Steven Spielberg speculated in a 2023 interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show that UFOs could be humans travelling back from 500,000 years in the future to study their own history.

The conversation addressed reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, in North American skies. The filmmaker expressed fascination with the sightings and concern about what he regarded as a lack of transparency surrounding them, calling for closer examination of what was happening.

At the time of the interview, Spielberg told Colbert he had never seen a UFO himself. His future humans theory was an imaginative possibility, rather than a claim that he had identified the objects or established evidence of time travel.

Steven Spielberg Imagines Visitors Studying Their Own Past
The filmmaker’s suggestion recast the visitors as anthropologists. Instead of arriving from a distant civilisation elsewhere in the universe, they might be human descendants returning to examine the lives of earlier generations.

He imagined people from ‘500,000 years in the future’ documenting the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. In that scenario, objects recorded by military cameras would be connected to an investigation of humanity’s own past.

‘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?’ he told Colbert.

The proposed reason for returning was historical research. Spielberg’s speculation also raised the possibility that those visitors would have knowledge unavailable to the people whose lives they were documenting.

Colbert drew attention to the optimistic implication of that explanation. Under Spielberg’s theory, he observed, ‘we survive’.

Spielberg qualified that optimism with the suggestion that ‘a certain percentage of us survive that allows these other generations to flourish’.

Steven Spielberg Considers Life Beyond Earth
The director of E.T. and Close Encounters also expressed a broader conviction that intelligent life exists beyond Earth. He presented that belief alongside a difficulty he saw in explaining how visitors could cross the distances involved.

‘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’.

He described a visit from 400 million light-years away as seemingly impossible outside films, unless travellers could find a way to reach Earth through wormholes. Both the distance and the proposed means of crossing it formed part of his speculation.

Spielberg qualified his authority on the subject, telling Colbert, ‘I’m not an astrophysicist’.

Read More: Steven Spielberg thinks UFOs might just be humans travelling back from 500,000 years in the future