Why Steven Spielberg has spent a lifetime dreaming of flying saucers

Few filmmakers are as closely associated with the wonder of the cosmos as Steven Spielberg. Across a career spanning decades, he has returned repeatedly to the theme of visitors from the stars, giving cinema some of its most enduring images of contact with the unknown. A feature in Smithsonian magazine explores where that lifelong fascination came from and why it has proved so durable.

Two films define the association. 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', released in 1977, imagined humanity's first meeting with an alien intelligence not as an invasion but as an awe-struck communion, its climax built around light and music rather than conflict. Five years later, 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' turned the alien visitor into a gentle, stranded creature befriended by a lonely child, becoming one of the most beloved films ever made.

The roots of these stories, the Smithsonian piece suggests, lie partly in Spielberg's own childhood. Like many children of postwar America, he grew up in an era saturated with images of space, rockets and the possibility of life beyond Earth. Personal experiences, including memories of looking at the night sky and a childhood shaped by family upheaval, fed an imagination drawn to ideas of escape, wonder and connection.

The cultural backdrop mattered as much as the personal one. The decades after the Second World War saw an explosion of interest in flying saucers, fuelled by real anxieties of the atomic age, a wave of reported sightings and a booming science-fiction industry. Spielberg came of age when the idea of extraterrestrial visitors was woven into films, television and popular conversation.

What set Spielberg's vision apart was its tone. Where much science fiction of earlier eras framed aliens as threats, embodiments of Cold War fears, his most famous works imagined benevolent visitors and emphasised curiosity over dread. That optimistic framing helped reshape how audiences pictured the possibility of contact, offering hope rather than menace.

The Smithsonian feature situates this within a broader American tradition of looking upward. The nation's fascination with space ran through its science, its politics and its entertainment, from the space race to a steady stream of stories about what might be out there. Spielberg's films both drew on and amplified that fascination, giving it some of its most memorable expressions.

His interest was not confined to fiction. Spielberg has spoken over the years about a genuine curiosity regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life, a sense of open-minded wonder about whether humanity is alone. That personal openness informs the sincerity of his films, which treat the prospect of contact as a source of meaning rather than mere spectacle.

The theme has also evolved across his career. Later projects revisited ideas of alien contact in different registers, sometimes darker or more ambiguous, reflecting how both the filmmaker and the culture around him changed. The through-line, however, remained: a persistent fascination with what lies beyond the familiar and how humans might respond to it.

That fascination resonates because it taps something universal. The question of whether we are alone in the universe is among the oldest humans ask, and Spielberg's films gave it emotional shape, translating an abstract cosmic mystery into intimate human stories of fear, friendship and awe.

The Smithsonian portrait ultimately frames Spielberg's flying saucers as more than a recurring motif. They are a lens through which one of cinema's most influential storytellers explored hope, childhood and the human longing to know what else might be out there, a preoccupation that has shaped not only his own work but the way generations of moviegoers imagine the stars.