Kansas City as the Setting
In Disclosure Day, Emily Blunt plays a meteorologist working at a Kansas City television station. It is during a routine weather broadcast that the possession scene occurs — she begins speaking in an unknown, clicking language on live television, becoming an unwilling conduit for alien communication.
Kansas City straddles the border of Kansas and Missouri, sitting squarely in the geographic center of the United States. It is a city of 500,000 people, a place where severe weather is a daily concern and TV meteorologists are local celebrities. It is, in every sense, middle America — and that is exactly the point.
By anchoring the story here rather than in a coastal power center, Spielberg signals something important about Disclosure Day: this is a story about ordinary people, not politicians or generals. The truth does not come from the Pentagon. It comes from a weather report in Kansas City.
Why Spielberg Chose Kansas and Missouri
Spielberg has a long history of setting his films in the American heartland, and Kansas City fits his storytelling instincts perfectly for several reasons:
The Heartland of America
Kansas City represents "ordinary America" — a working, middle-class city far from the coasts. When aliens choose to make contact through a Kansas City meteorologist rather than through the White House or the United Nations, it democratizes the event. The truth belongs not to the powerful, but to everyone.
Tornado Alley
Kansas and Missouri sit in the heart of Tornado Alley, which makes a meteorologist character feel natural and inevitable. These are people accustomed to scanning the skies for danger. There is a poetic logic to having someone whose job is watching the sky be the first to receive a message from beyond it.
"Ordinary America" Under Extraordinary Pressure
The flat, open farmland of the Kansas-Missouri region creates a visual language of vulnerability and exposure. There is nowhere to hide under those enormous skies. The crop circles visible in the Super Bowl trailer reinforce this — vast geometric patterns carved into fields that stretch to the horizon.
Actual Filming Locations
Despite being set in Kansas City, Disclosure Day was not filmed there. Production used locations across the eastern United States to double for the heartland and other settings in the film. Here is what we know about where filming took place:
New Jersey
Studio work and interior scenes, including the TV station set where the possession broadcast occurs. New Jersey's proximity to NYC and its established soundstage infrastructure made it a natural base of operations.
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta's massive studio complex and generous tax incentives have made it a production hub. Several sequences were filmed here, likely including some of the larger-scale scenes.
New York City
NYC scenes suggest the story expands beyond Kansas City as the disclosure event goes global. The trailer shows urban environments that could represent the wider world reacting to the news.
Huntington, NY
This Long Island town likely provided the suburban and small-town American exteriors. Its Main Street architecture could pass for a Kansas City neighborhood with the right production design.
The decision to shoot on the East Coast rather than on location in Kansas is standard for major productions. With Spielberg's production design team led by Rick Carter (a frequent collaborator), audiences will likely never notice the difference on screen.
The TV Station Set
The Kansas City television station is arguably the most important location in the entire film. It is where everything changes — where Emily Blunt's meteorologist is delivering a routine weather report and something takes over.
The possession scene — captured live on camera, broadcast to millions — transforms a familiar, even mundane setting into ground zero for humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. The contrast is deliberate and powerful: fluorescent-lit newsroom, weather maps on screen, and then a woman begins speaking in alien clicks.
This set was most likely constructed on a soundstage in New Jersey, built to replicate the look and feel of a mid-market local news station. Everything about the setting would be designed to feel recognizable and ordinary, so the moment of contact hits with maximum impact.
Kansas and UFO Lore
Spielberg's choice of Kansas is not arbitrary when it comes to UFO history. The state and surrounding region have a surprisingly rich history of sightings and unexplained phenomena:
- 1952 — Great Bend, Kansas: Multiple witnesses reported glowing objects performing impossible maneuvers over the city, one of several mass sighting events during the 1952 UFO wave that overwhelmed the Air Force.
- 1965 — Wichita, Kansas: Police officers reported a luminous disc hovering silently over the city, one of many credible law enforcement sightings in the region during the mid-1960s.
- Missouri MUFON Reports: The Kansas City metropolitan area has been a consistent source of UFO reports filed with the Mutual UFO Network, with sightings often concentrated along the Missouri River corridor.
- Whiteman Air Force Base: Located just 70 miles southeast of Kansas City, this active military base houses B-2 stealth bombers. The proximity of advanced military aircraft to a major metropolitan area has fueled decades of UFO speculation in the region.
- The Midwest Corridor: The Great Plains states have historically produced a disproportionate number of UFO reports, possibly due to clear skies, flat terrain providing unobstructed views, and low light pollution in rural areas.
By setting Disclosure Day in this region, Spielberg taps into real cultural history — a part of America where people have been looking up at the sky and wondering for generations.
Spielberg's Love of Middle America
Kansas City is not the first time Spielberg has planted his camera in the heartland. His filmography reveals a deep and recurring fascination with middle America as the stage for extraordinary events:
— Steven Spielberg (on his approach to science fiction)
The "Ordinary Person in Extraordinary Circumstances" Archetype
The Kansas City setting reinforces Spielberg's signature storytelling archetype: the ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Emily Blunt's meteorologist is not a scientist at SETI, not a government agent, not a military commander. She is someone who tells people whether to bring an umbrella tomorrow.
This archetype works because the audience can see themselves in the character. If first contact happened to a NASA astronaut, it would feel expected, almost procedural. But when it happens to a weather forecaster in Kansas City — live on the air, in front of millions — it feels shocking, intimate, and deeply human.
The heartland setting amplifies this effect. Kansas City is a city most Americans can imagine living in. It is familiar without being generic, specific without being exotic. It is the perfect canvas for Spielberg's brand of science fiction, which has always been less about the science and more about the fiction — the human story.
How the Rural Farmland Connects to the Crop Circles
The crop circles revealed in the Super Bowl trailer take on additional significance when you consider the Kansas City setting. The Kansas-Missouri region is surrounded by some of the most productive agricultural land in the world — millions of acres of wheat, corn, and soybean fields stretching in every direction.
The trailer shows vast geometric patterns carved into farmland, visible from aerial shots. These crop circles suggest that the alien presence is not limited to the possession event at the TV station — it is manifesting physically across the landscape surrounding Kansas City. The heartland is not just the setting for the story; it is being marked, claimed, or communicated through.
There is a visual poetry to this: the breadbasket of America, the land that feeds the nation, becoming a canvas for alien communication. The same flat, open terrain that makes Kansas vulnerable also makes it the perfect medium for messages meant to be seen from above.
What the Kansas City Connection Tells Us About the Story
The choice of Kansas City as the setting is not just atmospheric — it is narrative. It tells us several things about what Disclosure Day is really about:
- This is a populist story. The truth comes to the people, not to the powerful. A Kansas City weather broadcast reaches millions before any government can intervene.
- The cover-up has failed. By choosing a public, live-television setting, the aliens (or whatever force is at work) bypasses every institutional gatekeeper. Disclosure is involuntary and unstoppable.
- Geography matters. The heartland location, surrounded by farmland and open sky, connects the possession event to the crop circles and suggests a wider pattern of contact across the region.
- Spielberg is returning to his roots. Like Close Encounters in Indiana, this is Spielberg telling a first-contact story through the lens of ordinary American life. Nearly fifty years later, he is asking the same questions — but the answers may be different.
- The meteorologist profession is deliberate. Someone who watches the sky for a living. Someone the public trusts with daily information. Someone whose credibility is about to be shattered and transformed simultaneously.
Kansas City is not just where Disclosure Day happens to be set. It is central to what the film is trying to say about truth, ordinary life, and what happens when the sky you have been watching your whole career finally watches back.