The marketing for Disclosure Day has been unusually cagey, and if you haven’t had the chance to catch Steven Spielberg’s new alien movie yet, we won’t spoil it here. As the name implies, though, Spielberg’s latest sci-fi involves American officials keeping secrets about extraterrestrial life, and those secrets date back to the 1947 Roswell incident.
Roswell wasn’t modern America’s first UFO claim, but it’s the one now woven into the country’s mythos. We could spend all day simply listing the pop culture it’s influenced: The X-Files, Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Perfect Dark, Deus Ex, XCOM, a TV movie called Roswell that’s unrelated to the book and TV series called Roswell… you get the idea. Disclosure Day is the latest in a decadeslong display of pop culture dominance that owes its existence to a series of bizarre coincidences.
