The Coincidence Machine

When Art Imitates Life, and fails

Not a Movie Review

Dakota and I went to see Disclosure Day, and I left the cinema with that very specific kind of irritation where you know the movie was not good, but also know the movie is not really what is bothering you.

The movie itself was dumb in that modern blockbuster way where everything is happening all the time, yet somehow nothing has time to breathe. It felt badly paced, overly serious, and weirdly convinced that if it kept sprinting, nobody would notice that the plan made no sense. Why would aliens need a human translator if they can alter a human being to translate for them anyway? Why go through all this trouble? Why is the giant alien physically compromised? Why does everyone accept the end of reality with the emotional depth of changing phone plans?

But this is not a movie review. Not really.

The movie annoyed me, sure. But what stayed with me was not the plot. It was the feeling around the plot. That strange, greasy sensation you get when fiction, politics, timing, media, and real-world events all start brushing up against each other in a way that makes you feel insane for even noticing.

The Weird Feeling

I want to talk about coincidences. Not because I think every coincidence is evidence of some master plan, and not because I want to become one of those people who sees a triangle in a movie poster and starts connecting it to the World Economic Forum, ancient Egypt, and his neighbour’s Wi-Fi password.

I mean the subtler kind of coincidence. The kind that does not prove anything, but still changes the atmosphere.

The timing around Disclosure Day felt weird. A big Spielberg alien disclosure movie arrives at roughly the same cultural moment as renewed public UFO/UAP disclosure language, government websites with alien branding, and official releases of UAP-related records. The U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE page says UAP records are being released in tranches, with releases in May and June 2026.

That does not mean the movie was planted. It does not mean Spielberg is doing predictive programming from a secret underground Amblin bunker. It just means the timing was strange enough to make the whole thing feel staged by reality itself.

And that is the part that gets under my skin.

Coincidence as a Mood

Some coincidences are just coincidences. Most of them, probably.

But coincidences do not have to be conspiracies to have an effect on people. They can still create a mood. They can still make the world feel scripted. They can still make you wonder whether you are reacting to reality itself or to a version of reality you have already been trained to recognise.

That, to me, is the interesting part.

We do not encounter major events as blank slates. We carry templates around with us. Pandemic. Alien invasion. Government cover-up. Nuclear standoff. Cyberattack. Civil unrest. Climate collapse. AI takeover. Each one already has a tone, a colour palette, a soundtrack, and a set of expected emotional reactions.

When something happens in real life, we do not process it raw. We instinctively ask, “What kind of movie is this?”

And once we know the genre, we know how to feel.

The Pandemic Example

COVID is the obvious example, because it is still recent enough that everyone remembers the weirdness of it, but far enough away that people are already reorganising their memories around whatever story suits them best.

Before COVID, there had already been years of public warnings about pandemics. Bill Gates gave a TED talk in March 2015 called “The next outbreak? We’re not ready,” arguing that the world needed to prepare for epidemics with better planning, research, and health systems. (TED) In October 2019, Johns Hopkins, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a pandemic tabletop exercise based on a fictional scenario; Johns Hopkins described it as a training exercise for a hypothetical but scientifically plausible pandemic. (Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security)

Looking back, of course that feels eerie.

It does not mean those people caused COVID. Warning about a risk is not the same thing as creating it. Experts talk about pandemics because pandemics are real historical events and always have been. But emotionally, none of that fully removes the weirdness. When you remember seeing people talk about pathogens, preparedness, simulations, and global outbreak scenarios right before the real thing happened, it leaves a mark.

The rational part of your brain says, “That was public health forecasting.”

The paranoid part of your brain says, “That was a trailer.”

And even when the rational part wins, the paranoia does not fully shut up.

Preparation or Programming?

This is where the whole thing gets uncomfortable, because there is a difference between preparation and programming, but in practice they can look similar.

A society prepares for possible futures by imagining them. Governments run simulations. Experts model disasters. Filmmakers turn collective fears into stories. News outlets package uncertainty into repeatable images. Social media turns everything into memes before anyone has finished understanding it.

None of that requires a secret room full of people stroking cats and planning the next global plot twist. It can happen through culture alone.

But the effect is still real.

Media rehearses us. It gives us emotional muscle memory. It teaches us what the big event is supposed to look like before the big event happens. So when something does happen, part of us has already been there. We have seen the press conference. We have seen the panicked crowds. We have seen the lone whistleblower. We have seen the scientist ignored until it is too late. We have seen the government lie, then slowly admit a partial truth, then insist everyone stay calm.

By the time reality arrives, it is not unfamiliar. It is just the live-action version.

Real Life Does Not Imitate Art

That said, real life does not actually imitate art. Not properly.

Real life is much stupider.

