If you don’t believe in aliens yet, you’re behind.
The United States has been secretly working to capture UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena, the more formal term for UFOs — since as early as 1947, according to many high-ranking figures throughout the government, military and intelligence community. There is evidence and documentation of all kinds of findings that feel like the stuff of sci-fi: vehicles that appear to disobey the laws of physics, difficult-to-explain interference with American military activity and, indeed, the bodies of intelligent, nonhuman beings. Multiple species, at that.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all that info, take a breath. Yes, there are 80 years of covered-up research to catch up on. But Dan Farah, director of the SXSW documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” has spent the last three years of his life interviewing as many involved sources as possible and compiling all of the most important information in an “attempt to make the most definitive, credible film on what can be legally disclosed” surrounding the topic, he says, to get people up to speed.
Legally is a keyword here. A massive amount of what has been discovered in the decades since the U.S. began studying nonhuman intelligence is still classified, meaning that many of Farah’s interviewees in the documentary know a lot more than they could share with him without breaking the law. At the same time, there’s a significant volume of information available to the public that just isn’t widely talked about, for reasons the documentary dives into. That’s why Farah decided to create a resource to make people aware of what he calls “the base facts”: “The fact that we’re not alone in the universe. The fact that there has been recovery of technology of nonhuman origin. The fact that other nations are also recovering this technology, and that we are in a race to reverse-engineer this technology.”
That race is a large part of why certain information remains classified and is considered by the government to be unsafe to disclose — anything shared with the American people is also shared with the rest of the world. “I certainly didn’t think about it at first. I was like, ‘If this stuff exists, why aren’t they telling us?’” Farah says. “And then I learned the answer: There’s all this good stuff that could come out of it, but this technology could also be used by bad actors to cause significant destruction.” The documentary singles out China and Russia in particular as adversaries in the competition to study UAPs.
At the same time, key figures believe that the government has taken an antiquated approach to the disclosure of information about UAPs. The key voices in “The Age of Disclosure” are Jay Stratton, former Defense Intelligence Agency official and director of the government’s UAP Task Force, and Lue Elizondo, a former Department of Defense official and member of the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Both have dedicated nearly two decades to navigating highly secret avenues of government to figure out as much as possible about UAPs and disseminate everything that isn’t classified. What they say they’ve learned, along with actual evidence of nonhuman beings and technology, is that the cover-up around the topic has been misguided and deadly.
Stratton and Elizondo believe the stigma around aliens and UFOs to be a national security threat leaves Americans woefully unprepared for developments that could change the trajectory of humanity. And beyond that, Elizondo claims to have heard about high-ranking intelligence officials who have considered killing him to stop his disclosure efforts, which began in 2017 when he resigned from the Pentagon to protest UAP-related secrecy and speak to the media in order to pressure Congress to take the issue more seriously.
Farah ran into others with similar fears while filming “The Age of Disclosure.” Though 34 people with direct knowledge about UAPs appear in his finished film, he says he met with about 10 more who agreed to have conversations with him but ultimately declined to be filmed.
“Some high-level politicians were afraid of how it might taint their reputation or impact them politically,” he says. “And some intelligence officials legitimately believed that their lives would be in danger if they participated in the film. After long conversations with their significant others, they decided it just wasn’t worth it. That was eye-opening for me. The more you go down the rabbit hole, it becomes clear really fast that this 80-year cover-up of the truth has been enforced with threats.”
Elizondo’s media campaign has led to the crumbling of the cover-up that gives “The Age of Disclosure” its title. It’s the reason the documentary focuses as much on the mechanics of the government cover-up as it does the UAPs themselves. “I realized from my conversations with Jay and Lue,” Farah says, “that it is not a question of whether it’s real. It’s a question of what our country should be doing about it.”
That isn’t to say that “The Age of Disclosure” doesn’t take time to show you just how real UAPs are. Among the mind-boggling findings presented is that UAPs have apparently activated and deactivated manmade nuclear weapons. They have also been observed to move and accelerate at rates that seem impossible, going from complete stillness to disappearing over the horizon instantaneously, and without the combustion that manmade vehicles rely on. The crafts have been observed to travel within clear spheres, and scientists now believe that space and time function differently inside those bubbles. That’s how these beings would be able to survive moving at tens of thousands of miles per hour: inside the bubble, those speeds would feel normal. Intense internal scarring and multiple deaths have been recorded among people who have gotten in close proximity to those bubbles. It’s like standing under a jet mid-takeoff, but exponentially more powerful, as the energy it takes a UAP to move so quickly would require 100 times the amount of power the United States generates in a single day.
So there’s a lot to fear here. But “The Age of Disclosure” also gives reasons to hope. There’s the fact that humanity has yet to be destroyed when it seems that these lifeforms certainly could have pulled that off by now if they wanted to. And interestingly, UAP research has also been considered a humanitarian and environmental cause. If humans manage to harness the clean, combustion-free energy source that UAPs are using, we could eliminate the need for the fossil fuels that are causing climate change.
“There’s an analogy that several interview subjects said to me: Would we have won the space race if the president hadn’t stepped to the mic and said, ‘We’re gonna go to the moon?’ Probably not,” Farah says. “If people don’t know something’s real, how are they gonna choose to spend their brain power on it? There’s a lot of genius scientists out there who are putting their brain power towards saving the environment, right? What if no one knew global warming was a thing? Would those people be putting their brain power towards it?”
When asked about the impact he wants “The Age of Disclosure” to have, Farah points to something Elizondo says at the end of the documentary. “He says he wishes he could share more, but that he feels tremendous pressure to share what he can now, because he knows there will come a time when people will wish they knew the truth sooner,” Farah says. The fact that people still don’t believe in nonhuman is “a barrier to entry for any bright young mind in our country that could be contributing on this front.” In other words, getting the right information in the right hands is a matter of urgency.
And on top of that, as Elizondo emphasizes repeatedly in the film, there’s the idea that fundamental truths about our universe should belong to everyone, not just one organization or government. Humanity has wondered about other worlds for ages — just take a look at the art we create.
“What got me into the topic is what probably got a lot of people my age in the topic: I’m a child of the ’80s and ’90s, and I grew up with movies like ‘E.T.’ and ‘Close Encounters,’” Farah says. “The power of those two movies probably put me on the path to this film more than anything.”
He’s far from the only civilian on that path. The trailer for “The Age of Disclosure” reached tens of millions of views as soon as it was released, and the film nabbed a coveted premiere slot at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas — the biggest venue at SXSW. That alone is a landmark for the movement around disclosure: the topic needs eyes.
“The more I talk to leaders in government, the more I realize that they only pay attention to what the public wants them to pay attention to,” Farah says. “You have people in government who want to pay attention to this, but they need the public to be caught up. The film is just the tip of the iceberg. There are currently bipartisan efforts that will bring about more disclosure and declassify certain information, and I think this film will help get those laws passed.”
And what happens after that? For now, that’s classified.
