The highly anticipated UFO documentary The Age of Disclosure has its world premiere at South by Southwest Film Festival on Sunday and filmmaker Dan Farah is finally ready to talk about his years-long secretive effort to make the most credible nonfiction movie ever about the buzzy topic.
What makes Disclosure stand out among the thousands of previous UFO film and TV documentary efforts over the last several decades is that Farah only included on-record interviews with current and former senior members of the U.S. government, military and intelligence community with direct knowledge of unidentified aerial phenomena (or UAPs). The result is a riveting look at a subject that’s being taken far more seriously in recent years as high-level officials make statements, release videos, hold hearings, and take legislative action (like 2023’s bipartisan UAP Disclosure Act) which all lead to one conclusion: Something is going on.
In The Age of Disclosure, that something is boldly defined at the start of the film by several of its 34 interview subjects: That “non-human entities” are real, that they’ve been visiting our planet for a long time, that the United States entered into an arms race with foreign adversaries to reverse engineer technology from crashed aircraft, and that if certain factions of our government continue to keep this information secret and sequestered, that the United States could face another 9/11 — or much worse.
From there, Disclosure spins a deft narrative that breaks down the history of UFOs while attempting to answer several burning questions (such as how do the crafts work, why have they crashed, who is covering this up, and what do U.S. presidents know). The film will doubtlessly convert many skeptics, while also generating some skepticism of its own.