Spoiler Alert: This text will discuss  Disclosure Day in what I hope are  some interesting ways. If you read it before seeing the film be aware that it will absorb some of the energy of surprise.

When I went to Day of Disclosure, I expected another Steven Spielberg movie about aliens, from what I’d heard perhaps a little darker than the others. It’s dark all right, very dark, but that darkness is carefully concealed, so much so that I wonder if Spielberg was aware of it or if it’s a subtext contributed by a part of him he is not consciously of. I say that because of the house Margaret enters during her childhood memory of her abduction experience. The moment she called it a “Hansel and Gretel house,” I knew what the film was really about. At that moment, the film takes a dark and true turn, but in subtext, not on the surface.

In the movie, Margaret identifies the ship into which she was abducted as a “Hansel and Gretel House.” The old witch then appears at the end of the film as a wise and kindly old alien in a wheelchair. But the old witch is neither kindly nor wise. In fact, like everybody in the region, she is starving. Her candy house is there to lure children, who she hopes to overpower, then cook them and eat them. The children are desperate for food, too, and set about eating the candy house. But note this: both the children and the witch share the same problem: all are starving.

This universe is a vast, unimaginably cold desert, beset by impossible distances and infused with flickering apparitions that suggest the presence of others like it, somehow folded into the same space. So, an incredible great dark and here we are, and here also is the old witch smiling back at us from the prison of her own need . And what does she want, do you suppose? Keeping them out has been the ambition of the hidden government from the first moment our visitors were discovered, and the conflict between those who want them to stay away and those who want to welcome them is the core of the surface movie.

The Hansel and Gretel House is the subsurface story of the film, and the message to anyone who understands it could not be more clear: we are face to face with a clever old predator and we had best be careful. But there’s more to it  than that, both in the hidden part of the film and in real life. We must never forget what was said to Col. Phil Corso during his close encounter experience in New Mexico. When he asked what contact had to offer us, the answer was “a new world if you can take it.”

This is why Disclosure Day, which is a major contribution to this effort, works as both a surface text and a subtext. The message of the surface text is clear: we the people have to break down the barrier that this strange “official” presence (and also part of what is dark in our own hearts, namely our fear and our passivity) has put between us and the new world. The subtext is that we have to keep our own counsel and look out for our own welfare. When one of the people who sees what Margaret has become kneels to her and she makes her get up, that is saying loud and clear: trust yourself first.

Spielberg is almost certainly an experiencer, although the only thing he has ever said about himself is that he wishes he could see a flying saucer. So, if he is an experiencer, he is either memory-blocked or keeping it secret. Given that he has made a number of films about alien contact—and what he has done with the issue this time is something every human being on this planet should feel gratitude for.

But what is this movie’s real message? On the surface, it is about breaking the grip of a malignant force within the government that has been holding the truth that we are not alone hostage for generations. Obviously, there is such a force. The whistleblowers have made that clear. In recent months, the Trump administration has attempted to initiate a process of disclosure, so far without significant results. But that level of the film, and for that matter, of real life, is not what interests me. Whatever may come from government matters much less than what comes from the people, a sentiment that is certainly shared by Steven Spielberg.

It is the inner movie, the hidden one, that really resonates, and which makes it the achievement that it is.

Hansel and Gretel is not a pleasant tale, but it is certainly a reflection of the inner story of humanity’s relationship with the sort non-human presence that we are beginning to grapple with in real life, and a clear understanding of the inner message of  this movie shines an important light into the way we should understand the relationship and what we can do to make it work for us.

In the story, Hansel and Gretel, left in the woods by their starving parents during a famine, are tempted into the house of a wicked old witch, who lures them with charm and candies. She is a predator in disguise and plans to put them in the oven, bake them to death and devour them. But they see past the ruse and turn the tables on her, and she becomes the victim of her prey. Nothing is said about what they then do with her scorched carcass, but the film offers us an aim that should become the defining energy of contact. The character Daniel, the opposite number of the main character Margaret,  is given an understanding of math, “the language in which the book of the universe is written,” while Margaret is given the ability to read other people’s emotions, because the aliens regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage.  And indeed, it is important to understand that the cannibalistic witch is also the savior of the children. A brief look at the abduction process that unfolded between approximately 1960 and 2000 reveals two things: first, there was the removal of eggs from women and semen from men; second, many of the people who endured these appalling assaults have undergone a surprising trajectory from fear and anger to a more nuanced relationship. This is surprising to me, even in my own case. In this sense, it goes beyond the Hansel and Gretel story, as Gretel shoves the witch into her own oven and leaves her to burn. But the film does not stop with the danger involved in contact; indeed, the idea that the people of the world—the human species—can make this relationship work if they are but allowed to try. And they will. They must, for these governments we have now and all we know now and ever will know are going to fade into time, as all such things do, but this relationship that is starting now will be with us essentially forever. For we are at a fundamental inflection point in our history, in every way equivalent to the moment that we were forced down out of the trees, and what unfolds now between us and our visitors will continue on essentially forever, and that is a very, very long time.

