2026 film directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by David Koepp, released 12 June 2026, forty-nine years after Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A contractor steals his employer’s archive of encounter footage; a Kansas City meteorologist freezes on air and begins speaking in clicks only he can parse.
What it gets right
The cover-up does not run through a general. It runs through a private corporation that has overseen the American programme since 1973, structured so the money stays untraceable and the President is cut out, which mirrors the shape David Grusch described to Congress in July 2023 rather than inventing a paranoia of its own. The two leads are Experiencers, taken as children and left with latent abilities, and the film treats their testimony as the load-bearing centre rather than a sideshow, which is the material Spielberg circled in 1977 and did not commit to.
The beings
Spielberg has said the aliens were built from what real witnesses describe, and the clearest fingerprint is the Ariel School 1994 encounter at Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where dozens of schoolchildren described small beings with huge wraparound eyes and a telepathic, almost environmental message, and which John E. Mack flew out to investigate. Contact arriving as telepathy rooted in a childhood event quotes the modern record rather than the little green men.
Reception
Reviewed on this site in June 2026 as the most ufology-literate film Spielberg has made, against a critical line that fidelity to the existing lore is a failure of nerve.
Connections
Close Encounters of the Third Kind · Ariel School 1994 · John E. Mack · David Grusch · Experiencers · Legacy Program · Crash Retrieval Program · Roswell Incident 1947