Steven Spielberg shares his wild theory on the recent spate of UFO sightings

Steven Spielberg has shared his thoughts on aliens, and now we're wondering why we didn't ask him sooner.

While the Avatar director might not be keen on a sequel for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, it doesn't mean he isn't interested in aliens. It's quite the opposite, actually.

And with spy balloons/UFOs seemingly popping up all over the place lately - Wikipedia's UFO sightings aggregator lists recent sightings in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela - there is no better time to chat about it, to be frank.

So, in a recent interview on The Late Show with Steven Colbert, the Close Encounters of the Third Kind director was asked about the recent surge in UFO sightings.

Spoiler alert: Spielberg did not disappoint.

"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," he told Colbert.

"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."

So does he reckon we're on our own in the great celestial blackness we call space? Well, we'll let him tell you himself.

Spielberg said: "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."

But this is where it gets good.

The legendary director went on to suggest his own theory behind the recent spike in 'UFO' sightings, and it's a doozy.

"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.

PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy

"The most optimistic thing I feel about these things we see in the skies... 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?"

Spielberg added: "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."

Now that is one cool theory.

It'd almost make for a really cool movie.

Now if we only knew someone with a penchant for making incredible films... any takers?

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