Movies make mass revelation look clean. The truth drops, the world reacts, people cry, governments tremble, churches overflow, families embrace, humanity collectively stares into the sky and reconsiders its place in the universe.

In reality, half the population would not believe it, a quarter would make jokes, a chunk would immediately turn it into a partisan argument, and most people would still have to go to work the next morning.

That was one of the things that bothered me about Disclosure Day. Everyone folded way too quickly. The movie seemed to think that once the truth was revealed, people would naturally move into the correct emotional position. Shock, awe, fear, acceptance, unity. As if human beings have ever been that graceful.

We do not react to reality as one species. We react as tribes, fandoms, denominations, algorithms, markets, and comment sections.

If actual alien disclosure happened tomorrow, I do not think the world would become spiritually transformed. I think people would ask if the aliens were left-wing or right-wing. Someone would accuse them of being fake. Someone would try to sell alien protein powder. Someone would claim the Bible predicted it. Someone else would claim the aliens proved all religion false. A podcast would explain why the aliens were actually from Antarctica. The stock market would do something ridiculous.

And then, somehow, after three days, people would be bored.

The Religious Stuff

The religious element in the movie also annoyed me, because it felt like faith was being used as a shortcut rather than treated like something real people actually live inside.

A lot of alien stories do this. They treat religious people as fragile villagers whose entire worldview collapses the second something strange appears in the sky. It is such a lazy way to write belief. It assumes faith is just a lack of information, and that once a bigger piece of information arrives, faith automatically evaporates.

But that is not how religion works for most people.

A lot of religious traditions already contain enormous, non-human, cosmic categories. Angels. Demons. Principalities. Powers. Heavenly beings. Apocalyptic signs. Worlds seen and unseen. The idea that humanity is not the only intelligent life in existence is not automatically devastating to faith. For some people it might be. For others, it would be folded into an existing spiritual framework almost immediately.

That is what the movie missed. Faith does not always break under mystery. Sometimes mystery is the whole point.

The lazier version of the story is, “Aliens appear, religious people panic.” The more interesting version is, “Aliens appear, and every belief system on Earth tries to metabolise them.”

That would be much messier, and much more believable.

The Part That Actually Scares Me

The scary part is not aliens. It is not even government secrecy, although obviously that is its own bottomless pit.

The scary part is how easily perception can be softened in advance.

Not controlled completely. Not hypnotised. Just softened.

An idea starts as ridiculous. Then it becomes a movie. Then it becomes a news segment. Then it becomes a think-piece. Then it becomes a government phrase. Then it becomes a website. Then it becomes something your parents casually mention at dinner. Then, one day, it is just part of the background.

Nobody has to force you to accept it. They only have to make it familiar.

That is the machine I keep thinking about. The coincidence machine. The cultural process where the impossible becomes silly, then entertaining, then plausible, then bureaucratic, then normal.

By the time the event happens, you are not necessarily prepared in any meaningful moral or intellectual sense. You are just less surprised.

And maybe that is enough.

The Boring Explanation Is Still Weird

The boring explanation is that experts forecast risks, artists dramatise anxieties, governments use whatever language gets attention, and the public connects dots because human beings are meaning-making animals.

That explanation is probably true.

It is also still weird.

It is weird that pandemic exercises happened before a pandemic. It is weird that alien-disclosure entertainment arrives beside alien-disclosure politics. It is weird that media keeps giving us emotional rehearsals for disasters that later become real enough to make the rehearsals feel suspicious.

Again, not proof. Not a grand theory. Just weird.

And maybe that is the honest place to sit with it. Not in full conspiracy mode, but not in smug dismissal either. Because the people who dismiss everything as coincidence can be just as annoying as the people who think nothing is coincidence. Reality is usually more boring than conspiracy, but more suspicious than polite society wants to admit.

The Uneasy Middle

So no, I do not think every movie is a test balloon. I do not think Bill Gates caused COVID because he warned about pandemics. I do not think Spielberg made Disclosure Day because the government handed him a secret schedule of upcoming alien events.

But I do think powerful institutions, artists, experts, politicians, and media companies all swim in the same cultural water. They respond to the same fears. They anticipate the same crises. They borrow the same imagery. They turn the future into content before the future arrives.

Then, when the future does arrive, it feels like recognition.

Not because life imitates art.

Because art has already taught us how to recognise life.

That is the part I cannot shake. Not that fiction predicts reality perfectly. It clearly does not. Real people are too chaotic, stupid, funny, selfish, stubborn, faithful, cynical, and tired for that.

But fiction does give us the shape of events before we live through them. It hands us the symbols. It gives us the emotional presets. It tells us what kind of story we might be in.

And when the world starts using the same symbols back at us, it is hard not to feel like someone, somewhere, already saw the trailer.