A splashy new documentary that asserts the presence of extraterrestrial life on Earth and alleges a US government effort to hide information on possible alien activity is making waves at SXSW.
The Age of Disclosure expounds upon years of congressional activity and testimony surrounding the presence of Unexplained Anomalous Phenomena (or UAP, a rebranding of the stigmatized UFO), in the United States, drawing both buzz and skepticism at the Austin, Texas-based cultural festival.
The film, directed by Dan Farah, features 34 military and intelligence veterans with direct knowledge of or experience with UAPs. All testify to the presence of alien flying objects and, for some, extraterrestrial beings on Earth. Some also allege a government cover-up of supposedly paradigm-shifting information – an effort that the film’s lead subject, Luis Elizondo, a member of the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), deemed “the most successful disinformation campaign in the history of the US government”, representing “80 years of lies and deception”.
A bipartisan group of government officials, including the former senator for Florida and Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the Democratic New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand; and the Republican South Dakota senator Mike Rounds, also call for more transparency on the subject, citing their personal experience struggling to access any information on UAPs. All participants, according to the film, disclose as much information as they lawfully can – which isn’t that much in terms of hard evidence, as several critics have noted. As IndieWire put it, The Age of Disclosure presents “the most convincing argument you can make without showing any actual evidence”. The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg dismissed it as a “a basic cable exploitation doc done up with a fancy gloss”, in which “nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted”.
But it is still the most serious and sourced documentary on the government’s handling of UAP information to date, surveying years of growing public interest in the subject even as it proclaims, in Elizondo’s words, “the greatest paradigm shift in human history”. The Age of Disclosure is “the most historic documentary ever made on this topic”, said a key participant, Jay Stratton, a defense intelligence agency official and director of the government’s UAP taskforce, during a post-screening Q&A at the festival’s marquee Paramount Theatre.
“This is a very real situation, and the stakes are incredibly high, and it’s clearly the most bipartisan issue of our time – leaders from both political parties made it clear to me how serious it is,” said Farah, a producer on Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the 2020 UFO doc The Phenomenon, during the Q&A. “But the public has no idea. The average person on the street is just completely in the dark.”
The film opens with a montage of subjects – ex-military and intelligence veterans, many of whom have testified under oath before Congress – stating for the record: “We are not alone.” Though it entertains fantastical ideas that drew audible gasps from the audience – speculation of extraterrestrial life hiding in the unmapped depths of the ocean, discussions on theoretical time-space bending alien technology that would absolve humanity of fossil fuels – The Age of Disclosure builds on legitimate reporting on government programs.
Such reporting starts with a buzzy 2017 New York Times report on the existence of AATIP, which investigated UFO reports from deep within the Pentagon. (Elizondo and several other film participants, including the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon and the AATIP consulting physicist Harold Puthoff, served as named sources for the article.) In 2020, the Times confirmed AATIP’s continued existence as a renamed Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force within the office of naval intelligence, precipitating an official government inquiry into the subject.
Public interest led to several Pentagon reports confirming hundreds of UAP sightings by military personnel, as well as the launch of an official Pentagon online reporting tool. Last fall, Elizondo and several other film participants testified before Congress that the government conducted a secret UFO retrieval program – though the hearing lacked any direct evidence to support the claims. That followed a blockbuster congressional hearing in July 2023, in which the whistleblower David Grusch, who led analysis of UAP within a US defense agency, told lawmakers that the US government possessed non-human “biologics” and spacecraft. “I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access,” he told the committee, again without direct evidence.
The Age of Disclosure faces a similar hurdle: lots of talk of what certain people have seen that is too classified or too sensitive to actually detail and thus impossible to prove. Some participants decline to speculate on aliens, instead sticking to what is unknown. “It could be China, it could be Russia, it could be any adversary,” said Gillibrand of UAP sightings. Rubio warned against a failure of imagination over the capabilities of any US adversary, human or non-human. Both expressed national security concerns over the presence of UAPs in the US airspace – a rare point of agreement.
Other participants detail their personal experience witnessing a UAP event, such as Alex Dietrich, a navy lieutenant commander who has spoken publicly about seeing the so-called “Tic Tac object” during a flight off the coast of San Diego in 2004. The mysterious object appeared to have no wings, markings or exhaust plumes; naval radar detected that it could turn on a dime, and descended 80,000ft in less than a second. And still others, such as Puthoff and the astrophysicist Eric Davis, confidently assert the reality of extraterrestrial interference on earth, with many alleged sightings around US nuclear facilities – though, again, without documentation.
Elizondo and Stratton also briefly address a 2019 report by the Intercept questioning Elizondo’s expertise, finding “no discernible evidence that Luis Elizondo ever worked for a government UFO program, much less led one”. The two dismiss the report as a government attempt to discredit Elizondo through disinformation. The former CIA officer Jim Semivan, a 25-year veteran of the senior intelligence service, called the larger alleged government suppression tactics and siloing of information a “tradition of disbelief”.
Provocative and controversial as the claims are, the film-makers left the question of next steps to the audience, with an explicit call to demand more information from lawmakers they say are also kept in the dark. “Push your representatives, push the executive branch, push the president to make this come to light, make the transparency happen, so the world can understand what we’ve been dealing with is real,” said Stratton. “We are not alone.”
The Age of Disclosure is screening at the SXSW film festival and will be released later this year
