Throughout a jam-packed SXSW panel about his profession, director Steven Spielberg talked every little thing from Disclosure Day to aliens to President Barack Obama. And sure, all these subjects are associated.

Disclosure Day follows a cybersecurity administrator (Josh O’Connor) who decides to show an enormous secret: that people aren’t alone within the universe. It marks Spielberg’s return to UFOs and aliens, subject material he is already well-versed in due to movies like E.T. the Additional-Terrestrial and Shut Encounters of the Third Form.

The movie’s story of a authorities cover-up of alien exercise comes at a pertinent time, as President Obama not too long ago mentioned his personal perception in aliens on Brian Tyler Cohen’s No Lie podcast.

“They’re actual, however I have not seen them,” Obama mentioned in a pace spherical portion of the interview, earlier than clarifying the aliens are “not being saved in Space 51.”

As Spielberg informed panel host Sean Fennessey, “When President Obama made that remark, I assumed, ‘Oh my God, that is so nice for Disclosure Day.“

Days later, Obama walked again the feedback in an Instagram post, writing: “Statistically, the universe is so huge that the percentages are good there’s life on the market. However the distances between photo voltaic techniques are so nice that the possibilities we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I noticed no proof throughout my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Actually!”

For Spielberg, that is the very same perception he is held since childhood.

“[Obama] mentioned what he believed in was life within the cosmos, which, after all, everyone ought to consider in, as a result of nobody ought to ever suppose that we’re the one clever civilization in the complete universe,” Spielberg mentioned on the SXSW panel. “I’ve all the time believed, whilst a child, that we weren’t alone, in order that simply goes with out saying.”

Spielberg was “reinvigorated” to return to the world of UFOs by a 2017 New York Times article by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean in regards to the Pentagon’s UFO program and the potential for a authorities coverup.

“I’ve a really sturdy sneaking suspicion that we aren’t alone right here on Earth proper now,” Spielberg mentioned.

Nevertheless, he lamented, he himself has by no means had an extra-terrestrial expertise.

“Half my pals have seen UFOs, now known as UAPs,” Spielberg mentioned. “I have not. I made a film known as Shut Encounters of the Third Form. I have not even had a detailed encounter of the primary or second type. The place’s the justice of that?”

Disclosure Day hits theaters June 12.

Kristy Puchko contributed to this reporting on the bottom at SXSW.