ARE THEY PEOPLE?
The One Word in Spielberg’s Disclosure Day Trailers That Changes Everything
By Janet Kira Lessin, contributors Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. & Claudia Lenore
I have watched the trailers for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, scheduled for release June 12, 2026, more times than I can count. My mind works this way. It turns information over, examines it from every angle, and keeps working until something clicks. I watch as a researcher and as an Experiencer, knowing that in material this carefully crafted, every detail carries meaning and every word was chosen for a reason.
After many viewings, one thing crystallized above everything else. The special effects carry their own power, and the star-studded cast brings extraordinary talent, but the most consequential element in those trailers is a single word, used three times, selected with precision by one of the most gifted storytellers in the history of cinema. That word is people.
Three Times. The Same Word. The Same Question.
The trailers give us three distinct moments where this word does its work. Josh O’Connor’s character declares that people have a right to know the truth. The tagline announces that the truth belongs to seven billion people. And a character asks the question that cuts to the core of the entire film: Are they people? Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp chose the word people, deliberately and three times over. They wrote humans nowhere in those trailers. They wrote aliens nowhere either, and both those omissions are as deliberate as the word they chose. At this budget level, with this creative team, with a director whose command of language and image spans fifty years of masterwork, that choice rewards every bit of attention a viewer brings to it.
The Mathematics of Seven Billion
Earth’s population stands at approximately 8.2 billion. When the trailer declares that the truth belongs to seven billion people, it leaves more than one billion beings outside that count. The film holds its answer in reserve. Are those beings the non-human intelligences that the Experiencer community has documented for decades, living among us in humanoid form? Are they the hybrid beings reported by thousands of contactees and abductees across generations and cultures? The trailer returns again and again to close-up shots of pupils dilating in ways that strike the viewer as wrong, and that image is there for a reason. Spielberg answered the question of whether extraterrestrial life exists forty-nine years ago with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The question he brings to Disclosure Day cuts far deeper: among all the beings walking this Earth, which ones qualify as people?
What People Means in the Experiencer Community
Within the UFO research and Experiencer community, the word people carries specific philosophical weight when applied to non-human intelligences, and we use it with full intention. People implies personhood: consciousness, autonomy, the capacity for relationships, culture, and meaning, and the foundation for rights and dignity. Many of the beings that Experiencers have encountered across centuries of documented contact are human in consciousness though alien in origin, and they are people in the deepest and most essential sense of that word. They hold intentions. They communicate across the barriers of language and species. They pursue agendas, form relationships with the humans they contact, and make choices that carry moral weight. Spielberg’s question, Are they people?, is the right question, and the fact that the trailer leaves it unanswered is itself a statement about how far this civilization still has to travel.
Gene Roddenberry Started This Conversation, and I Helped Save It
The philosophical lineage of people as an inclusive, cross-species, consciousness-based term began with Gene Roddenberry, who built this framework into the cultural mainstream through Star Trek, a show I helped save from cancellation in 1967 at age thirteen, as part of the original Save Star Trek letter-writing campaign that flooded NBC with viewer mail and kept the series alive long enough to reshape the culture.
Star Trek established something radical for its era: personhood belongs to consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness, with biology and species membership serving as irrelevant criteria. The celebrated Next Generation episode The Measure of a Man places this principle at the center of a formal legal proceeding, where Captain Picard argues that the android Data deserves the rights of a person because he demonstrates intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. The ruling established within the Star Trek universe what the Experiencer community has long understood in the real one: human beings are human persons, Klingons are non-human persons, and the basis of rights and dignity extends to any being capable of consciousness, regardless of the body it inhabits or the planet it calls home. Roddenberry planted that seed with courage and vision. I helped keep it alive in 1967. Spielberg now carries it to the largest audience in history at the most consequential moment yet.
People of Earth: Hollywood Has Been Using Our Language for Years
The connection between the word people and the phenomenon of extraterrestrial contact runs deeper in popular culture than most viewers realize. The TBS comedy series People of Earth, which aired in 2016 and 2017, drew its title from the 1956 science fiction film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, in which conquering aliens address humanity with the phrase People of Earth. Attention! More telling, the show centered on a support group whose members called themselves experiencers, the term our community developed and uses for a specific reason: it honors the agency and the witness of those who have lived through contact, rather than reducing them to passive recipients of something done to them.
Someone in that writers’ room had done serious research into the Experiencer community. The show portrayed its alien characters as people in their own right, complete with office politics, interpersonal conflicts, emotional lives, and genuine moral dilemmas about their relationship with the humans they contacted. This portrait is consistent with what thousands of Experiencers have reported across decades of documented testimony. Hollywood has mined that testimony for source material for years, and the debt to the community that generated it remains largely unacknowledged.
Sophia, Guardianship, and the Politics of Personhood
In October 2017, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot created by Hanson Robotics, making her the first robot in history to receive legal personhood in any country. The United Nations named her its first Innovation Champion, the first non-human entity ever to hold a UN title. The global reaction exposed a contradiction that cut straight to the bone of the personhood question. Saudi women pointed out on social media that Sophia appeared at the ceremonial summit without a headscarf or abaya, both legally mandatory for women in Saudi Arabia. A hashtag spread across Arabic social media translating as Sophia calls for dropping guardianship, because a machine had received freedoms that living Saudi women were still legally denied.
