielberg. Buzz about the film is generally good. I hope that Disclosure Day is good. I plan to see it, so I am not judging Spielberg’s film in advance. If there is a sinister conspiracy behind this movie, then that sinister conspiracy is going to get my ticket and popcorn and soda money.
And then I’m sure I’ll have much more to say.
Post script, here are two reviews, one good, one bad.
Jeremy Jahns is a respected and honest YouTuber with a positive review. He doesn’t know, or care, about Harmonialism. He just cares about being entertained. Jahns says he had a good time with Disclosure Day. The real test of a gospel film is whether it annoys us with the altar call. Apparently this film did not do that.
Here is Chris Gore of Film Threat. He also does not know or care about Harmonialism. He is a film critic who demands to be entertained. He says he did not have a good time watching Disclosure Day. The real test of a mystery box is whether the payoff was worthwhile. Apparently this film does not do that, which would also be very consistent with Harmonialism.