It has been hailed as a game changer in public attitudes towards UFOs, ending a culture of silence around claims once dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists and crackpots.
The Age of Disclosure has been boosted in its effort to shift the conversation about extraterrestrials from the fringe to the mainstream with a Capitol Hill screening and considerable commercial success. It broke the record for highest-grossing documentary on Amazon’s Prime Video within 48 hours of its release, Deadline reported this week.
But not everyone is impressed by the film’s claims that UFOs – now called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) – are real and that governments have been hiding evidence for decades. Several sceptics have gone online to push back at The Age of Disclosure, contending that it has been over-hyped and fails to present new or compelling evidence.
In their telling, the documentary has slick production values but rehashes familiar, decades-old grainy infrared videos and anecdotal pilot testimonies insufficient to support extraordinary claims of alien technology.
Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, says by phone from Santa Barbara, California: “All we have are blurry photographs, grainy videos and anecdotes from people that say they know somebody who knows something, or they know somebody who said they saw the spaceship, touched the aliens or worked on back engineering the spaceships and so on.
“But if you say, who was this person you talked to? ‘Well, I can’t tell you.’ Where was the spaceship? ‘I can’t tell you.’ Do you have any photographs? ‘No, but here’s this grainy video of this blob that was taken from a navy pilot 14 years ago off the coast of San Diego. This is kind of weird. It’s hard to say what it is but it could be aliens.’”
Shermer, who for 30 years taught college and university courses in critical thinking and has written books including Why People Believe Weird Things, adds: “From a scientific point of view, none of this is valuable other than well, there might be something interesting here, let’s go find out. It’s no different from the whole search for Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, that whole thing.”
Directed and produced by Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure asserts an 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and secret recovery and reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology. It features interviews with 34 individuals from US government, military and intelligence backgrounds.
They include secretary of state and national security adviser Marco Rubio, senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. Their presence has been seen as giving the film heft and helping reduce the stigma long felt by alleged UAP witnesses.
In an interview last week on Fox News, Rubio was asked about his claim in the documentary that unknown entities have been operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities. He did not attack the documentary or seek to disown his remarks – but he did seek to add some context.
“First of all, I’m not disavowing that,” Rubio said. “It was an interview that was done almost, like, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the senate. So it wasn’t recent. The second point I would make, I was describing the allegations that people have come forward with … I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of in that regard. A little bit of selective editing, but it’s okay because you’re trying to sell a show there.”
Sceptics argue that UAP sightings are better explained by a combination of misidentification of mundane objects (balloons, satellites, drones), perceptual errors in low-information environments, secret terrestrial technologies and misunderstood optical and sensor phenomena.
Jason Colavito, author of The Cult of Alien Gods: HP Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, comments: “While I can’t possibly give a single explanation for UFOs, or categorically say that no UFO has ever been an alien spaceship, every UFO that has ever been identified has turned out to be a prosaic – either natural or human made – object, and there’s no reason to suspect that any of the objects seen in that movie are anything but that.”
Colavito was left cold by The Age of Disclosure. “I found the film to basically be an Ancient Aliens episode with better lighting,” he says. “It was a rehash of material that has been used many times before. I thought that it was old stuff in a slick new package. A lot of the people that you saw interviewed have already appeared on Ancient Aliens, on NewsNation and on other platforms saying the same thing.
“The only surprising thing was that they actually went into some of the more extreme and ridiculous pseudoscientific claims they make about how we can’t photograph UFOs clearly because they’re in a space time quantum bubble that distorts all the light around them so we can’t see them. That’s obviously an ex post facto explanation. These are things that people who are very smart have fooled themselves into thinking are true in order to justify a belief that they already came into the process holding.”
Colavito notes that the film has had an extensive and expensive publicity campaign including a Hollywood-style premiere. He sees it as part of a sophisticated media campaign aimed at securing government funding for defence contractors and associated thinktanks.
“One of the things that surprised me is how much of the film seemed to be an advertisement for investing in UFO-themed energy research. That’s where you have to look into the question of how many of the talking heads in that documentary have government ties, not just that they formerly worked in the government, but that they are currently profiting from the work that they’re doing promoting UFOs.
“Luis Elizondo [an author and UAP disclosure activist who also serves as an executive producer on the film], for example, works for a defence contracting company, or at least did until recently, and many of the others also have current or former ties to defence contractors and other businesses and entities that make money from government contracts and government investment.”
But for all the headlines and TV attention, Colavito doubts that the buzz will last. “It’s already fading from coverage,” he says. “This was the kind of thing that has a big publicity campaign leading up to it but then, once people begin to see the actual product, interest falls off rapidly because there is nothing new and nothing convincing in the film. There are a lot of stories but very few facts.”
Joshua Semeter, director of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, has only seen the trailer for The Age of Disclosure and was unimpressed. “I guess the word is disappointed to see that their primary evidence is all of these grainy infrared videos.” he says. “There’s a lot of money to be made by keeping things in the spooky category. That’s basically what’s going on here.”
Semeter, who served on a Nasa team studying the origin of UAPs, believes that the film is unlikely to create a lasting cultural shift or mainstream acceptance of its claims. Instead it is the culmination of a recent period of heightened interest in UAPs.
“We went through a UAP bubble over the past eight years and a lot of this evidence that’s being put forth by the aviators is very old evidence from the 2000s. We’re at the tail end. This production was an effort to grab the last little bits as we head out of the current UAP bubble.”
