Barely a month ago, the Trump administration released a new tranche of documents relating to UFO sightings. This act of “unprecedented transparency” was widely perceived as the latest Weapon of Mass Distraction in the President’s arsenal. Although millions of documents from the Epstein files have been kept under wraps, Trump was willing to astound us with government secrets about extraterrestials.
The result of course, was a big nothing. No new evidence, no startling revelations, just the same fuzzy photos of mysterious objects in the sky, bright lights and tall tales. The lesson may be that everyday life under Trump has become scarier and more unpredictable than any dark fantasies about creatures from outer space.
This is the unspoken subtext in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, which is ostensibly about revealing secrets of alien visitations the US government has kept locked away for decades. If it’s more dramatic than the non-event of the document dump, that’s because this is a tale about the alarming overreach of the state rather than an exposé of extraterrestial knowledge.