What is it with Spielberg and space aliens? We break down his career-long fixation

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Obsession is maybe too hard-edged; interest too soft.But from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T” to his new sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg has spent nearly the entire length of his career returning to the possibility that we are not alone in the universe.

Even “Firelight,” the amateur movie he made as an Arizona teenager in 1964, revolved around extraterrestrial visitors.That recurring fascination stands out partly because Spielberg has never been a filmmaker who stays in one lane.Across 36 features as a director, he has pivoted between science fiction, war films, historical dramas, adventure movies, thrillers, comedies and even a musical while somehow retaining the same famed Spielbergian sense of emotional wonder that defined his earliest work.Which makes “Disclosure Day” — opening Friday and built around mysterious transmissions, buried government secrets and the possibility of alien contact — feel less like a detour than a return to one of Spielberg’s oldest creative preoccupations.

Speaking about the film in March at SXSW, Spielberg admitted that while he has no special knowledge about extraterrestrial life, he nevertheless has “a very strong, sneaking suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now.And I made a movie about that.”So with Spielberg once again looking skyward, we decided to revisit the director’s long cinematic relationship with aliens, as figures of astonishment, terror, transcendence and, occasionally, giant crystal skulls from another dimension.Josh Rottenberg: I don’t really remember a world without Spielberg’s aliens.

I was 6 when “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” arrived in 1977, not much older than the little boy played by Cary Guffey who is carried off by visitors from another world after his toys mysteriously come to life.Five years later, I was exactly Elliott’s a...