How Steven Spielberg's Very First Feature Film Foreshadowed Disclosure Day

Contains spoilers for "Disclosure Day"

"Disclosure Day" is not Steven Spielberg's first UFO movie, or his second, or his third, or even his fourth. And if you're thinking all the way back to 1977 and the classic "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which Spielberg wrote as well as directed, that's still more than a decade after the start of his work in alien invasion cinema. While most would identify the 1971 TV movie "Duel" as the acclaimed filmmaker's first feature film, and 1974's "The Sugarland Express" as his proper theatrical debut, Spielberg's very first feature-length production arrived in 1964, when he was just 17 years old.

The film was called "Firelight," and like "E.T.," "Close Encounters," "War of the Worlds," and now "Disclosure Day," it told a story about aliens arriving on Earth from another planet. The film takes place in a small town in Arizona, where strange UFO phenomena spark a series of tense encounters, ultimately revealing an alien plot to abduct the town and create a human zoo. After 13 years, Spielberg put a proper Hollywood spin on a similar idea, which gave us "Close Encounters."

"Disclosure Day" offers a much more optimistic vision of extraterrestrial visitation, where the aliens in question seek only to enlighten and uplift humanity, despite our repeated efforts to imprison and torment them. While it would be interesting to rewatch Spielberg's very first alien film for a direct comparison, doing so these days is unfortunately impossible.

"Firelight" clocks in at a pretty substantial 140 minutes, but today, you'll be lucky to find four of them online. The film was produced by Steven Spielberg's parents, who rented out a local movie theater for a proper debut when the film was completed.

Though the movie is recognized in a sort of canonical sense (it would be hard to ignore such an early feature effort from one of America's most famous living filmmakers), the director himself seems to have little love for the project in retrospect. While many would call "Ready Player One" Spielberg's worst film, Spielberg has given "Firelight" that dubious honor, though in fairness, a film made for $500 by a teenager with no formal training perhaps deserves a bit more grace.

The footage that is available is full of close-up camera shots, dynamic movement, rudimentary special effects, and a level of gruesomeness more common in Spielberg's earlier films. All are hallmarks of his career, either at various stages or throughout its entirety, and the subject matter in particular draws a direct lineage across 62 years from "Firelight" to "Disclosure Day."

Steven Spielberg has made some of the best alien movies of all time, and in 2026, he's made another. "Disclosure Day" doesn't have the iconic childhood nostalgia of "E.T." or the late '70s psychedelic enigma of "Close Encounters." Instead, it's a story about the deep divisions of humanity and the ways in which true wonder and discovery can cross them — or at least, it tries to be about that.

Spielberg has clearly always been fascinated by the possibility of life beyond our world and of knowledge, just out of reach, which could change everything. That fascination takes the shape of terror in "Firelight," but in most of his later alien films, including "Disclosure Day," it embraces a more nuanced tone. Yet despite those differences, it's still the same sense of wonder that carries through the films, charting more than six decades in filmmaking for one of our most iconic directors.