Disclosure Day: If Something Wanted to Reach Us, It Would Come as an Animal 🛸

On Disclosure Day, the stag, the fox, the butterfly, and why none of this surprised me.

I watched Disclosure Day by Steven Spielberg.

There were several moments that stopped me. Not because they were shocking, but because they confirmed something I have been sitting with for a long time without quite having the language for it. The beings in those scenes chose to appear as specific animals. A deer. A fox. A cardinal. A squirrel. And in the bedroom of a young girl, butterflies on the wallpaper.

Not randomly. Not arbitrarily. The choices were intentional, and the significance was clear to anyone who has spent time with these animals as teachers rather than as wildlife.

I am not here to make claims about what disclosure means or what is true. I have my own beliefs and I hold them privately, the way you hold anything that matters. But I want to think through this with you, because it lands directly in the middle of what this work is about.

If an intelligence wanted to reach us, to communicate without triggering fear, to be recognised rather than fled from, the single most sophisticated thing it could do is appear as something we already know how to receive.

And for thousands of years, across every culture that has ever existed, the animals we have known how to receive are the same ones.

The Deer

The deer is one of the oldest sacred animals in human memory. In Celtic mythology, the deer is a magical creature, one of the oldest animals in the world according to the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen, able to move between the worlds in ways other animals cannot. Cernunnos, the antlered god of the Celts, Lord of Wild Things, is depicted surrounded by deer. He is not a god of war or sky. He is the god of the in-between. The threshold. The place where things cross over.

In the Arthurian tradition, the white deer is the creature that cannot be caught. It appears at the beginning of a quest and leads the knight not toward a destination but toward a transformation. You do not hunt it. You follow it until you understand why you were called.

The antlers, shed and regrown each year, are the most visible biological proof of cycles that human beings have always found sacred: loss, renewal, and the return of what was taken.

In my own Unzipped series, the Stag has three eyes. I painted him that way before I had fully articulated why. The third eye is not metaphor in this context. It is the acknowledgement that he perceives on a frequency we are not built to access directly. He does not miss anything. He is already aware of what is coming before it arrives.

If something wanted to appear as a being of heightened perception, of threshold-crossing, of sacred witnessing, it would come as a deer.

The Fox

The fox is the most consistent trickster in the mythological record. Not trickster in the modern sense of someone who deceives for gain. Trickster in the oldest sense: the being who operates outside the rules of consensus reality, who moves between worlds without asking permission, who reveals truth by breaking the expected pattern.

In Japanese mythology, the kitsune is a fox spirit of extraordinary intelligence, a divine messenger of Inari in Shinto tradition, documented across more than a thousand years of Japanese religious and literary history. The more tails, the older and more powerful. She is not dangerous because she is deceptive. She is powerful because she understands more than she reveals.

Due to its nocturnal activity and liminal nature, the fox is considered across many traditions to be a being of the Otherworld, functioning as a psychopomp, guiding souls through transitional states. In Romanian folk belief, the fox literally knows the hidden paths through the spirit world and leads the newly departed along them. In Celtic sources, the fox navigates boundaries, moves between worlds, and is associated with deep, earned, embodied knowledge.

In Indigenous North American traditions, the fox is a teacher of discernment. She shows you what is real by showing you what is not.

If something wanted to appear as a being of intelligence, of boundary-crossing, of knowing more than it discloses, it would come as a fox.

The Cardinal

The cardinal is a bird that belongs, mythologically speaking, to the space between worlds.

In Cherokee tradition, the cardinal is the daughter of the Sun, a messenger who delivers news from beyond. Among Pueblo peoples, the cardinal's song is heard as a spirit voice, ancestors speaking from the other side. Across many Native American traditions, the cardinal is understood as the spiritual essence of departed loved ones, a bridge between the human realm and whatever lies beyond it.

The word cardinal comes from the Latin cardo, meaning axis or pivot point. The hinge on which worlds turn. That is not a coincidence in a film about contact.

If something wanted to appear as a being of ancestral connection, of messages carried between realms, it would come as a cardinal.

The Squirrel

This one is personal. The squirrel is the second painting in the Animarii series. I know her well.

In Norse mythology, the squirrel Ratatoskr runs up and down Yggdrasil, the World Tree, carrying messages between the eagle at the top and the serpent at the roots. She is the essential link between realms. Remove her and the cosmic communication stops. In Celtic mythology, the squirrel is a messenger between the Otherworld and the human realm, linked to hidden knowledge and the secret things buried in the earth waiting to be found.

In the Hindu tradition, squirrels helped Lord Rama cross the ocean to rescue his wife, and in gratitude Rama blessed them by running three fingers along their backs. That is where the stripes come from.

The squirrel buries things and finds them again by instinct and memory. She is the keeper of what is hidden. Everything she knows, she carries quietly.

If something wanted to appear as a being of hidden knowledge, of messages carried between realms, of quiet and patient intelligence, it would come as a squirrel.

The Butterflies on the Wall

The butterflies in Disclosure Day do not appear as living animals. They are on the wallpaper of a young girl's bedroom. And that detail matters more, not less.

The film tells us directly that the aliens chose animals she already loved, creatures that made her feel safe. The butterfly wallpaper is not background detail. It is the room itself speaking. The sanctuary already filled with the symbol of the soul before the contact happens.

In Greek, butterfly is psyche. The same word as soul. In Indigenous traditions of the Americas, the butterfly carries prayers between the living and the spirit world. In Celtic tradition, she is the soul made visible. She has always been the transfiguration, the proof that complete transformation is survivable.

I have to be honest with you about this one.

The butterfly arrived in my life a few years ago, following a spiritual breakthrough I was not expecting and cannot fully describe even now. She was not part of my life before that. And then suddenly she was everywhere, insistently, in a way that felt less like coincidence and more like instruction.

The Animarii butterfly painting is the only piece in the series I have kept. It is not for sale. She mattered enough that I had her made into a dress and a bag. She lives on my body as well as my wall. That is how significant she became.

So when I saw her on that wallpaper, present in the room before the contact began, I understood exactly what Spielberg was doing.

Why none of this surprised me

I have been painting animals as emissaries from other worlds for years now. Not decoratively. Not as wildlife art. As the beings that every wisdom tradition independently identified as the carriers of something beyond ordinary sight.

The reason these animals appear in Disclosure Day is the same reason they appear in every shamanic tradition, every sacred text, every mythology that has tried to describe contact with something larger than ordinary human experience. They are the forms that intelligence takes when it wants to be recognised rather than feared. They are the language that something very old chose because it knew we already spoke it.

The animals were always the point.

We just needed a moment like this one to remember why.

To everyone who made Disclosure Day: thank you for this. The deliberate, careful choice to use these specific animals, for these specific moments, shows a depth of understanding that is rare in any storytelling. You did not reach for random creatures. You reached for the ones that every culture on earth has always known carry something beyond the ordinary. That is a gift to anyone watching who already speaks this language, and an opening for everyone who is just beginning to.

Rebecca 🦋