Spoiler alert: this piece reveals the ending.

Steven Spielberg's latest sci-fi epic starts with a boot stamping on a human face three times, which, in cinematic terms, feels like forever.

Cut to the howling crowd at the wrestling match, seated among them cybersecurity whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) surrounded by his pursuers: plainclothes mercenaries.

They are staring at her on screens of all sizes. They are New York commuters, North Korean soldiers in the peninsula's Demilitarised Zone, Russian tank crews deployed next to silos, London pedestrians, late-night drivers, and people in bars and restaurants.

These people are in a world that the broadcast has just frozen on the brink of war, and they have been snapped out of their routine lives to face something truly extraordinary.

Between those two scenes, the boot stamping on a face forever and the global disclosure broadcast, ending in a cliffhanger, lies the film's whole arc, which Spielberg told is “built on a foundation of truth … I absolutely think they have been here. They are here. And, who knows, maybe they have always been here.”

The source of the message that the cinema audience never gets to hear is a tall extraterrestrial who was freed from his human captors by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) and wheeled into a TV studio to be part of the disclosure.

For the two protagonists, Fairchild (Blunt), an American TV personality with previously unknown linguistic skills, and Kellner (O'Connor), who understands what the extraterrestrials say, is a journey towards remembrance and clarity.

For everyone else, it is a journey of disclosure.

Fairchild is a woman in her late 30s with a mind fractured by a childhood trauma that the film shows only in glimpses: the abduction. Kellner is in the same age bracket but feels more like a young adult, which is perhaps an echo from the children of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

What connects Fairchild and Kellner is Hugo Wakefield, a former Wardex insider running a cell of company defectors. Wardex is Spielberg's version of the private part of the military-industrial complex, which outgoing US President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech on 17 January 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

On 16 December 2017, revealed the existence of a Pentagon programme keeping track of UFOs.

Between that date and the alleged Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) crash in Roswell, New Mexico, 70 years earlier, on 7 July 1947, UFOs remained a subject that carried stigma for many who claimed to have witnessed one, especially if they were a pilot or worked inside the government.

As a result, the visible research and speculation about the phenomenon developed in the wild outside official institutions.

The ideas about the nature of UFOs seem to cluster around a number of narratives:

• Nuts-and-bolts craft. Something physical is in the air that someone built. These could include, for example, radar returns, metal, performance envelopes, or engineering. Much of what has been seen in the skies may be secret experimental aircraft of the US military, which might prefer witnesses to believe they saw extraterrestrials and be ridiculed into silence rather than recognise something the military does not want anyone to know about.
• Space brothers.They are here, they are wiser, and they have come to warn us — often about nuclear weapons, and sometimes about ecology. They could be contactees or close encounters. Occasionally, they come with a redemption narrative.
• Alien invasion. Abductions. Experiments. Implants. Hybrid programmes. Missing time. The register is medical violation. The witnesses are victims.
• Human psychology. The sightings are experiences of something, but that ‘something’ is inside the observer. Sleep paralysis. Misperception. Anxiety over new technology. The reports are taken seriously, but as data about , not extraterrestrials.
• Folklore. The phenomenon was once described as fairies, angels, or demons who behave like shape-shifting tricksters rather than spacecraft.
• Trans-dimensionalism. These are not from outer space, but from somewhere alongside us; a neighbouring dimension. These could be portals: folds in the universe that occasionally open. A craft moved sideways into our frame of reference and, a moment later, phased out. Space-time dilation and confusion. 
• Ultraterrestrials. These are entities native to this planet who were here all along, occupying a band of reality we cannot see, and adopting whatever costume the era finds plausible; for example, 1890s airships or today’s ‘UFOs’.
• Psyops. The lights are real but deliberately staged. They feature state-like actors manipulating the perceptions and minds of the great unwashed.
• Ancient aliens. They came long ago and built things — perhaps even us. Archaeology. Von Däniken territory.
• The debunkers. Every case is a balloon, a lenticular cloud, Venus, a hoax, or a sensor artefact.
• Millenarianism. The world is about to end and be remade, with a chosen few carried through. Contact as apocalypse and salvation. The sky as the location from which transcendence arrives. Channellers. The Heaven's Gate suicide cult in 1997. The Raëlian movement somewhere further towards the mainstream.

