{"id":60234,"date":"2026-06-12T21:19:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=60234"},"modified":"2026-06-12T21:19:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:19:01","slug":"what-is-disclosure-day-actually-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=60234","title":{"rendered":"What Is Disclosure Day Actually About?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This article contains spoilers for Disclosure Day.<\/em><\/p>\n

For a movie titled Disclosure Day (review)<\/u>, the new Steven Spielberg film sure keeps things mysterious for most of its 145-minute runtime. Trailers have shown Emily Blunt\u2019s meteorologist Margaret Fairchild speaking in tongues on TV, Josh O\u2019Connor\u2019s cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner on the run with a black backpack, and some pointed shots of animals. But that\u2019s pretty much it, though the overwhelming suspicion is that following in the footsteps of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (as well as War of the Worlds and sort of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), this is yet another Spielberg alien movie. And the title definitely implies that the existence of aliens gets disclosed \u2014 perhaps not during nighttime, but during the day.<\/p>\n

Well, it does<\/em> happen during nighttime; shows what you know! But more importantly, the actual disclosure of alien life, while the climax of the film, is far and away one of the least consequential points of the plot, at least on the micro level. On the macro level? It changes the world, or at least has the potential to do so. But if you\u2019re wondering what Disclosure Day is actually about, you might still be flummoxed after leaving the theater, so we\u2019ll attempt to explain what it\u2019s about from a plot level, then break down what it likely means from a thematic level.<\/p>\n

This is: Disclosure Day Disclosure Day, where we disclose what Disclosure Day is really all about. Day.<\/p>\n

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What Disclosure Day Is Actually About: The Plot Explained<\/strong><\/h2>\n

If you want a full plot summary, a site called \u201cWikipedia\u201d exists and it\u2019s pretty cool, so check it out. Instead of going beat by beat through the whole thing, we\u2019re going to do our best to lay this out in chronological order and fill in the gaps in terms of what happened in the movie, which somewhat gets left up to the viewer to interpret. And because this is our<\/em> interpretation, you may have intuited different things that are going on here.<\/p>\n

The events of the movie actually go all the way back to the 1940s and Roswell, though that\u2019s only what we see in the footage released to the world at the end of the film; it\u2019s possibly a longer span of time. Regardless, the Roswell crash was indeed an alien spaceship, and it was far from the last encounter humans \u2014 and Americans in particular \u2014 had with the little grey aliens with the big eyes. Over the decades, multiple other crafts have crashed and<\/em> successfully landed, which is something the US government has kept secret for years.<\/p>\n

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Or rather, it was initially<\/em> the US government, up until President Nixon brought an actor friend to check out a few alien corpses. At that point, Wardex, a corporation run for at least the past 35 years by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) realized that Presidents become civilians after eight years (not exactly true, but moving on), so began to leave them out of the circle of trust. Wardex, an independent government contractor, became the sole steward of all alien knowledge and technology, using it to progress tech in the outside world, torture aliens, and hold three cylindrical artifacts that can do anything from make a man teleport to control minds to essentially work as a TV remote. That last one is less impressive, though it is the final thing we see an artifact do in the movie, so your mileage may vary on how exciting that is.<\/p>\n

While Wardex has been studying and dissecting these alien visitors, they\u2019ve continued to visit us. In 1996, they took two people to their ships: younger versions of Margaret and Daniel. Appearing as animals like an elk, a raccoon, and a cardinal so that the children wouldn\u2019t be scared, they led Margaret to an old fairytale-looking house where it snows upside down outside and fundamentally changed both Margaret and Daniel, granting them fantastic abilities.<\/p>\n

The knowledge of aliens does not belong to a secretive government-adjacent company or cabal \u2014\u00a0it belongs to the eight billion people who live on planet Earth.\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Those abilities boil down to telepathy and linguistics, respectively, though they take more forms than that. However, while the movie doesn\u2019t explicitly state this out loud, it seems after the encounter with the aliens, Margaret likely read her father\u2019s mind and ran away from him \u2014 the event was so traumatic that she suppressed her abilities for years. Daniel simply cannot remember his childhood and also<\/em> suppressed his abilities until one of the aliens in animal guise looked in on him during college when he was a hard-partying almost dropout, unlocking his power to read math like a language and allowing him to get hired by Wardex. Daniel didn\u2019t know that aliens had gifted him a power, or that he had a power at all; the only thing Daniel knew was that he could suddenly understand complex math and code.<\/p>\n

At Wardex, Daniel met Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a man who works with extraterrestrial biology and who communicated directly with the aliens. At some point, one of the aliens escaped (who we see towards the end of the movie), and began to manipulate events behind the scenes to lead up to Disclosure Day. Along with Hugo, that alien hatched a complex plan to bring Margaret and Daniel back together so they could activate their Wonder Twins powers and reveal the truth about aliens to the world. Why? We\u2019ll get more into that in the next section, but the major argument throughout the movie is that the knowledge of aliens does not belong to a secretive government-adjacent company or cabal \u2014 it belongs to the eight billion people who live on planet Earth.<\/p>\n

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Emily Blunt and Josh O\u2019Connor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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That plan was to have a section of Wardex employees defect on moral grounds and begin building a scale replica of Margaret\u2019s childhood home. Hugo and company were aware that Margaret had powers, but they were waiting for her to be activated\u2026 which she is, by one of the aliens masquerading as a cardinal. That leads to the events we see in the movie, where Margaret and Daniel loop their way around multiple times until they come to Hugo\u2019s version of Margaret\u2019s house, all built to allow her to confront the trauma of her alien abduction and get ready for \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 Disclosure Day.<\/p>\n

And that does happen, as Hugo and company bring Margaret to KCXE in Kansas City, dump all the footage of every alien encounter for nearly three-quarters of a century onto the world, and reveal the existence of aliens among us. But as to what the movie is about<\/em>, it\u2019s to bring Daniel and Margaret \u2014 two halves of the same alien experiment \u2014 together, make them face their trauma, and come out better and more confident people for it. It\u2019s also so the escaped alien can whisper something to Daniel, who translates it for Margaret, who then goes and tells the world, \u201clisten.\u201d The end!<\/p>\n