Steven Spielberg on UFOs and Aliens: ‘We’re Not Alone in the Universe’

In recent weeks, American skies have been filled with various balloons and other unidentified flying objects that the U.S. military has been forced to shoot down. The lack of information provided has led many curious Americans to draw their own conclusions about the mysterious objects — including Steven Spielberg. In a career-spanning interview on “The Late Show with Steven Colbert,” the “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” director was asked about the recent surge in UFO spottings. While the Oscar frontrunner isn’t ready to fully endorse the theory that we’re being visited by aliens, the saga has certainly piqued his interest.

“I’ve never seen a UFO,” Spielberg said. “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.”

He continued: “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.”

But while Spielberg isn’t convinced that anyone in the universe has figured out faster-than-light travel, he’s more open to the idea that humans may have figured out time travel. He presented Colbert with his own theory that the UFOs we’re seeing are actually humans visiting us from the future.

“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?,” he said. “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.”

When Colbert joked that Spielberg’s theory means that humanity would have survived 500,000 years, the famously optimistic Spielberg replied with a joke of his own.

“Yes, we survive,” he said. “Or at least a certain percentage of us survives that allows future generations to flourish.”