Emily Blunt's Possession Scene
The inciting incident of Disclosure Day is one of the most striking scenes in any Spielberg trailer: Emily Blunt's Kansas City meteorologist is delivering a routine live weather broadcast when something takes over her body. Her voice shifts. Her eyes change. She begins producing a series of rapid, inhuman clicking sounds — an alien language transmitted through a human vessel, broadcast to millions of viewers in real time.
Production sources have described this sequence as depicting "altered states of consciousness" — a deliberate framing that raises profound questions about what is actually happening to her character.
— Disclosure Day trailer
What is actually happening to her?
The trailer leaves this deliberately ambiguous, and fans have proposed three main interpretations:
Alien Possession
An extraterrestrial intelligence physically takes control of Blunt's body, using her as a vessel to communicate with humanity. This would make her an unwilling conduit — her consciousness suppressed or displaced while an alien mind speaks through her. The loss of bodily autonomy is the horror. The public broadcast is the disclosure.
Telepathic Channeling
Rather than full possession, the aliens may be establishing a telepathic link — channeling a message through her mind. In this reading, Blunt's character is still present but overwhelmed by an intelligence far beyond human comprehension. She is a receiver, not a host. The "altered state" is her consciousness expanding to accommodate alien thought patterns.
Involuntary Contact Response
Perhaps the aliens are not specifically targeting her. Their arrival or proximity triggers a neurological response in certain humans — an altered state of consciousness that manifests as speaking in their language. Blunt's character may be one of many "receivers" worldwide, and she just happens to be on live TV when it happens.
Colin Firth and the Electrode Experiments
In the first-look images released in January 2026, Colin Firth is shown with electrodes attached to his head — a striking visual that immediately evoked government mind-control programs and classified psychic research. While his full role remains under wraps, the imagery tells a story.
If Blunt's altered state is involuntary and alien-initiated, Firth's appears to be deliberate and government-engineered. Two sides of the same phenomenon: one caused by extraterrestrial contact, the other manufactured by humans trying to replicate or control it.
MKUltra Parallels
The CIA's real-world MKUltra program (1953-1973) used drugs, electrodes, sensory deprivation, and psychological manipulation to explore mind control. Firth's electrode imagery is a direct visual callback to these experiments. In the world of Disclosure Day, the government may have been attempting to induce contact with alien intelligence through forced altered states — long before Blunt's character made public, uncontrolled contact on live television.
Remote Viewing / Psychic Espionage
Firth's character could be involved in a remote viewing program — using altered consciousness to perceive distant locations, events, or even alien intelligence. The electrodes would be monitoring (or amplifying) his brain's activity during these sessions. This would tie directly into Project Stargate and the real history of government-funded psychic research.
Controlled Contact Protocol
Perhaps the government already knows about the aliens and has been attempting to establish controlled communication through human subjects wired with neural interfaces. Firth's character may be a willing or unwilling participant in these experiments — a predecessor to the spontaneous contact that Blunt's character later experiences on live TV.
The Real Science Behind the Fiction
What makes Disclosure Day's altered-states theme so compelling is that it draws from documented, declassified real-world programs. Spielberg is not inventing this concept from whole cloth — he is dramatizing phenomena that governments have genuinely studied.
Project Stargate (1978-1995)
The U.S. government's $20 million remote viewing program, run through the Defense Intelligence Agency and Stanford Research Institute. Psychics were used to attempt to "see" Soviet military installations, hostage locations, and classified facilities using only their minds. The program ran for nearly two decades before being declassified in 1995. Multiple participants reported contact with non-human intelligence during sessions.
CIA Consciousness Research
Beyond MKUltra, the CIA explored altered states through the Gateway Process — a program that used binaural audio beats and meditation techniques to induce out-of-body experiences and expanded consciousness. A declassified 1983 report described the universe as a hologram and consciousness as the mechanism for interacting with it. The program explicitly explored whether altered states could be used for intelligence gathering beyond physical perception.
CE-5 Protocols
Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5) are human-initiated contact events, developed primarily by Dr. Steven Greer as part of his disclosure movement. CE-5 protocols use meditation, coherent thought, and altered states of consciousness to attempt direct communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Practitioners report sightings, telepathic contact, and anomalous phenomena during sessions. Whether or not one accepts the claims, the conceptual framework — humans using consciousness as a contact mechanism — maps directly onto what Disclosure Day appears to be exploring.
Dr. Steven Greer and the Disclosure Movement
The film's title itself — Disclosure Day — invokes the language of the real-world disclosure movement led by figures like Dr. Steven Greer, Luis Elizondo, and David Grusch. Greer has long argued that consciousness is central to the UFO/UAP phenomenon, and that governments have suppressed not just physical evidence but also knowledge about the role of altered states in extraterrestrial contact. The film appears to dramatize this exact thesis: that disclosure is not just about releasing documents, but about acknowledging a fundamentally different relationship between consciousness and non-human intelligence.
Spielberg's History with Altered States
Altered consciousness is not new territory for Spielberg. Across his filmography, he has repeatedly explored the idea that contact with the unknown changes the human mind — and that this change is both terrifying and transcendent.
