Is ‘Disclosure Day’ Secretly a ‘Close Encounters’ Sequel?

The following post contains some SPOILERS for Disclosure Day, although not much more than what was shown in the movie’s trailer. It also contains spoilers for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That movie turns 50 years old in 2027.

Steven Spielberg has directed dozens of movies over his legendary Hollywood career. He only wrote five of those films — and two of them are his 1977 sci-fi blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind and his 2026 sci-fi blockbuster Disclosure Day. Given that fact, and the fact that both movies share extremely similar storylines and themes about the discovery of alien life, there’s sure to be a instinct by some longtime Spielberg fans to compare the two movies.

It’s an understandable urge. The two movies, made nearly 50 years apart, reflect two very different approaches to essentially the same subject. The tones are distinct — Close Encounters begins as a domestic drama, and then becomes something of a road trip adventure, while Disclosure Day is a paranoid thriller — but their storylines are broadly comparable. In each movie, two ordinary people accidentally stumble upon extraterrestrials, prompting a dangerous journey to discover the full truth about their existence.

As soon as it was announced that Spielberg was making another alien movie, and that he was helping write it (David Koepp turned Spielberg’s original story into the final screenplay), people began to speculate whether the two films might be connected in some closer way than their shared author and concept. In especially nerdy corners of the internet, dorks openly wondered: Is it possible that Disclosure Day is a secret sequel to Close Encounters?

The surface answer is no. None of the events of Close Encounters are explicitly referenced in Disclosure Day, and none of its characters appear in the new film either. But c’mon. This is 2026. This is the internet. This is social media and Reddit. You think there won’t be fan theories about it? I would bet my Japanese laserdisc of Raiders of the Lost Ark that there will be. It’s just a matter of what shape they might take.

Here, in my opinion, are the two most likely theories.

The Two Films Exist in the Same Fictional Universe

While Disclosure Day doesn’t feature the shocking return of Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary from Close Encounters (“Hey everyone! Did you miss the worst movie dad of the 1970s? Well, he’s back!”), there’s nothing in Disclosure Day that precludes it taking place decades after the events of Close Encounters in the same universe. While it’s true that Disclosure Day’s alien mythology focuses on infamous real-world UFO conspiracies like the supposed crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, the fact that the new movie explicitly mentions decades of governmental and private corporation cover-ups surrounding alien life actually increases the possibility that Disclosure Day and Close Encounters could share a cinematic universe.

After all, Close Encounters hinges on one such cover-up. When a French scientist (Francois Truffaut) and his team of UFO experts realize that there may be a UFO landing at Wyoming’s Devils Tower they plant a false story that a train crash caused the release of toxic nerve gas, which allows the U.S. government to order a mandatory evacuation of the surrounding area. (It’s always a train crash in a Spielberg movie, huh?)

This sounds a lot like the sort of duplicitous shenanigans engineered by the Wardex Corporation in Disclosure Day. This private government contractor, led by Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon, will go to any length to preserve the secrecy around the possible alien landings on Earth. Faking a train wreck and mass evictions are just another Tuesday to these guys.

Josh O’Connor’s Character Is the Grown-Up Version of Barry Guiler From Close Encounters

Someone on Reddit is going to propose this one. (Maybe they already have.) I imagine the theory will go something like this:

Disclosure Day hero Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a cybersecurity expert who winds up stealing information on aliens from his employers at Wardex. Spielberg slowly reveals that Daniel’s interest in this data is far more personal than it originally appears (even to Daniel). Although he’s largely suppressed the memory, Daniel (as well as Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist) were abducted by aliens when they were children. These beings experimented on the kids’ minds using otherworldly devices. Afterwards, Daniel gained a superhuman ability to perceive mathematics (and thus the ability to understand the aliens’ incomprehensible language).

Daniel’s backstory isn’t all that far off from the events in Close Encounters surrounding little Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey), a three-year-old boy taken from his home in Indiana by aliens right around the same time that Roy has his close encounter. It’s never revealed why the aliens want Barry, nor do we learn what the aliens do to or with him while they have him. They eventually return him to his mother (Melinda Dillon), seemingly no worse for wear, in Close Encounters’ famous final scene.

Is it possible then that Daniel Kellner is a grown-up Barry Guiler under a different name? It’s not that far of a stretch to think Barry and his mom were forced to relocate and change their names (by the Wardex Corporation?) in exchange for their silence about what they witnessed at Devils Tower. That seems totally plausible. And Daniel’s childhood abduction (which he says he can’t remember) could easily resemble the one Barry has onscreen in Close Encounters.

The main reason why this fan theory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny is the timeline. Close Encounters takes place in 1977. (There’s even a title card in the opening scene that dates the film to that year.) If Barry was born in 1974, he’d be 51 in 2026. And Josh O’Connor sure ain’t 51 years old. (He just turned 36.) Daniel and Margaret say their abduction took place in the mid-1990s. That would seem to rule out the Daniel is Barry theory.

Ah, but there is still a way you can work around that fact. Barry isn’t the only person that walks off the alien mothership at the end of Close Encounters. As you can see in the clip above, he’s joined by numerous other abductees, including members of the U.S. armed forces who vanished during World War II. Men taken in the 1940s return in 1977 looking like they just stepped out of a John Ford war film; they have not aged a day. (The aliens have apparently mastered Botox technology in addition to interstellar travel.)

So it’s possible that whatever happened to Barry/Daniel as a child altered his aging too. Maybe he ages slower than other people. Maybe he was abducted a second time in the 1990s and that’s when he met Margaret. Basically once you take the alien’s immortality tech into account, just about anything is possible in terms of timelines.

Is it a stretch? Absolutely. But when are online fan theories not a stretch? If they weren’t a stretch, they wouldn’t be fan theories. They would be proven pieces of movie text.