By Eko | Source
Disclosure Day, the new Spielberg film, opened Friday, the same day the government released another batch of its files on the things in the sky.
The story was written, produced, and directed by the man moviegoers trust to make them feel wonder at the sky, the man who spent 50 years teaching audiences to love whatever comes down out of it. The safest hands for the job.
In the movie the visitors lead a small girl through warm snow to a glowing cottage the script calls Hansel and Gretel’s house. She walks in, smiling, they lay her on a table, and say the ones that took her came to save everyone.
The creatures come to her window in the shape of woodland animals.
She follows them through the snow to the bright little house. Inside, a boy her age is already on the table. The visitors do their work. The memory goes down and stays down for decades, until they need it and switch it back on.
The film has a word for what the taken children become. Vessels. Carriers for the message of the beings who took them. The last thing the audience hears is one instruction. Listen.
In Hansel and Gretel the witch builds her walls out of candy to bring the children in, and then she eats them. The movie puts its rescue in that house.
The score is John Williams, 94 years old, the same hands that told audiences what to feel since before most of them were born. On big screens in darkened theaters, sound loud enough to tell your body what to feel before your mind can argue. That is the machine. What it’s selling now is a new religion.
I have written before about “The Other List,” the one almost nobody reads because it is not salacious. Not flight logs. Proposals. Designer-baby pitches, gene-editing ventures, money moving to laboratories in places that do not ask questions. A trafficker with no visible income bought a ranch in New Mexico ringed by every national laboratory that ever touched the saucer question, and spent his money on physicists.
The children and the money were real, and the official voices managed what could be said about it.
Disclosure Day shows the same sequence, kids lured and laid on tables, their memories managed, their testimony moved through antiquated TV anchor desks, and calls it salvation.
Every old culture that kept records remembers things coming out of the sky.
Around 700 BC a Greek farmer named Hesiod set down the family tree of the gods, and at the head sat the oldest king of heaven, who kept his throne by swallowing his children as they were born. Rome called him Saturn.
Wernher von Braun, brought over under Paperclip, spent his last years repeating a warning to Carol Rosin, the colleague at his side when he died. The threats would be sold in order, he said, each one justifying more weapons overhead. Hostile nations. Terrorists. Rogue states. Asteroids.
The last card would be the aliens, and the whole sequence a lie.
The same man, in a novel he wrote in 1949, gave Mars an elected ruler and titled him the Elon.
Every god that came out of the sky asked for the children.
Believe not every spirit. Test them. John wrote that, and Paul gave the reason.
The counterfeit comes dressed as an angel of light, looking like the rescuer, speaking to the wound, asking only for what you were already trained to give.
The girl opens the window because the creatures are small and dear and she is gentle toward them. The film makes that gentleness the law of the universe and says the visitors crossed the dark to teach it to us.
I grew up on his movies. Jurassic Park when I was small, the water trembling in the cup before you saw the thing coming. AI and Minority Report later. Not to mention E.T. The awe was real, and nobody tells a kid to test the spirits.
One descent in the whole record runs the other way.
A man born under an occupied sky, in a province the empire kept for its taxes and its crosses. No lights over the capital. No craft on the mountain. No broadcast. When the crowd came to make him a king he walked away from the crown. When the friend closest to him asked to be shown the Father, he answered, whoever has seen me has seen the Father. When they asked when the kingdom would come, with what signs, on whose desk it would be announced, he told them the kingdom of God is inside you.
No vigil. No table. Nothing taken from anyone.
He asked for nothing and gave his own blood.
The old texts never thought the sky was empty.
They drew it crowded, ordered, governed, and they drew this world as the one province that went dark, cut off in a rebellion older than any record. The question was always which voice in it had any standing to ask for your trust.
Last night, while Disclosure Day played in theaters, more than 300,000 people packed the grounds around the White House for the first fights ever held on the South Lawn, just a few days short of our nation’s 250th birthday. Flags on the trucks. Badass flyovers. A crowd you could hear from the Mall.
Justin Gaethje went in a 6-to-1 underdog and broke Ilia Topuria, who had never lost, across four rounds to take the title. When it was over he gave the glory to God, said he had prayed for the chance, and reminded everyone that 250 years ago the country had been a longer shot than he was, and to look at it now.
Earlier in the night Mauricio Ruffy, a Brazilian, knocked out Michael Chandler in the first round and then, speaking through an interpreter, did not thank his team or call his next fight.
He recited John 3:16 to the whole broadcast. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
Then he told everyone watching to give their lives to Jesus.
2 to 3 million people went to see Disclosure Day this weekend. 130 million watched UFC. More than the last Super Bowl.
Nobody scripted that and nobody paid for it. The thing people said on the lawn was older than any of it, the one who came down once, asked for nothing, and said it was never in the sky to begin with.
It was inside you the whole time.
♥ EKO