Roy Neary's Compulsions
After his encounter with alien lights, Richard Dreyfuss's Roy Neary becomes obsessed — compulsively sculpting Devil's Tower from mashed potatoes, clay, and dirt. His altered state is not possession but implanted knowledge: an image placed in his mind by alien intelligence, driving him toward the contact point. His family thinks he is losing his mind. He is actually being called.
The Telepathic Bond
Elliott and E.T. share a psychic link — when E.T. drinks beer, Elliott gets drunk at school. When E.T. is dying, Elliott weakens. This is altered consciousness as emotional symbiosis: two beings from different worlds connected through a bond that transcends language. It is benevolent, intimate, and profoundly alien.
Emily Blunt's Possession
The evolution is clear. From implanted compulsions (Close Encounters) to empathic bonding (E.T.) to full-body possession — Spielberg is escalating. Blunt's character does not sculpt mountains or feel alien emotions. She becomes the alien's voice. This is Spielberg's most extreme depiction of human-alien consciousness merging.
The progression across nearly 50 years of filmmaking is striking: each film pushes the boundary of how deeply alien intelligence can penetrate human consciousness. Disclosure Day appears to be the culmination — the moment where the boundary dissolves entirely.
The Alien Clicking Language
One of the most discussed elements of the Disclosure Day trailers is the clicking sounds that emerge from Emily Blunt's character during her on-air possession. These are not random noises — they have a rhythm, a structure, a sense of intentional communication.
Why Clicks?
The choice of clicking sounds is significant. In linguistics, click consonants are among the most complex sounds in human language — found in southern African languages like Xhosa and Zulu, they require precise tongue and mouth coordination that most humans cannot easily replicate. By choosing clicks as the alien language, Spielberg and his team are making a statement: this communication exists at the edge of what a human body can produce.
The implication is that Blunt's character is being pushed to the physical limits of human vocalization — her body forced to produce sounds it was never designed to make, by an intelligence that communicates in frequencies and patterns alien to our biology.
Alien Language in Cinema
The clicking language places Disclosure Day in a tradition of films that take alien communication seriously:
- Close Encounters — The five-note musical motif used as a shared language between humans and aliens
- Arrival (2016) — Heptapod logograms that alter human perception of time
- Contact (1997) — Mathematical signals as the universal language
- Disclosure Day — Clicks transmitted through a possessed human body, turning a person into a living broadcast
What distinguishes Disclosure Day's approach is that the language is not decoded from a signal or displayed on a screen. It comes through a human being — making the altered state of consciousness the communication medium itself.
Altered States and the Disclosure Theme
The film's title is not accidental. Disclosure Day is about the moment when the truth about extraterrestrial life becomes public — and the altered-states theme is central to how that disclosure happens.
Consider the layers:
- The government already knows. Colin Firth's electrode experiments suggest classified programs have been studying alien contact through altered consciousness for years, possibly decades.
- They cannot control it. Blunt's live-TV possession is the system breaking. The aliens bypass government gatekeepers by making contact through an ordinary person on a public broadcast.
- Consciousness is the battleground. The real conflict is not between humans and aliens but between those who want to control the contact experience (the government, the electrodes, the secrecy) and the uncontrollable reality of alien intelligence reaching human minds directly.
- Disclosure happens through the body. Not through leaked documents or press conferences, but through a woman speaking an alien language on live television. The most intimate possible form of disclosure — it happens inside a person.
This framing connects directly to the real-world UAP disclosure movement, where consciousness and the "woo" aspects of the phenomenon have become increasingly central to the conversation. Disclosure Day appears to take the position that you cannot separate the physical reality of alien contact from its effect on human consciousness.
Fan Theories: What Is Happening to the Characters?
Blunt and Firth Are Connected
The most popular fan theory holds that Firth's character was an earlier test subject in a government program attempting to achieve what Blunt's character does spontaneously. The electrodes were the government's attempt to force contact. The possession was the aliens' way of making contact on their own terms. Firth's character may recognize what is happening to Blunt because it happened to him — in a lab, in secret, under controlled conditions.
The Clicking Is a Warning
Some fans believe the alien language being transmitted through Blunt is not a greeting but a warning — urgent enough that the aliens bypassed all protocols and used a human body to deliver it. The altered state is a last resort. Something is coming, and the aliens need humanity to understand before it arrives.
Multiple "Receivers" Worldwide
Blunt's character may not be unique. The theory suggests that dozens or hundreds of people worldwide experienced the same altered state simultaneously — speaking in clicks, channeling alien communication. Blunt's character just happened to be on live TV. This would explain the "seven billion people" tagline: the disclosure is not one broadcast but a global neurological event.
The Altered State Is Permanent
What if Blunt's character does not simply "recover" from the possession? What if the altered state changes her permanently — giving her ongoing access to alien communication, making her a permanent bridge between species? This would make her the most important person on Earth and the greatest threat to any government cover-up.
Close Encounters Sequel Universe
The Super Bowl trailer revealed spaceship designs that closely mirror the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If the films share a universe, then the altered states in Disclosure Day could be the next evolution of what Roy Neary experienced in 1977 — the same aliens, now making more direct and aggressive contact with humanity, no longer content with implanting compulsions but taking over human bodies entirely.
Full details remain under wraps until Disclosure Day opens on June 12, 2026. Theories on this page are based on trailer footage, first-look images, and confirmed production descriptions.