What “Disclosure Day” Means to Someone Who Already Knew
What does it mean when the world finally catches up to something you’ve known your whole life? A personal essay on memory, disclosure, and the night a silver being in the bushes waved at an 11-year-old girl in a small Pennsylvania town – and she waved back.
⚠️ Some “Disclosure Day” spoilers ahead. Nothing that will ruin the experience – but if you’re completely spoiler-averse, see the movie first, then come back.
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On opening night, I sat in a movie theater with my son and watched “Disclosure Day.”
I was not prepared for what happened to me.
Not the film itself – though we’ll get to that. What I wasn’t prepared for was the scene where they recreated the main character’s childhood home. The house where it happened to her. The bedroom. The stairs.
The stairs.
I don’t fully know how to explain what moved through me in that moment. Or how any of this can be translated, really. My eyes filled before I even understood why. Something old and deep and buried and very, very real came rushing back – not as a logical thought, but as a visual and visceral remembering. Of being an 11-year-old in a house in New Castle, Pennsylvania, standing at a window in the dark, walking toward the unknown.
Sitting in the driveway with my son after the movie, I shared things I hadn’t said out loud in years. He pulled up my childhood home on Google Maps, and there it was – the well-worn path my brother and I used to shuffle through, wearing down the grass between the houses, just like I’d described to him. The bush in the backyard, fifty years older now, grown into something more like a tree, in exactly the spot I said it was.
I laughed and cried at the same time. Memory is a funny thing.
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What I Remember
The house was built in 1925. Big, multi-level, full of the kind of creaky quiet that old houses have at night. My bedroom was on the second floor: door, then my bed to the left, a dresser with a mirror to the right, a window at my feet that looked out to the backyard, another window beside the bed that faced the neighbor’s house.
One night, something woke me up.
My stunned little eyes saw a fireball soar through my window on my left, arc over me, bounce off the mirror, and completely reverse.
And then, shortly afterwards, there was a silverish-white glowing, pulsating light at the window by the foot of my bed. Constant, like quivering lightning that didn’t stop.
Taking slow, fearful steps toward the window, I didn’t know what the light was. I didn’t know what I would find. But something pushed me beyond the fear.
I looked down into the backyard. There were bushes between our house and the neighbor’s, the shortcut my brother and I had carved into the grass without meaning to. And there, in those bushes, was a silver being, light surrounding him.
He looked up at me. And waved.
I waved back.
And I remember – I remember this clearly – I wasn’t afraid anymore. I felt happy. Like seeing an old friend.
That’s where the memory stops. I don’t know what happened after that. Not sure how (or if) I got back to bed, or what the rest of that night held.
My mom told me her side of it years later: the red and green flashing lights reflected in the stained glass window going up the stairs (not an ambulance), the glowing light on the landing above, a force that kept her from climbing the stairs no matter how hard she pulled herself up the banister, screaming my name and hearing nothing. And, finally: “I’m okay, mommy. It’s okay.”
Then, lights off.
She said she turned around, went back into the kitchen, and sat there until morning. She was afraid to go upstairs. She waited to see if I’d come down.
She said when I did, I seemed angry.
I’ve thought about that occasionally. Why angry? Every time I’ve turned it over in my mind, what I felt wasn’t anger. It was love – that moment at the window, waving at someone who felt like a familiar friend. There’s a part of me that wonders if I was angry because I came back. Earth, amirite?!
My mom had experiences too. She’d had missing time earlier in her life. She was deeply Catholic, deeply frightened, and she’d reached out to priests for forgiveness and researchers for information – Budd Hopkins, J. Allen Hynek, John Mack – exchanging letters, trying to understand. When something like this becomes part of your family’s story, it doesn’t leave. It becomes part of the fabric of who you are.
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What I’ve Always Known
I also remember being three years old, lying in the back of my dad’s orange Volkswagen Bug – in the days when cars had that little curved dip behind the back seat, when seatbelts were merely a suggestion. I used to lie in that dip and look up at the stars through the window.
I remember crying. Asking why ‘they’ dropped me off here. Begging to go home.
That feeling stayed for years. A peculiar homesickness – not for any place on earth, but for something I couldn’t name. It didn’t go away until I had my daughter, when I discovered home was a tiny bundle in my arms. And later, my son. Then the stars became something I could simply love, rather than yearn for.
There’s also a small, unexplained mark on my left arm from that night that’s never closed, never faded, all these years later. I’ve never talked about this publicly. I’m not sure why I’m saying it now, except that it feels important to tell the whole truth – or as much of the truth as I remember.