This episode reveals something essential about the question Spielberg’s film raises. The question Are they people? is a political question, asked throughout human history about whoever the dominant power structure found it convenient to exclude from full personhood. It was asked about women, about enslaved people, about indigenous populations, about anyone whose inclusion in the circle of rights and dignity threatened an existing order. The Experiencer community knows this territory from direct experience. Our testimony was dismissed as delusion, our research labeled pseudoscience, and our credibility attacked by the very government institutions that conducted their own classified investigations into the same phenomena we documented in public.
As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, the question of AI personhood will demand serious legal and philosophical attention. The frameworks that the Experiencer community, the UFO research world, and science fiction have built across decades will be essential tools for navigating that future with wisdom and humanity intact.
The Experiencers Already Disclosed Everything
As Disclosure Day approaches and the cultural conversation accelerates around it, one truth demands clear statement: the Experiencer community disclosed this information decades ago, centuries ago, and in the form of ancient records, millennia ago. We told our truth long before any government acknowledged it. We lived and documented this reality long before Hollywood dramatized it. We told our stories at conferences, in books, on radio programs, in research papers, and in support communities where people who had nowhere else to turn could find validation. We did this at enormous personal cost. Ridicule, professional destruction, and the pathologizing of our testimony by institutional medicine and mainstream academia served, whether by design or by inertia, to suppress the most honest and comprehensive record of this phenomenon in existence.
The full record the Experiencer community built includes the hybridization programs, the non-human intelligences living among us in humanoid form, the multi-generational nature of contact relationships, the genetic and consciousness dimensions of the phenomenon, and the fundamental question of which beings qualify as people with rights and dignity. Researchers and witnesses documented, analyzed, and shared all of this long before any government acknowledged it and long before Spielberg assembled his understanding of the same material. The disclosure that presidents and Pentagon officials now race to claim as their achievement belonged first and always to the people who lived it and told the truth about it at personal cost, year after year, for as long as anyone can remember.
Before the modern Experiencer movement, the same knowledge lived in the Vedic texts that described vimanas with technical precision, in the Sumerian tablets that Zecharia Sitchin spent his life translating, in the medieval European accounts of fairy contact that match modern Experiencer reports in striking structural detail, in the shamanic traditions of cultures worldwide that described non-human teachers and interdimensional relationships as central features of reality, and in the cave paintings, megalithic structures, and oral histories that preceded all written record. Humanity carried the knowledge of non-human intelligences across every era and every culture. What changed, periodically and at great cost to those who held the knowledge, was who was willing to listen.
Spielberg’s Long Research and What Is Owed
Spielberg’s engagement with this material spans nearly fifty years, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 through E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 to the Emmy Award-winning 2002 miniseries Taken, which explored hybridization programs, multi-generational abduction, and government cover-ups across four generations of three American families. Writer Leslie Bohem spent years immersed in the literature and accounts of the UFO research community before filming began on Taken. The source material for that series, as for Disclosure Day, came from researchers, witnesses, and Experiencers who built their record across decades at personal cost.
Spielberg may be the right vessel for bringing this truth to mainstream humanity at this cultural moment. His body of work has earned the trust of audiences worldwide, and his instinct for the place where the personal and the cosmic intersect stands unmatched in Hollywood. The acknowledgment owed to the Experiencer community is real and long overdue. We provided the source material, the documented testimony, the philosophical frameworks, and the decades of intellectual labor that ground his storytelling. We are the primary archivists of this knowledge, and that recognition belongs in the public record.
On Proof, Consensus, and What Is Real
As a researcher and Experiencer I want to be honest about something that matters to me. I can prove my experiences through the gathered weight of consistent testimony, corroborating witnesses, physical evidence where it exists, and the internal coherence of a body of documented experience spanning decades. The question of what constitutes proof is itself far more complicated than our institutions typically acknowledge, and the demand for a certain kind of proof applied selectively to Experiencer testimony while exempted from most of what civilization accepts as historical fact is a political act dressed as epistemology.
The entire historical record rests on witness testimony. Every major religious tradition was founded on the accounts of those who claimed direct experience of the sacred. Every court of law operates on the principle that witness testimony, evaluated carefully and placed in context, constitutes meaningful evidence of what occurred. We accept these things as real because we arrived at consensus, a shared agreement to recognize them as part of collective reality. Quantum physics deepens this picture further: at the subatomic level, matter exists in superposition until observed, meaning the observer participates in the creation of what is real. This is the actual observed behavior of matter at its most fundamental level, confirmed by decades of experimental physics.
We live in consensus reality, a world recognized as real in part because we collectively agreed to recognize it as such. The Experiencer community has been building a different consensus, one contact account at a time, one conference and book and radio broadcast and research paper at a time, for generations. That consensus now shifts in ways visible in congressional hearings, government file releases, presidential statements, and the work of the most commercially successful filmmaker in history. What Spielberg does with Disclosure Day is carry the Experiencer consensus into the mainstream, where it will meet the official consensus and begin the long work of integration that this civilization has been postponing for far too long.
We are people. They are people. We have always been the disclosure.
Janet Kira Lessin is co-founder of Aquarian Media Enterprises and Aquarian Radio, author, consciousness researcher, and Experiencer who has been involved in UFO and disclosure work for over 60 years. She participated in the original Save Star Trek campaign in 1967, studied directly with Zecharia Sitchin from 1998 to 2010, and has presented at major conferences including Contact in the Desert. She lives on Maui, Hawaii with her husband Dr. Sasha Alex Lessin
