DISCLOSURE DAY: THE SUPER BOWL TRAILER

Flying saucer, or something ... different?

There are several intriguing breadcrumbs in the latest trailer for Disclosure Day, but one image in particular caught my attention: what appears to be a UAP (the modern term for a UFO) emerging from roiling clouds against a dark, turbulent sky. This could be the first visual nod towards visitors from a far away world.

Or is it?

Impressions, Impressions, Impressions. The content of this new trailer, plus what was revealed previously in the teaser trailer, suggests that what Disclosure Day may be about is the "aliens" that live right next door to us. Under the ocean. Maybe in a parallel dimension. Or perhaps occupying the very same space as us in the same dimension, but beyond our unaided ability to perceive, like in the movie Midnight Special. (I'll talk more about Midnight Special in an upcoming blog post.)

The Evidence. In the trailer, some of the characters seem less like witnesses to an external visitation and more like explorers of an inner, hidden world, one accessed through drugs or occult/shamanic practices. With their senses altered, pupils dilated, and perceptions unmoored from the ordinary, these characters appear to be glimpsing beyond the limits of everyday experience, beyond "ordinary" reality.

In that sense, the film feels closer to the kind of “seeing” that Carlos Castaneda described in the (alleged) teachings of Don Juan Matus (a mode of perception that penetrates mere appearances) or to the visions reported by those who encounter strange, geometric landscapes and “machine elves” under the influence of the most intense psychedelics known to science, like DMT.

Strangers Among Us. One of the emerging trends in “UAP-ology,” if that’s what we should call it, is a growing openness to the idea that whatever we are encountering may be far stranger than extraterrestrial spacecraft. Speculation now ranges from incursions from other dimensions, to non-human intelligences that have evolved alongside us on Earth (perhaps in a dark matter realm), to visitors from the future, and to demons and angels. It is a subject that invites and perhaps even rewards wild theorizing, and it may be that Spielberg is deliberately leaning into that ambiguity rather than closing it down.

The new trailer itself strongly gestures in this direction. It speaks of beings who look like people but are not-really-people that might be walking among us, echoing cryptic remarks made by individuals who claim access to classified knowledge. It also repeatedly highlights pupil dilation (mydriasis) in characters who appear to be perceiving something hidden from ordinary view, as if their senses have been unlocked or recalibrated.

None of this, in my view, undermines my original thoughts about the teaser trailer. But it does underscore how much of this remains conjecture; dependent on the assumption that Spielberg is not deliberately misleading his audience. Personally, I think that’s a safe assumption. Few things damage a film more than marketing that promises one story but delivers another, and I have never known Spielberg to play that kind of trick on viewers.

The Bigger Picture. What is most tantalizing to me, then, is not simply what Disclosure Day might reveal, but what it suggests about us. If the film is truly about seeing rather than merely being shown, then its deepest question may not be “Are they here?” but “What happens to humanity if we finally learn how to see what has always been around us?”

Perhaps the real disclosure will not come from a government briefing, a crashed craft, or a global announcement. Perhaps it will come from a shift in perception: a moment when ordinary people begin to glimpse realities that were always present, but invisible.

And if that moment arrives, we may discover that the most unsettling revelation is not that we are not alone, but that we have never been alone, and are only now waking up to what that truly means ... about "what" we are, and maybe about the nature of everything.