The cover-up narrative serves as connective tissue; it can be bolted onto any of the others. And the strands rarely argue with each other about evidence — they disagree about what kind of story is being told.

In , Spielberg uses the cover-up together with space brothers and abductions, showing the alien abduction as benign, and the human deep state as malignant.

In 2007, after its decades-long official absence from the field of UFO research, the US Government started to re-engage with the phenomenon, and has today brought it into its bureaucracy:

One of the first measures taken by the Pentagon, when it took over the tracking of UFOs, was to change the names. The US Government now refers to UFOs as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), an extraterrestrial as an ET, and Non-Human Intelligence as NHI.

Among the Exhibits

Over this menagerie of contactees, abduction researchers, crash-retrieval theorists, would-be messiahs, and debunkers towered Jacques Vallée, a French-American computer scientist with a background in astrophysics who navigated the minefield unscathed.

When Spielberg released Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, he based the film's French scientist, Lacombe, partly on Vallée, while also giving Vallée's mentor, Dr J. Allen Hynek, a cameo.

Then, on 9 May 2001, a contactee and an emergency physician in his mid-40s, Steven Greer, assembled more than 20 military, government, corporate, and intelligence witnesses at the National Press Club in Washington and had them testify, on camera, that the subject was heavily censored. They worked under the name ‘Disclosure Project’.

The Project came about after Greer had failed in the 1990s to interest the American political establishment in disclosure and had given up on the US Government.

The press conference demonstrated that disclosure was not necessarily a prerogative of governments, but could be pursued entirely from outside; insiders with service records could go on the record without authorisation.

Greer's explanation went far beyond secrecy about extraterrestrial craft. He argued that the hidden prize was technological: humanity had allegedly mastered antigravity and free energy, and the discoveries had been suppressed because they threatened the current economic order, in which everything must be metered, billed, and paid for by someone.

Greer gives October 1954 as the month humanity mastered antigravity, after which official research and speculation about this field of physics were quickly ushered off-stage.

According to Greer's account, this technical know-how does not reside inside the US Government, but was, early in the process, sequestered into the privately owned part of the military-industrial complex.

Accompanying the US Government's incursion into the UFO/UAP discussion was the creation of a non-profit named the , which leaves internet search engines unsure which disclosure to return results for: Steven Greer's original Disclosure Project, or the Disclosure Foundation, which many view as a controlled-opposition initiative and an effort to nudge Steven Greer and the Disclosure Project off the board.

All but three of Jacques Vallée's many books are non-fiction. The exceptions are (1996) — a rewrite of his French novel (1986) — and (2007). Upon the release of , he said this in an interview: “In the current situation I find it easier to say what I have to say in fiction form.” 

Vallée's position is that UFOs are real, but they need not be spacecraft or visitors from other planets. There are far more landings and sightings that take place than a survey of Earth would require to map them, craft that fade rather than depart, visitors too human-looking to have come from elsewhere but with incoherent accounts of their origin, and abduction procedures that make no sense for an advanced species.

Instead, Vallée proposes they may originate outside the physical framework we normally assume, and can change shape, distort time, and affect human minds.

Governments and private interests are essentially clueless, although they may hold fragments of the phenomenon.

Finally, the phenomenon itself may also aim to deceive.

In Messengers of Deception (1979), Vallée describes meeting a man he calls Major Murphy who had retired from a US intelligence service. His actual rank, Vallée notes, was much higher than Major. Murphy asked why Vallée, being a scientist, thought UFOs were a scientific problem. Science has rules, and one of them is that the phenomenon being observed must be assumed natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. The UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. Vallée responded, “If it is, then the study of it doesn't belong in science. It belongs in Intelligence.”

The suggestion made was that the UFO phenomenon should be viewed as a counterintelligence challenge, not as a dead fossil to be dusted off and studied under a microscope, or as an immutable natural law theorised over based on repeated experiments.

Murphy continued: “If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know this is the 'cheap' part of the information. I still need the other 5 per cent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 per cent!”

Vallée believes governments have built a layer of human deception around the UFO phenomenon that includes staged saucers, fake abductions, alien bodies, cults used as fronts, and infiltrated UFO groups. This deception hides secret experiments and military tests while also conditioning public belief in aliens as a tool for seizing power. Vallée said in (1975): “We are not dealing with successive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system.”