I’ve thought about hypnosis. What lives in the memory gap? I haven’t done it, yet I know something happened. And I know it shaped everything that came after – my fascination with quantum physics, with neuroscience, with parallel universes, with consciousness and who we are in the universe. “The X-Files” didn’t feel like science fiction to me; it felt like validation. “Fringe” felt like a serious inquiry into the nature of reality vs. an out-there TV series. These weren’t escapist stories. They were the closest the culture had come to saying out loud what I already quietly knew: that there is more than the three-dimensional world we’ve been taught to navigate.
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The Night My Son Was Born
Years later – in a different chapter of my life, a much harder one – I was in intense labor in the middle of the night. Contractions stopped, and the hospital sent me home too soon: “Come back when you’re really in labor.” And so there my then-husband and I were, around 3 a.m., driving back down the long dark country road, trees towering on both sides. The kind of darkness that presses in.
He was quite displeased. It was not a good time in my life. It never really is with an abusive, alcoholic spouse. I’ll leave it at that. It took every effort to keep myself still, hold everything in, try to stay quiet and take up as little space as possible, despite the pain.
And then, just as we neared home, something appeared above the trees.
A massive, circular ship – lights glowing, moving slowly over our car. Not very high, just above the treetops. Almost floating. Completely silent.
He stopped the car. We looked at each other.
“Did you see that?”
“Yes.”
Something in the car shifted too – his anger, which had filled every mile of that drive, dissipated. The lights felt protective, somehow, though I couldn’t have explained why. We never spoke of it again.
Contractions restarted. Soon after we got home, my water broke. I called my doctor, whispering, trying not to bother the man asleep in the other room. She told me to go straight to the emergency room – she’d meet me there. And she did. In her pajamas, in the early morning hours.
My son was born shortly after. The cord wrapped around his neck twice. My doctor said she had never seen a cord that long – and that if it had been any other way, he wouldn’t have made it by the time we arrived.
He was also born with the amniotic sac still over his face. The caul. The veil.
As she placed him in my arms, my doctor – this quiet, stoic woman in her pajamas in the delivery room – told me that in many traditions across many cultures, babies born with the caul are believed to be seers. Shamans. Spiritual leaders. Beings with a particular connection to whatever lies on the other side of the veil between worlds.
I looked down at him.
My mind went to what had floated silently over our car just hours earlier.
Was there a connection? I can’t say with certainty. But I know what I believe.
That son is the one who sat with me in the driveway after “Disclosure Day.” Who pulled up the house on Google Maps. Who found the bush-tree, still standing, exactly where I said it would be. The one whose hero is Carl Sagan, whose passion and career have been in aerospace.
Sometimes knowing is enough.
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The Movies That Cracked Me Open
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was the first time I saw my own experience reflected back at me on a screen. I was young then (weren’t we all?), and I remember the specific relief of it – the feeling of I’m not crazy. This is real. Other people know. That movie gave me language for something I’d been carrying without words.
“Arrival” did something different entirely.
I watched it for the first time when my granddaughter – who was 15 – was just on the other side of fighting stage 4 cancer. The doctors had given her limited time. We were past that but still in the midst of the unsurvivable. I sat in that theater watching a film about Louise, a linguist who learns an alien language so complex and nonlinear that it literally rewires her brain – and in doing so, she begins to experience time differently. She sees her daughter’s entire life at once: the joy, the loss, the choice to love anyway.
That movie wrecked me. In the best possible way.
Because none of this is really about aliens. It’s about empathy. About what happens when you make a genuine attempt to understand something radically different from yourself – and how that effort, that willingness to reach across the impossible divide, can change outcomes. Stop wars. Save worlds.
“Close Encounters” gave us Roy and Jillian… two strangers brought together by a shared knowing, drawn toward something so unspeakably vast, something others couldn’t see. “Arrival” gave us Louise, rewired by a language not of this world, choosing love with full knowledge of its cost. And “Disclosure Day” gave us Daniel, Margaret, and Eve – head, heart, and instrument – each playing their part in bringing a message to a world that wasn’t sure it was ready.
Three films. The same throughline: empathy, trust, and the willingness to believe something beyond ourselves is possible.
And to listen – to your heart and to each other.
It’s also about time. About the way grief and love exist outside of linear sequence. About being willing to do the hardest thing – to say yes to a life knowing exactly what it will cost you – because the love is worth it.
My granddaughter sailed past her statistical timeline. A sophomore in high school whose world came crashing down. Then we held our breath for the dreaded five-year mark. Cancer-free, she sailed past that too. Then, she was told she’d never have children.
Now a VIP toddler’s mom, she’s a literal badass and proud of every chapter of her story.
When we finally exhaled – when she got her stunning all clear, attributed to both western and holistic medicine – we went to see “The Fault In Our Stars” together. I have a photograph of us in the parking lot afterward, eyes sparkling from tears, love flowing everywhere. Knowing what she overcame. Knowing what we almost lost.
