Steven Spielberg has had plenty of close encounters with aliens as a movie director and producer, so when it comes to the recent increase in UFO sightings, unsurprisingly, the Oscar-winner has some ideas of what exactly it all means. Spielberg most famously delved into alien storylines with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Still, while speaking to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, the director could almost have been pitching another movie with his impressive theories of what those UFOs could be. He said:

“I’ve never seen a UFO. I wish I had! I’ve never seen anything I can’t explain. But I believe certain people who have seen things that they can’t explain. I think what has been coming up recently is fascinating, absolutely fascinating. And I think the secrecy that is shrouding all of these sightings and the lack of transparency… I think there is something going on that just needs extraordinary due diligence. I don’t believe we’re alone in the universe. I think it’s mathematically impossible that we are the only intelligent species in the cosmos. I think that’s totally impossible.

At the same time, it also seems impossible that someone would visit us from 400 million lightyears from here — except in the movies, of course — unless it figures out some way of jumping the shark, so to speak, and getting here through wormholes. The most optimistic thing I feel about these things we see in the skies, that the Army and Navy and Air Force are recording on their gun cameras, is that what if they’re not from an advanced civilization 300 million lightyears from here? What if it’s us, 500,000 years in the future, that is coming back to document the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century because they’re anthropologists? And they know something we don’t quite know yet that has occurred, and they’re trying to track the last hundred years of our history.”

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Steven Spielberg is in Contention to Win Another Oscar This Month

The Fablemans
Universal Pictures

While he may not have personally witnessed a UFO, Steven Spielberg has seen his fair share of Oscar wins in his career. Having been nominated again for his semi-autobiographical movie The Fablemans, Spielberg’s film could be one of the winners at the Oscars ceremony next week.

Spielberg has already taken his place as one of the greatest film directors of all time and has very little left to prove. Last year, his remake of West Side Story secured him an Oscar nomination, resulting in him being given the nod by the Academy in six different decades. Spielberg’s previous nominations were Lincoln in the 2010s, Munich in the 2000s, both Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List in the 1990s, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the 1980s, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the 1970s.