The Age of Disclosure, directed by Dan Farah, producer of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the fantasy series The Shannara Chronicles, is one of those documentaries that will likely be judged in hindsight – aging as either a fine wine or cheese depending on whether it’s a forerunner or footnote. If the world trundles on with no true momentum regarding whether we’re truly alone in this corner of the universe, then it’ll be just another disposable doc, albeit one with a higher budget, doomed for repeats on cable television. However, should revelations about UFOS, UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) or legacy cover-ups be legitimately revealed in the next decade or so – and one can no longer truly discount the possibility – then the production could look to be a significant milestone in getting prominent people to go on the record.
But that’s a big IF.
Then again, say what you want about their politics, but it’s no mean achievement to get the likes of Marco Rubio, James Crapper (Self – Director of National Intelligence (Fmr.), U.S. Air Force (Ret.)), physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff, former UAP Task Force boss Jay Stratton – all anchored to some degree by ex-Pentagon officer Lue Elizondo, to look straight down the lens and go on the record about the fact that there is a significant number of incidents regarding aerial phenomena that cannot be explained by the accepted level of current technology and that has actually been the case for decades. Where once there was a level of silence, deniability, ridicule and Hollywood hokum about any talk of alien visitors, it’s now no longer the third-rail of societal politics, no longer the purview of outliers and dubious accounts of lights in the sky and livestock-probing that it once was. Yes, much remains somewhere between wild speculation and ‘classified’ material, but there’s now the admission that there’s something to be classified. Baby-steps etc…
Your enjoyment will largely be how much you take what is presented as fact. In some ways there’s little new here – the talking heads are different, but it’s still easy to point at the ‘I know this to be true, but it’s so classified I can’t talk much about it‘ aspect that will hobble even the best of intentions. There’s familiar footage (including the infamous ‘tic-tac’ shape that eluded fighter planes and acknowledgement that several bases scrambled jets in vain pursuit. Certainly, the frustration that some of the participants have – some with genuine government and relevant investigative oversight credentials – is palpable, years of being side-lined, careers road-blocked and dismissed as bothersome bureaucrats or kooks, only for several key factors to be later admitted as true. When the faces are one you recognise as talking elsewhere about everyday military issues, you can’t simply wave all of them off, even if pointing to the lack of specifics. And it’s hard to be presented with footage of objects doing almost impossible things, be told they’re weather balloons and atmospheric distortions and then have it be noted that other people are treating it as a highest national defense priority.
The final third of the documentary leans far more overtly into speculation than the cold hard facts of admittedly-peculiar footage. Experts look at what would theoretically be needed for any craft to perform the physics-defying movements seen by witnesses (anti-gravity, high speed and instant direction changes that would seem impossible for even cutting-edge conventional military aircraft). We’ve become used to ‘experts’ talking with the furrowed foreheads about aspects of the most surreal supernatural elements as if they were foregone facts and so every time I heard ‘quantum bubbles’ and ‘time-travel’ offered up here with the same solemnity, there’s temptation to think we’ve gone too far down an avenue with few real sign-posts but lots of detours. (“I’m not saying aliens, but aliens!!!” memes come to mind). Then again, the people interviewed here are not the stereotypical UFO-chasers of old, they are scientists and officials who have some formal insights. It’s hard not to conclude they were right about the obfuscation, if not what us/was behind closed doors and fences.
The Age of Disclosure is glossy and high-budget, but as with those cable-shows of old, it does tend to selectively pick its facts and presents its commentators as bespoke observers pledged to transparency… yet there’s also notable sins of omission when it comes to exorcising some of the claims they’ve made in the past that don’t quite fit the doc’s more linear and embracing narrative. It doesn’t necessarily move the needle on whether we’re alone in the universe (and there’s a difference between the probability of extra-terrestrial intelligence and the intelligence to avoid visiting us) but it does reveal that the inexplicable isn’t being casually ignored as one might suspect and that even in an age of other priorities, the unexplored skies and the oceans likely hold revelations and truths that we haven’t yet fully encountered… but remain of interest. As basic revelations go it’s fine and dandy to list known unknowns, but it’s hardly amounts to the smoking laser-gun we might have been promised by the trailers. In essence, it’s a documentary that gives a platform to the fact that there is now a valid platform from which to preach, even if the substance of what is going on is still up for debate. Yet, there’s no arguing the doc is a triumph of good marketing. Definitive answers, not so much. Questions, being formally acknowledged, far more so. It’d be more accurate to suggest that the doc asks all the right, if familiar, questions and has people finally acknowledging the validity of asking them – if not admitting to anything substantial that we didn’t think already. Our cast talk of seeing alien beings and know them to exist, yet can’t provide anything conclusive except their word. Less a Book of Revelations, then, more a Brochure of Academic Anecdotes…
‘The truth is out there, but what is the truth?‘ or perhaps the more on-the-nose ‘I still want to believe…‘ remain the updated Fox Mulder mantras of the moment.
The Age of Disclosure is now available on Amazon Prime Video.
- Documentary Result7
