Way back in June of 2011, Disney paid Damon Lindelof a whopping seven figures to make "the next Star Wars." Then in May of this year Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol director Brad Bird was attached to the picture to direct, and the project was given a name, 1952.
We speculated that this ominous name must have something to so with the infamous Washington flap, a string of nights in 1952 when mysterious floating object appeared above the DC Capitol. And today Vulture finally has some a few details on this mysterious project.
An unnamed source leaks that 1952 will be set "largely" in the present day. And the plot of the story is centered around aliens making contact here on Earth. The report points to Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a large influence. So perhaps these will be friendly aliens! Finally the plot will follow a 40-ish man. This movie is apparently not about an alien encounter, but is still in the vein of Close Encounters. So they might not be touching faces, but we're still betting on some kind of alien appearing in this movie.
Adding a bit of confusion to the mix Vulture also has this little tidbit:
When Lindelof had a meeting to discuss the project with Disney's head of production, Sean Bailey, the Disney exec arranged for Lindelof to be given access to one of the studios odder curiosities: a banker's box of files and documents that had been left moldering in Walt Disney's personal development lab, WED Enterprises, which later became the studio's vaunted Imagineering department. The box was originally labeled with the title of the studio's 1965 comedy That Darn Cat!, which had been crossed out and in its place was written "1952." Inside was a random-at-first-glance collection of documents and primary source materials that, when looked at all together, indicated that someone had been working on a project (movie? theme park ride?) about alien contact.
While interesting, this doesn't lead us that much closer to finding out exactly why this movie is called 1952, but we'd like to state that we're 100% down for a Brad Bird That Darn Cat reboot.