Disclosure Day and interspecies communication—alien language isn’t just weird noises

Disclosure Day raises a big question: How do you talk to aliens?

A linguist lays out what communicating with aliens could actually involve—and what that tells us about human language

By Rachel Feltman , Sushmita Pathak , Brianne Kane & Alex Sugiura

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American ’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Today marks the release of one of the summer’s hottest blockbusters: Disclosure Day . Here’s what director Steven Spielberg had to say about the film in a recent interview with SciAm ’s associate books editor Bri Kane:

[CLIP: Director Steven Spielberg speaks with Scientific American’s Bri Kane : “This was a human interest story. And yes, it is a story about extraterrestrial, you know, contact, communication, interaction, but it’s also a story about secrets. It’s a story about the unknown, and it’s also a story about, ‘Why should the unknown be known by some people and not all people?’”]

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Feltman: You can check out Bri’s full conversation with Spielberg at ScientificAmerican.com or on our YouTube channel . But for today’s episode, we decided to take a closer look at one of those themes in particular: alien communication. What makes a language sound “alien” enough for a sci-fi film—and what do linguists think it would actually be like to try to understand an extraterrestrial visitor?