Life. Death. Fear. Overcoming. Chapters we didn’t choose, but rewrote anyway.
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What Disclosure Day Was: An Opinion
I want to be honest about the film, because I’ve seen the full swing of online reactions – from the greatest movie ever made to so boring, I fell asleep. I didn’t think it was either spot on the pendulum. There were moments of genuine cheesiness that I noticed and forgave. It didn’t impact me the way “Arrival” did, or carry the story like “Close Encounters.”
But it moved me. It did something else, and here’s what it got deeply right:
The suffering alien – the one being confined, afraid – broke me. That scene landed as pure empathy, the way great storytelling should. If you can watch a being in pain and feel for it regardless of what it looks like, you’re doing the thing “Arrival” was asking of us: to reach across the gap, to evolve, to become better humans.
The Catholic thread got me too. I grew up deeply immersed in that world – the rituals, the certainty, the fear, the guilt, the contained cosmology of it all. And there’s a moment in “Disclosure Day” where a nun asks Eve, simply: “Why would He create an entire universe but save it only for us?”
I wanted to stand up in the theater and clap.
That one question – asked by someone whose entire faith tradition would seem to argue the opposite – changes the trajectory of the story. Eve, moved by those words, ultimately gets Margaret the artifact she needs to share the message with the world. One act of expanded thinking ripples outward and saves everything.
That’s not cheesy. That’s the entire point.
And the animals. In “Disclosure Day,” beings come to children in animal form, to ease their fear. In Native traditions, animals are understood as messengers – connectors between what we can see and what we can’t, carriers of meaning we’re not always equipped to receive directly.
Which brings me to my hummingbird.
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The Hummingbird
For weeks now, a hummingbird has been visiting me every afternoon. I’ve lived in this house for years and never once seen a hummingbird here before.
I looked it up (of course I did). In medicine card traditions, the hummingbird carries specific messages: a loved one is near. A reminder for joy during difficult times. A divine messenger. A bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.
I’ve been going through some challenging things lately. The kind of things that make you look up at the sky and wonder what pieces of stretched-too-thin thread are holding you together.
And every afternoon, without fail, this tiny iridescent visitor appears – and makes me smile.
I don’t think that’s nothing. I’ve never thought things like that, the signs, are nothing.
Not since I was 11 years old and stood at a window in the dark and felt – inexplicably, overwhelmingly – that I was not alone.
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Why Any of This Belongs Here
I’m a communications strategist. I’ve spent a career in corporate boardrooms, managing communications for Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, transformational leaders, and a New York Times best-selling author. There isn’t an obvious lane for: Oh, I also believe all of this, because I’ve lived it.
Corporate professional vs. decades-long seeker and rabbit hole dweller. It’s been a long, strange trip…
But if you’ve ever spent any time on my website, you might have noticed something in my main hero image… a tiny UFO, tucked among the stars.
That’s not decorative. That’s not whimsical branding (although I’m always down for whimsy). That’s a nod to a night in New Castle that I’ve never forgotten, and the silver being in the bushes who waved at me like he already knew me.
I waved back.
I’m still waving.
“Disclosure Day” didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But it gave the world a language – finally, openly, loudly – for a conversation I’ve been having quietly inside my head for half a century. And maybe that’s what disclosure really means. Not just governments releasing files. But all of us, one by one, remembering, saying: I know what I experienced. I’m done pretending it doesn’t matter.
The universe is vast beyond comprehension. We are a minuscule speck within it. The idea that we are all there is – that consciousness, intelligence, love, curiosity exist only here, only us, only now – has never made sense to me.
Not since I was three years old, crying for the stars. Not since I was 11 and felt, for one shining moment, like I really was home.
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In everything otherworldly that’s happened over the years – things I still don’t have full words for – I’ve never once felt afraid. Just protected and cared for. Like an invisible family that’s been checking in on me my whole life. Maybe that’s denial. Maybe I’ve repressed something I don’t want to look at. I genuinely don’t know. But after fifty years, what I keep coming back to is… love. And can that ever be wrong?
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I’ll leave you now on this note. If there’s one thing we should all realize by now, the universe has quite the sense of humor. My son’s good friend is someone whose last name you’d recognize if you know UAP lore… from the same family my mom reached out to – fifty-some years ago, on the other side of the country – trying to make sense of her experiences.
Coincidence?
I couldn’t make this up if I tried.
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Do you have your own quiet knowing? Your own story you’ve never quite said out loud? If so, I’d love to hear it. You can reach me at ren@starstuff.studio or find me on Instagram @ren_starstuffstudio. Some conversations are worth having, even if the world is only just now catching up.
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