Long Islanders are hoping to have 'close encounters' with Steven Spielberg's UFO movie 'Disclosure Day'

What Roy Mauritsen remembers about seeing Steven Spielberg’s "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" as a boy is the looming shape of Devils Tower. For a kid growing up in Suffolk County, the peculiarly flat-topped rock formation in Wyoming — which serves as the site of a mind-boggling meeting between mankind and alien-kind — was a mysterious and mesmerizing image. Released in December 1977, Spielberg’s film became a $300 million hit and a sci-fi classic widely admired by filmmakers from Stanley Kubrick to Pixar’s Andrew Stanton.

Nearly 50 years later, Mauritsen, 56, a graphic designer who helps run the Long Island sci-fi fan organization I-CON, plans to be one of the first in line at the Regal Deer Park to see "Disclosure Day," the new Spielberg film that’s being called a stealth sequel to "Close Encounters."

"It’s a return to Spielberg doing the stuff we know he's good at," Mauritsen predicted. "So it's going to be a good ride."

"Disclosure Day" casts Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor as strangers trying to alert the world to the existence of alien life while staying one step ahead of Wardex, a private security corporation working for the government (its ruthless leader is played by Colin Firth). In the run-up to the film’s June 12 release, online discussion focused on the similarities between the two Spielberg movies: extraterrestrials, a government cover-up, kids who make contact and, of course, that quintessentially Spielbergian mix of fear and wonder. Yet "Disclosure Day" also addresses how much has changed since the days of "Close Encounters," from rapidly advancing technology to crumbling faith in civic institutions.

"It's not a sequel, obviously, and none of the characters recur," David Koepp, the writer of "Disclosure Day" and a frequent Spielberg collaborator, said. "But I think it is fair to say it’s a bookend."

PARANORMAL HEYDAY

The 1970s was a decade fascinated by the paranormal. The mentalist Uri Geller became a celebrity by supposedly bending spoons with his mind, while Leonard Nimoy hunted Bigfoot in his popular television show "In Search of ..." Folks from Indiana to Tennessee began telling stories of alien contact, and The National Enquirer bumped its cash prize for proof of extraterrestrials from $100,000 to a whopping $1 million, according to the Lexington Herald Leader in Kentucky (the state where in 1976 three women said their car had been controlled by aliens).

"Didn’t it seem like every other day someone was being abducted?" Lon Cohen, editor and publisher of the Rocky Point-based website SciFiSland.com, said. Cohen, 55, added that there was no internet to consult for fact-checking at the time, "so when you saw these stories, you didn't know whether to believe them or not."

'CLOSE ENCOUNTERS' REFLECTED ITS TIME

Into that milieu dropped "Close Encounters," which not only took alien sightings seriously but regarded them as something like a religious experience. In the film, Indiana electrician lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) sees an alien spacecraft, becomes haunted by visions of that unfamiliar Wyoming tower and finds himself drawn there along with other believers.

Spielberg "had more of a wide-eyed, childlike view of things," Cohen said, recalling how the film ends with a literal symphony of interspecies communication (featuring one of composer John Williams’ best-remembered themes) and the sight of long-vanished humans returning from the great beyond. "It felt like a huge, positive, almost spiritual take on how aliens would be," Cohen said.

Since then, UFO culture has gone through different phases. The 1980s saw a boom in conspiracy theories about Roswell, the U.S. Army airfield in New Mexico that supposedly contained evidence of an alien spacecraft and possibly its crew. "Communion," Whitley Strieber’s 1987 first-person account of his abduction, featured a portrait of an alien — gray skin, hairless cranium, almond-shaped eyes — that helped define the popular notion of what extraterrestrials must look like. (Enthusiasts call them simply The Grays.)

"For some reason, most if not all stories about contact with aliens involve descriptions along these lines," Koepp acknowledged. Maybe, he added archly, "we saw it 50,000 years ago and it got implanted there."

LONG ISLAND AND UFOs

Long Island, too, joined the fray. In the 1980s, John Ford, a retired Suffolk County court officer, formed the Long Island UFO Network and was later accused of trying to poison officials with radium. Also during the ‘80s, Montauk Air Force Station (Camp Hero) became the subject of fantastic stories about (among other things) extraterrestrial life; it would became an inspiration for the Netflix series "Stranger Things," originally titled "Montauk."

"Long Island does have a couple of notches in the UFO conspiracy belt," said I-CON’s Mauritsen.

During the 1990s, the notion of aliens and government cover-ups were familiar enough to inspire a hugely popular television show, "The X-Files," and a hit Hollywood franchise, "Men in Black." The former had a spooky feel while the latter was broadly comedic, but a few years after 9/11 Spielberg released "War of the Worlds," an alien invasion film (based on the H.G. Wells novel) that offered a much darker picture.

That 2005 film "imagines a sort of catastrophic coming of the aliens, with mass panic and infrastructural collapse," Simone Brione, a literature professor who specializes in science fiction at Stony Brook University, said. Spielberg, he explained, "transforms the trope of the extraterrestrial contact into an allegory for terrorism."

(The most obvious flaw in all UFO stories, according to Stephen Lawrence, a professor of physics and astronomy at Hofstra University, is that any beings who possessed the advanced technology needed to travel light-years to Earth wouldn’t need to. "Whatever problem you might have on your home planet," Lawrence said, "you can solve it there.")

As for 2026, it’s a different world, according to Koepp. For starters, the theories about government cover-ups turned out to have a germ of truth, he said, pointing to a 2017 New York Times story that revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, quietly run by the Defense Department for years. Then there’s the current administration’s recent decision to release what the Pentagon has called "new, never-before-seen" files about UFO’s that date back to at least the 1960s. Even the term UFO, long associated with little green men, is gradually being replaced by UAP, which stands for the more agnostic-sounding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

Spielberg’s first UFO movie "was the beginning of a conversation — along with other notable movies from the ‘70s — about, ‘Hey, do you guys think maybe our government might be lying to us?’" Koepp explained. "And now it's 2026, and we know for a certainty the government is lying to us."

Both films, he added, "very niftily reflect the times from which they grew."