Steven Spielberg has suggested that aliens “are here” on Earth in interviews promoting his new sci-fi epic, Disclosure Day.
"Based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I’ve gathered throughout my whole life, everybody I’ve listened to and every documentary I’ve ever watched and all the testimonies in Congress that I’ve heard, I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here,” the director told CBS.
"And who knows, maybe they’ve always been here.”
He added that he was confident in this belief, despite never personally coming into contact with the paranormal.
"Isn’t that terrible? Yeah. I deserved it. I deserved a sighting. And I need a sighting.
"I mean, I’m an ambassador of these guys and they haven’t shown themselves to me. I don’t get that.”
Disclosure Day, which Spielberg describes as a “bookend” to his 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, stars Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt as cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner and meteorologist Margaret Fairchild as they attempt to expose a government cover-up of extra-terrestrial contact.
It has already taken £74 million at the global box office after a strong opening last week.
Despite some mixed reviews from critics, Spielberg called the film “a summation of my life in science fiction, which started when I was 17 years old”, recalling a childhood memory that sparked his interest in the cosmos.
"About five or six years old, I was living in New Jersey, and [my] father came into the bedroom and woke [me] up from a sound sleep and put [me] in a car,” he explained.
"And I kept saying, ‘Dad, what is it? What is it?’ He said ‘It’s a surprise’. And he stopped at the big park, and it was the Perseid meteor shower. And that was the beginning of my love affair with the sky.
"I remember how shocked I was, but I also remember seeing these points of light darting across the sky, and I remember thinking that was one of the most extraordinary things I had ever seen.”
Disclosure Day is playing now in cinemas, with screenings at major chains scheduled into early July.
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