Before any disclosure from government agencies, Hollywood has spent decades building the images Americans reach for when they hear about UFOs and extraterrestrials. Those portrayals range from visitors who come to warn people after nuclear war to stories of more hostile encounters, and they influence the expectations people bring to new claims about what is real.
In recent remarks, President Donald Trump has said he wants government agencies to release secret files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs, a move that has revived the question of whether fiction will be overtaken by fact. The idea of “disclosure” is also already embedded in public conversation, even as the evidence base remains unsettled.
Duke University professor Priscilla Wald, who teaches a class on science fiction and film, said that even with Hollywood still driving popular ideas, science fiction could be separated from fact—or reframed as factual if agencies release secret records. She described science fiction as shaping how people think about intelligent life elsewhere, including “whether it’s invasion narratives or aliens coming to warn us,” as well as stories where aliens “just say ‘hi.’”
Wald also pointed to how different Hollywood storylines can map onto different emotional reactions if new information emerged. She said that if people learned aliens were on the way, “there would be a mix of responses,” including people who would welcome the visitors and others who would prepare supplies. She later added that “the fear” people might feel can reflect how people project their own social conflicts onto outsiders—saying that depictions of violent conquerors “sounds like us.”
The conversation has surfaced alongside comments from Barack Obama, who suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real. Obama later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens had made contact, though he said the universe is vast and that odds are good that life exists elsewhere.
Retired Navy Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet said any government release would depend on what agencies actually disclosed. He said, “I think people can handle it,” adding that the outcome “does, of course, depend on what information is released (by the government).”
Hollywood’s track record with UFO narratives dates back at least to the years after the 1947 discovery of debris near Roswell, New Mexico, where authorities initially identified crash materials as a flying disc before backtracking and saying they were from a high-altitude weather balloon. About three years later, “The Flying Saucer” reached theaters, followed by additional low-budget entries and other films that have continued to attract sci-fi audiences, including “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
Wald said “The Day the Earth Stood Still” presents extraterrestrials as “gentle souls” who warn humanity after nuclear war, framing the message as a warning about the problems humans create in the cosmos. She said other movies took darker turns, with depictions of aliens arriving with nefarious motives—sometimes to kill people or to take over Earth.
The entertainment industry’s broader influence also stretches into documentaries, including 2025’s “The Age of Disclosure,” which the AP story describes as detailing government knowledge of intelligent life outside humans and efforts to reverse engineer alien technology. Steven Spielberg, who directed “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” is also credited in the story for his upcoming film “Disclosure Day,” which teases the idea that seeing proof of non-human visitors would raise questions about what people fear and why.