June 16, 2026

We are not alone.

That is the message from Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, which I enjoyed yesterday at my local theater. I don’t see many flicks in movie theaters these days, but I appreciate Spielberg’s storytelling skills, and the metaphysical questions raised by this picture intrigued me enough to want to see it sooner rather than later.

Although the story suffers from an excess of violent car chase scenes and explosions, I suppose they are obligatory in order to appeal to a mass audience. But I found the movie entertaining in spite of those drawbacks, though not as captivating as Spielberg’s other alien films, ET the Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The film title refers to an event in which it is revealed to the human race that the U.S. government and one of its defense contractors have been withholding information from the public about decades of government communications with extraterrestrial beings from an advanced civilization. The movie suggests that this revelation would be a major wake-up call for humanity, though it only touches upon the implications of such a paradigm shift in our understanding of the nature of our reality.

For some Christian fundamentalists, such a wake-up call would be a shake-up call. In a May 31st article in the New York Times it was reported that a group of Pentecostal pastors and podcasters was recently given a private briefing by two “intelligence operators” about the possible existence of visiting aliens, and these religious conservatives were alarmed. They, and later Vice President J.D. Vance, proclaimed these hypothetical visitors to be demons.

But a Catholic columnist for the New York Times had a more thoughtful response to the possibility of extraterrestrial existence. In his June 13th piece “Does UFO Disclosure Threaten Faith?” Ross Douthat wrote about Steven Spielberg’s movie and the debate about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be a threat to organized religion, “with aliens stepping into the role that’s traditionally occupied by popes and prophets and mystics, angelic messengers or the Holy Spirit…The implication is that aliens are helping humankind to become spiritually mature. Which means that if God exists in the movie’s universe, the alien race seemingly stands in a closer relationship to the deity than human beings, and they’re here to act as the divinity’s interpreters and agents. And that idea – again, a commonplace one in certain circles of UFO discourse – is in pretty obvious tension with the belief that an existing scripture or teaching authority is the surest guide to faith and morals.”

Given the “pretty obvious” failure of organized religions around the world to elevate the human condition and morality, I would change the words of the John Lennon song to say “All we are saying is give aliens a chance.”

I’m not expecting flying saucers to land anytime soon, if ever. After all, the immense interstellar distances and the laws of physics make such an arrival unlikely, although maybe wormholes or some sort of interdimensional travel technology could surprise us.

Nor do I put much faith in conspiracy theories, although government, corporate, and religious coverups are not unknown.

But something has to serve as a catalyst for a shift in human consciousness, and I just hope we don’t do it the hard way. Climate catastrophes, nuclear or biological war, or more pandemics would certainly be shocks to our systems, but would they lead to a new understanding of our interconnectedness?

I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which mysterious monoliths appear out of nowhere at crucial stages of human evolution. According to the Arthur C. Clarke novels that inspired the movie, these vertical rectangles were designed by an advanced extraterrestrial race to help Earthlings and other beings in the Milky Way galaxy to make progress in their technological development.

I’m skeptical about the value of technological “progress,” because without the wisdom to manage it constructively, technology such as artificial intelligence can morph into artificial stupidity. But I would welcome help from more evolved civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, if they exist and are willing and able to offer us primitive humans a helping hand or a helping tentacle in our collective spiritual awakening.

What my intuition, my sixth sense, tells me is that such help is not only on the way – it is here, now, within us. We don’t need spaceships to rescue us, though they might be helpful, but we do need the inspiration and guidance being offered continually by higher levels of our own consciousness. Whether you call those higher frequencies light beings or spirit guides or angels, or buddhas from other dimensions, I believe it’s possible to tune in to those channels, those levels of our own awareness. And I’m workin’ on it.

In the meantime, if an ET offers me a joyride on his or her spaceship, my response will be: Yeeehaww! Ride ’em, cowboy!

All I know is that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. And more than meets the I.

We are not alone.