5 UFO Movies That Feel Like the Perfect Companion to Disclosure Day, Ranked

The new trailer for Disclosure Day asks a question: “If someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?” Steven Spielberg has been circling this subject his entire career, and he himself appears in the trailer as a narrator. The premise involves, basically, extraterrestrials hidden in plain sight. The cast is fantastic (Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, and more). There is a third act, Spielberg said during CinemaCon in April, the marketing is deliberately concealing (via Gizmodo). All of that makes us all the more excited.

Here, we take a look at the films that did the imaginative labor of living with the question before Disclosure Day. And yes, if you are wondering, there is a Spielberg movie here, too. These five aren’t ranked by craft alone. The real criterion is how they explore the specific terror and longing that Disclosure Day seems to be about.

5 The Vast of Night Feels Like a Spielberg UFO Mystery on an Indie Budget

Andrew Patterson’s 2019 feature debut is about longing for the forgotten American small towns and shortwave radio. It is also about the feeling that the universe is trying to speak to you personally, if you could just tune the dial correctly.

Its framing device is a Twilight Zone knockoff called Paradox Theatre Hour. It gives the whole film the quality of a memory retrieved under hypnosis. The Vast of Night understands that the horror of the unknown is in the creeping apprehension that it has always been there, just beyond the frequency you normally receive.

4 Nope Is the Most Original UFO Horror Movie of the Modern Era

Jordan Peele’s Nope is, on its surface, about a brother and sister trying to photograph something in the sky above their Agua Dulce horse ranch. It is also a film about spectacle itself — our addiction to witnessing, our need to point a camera at the thing that is killing us. 

Jean Jacket, the name OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) gives the entity above his property (which he believes is a UFO at first), is a predator that has evolved to exploit the specific weakness of a species that invented cinema. Nope is terrifying because it proposes that first contact will not be an encounter between intelligences. It will be an encounter between a creature and its food.

3 Signs Is the Perfect Mix of UFO Horror and Existential Dread

Signs is not about aliens, though it is a UFO movie through and through. It is about Graham Hess (Mel Gibson). He is trying to find a reason to keep moving after his wife’s death and asking whether the universe is made of accidents or patterns. 

M. Night Shyamalan shoots his Bucks County farmhouse the way Tobe Hooper shot his Texas farmhouse in one of the best slasher movies of all time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which means simply as a structure that has stopped protecting the people inside it. What the film is really asking is whether the thing that killed his wife (a car, a man, a moment of terrible ordinary chance) was random or meant, and whether the answer to that question is the difference between despair and survival. It is one of the greatest sci-fi horror movies as well.

2 Arrival Is the Smartest and Most Emotional First-Contact Movie Ever Made

Denis Villeneuve made Arrival before we knew what we now know, or are being told we know, or are being allowed to partially understand. Based on the novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (which is quite different from the movie, and definitely worth reading), there is something prophetic and elegiac about the film. The performance of Amy Adams is brilliant. It is also subtle in the manner of true intelligence, introspective yet immediate.

What destroys us is the film’s refusal to reconcile grief and wonder, and to assert which one is ultimately the greater truth. Arrival proposes that the real first contact is not between them and us. It is between who we are and who we might be willing to become.

1 Close Encounters of the Third Kind Is Still the Greatest UFO Movie Ever Made

This movie is why we can’t wait to see Disclosure Day. What we find devastating about Close Encounters of the Third Kind is that Spielberg is completely, uncomplicatedly on Roy Neary’s side. The abandonment of his family is portrayed not as a tragedy but as liberation. 

If you have ever been the person left behind (and most of us have been), the film’s ecstatic final act asks you to simply accept this and to find the beauty in it. Which we do and resent finding. The final sequence at Devil’s Tower ruins nearly every alien movie that came after it. Simply the greatest UFO movie ever, and also one of Steven Spielberg’s best alien movies.

Here are all the five best UFO movies in a nutshell:

Title	Year	Director	Main Cast	Plot	IMDb (as of May 28, 2026)	Rotten Tomatoes (as of May 28, 2026)
The Vast of Night	2019	Andrew Patterson	Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz	A switchboard operator and radio DJ in 1950s New Mexico trace a mysterious audio frequency to something in the sky above their small town.	6.7/10	92% | 66%
Nope	2022	Jordan Peele	Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun	A brother and sister on a California horse ranch discover a massive predatory entity hiding in the clouds above their property.	6.8/10	83% | 69%
Signs	2002	M. Night Shyamalan	Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin	A grieving ex-priest finds crop circles on his Pennsylvania farm as an alien invasion begins — and searches for a reason to believe in anything at all.	6.8/10	76% | 67%
Arrival	2016	Denis Villeneuve	Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker	A linguist is recruited to communicate with alien vessels that have landed at twelve sites around the world, before global panic tips into war.	7.9/10	94% | 83%
Close Encounters of the Third Kind	1977	Steven Spielberg	Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon	An Indiana utility worker becomes obsessed with a recurring vision after a UFO encounter, following it to a government staging ground for humanity’s first contact.	7.6/10	91% | 85%

Can Disclosure Day outdo Close Encounters of the Third Kind to become the best UFO movie ever? Let us know in the comments!

Disclosure Day hits theaters in the US on June 12, 2026.