Steven Spielberg Has A Theory About The Recent Uptick In UFO Sightings—And It's Very On-Brand

Anyone who has spent any amount of time on TikTok knows the TikTok community loves to entertain a good conspiracy theory about the paranormal, including criptids, ghosts, evil spectres and extraterrestrials.

MermaidTok and SpiritTok are constantly trending, after all.

But a recent popular theory involves unidentified objects, or UFOs, sighted over the United States, like in this video that notes multiple sightings in February 2023 alone.

Now the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial director Steven Spielberg has his own theory.

While on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert tackling a career-spanning interview, fantastical subjects came up including the many UFO sightings on TikTok, as well as the mysterious balloons from China sighted over the United States.

Looking quite serious, the director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind explained to Colbert:

“I’ve never seen a UFO. 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.”

"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 the Oscar-award-winning director had quite a theory to share with Colbert.

“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?,"

"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.”

You can watch the full interview between Spielberg and Colbert here:

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For his theory to work, humans would have to still be around in 500,000 years, which Spielberg believes we will be.

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

Some on Twitter could get behind what Spielberg was suggesting.

But some still needed more convincing.

Since Spielberg is already well-known for reaching into the past with Jurassic Park and out to worlds beyond with ET, Super 8 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it would only make sense for him to have theories about the worlds he has made real for so many people.