âDisclosure Dayâ is nigh!

Weâre not talking about end times for UFO believers, but about this weekâs debut of Steven Spielbergâs latest movie about space aliens.

âDisclosure Dayâ is something of a second coming for the classic alien sci-fi movie â or perhaps a third coming, given that Spielberg is already famous for âClose Encounters of the Third Kindâ (1977) and âE.T. the Extra-Terrestrialâ (1982).

The second-coming analogy is apt for another reason: The movieâs title plays off the expectation that the worldâs governments will disclose all their secrets about alien contact, but only when they determine that their citizens are ready to hear them. âUFO believers await the day of disclosure with the same burning eagerness as a religious believer expecting the Messiah,â Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at The Atlantic, writes in a forthcoming book titled âWe Want to Believe.â

Kirsch says such believers might greet Spielbergâs movie as evidence that Disclosure Day is truly nigh. âFor people who are very deeply committed to this idea of disclosure, they will take it as confirmation that disclosure is something that is really going to happen,â he says.

Even Meg Charlton, the author of a newly published alien-abduction novel titled âVoyagers,â felt a sense of anticipation as she was writing the manuscript. âI did spend a lot of the book nervous that I would be scooped by first contact somehow, or full disclosure,â she recalls.

In a double-stuffed episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Kirsch and Charlton explore what science and fiction reveal about our obsession with alien visitors.

Fiction Science podcast: The facts and fiction of 'Disclosure Day'

Stories of otherworldly encounters go back millennia â for example, there are references in the Bible to angels ascending and descending on Jacobâs Ladder, or the prophet Elijah spotting wheels of fire in the sky. Kirsch argues that UFOs and space aliens address a psychic need that angels or fairies satisfied in the days before the space age.

âWe do want to feel like weâre not alone in the universe, right?â Kirsch says. âHuman beings have always wanted to feel that way, since long before people talked about UFOs, or knew that there was life on other planets, or knew what other planets really were. People thought the world is full of non-human intelligences. Thatâs a constant in human civilization going back to the very beginning. Weâve just had different languages for what those non-human intelligences are.â

The modern UFO era began in 1947, and waves of alien anticipation have advanced and retreated ever since. The current wave broke in 2017, when word started leaking out about the Pentagonâs efforts to investigate UFO sightings by military fliers.

Thatâs what piqued Kirschâs interest.

âFor a minute there, it started to seem like maybe there could be some threads to unravel to this story, and if you followed it, we would find something concrete,â he said. But a true Disclosure Day never came.

Looking back from the present day, Kirsch notes how the narrative has stalled. âI think that over the last nine years, as the story has been processed and followed up, what we found is that there isnât really anything behind it,â he says.

Issues for science and religion

Adam Kirsch is the author of âWe Want to Believe.â (Credits: Adam Kirsch Photo via LinkedIn; Cover Design by Kelly Winton)

Kirsch argues that eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings canât serve as scientific evidence of their existence.

âEvidence in the scientific sense has to be testable and repeatable,â he says. âIf someone has an experience that they canât explain, thatâs a personal experience that no one else is privy to and cannot be repeated, then you can testify to it. You can say this happened to me, but what you have at the end of that is a story that someone told. People have always told stories about unbelievable, miraculous, amazing things.â

âWe Want to Believeâ delves into how perspectives on UFOs have changed over the course of decades, why the subject came to be taken seriously, and how alien anticipation is connected to the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. The book also explores the philosophical implications of finding (or not finding) life beyond Earth.

What if we are alone in the universe after all? âThe space age is the first time in human history that thereâs good reason to think that only human minds exist,â Kirsch says. âWhat does it do to the way we think about ourselves and the future of our species and the future of our planet? I think those are huge questions with all kinds of interesting implications â not just scientific, but also religious and social.â

âDisclosure Dayâ capitalizes on the religious angle. In one scene, a character suggests that aliens may be ânearer to Godâ than humans. And in a later scene, a different character asks a nun whoâs giving her shelter from the men in black, âDoes God love us? Only us?â

Fiction focuses on the humans

Meg Charlton is the author of âVoyagers.â (Photo by Jessie Casey; Title Art by 3d_kot / Shutterstock / Harper)

Charlton looks at alien encounters through a different lens in âVoyagers,â her first novel.

She weaves in references to the controversies currently surrounding the subject of UFOs â ranging from suspicions that an interstellar object known as âOumuamua was actually an alien spaceship, to suspicions that UFOs (now known officially as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs) are actually powered by technologies developed in China or Russia. But the heart of her story is a decades-old mystery surrounding the 36-hour disappearance of two children in 1997. Were their missing memories caused by an alien abduction, or by a totally terrestrial type of trauma?

Charlton says she was inspired to write âVoyagersâ by the stories she heard while covering the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico. The annual event is a magnet for âexperiencersâ â that is, people who turn to paranormal explanations for the anomalous experiences theyâve had.

âWhat really drew me to this as a novelist, and also as a human being, was the emotional resonance of the stories of people who had been through these experiences,â she says. âI was really thinking about how they spoke to these very universal questions about belief, about self-trust, about memory, about what happens when a private experience then gets turned into something public for other people to consume and dissect and analyze and question.â

In the course of researching the novel, Charlton learned about online support groups for experiencers â safe spaces where people can share stories about alien encounters without ridicule or cross-examination.

âI think thatâs something thatâs important for all of us, beyond just people who have had these kinds of anomalous experiences,â she says. âWe all have experiences, I think, that donât fit into the narrative we tell about ourselves or that we tell about our lives or the world. And having other people to talk about that with, to make you feel less alone, I think, is essential for all of us.â

Are we alone? âVoyagers,â âWe Want to Believeâ â and âDisclosure Day,â for that matter â all suggest itâs important to contemplate that question, even if we never find the answer.

Check out the original version of this item on Cosmic Log for bonus alien-abduction book recommendations from Meg Charlton. âVoyagersâ is due for release on June 16, and âWe Want to Believeâ comes out on Aug. 25. While youâre waiting for âWe Want to Believe,â you can check out Adam Kirschâs article for The Atlantic on the buzz over UFOs. (Hereâs an archived version of the article.) âDisclosure Dayâ is playing at a theater near you. There are a couple of other events coming up for UFO fans: The Men in Black Birthday Bash and Festival is scheduled in Des Moines, Wash., on June 20-21. This yearâs Roswell UFO Festival takes place July 2-4.

To get up to speed on the UFO beat, check out this roundup. In a related development, an international committee of experts has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence for the first time in more than 15 years.

Fiction Science is included in FeedSpotâs 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.