With 'Disclosure Day,' the director returns to a longtime preoccupation. Two Times staffers explore his ongoing fascination with extraterrestrials.

For roughly the first three decades of his career, Spielberg tended to take a fairly sanguine view of aliens, refusing to succumb to the disaster-movie framework of aliens attacking terrified Earthlings. That changed in a big way after 9/11, when Spielberg made a couple of Tom Cruise -starring sci-fi blockbusters grappling with a changed world.

Steven Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Disclosure Day and E.T., has said he believes in aliens.

The 1977 sci-fi UFO epic is influential yet, thanks partly to Star Wars, it's also like nothing else

We're disclosing what Steven Spielberg, Demi Lovato, Tom Cruise and more celebrities have said about the possibility that the people of Earth aren't alone in this universe.