Vallée put this in his 1986 novel : “An organisation like Alintel could use belief in an extraterrestrial invasion to precipitate a state of martial law and impose its own control.” The rationale was as follows: “For them, anything is preferable to the idea that the government might simply not know what these objects are. Their power rests in large part on the ordinary public imagining that they hold the ultimate secret and will not reveal it.”

A control system needs at least two opposing principles to function, Vallée argues, and uses a thermostat as the example. It holds the temperature between two limits, triggering cooling in one direction and heating in the other. An observer who decides that warm is good and cold is bad will be right half the time and will never grasp the mechanism. “What we see in effect here is not an alien invasion. It is a control system which acts on humans and uses humans.”

In , the UFO matter is already controlled by a global intelligence agency operating above nation-states, which is called Alintel. In the English language version, (1996), this had been changed to an American operation. In and , Vallée lets the UFO phenomenon itself destroy the human secrecy: “The planet must not be subjected to the scientific dictatorship of the great powers.”

Just like Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, carries an air of drama-documentary about it. The thriller wrapping, sprinkled with Spielberg's innocent childhood sense of awe, is what makes the story work in cinemas. The film's proposition, as stated through the plot, is that disclosure will happen from inside the institutions that hold the secret through employees with moral convictions, not by outsiders.

In the film, this is Wakefield and his network of defectors.

At the same time, Spielberg could not have found a better choice for the family-safe villain Noah Scanlon than the perfectly likeable gentleman Colin Firth, who fights disclosure by every means available, until the very end, when — with no other effective alternative — he resigns himself to the process.

Whereas the 1977 ends with a handshake between a government that lies and the contactees, with the contactees ultimately allowed to board the alien craft, the new film ends with capitulation, after has run out of tricks.

The rational decency found at the end of has been demoted to the surrender of a man who finds it increasingly difficult to stomach the deception, the torturing, and the killing.

In 1977, the institution itself could still be the vehicle for moral progress.

In 2026, Spielberg has withdrawn that faith: constructive change now comes when individuals inside institutions refuse to serve them.

States and governments cannot be redeemed. Only the individuals inside them can, and this can happen only one at a time.

But it never really was the government.

In Spielberg's film, the villain Wardex is a private company — outranking both the Pentagon and the FBI — which runs the show and which stands in for the military-industrial complex warned about by President Eisenhower in 1961.

When Eisenhower delivered that warning, he had already lost twice to it, or maybe more times.

U-2 photography from 1959 onwards told him the missile gap was fictional, but he could not say so without giving up the source, so he absorbed the political damage and let the lie stand unchallenged. And when Congress voted $345 million for the B-70 bomber in the 1960 fiscal year, his administration impounded $195 million of it and released only $150 million. This was money extorted from a president who had been a four-star general and led the war in Europe against Nazi Germany, and who knew that the US did not need the number of aircraft the military-industrial complex wished to peddle for US taxpayers' money.

Then there is the unverified UFO lore.

In 1958, according to an anonymous witness presented at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington in late April and early May 2013, Eisenhower summoned two CIA men to the Oval Office and complained that the committee known as Majestic-12 (MJ-12) was sending him nothing about what it was learning from recovered extraterrestrial craft at Area 51 and its neighbouring site, S-4.

When Eisenhower insisted, he was told that the government had no jurisdiction over what was being done there. Eisenhower then threatened to send in troops and take the base over unless whoever was in charge reported to him within the week.

If that witness is to be believed, this was Spielberg's Wardex in action, 68 years ago. It would also have meant that the US Government had lost control over the UFO/UAP issue.

Among the many witnesses Steven Greer presented in Washington in 2001 was Dr Carol Rosin, an aerospace executive who had worked alongside Wernher von Braun, the V-2 engineer brought to America under Operation Paperclip. Later, von Braun became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre and the architect of the Saturn V — NASA's most powerful rocket of its era. Rosin testified that from 1974 onwards, von Braun repeatedly warned her of a sequence of enemies that would be used to justify the weaponisation of space: first the Russians, then terrorists, then rogue states, then asteroids, and finally — the last card in the deck — an extraterrestrial threat.

This brings us back to the very opening of and that face being stamped on in the wrestling match.

Here is perhaps the best-known line from George Orwell's : “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever”.

Is this Spielberg's real message to his audience — delivered in the first five seconds of the film — a warning about what is waiting in the wings?