In the half century that has elapsed since the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Disclosure Day,” which opens today, perception surrounding so-called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) in both Hollywood and the broader public has shifted seismically.
Case in point: a robust class of consultants specializing in UAPs and extraterrestrial life who are helping filmmakers and studios with a growing pool of projects focused on the topic.
Jim Semivan, a retired officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service, co-founded the UAP-focused entertainment company, To The Stars, with Tom DeLonge, the former guitarist of Blink 182, in 2017.
There is David Grusch — a former U.S. Air Force officer turned whistleblower — who is now a producer on several high profile projects including one by Jerry Bruckheimer. Grusch testified before Congress in 2023 that various government agencies were covering secret UFO programs and had recovered non-human material from crashes. There is Richard Doty, a former Air Force Intelligence Officer who has a growing list of writing credits, according to IMDb.
Foremost among this group of UAP thought leaders is the filmmaker and journalist Jeremy Corbell whose 2018 film, “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” is considered a watershed moment in pulling UAPs closer to the mainstream. Corbell has been collaborating for more than a decade with the groundbreaking UAP journalist George Knapp, who wrote the book on which “Hunt for Skinwalker” is based.
“There has been a massive resurgence in discourse surrounding UAPs and disclosure. The interest is fervent and the result is that art is imitating life and life is now imitating art,” Corbell told Page Six Hollywood. Corbell, who was the subject of a 2026 documentary, “Sleeping Dog” by director Michael Lazovsky, said the UAP consultant “industry” is permeated with subterfuge, phoniness and corruption. “There is so much manipulation going on in this field,” he said.
And then there’s the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, a non-profit which aims to close the gap between storytellers and UAP researchers to combat what they call “a government-imposed truth embargo.”
The HDA was co-founded in 2023 by publicist Dan Harary and Stephen Bassett, director of the Paradigm Research Group and the country’s first registered UFO lobbyist. The group includes Hollywood creatives — such as actors Michael Ian Black, Dave FoleyDania RamirezThomas Jane — and UFO researchers. “It’s basically a networking organization to help people interested in the phenomenon and entertainment types get together to portray more realistic and optimistic visions of the phenomenon,” said Paul Hynek, CFO of HDA. (Hynek is also the son of the legendary “UFOlogist” J. Allen Hynek.)
Sources close to Spielberg say that the icon did not rely on any outside experts for “Disclosure Day,” but that wasn’t the case on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” back in 1977. Spielberg worked closely with J. Allen Hynek, who was part of the Air Force’s “Project Blue Book” — the code name for a UFO study. Hynek is credited with developing the “Close Encounters” hierarchy that Spielberg based his movie on.
Paul Hynek tells P6H that his dad was nervous when Spielberg first approached him, because the world was much more skeptical in the ’70s. “And Hollywood skews very dystopian about the views of UFOs,” he said. He said his dad praised the movie for having a “sympathetic” portrayal of people who say they’ve had encounters with UFOs.
Paul recalled he visited the set and met Spielberg himself, a relationship that has continued. “Overall the movie really helped legitimize the phenomenon,” he said. “[It] enabled a lot of people to be able to come forward.”
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