Disclosure Day with Steven Spielberg & David Koepp

About This Episode

Have aliens already secretly visited us? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with legendary director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp to discuss their new film Disclosure Day, the science and psychology of alien contact, and why Spielberg believes there’s more out there than meets the eye.

Why does Spielberg have so many alien movies? Spielberg reflects on a career defined by the unknown, from his very first film to Close Encounters, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds. He traces his renewed fascination with UFOs to a 2017 New York Times article. Is there enough evidence of aliens out there? If the government were to find aliens, should they tell us?  We explore how smartphones have turned the entire population into a crowdsourced surveillance network, and whether the timing of government file releases around the film’s debut is really just a coincidence.

David Koepp then joins to pull back the curtain on the craft of screenwriting. We learn about the delicate line between science and fiction in writing science fiction. Would alien disclosure remedy conflict on Earth? Are we projecting our own colonial history onto the evil alien trope? And could aliens exist entirely outside our sensory perception? Neil reminds us that we’ve invented instruments to extend our senses before and that the universe is almost always stranger than we imagine.

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