“The Age of Disclosure,” which premiered today at SXSW, is a documentary that millions of people are going to want to see. It’s a movie that purports to offer incontrovertible evidence that spaceships from other worlds are visiting us. And if you attempt to argue — as I will do in this review — that what you’re seeing in the film isn’t what you think you’re seeing, you’re likely to be attacked as a heretic and a denier of reality, someone who turns a blind eye to the proof that’s sitting right in front of them.
The evidence, if you truly look at it, isn’t all that compelling: blurry black-and-white U.S. government video footage that shows tiny objects zipping forward over the surface of the water. It’s the footage of aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots that we all saw back in 2021, when it was declassified. It’s fascinating to look at but quite inconclusive. It’s hardly the stuff that alien dreams are made of.
But let’s be clear about something. Like all my fellow curiosity seekers who will see “The Age of Disclosure,” and like everyone reading this review, I’m someone who wants to believe. Over the years, I have gorged on every UFO special and documentary and YouTube video I can, always looking for that feeling of awe, eager for those images of glowing lights in the sky, of mysterious “spaceships,” to be real. On occasion, I’ve been momentarily lured into the rabbit-hole sensation that yes! Behold! They are real! It’s a feeling akin to seeing the proof of God’s existence.
The hunger many of us have for that feeling, and the way that we take the evidence before us and convince ourselves that it’s undeniable, is a powerful thing. Yet there are deep, underlying patterns at work in our relationship to alien phenomena, and when you start to perceive those patterns, it makes one a little less susceptible to the rapture of wide-eyed belief.
The truth may be out there. But the real truth is that each era responds to the extraterrestrial “evidence” that’s tailor-made for it. In 1938, Orson Welles’ CBS Radio Network broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” was so convincing that it triggered a mass panic, convincing countless listeners that a full-scale Martian invasion was taking place. The 1980s were the heyday of tales of alien abduction, with scores of “witnesses” offering variations on the same populist story: how they’d been taken into a spaceship and subjected to sinister medical experiments at the hands of creatures who were almost inevitably described as looking like the alien at the end of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” These were woozy tales for a time of countercultural hangover. In the ’90s, “The X-Files” was about the dawn of the age we’re in now, when everything is perceived to be a conspiracy and a cover-up — which, significantly, started out as a left-wing view, only to morph into a right-wing view.
Where “The Age of Disclosure” strikes a new and vivid tone is that it’s the first extraterrestrial pop-culture bombshell that presents itself through the buttoned-down ethos of science, technology, bureaucracy, data. For starters, it’s not about “UFOs” — now a corny, outdated term employed by amateurs. It’s about UAPs, which stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (so much more of a 10-dollar-word feel!). And apart from the government-sanctioned UAP footage (which doesn’t have much variety to it), the documentary, as directed by Dan Farah, is essentially a two-hour parade of talking heads.
But these are neither outliers nor “crackpots.” They are 34 senior members of the U.S. government, military, and intelligence communities, all of whom claim to have “direct knowledge” of UAPs. These are people with prestige and credibility, and nearly all are somber-looking white men. So they must be right! Right?
They are unequivocal in what they say. “I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings,” says Jay Stratton, former Director of the Government UAP Task Force. “This is the biggest discovery in human history,” says Christopher Mellon, a former Department of Defense official. The film’s testimony comes from people you’re familiar with, like Senator-turned-Secretary of State Marco Rubio or former director of National Intelligence Gen. Jim Clapper or South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds. And it comes from people you don’t know who seem venerable and impressive, like Hal Puthoff, a wizened 88-year-old quantum physicist who was the chief scientist of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. These people all look and sound so important that the message that blankets every moment of “The Age of Disclosure” is: They’re official. And what they have to say is official.
What they have to say adds up to one primal narrative, repeated over and over (kind of like the alien-abduction stories). It’s all about the otherworldly physical qualities of the alleged spaceships observed by Navy pilots. Here’s what we learn: that the ships move at speeds far beyond anything our technology has invented. That even at those speeds, they can stop on a dime, which is unheard of. One witness talks about how a ship would hover in the air, then shoot up into space, then come back down to hover again (also unheard of). A few of the witnesses worked for the CIA, so they possess the knowledge to testify that these spaceships are not part of a top-secret government program. Do they come out of a top-secret program from China or Russia? That would be impossible, because America’s outer-space technology far outstrips theirs.
Speaking of China and Russia, it’s part of the film’s mystique that rather than describing most of this with the awestruck wonder you might expect, the officials on hand all talk about the alien-spaceship sightings as a sober matter of military defense. According to several of the witnesses, there have been extraterrestrial crash landings (we’ve picked up the spaceships themselves, and sometimes their inhabitants), and the basic strategy that the U.S. government is interested in is to study the crashed ships and reverse engineer their technology, in the hopes that our enemies don’t get hold of it first.
For a while, the witnesses mostly discuss spaceships that resemble the one in the famous “Tic Tac” incident, when U.S. Naval aviators, on Nov. 14, 2004, first spotted an object zipping through the air that was shaped like a breath mint. But we also hear numerous descriptions of grander alien ships — gigantic red cubes and black rectangles (like the monolith in “2001”), hovering right at the gates of government facilities. I should mention that several of the witnesses mention the government UAP footage that remains classified, which they themselves have seen, and which they say leaves absolutely no doubt that these are phenomena from other worlds.
Life is complicated, but some things are binary. Either the things that the people in “The Age of Disclosure” are talking about are alien spaceships…or they’re not. Many who see the film will come away thinking that they are. At moments, I listened to the testimonials and got swept up in them. I thought, “Could it be? Maybe it could.”
But then my skepticism kicked in. It has to do with two highly earthbound phenomena. The first is the power of suggestion — the way that stories get repeated, and exaggerated, and embellished, and confirmed. But the far more powerful issue, at least to me, is this.
For decades, there was a ton of UFO footage shot on 8mm cameras, then digital cameras. But we now live in an age when cameras are literally everywhere. Everyone has one on their phone. The military compounds that are involved in these stories are laced with surveillance cameras. Our entire world is laced with surveillance cameras. So if the whole planet is now wired to take pictures, how come there is no footage in “The Age of Disclosure” — not one second of it — that actually captures any of the things these people are talking about? Do aliens only show up…in top-secret places? How do they know?
The title of the film refers to the idea — or is it merely the hope? — that we now live in an age when the government is being pressured to shed its secrecy. The people want to know, and the film says: We will know. But if that’s the case, then when are we actually going to be shown something that looks like more than a dupe of a dupe of an old video game depicting a blurry black dot of an alien spaceship cruising over water at what looks to be about 300 miles per hour?
I’ll believe it when I see it.
