Binge This Steven Spielberg Sci-Fi Miniseries Before Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg has aliens on the brain again, and I mean that as a compliment. With his next UFO thriller, Disclosure Day, landing in theaters June 12, it is the perfect time to dust off the last time he went long on abductions, cover-ups, and the people stuck between them: a sprawling 2002 miniseries that was a huge TV event then and is oddly under-discussed now.

Spielberg and UFOs: the ongoing obsession

Spielberg has kicked at extraterrestrial stories from every angle for decades: the awe and wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the pure-heart family fantasy of E.T. (1982), the crowd-pleasing disaster ride of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise (2005), and even the shiny, pulpier flavor of interdimensional beings in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Disclosure Day sounds like it is circling back to the conspiratorial side of the sandbox — alien secrets, government denials, and ordinary folks trying to survive as the truth starts to leak out — but until that one stops being a mystery box, let’s rewind to the deep cut.

The 2002 deep cut: Steven Spielberg Presents Taken

Released on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2002, Taken was built to feel big: a generational, 10-part saga that tried to do for abduction lore what a prestige novel does for family drama. It was hyped as an event at the time and has since slipped into that weird cultural fog where great, ambitious things tend to live until someone says, hey, remember this?

• Format: 10 episodes, roughly 90 minutes each, originally broadcast in two-hour blocks
• Executive producer: Steven Spielberg
• Writer: All 10 episodes by Leslie Bohem (Dante's Peak, Daylight)
• Directors: A different director per episode, including Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Salem's Lot), Bryan Spicer (The X-Files), and Breck Eisner (Sahara)
• Cast (stacked, with a lot of early-career turns): Dakota Fanning, Anton Yelchin, Joel Gretsch, Steve Burton, John Hawkes, Matt Frewer, Ryan Hurst, Catherine Dent, Desmond Harrington, Julie Benz, Kevin Durand, Justin Chatwin, Michael Jeter, Ryan Merriman

Three families, one crash, six decades

Taken threads everything back to the infamous 1947 Roswell crash and then tracks the fallout through three families from 1944 to 2002. The Keys line is the abduction side of the story, beginning with Captain Russell Keys (Steve Burton) and his WWII-era encounters that echo down to his granddaughter Allie (Dakota Fanning) in the present. The Crawford clan is the government arm, with Owen Crawford (Joel Gretsch) rising through the machinery dedicated to keeping Roswell buried. And the Clarkes are the civilians who take in an injured alien and spend decades trying to protect both their secret and the child born from that encounter (Anton Yelchin).

It is a proper generational tapestry: parents make choices, kids inherit the consequences, and the show keeps paying off details you clocked hours earlier. Some branches learn and try to break the cycle, others double down on the worst instincts, and a few discover abilities that feel like both a gift and a burden. The abduction material goes for unnerving over cute, and it works — cold, clinical, and hard to shake.

Big TV, bigger emotions

You can feel the Spielberg clout in the scale. For early-2000s television, the production is ambitiously mounted — not just a couple of spooky lights and a fog machine. Sure, a few effects show their age 24 years later, but the show still swings for the fences: one minute you are neck-deep in family trauma, the next you are watching soldiers push into an alien craft. That tonal whiplash is the point; the human mess and the cosmic unknown feed each other.

Queue it up before Disclosure Day

If Disclosure Day has you itching for conspiracies, cover-ups, and the lives ground up in between, Taken is a satisfying, surprisingly emotional binge that hits those exact wavelengths. It is a forgotten triumph in Spielberg’s long conversation with UFOs — and a smart warm-up while we wait for June 12.