It is going to take co-operation among us and a level of community that we have not yet achieved. The “insiders” know that government will at some point lose agency as disclosure becomes contact and then communion, and this is something that they appear to fear. In part, it is because they see the predatory side of our visitors. In part it is because they fear the new powers that popular contact will bring getting loose in the public environment.

Now let’s look a little deeper into that subtext, specifically the importance of Hansel and Gretel in giving us a clearer view of what the “if you can take it” part of the crucial Phil Corso message means. And yes, I am aware of the controversies that surround his work. Why such controversies exist and what they really mean is a subject for another discussion, one which will center around the nature of the static that makes communication across the reaches of time difficult. Suffice to say that the particular message I am referring to here is of central importance to the human future.

The Hansel and Gretel story reflects an ancient human fear, which is that of being devoured by a monster. This probably comes to us from earliest awareness, literally from the dawn of the species. Homo erectus appeared as a land dweller about two million years ago, an evolutionary change which coincided with the gradual disappearance of the arboreal forest in parts of Africa, which started about four million years ago. As the forest slowly gave way to savannah, the tree-dwelling apes were forced onto the ground. Homo erectus could probably run, but not well and not fast. The result of this was that the species needed as many babies as it could birth, as a result of which it gradually lost sexual seasonality. Thus, all these years later, we have a population crisis, which is what our visitors have identified to me, incidentally, as our only real problem. Our peril is not due to sin and the anger of gods. It is that there are too many of us now because, in the distant past, our inability to run well meant that, in order for the species to survive, its sexuality seasonality had to disappear.

We were helpless before marauding predators and desperate to survive, and it is out of that past that fear of the ogre and its particular threat to children probably emerges. It is also where salvation by fire comes from, for it was fire that enabled us to claim mastery over the animals. And indeed, in the movie it is a device that looks like a stick of wood and glows with inner fire that is the magic wand that eventually comes into the hand of Daniel, who uses it to finally defeat Noah.

In the Hansel and Gretel story, the witch shows absolutely no empathy. She is prevented from doing so by her hunger. In the same sense, nation states and corporate entities too often lose their access to it when their needs are stifled. It is through the richness of community that our species will prevail, and only that.

So here we are with a movie that emerges at once out of the mind of a great genius and also out of his unconscious, and, as I have speculated, also in all probability, at least once close encounter experience that imprinted on him.

In fact, Margaret may well be Steven, and if so, then the entrance into the Hansel and Gretel house is his own journey with the visitors. Possibly, it was not a journey to be remembered directly. Some close encounters are open activations, which drive the experiencer involved to shout their story to the treetops. That is what happened to me, and has to so many others. There are others that are more in the nature of imprintings, and that’s what I think may have happened to Steven. If so, then, as he grows older, it may come drifting into his dreams, if that has not happened already.

Or he may take it with him, concealed forever  in the hidden weave of his life. Either way, it is no matter. He has done what he has done, getting his vastly resonant and now deeply nuanced message out into the mind of our species.

We have come to a place of profound change. The population crisis has taken us to the right shoulder of a bell curve. Over the next few years or decades, it will become apparent to everybody that our planet can no longer sustain us. This will result in agonizing changes and great disruption, possibly even nuclear war. In the movie, our visitors interrupt such a process by emerging when they do.

Noah in the movie¸ like the official world in real life, cries out that disclosure must be a slow process, that just dropping this reality into the lap of the world will cause terminal chaos.

Well, yes, that’s accurate. Many ancient institutions and cherished beliefs will come to see irrelevant. As corporations realize that the future of technology is now an unknown, another kind of chaos will threaten. Markets cannot easily reconcile the unknown.

That is exactly where we are now, and Steven Spielberg, in offering us a kindly old alien in a wheelchair has also invited us into the Hansel and Gretel House, the ancient lair of the ogre. We are Theseus, off to do the impossible and slay the Minotaur. Margaret is Ariadne, the weaver, seeking to guide our way.

I doubt if our visitors would even be here if they thought that we would never understand that the predator is really as vulnerable as the prey. We have been dancing with the ogre for two million years, after all, and haven’t been eaten yet.

Nor does the ogre want to eat us. Let me leave you with a secret revealed. If the visitors are here to prey on us, to devour our souls or whatever, we are going to discover that soon enough. And I can’t say it isn’t true. I’ve seen things that suggest that they may want this. But I have also seen their deep curiosity and careful interest, always observing as closely as they can without causing us to redirect all of our creative energies toward their magical possessions.

This is not what someone who is here to feed off us would do. Rather, it is much more the stance of a dancer, and I think that’s exactly what is on offer here. That’s the secret of the wicked witch. She also is desperate for food. But that is not our blood and our bone or the finer flesh of the soul. A dance is a matter of mutual appreciation, stepping into the mystery and the pleasure of the other, the desire of the other and the danger of loving them, mixing heat with heat in this frozen void we call the universe.

So the witch rises out of her wheelchair and holds out her hands to the children and bids them dance. And we say yes, we will dance, but not too close, not just yet. Indeed,  we are beginning to dance in the silent vastness, empty except for the two of us, that is our only home.