secretly made documentary insists that aliens exist

Director Dan Farah grew up with aliens. As a child of the 80s and 90s, popular culture was full of extraterrestrial sightings. “How can you be a kid who watches movies like ET and Close Encounters, TV shows like The X Files, and doesn’t end up wondering if we’re alone in the universe?” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “And whether the U.S. government is actually keeping secrets from the public.”

Relating to: ’80 years of lies and deception’: Is this movie proof of alien life on Earth?

Farah’s encounter with otherworldly beings in fiction sparked an interest that has now evolved into a professional pursuit and became the subject of her first documentary, The Age of Disclose. Here, Farah argues that the United States has been withholding a type of information regarding UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) – short for stigmatized UFO rebranding – for decades.

It would be easy to assume that this is a matter of tinfoil hats and Reddit forums, and in some ways the documentary’s fake narrator, Luis Elizondo, might at first seem like some kind of conspiracy theorist. Holding a blackboard and a piece of chalk, he tries to sell the audience, spouting off lots of overwhelming military and intelligence jargon like “hypsonic velocity” and “transmedia travel” with undeniable passion.

But there’s a reason Farah turned to Elizondo (who also serves as an executive producer on the film). He has real credentials. Elizondo, a former Pentagon official who helped lead the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), left his post in 2017, claiming the department was withholding vital information from the public. He also claims that the Ministry of Defense launched a “strong disinformation campaign” to discredit his work.

Farah, who has served as a producer on several films including Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, noted that he “only interviews people who work within the US government and have direct knowledge” of these programs. While filming Age of Disclosure, getting more former officials and experts on board helped persuade others to participate as well.

But Farah steered a rough ship during the three years it took to make the film. “Everyone’s names would be kept silent until it was done,” he said, noting that he only told documentary subjects about who had agreed to take part in order to make them comfortable. “We were going to make the movie in secrecy, so that information about who was in the movie wouldn’t come out until we were done with this movie, and these people I was approaching would be safe in numbers.”

Farah also chose to produce the film independently, independent of a studio or broadcaster. “None of them want to be in a big commercial documentary,” Farah explained. “They’re afraid of it becoming sensational. They’re afraid of intersecting with someone who’s not on their level, who will weaken them.”

His first major commitment came from Jay Stratton, one of the defense officials who started AATIP. He had a storied career investigating UAP and nonhuman intelligence life on behalf of the government and was responsible for briefing senior lawmakers in Congress and the White House. “I saw non-human vehicles and non-human beings with my own eyes,” Stratton states bluntly at the beginning of the film.

Stratton agreeing to “break his silence” had enormous “ripple effects” on the rest of the film, persuading others to come forward. Things escalated further when current secretary of state Marco Rubio agreed to attend. “The next thing you know, General Jim Clapper was joining in,” Farah said of the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, who sat down for the interview.

To be sure, the wealth of contributions from 34 members of Congress across the political spectrum and people with wealth of national security experience (many of whom would balk at the prospect of a cable news release, let alone an independent documentary) certainly lends a veneer of credibility. At first glance, you are greeted with propulsive string music and a super-cut of former military and intelligence officers ensconced in the seats. They all offer brief summaries of their backgrounds, explaining that we are not alone and why the American people need to know more about this.

“This [UAP] The technology does things we can’t do, and if we can’t figure out what it is, what it wants, or what it’s used for,” says the National Security Council’s former director of aviation security. AATIP’s former chief scientist claims that those tasked with ensuring information about UAPs doesn’t leak will “use any tool they can find to convince people that they shouldn’t come forward.” Meanwhile, a former defense official said, if we can understand the technology we’re observing, it opens the door to “many potential beneficial effects, including clean energy.”

In many respects, Rubio offers one of the more convincing arguments. Much of the research and intelligence on UAPs has been on a need-to-know basis, he says, and incoming administrations have been left out of the loop on the details. “But this is starting to get out of control,” he notes, leading to a lack of transparency that could give U.S. rivals an advantage in analyzing UAP technology. That theory sounds even more convincing coming from the well-known foreign policy hawk who spent time leading a bipartisan effort in the Senate to learn more about UAPs.

As Farah sees it, the geopolitical arms race to reverse engineer UAP technology is one of the biggest reasons behind the alleged cover-up. “You can’t tell your friends without telling your enemies,” Farah says in our interview, while reading one of Stratton’s lines in the documentary. He traces a line from the debunked 1947 Roswell “alien rescue” incident (often considered the birth of the modern UAP conspiracies) to what he sees as an ongoing effort to withhold information for fear that enemies will know how much the United States knows about extraterrestrial life.

“Put yourself in the shoes of the US government and military officials in the ’40s,” Farah said, explaining that the Truman administration, fresh off its victory in the Second World War, could not tell the American people “we are in another conflict from which we cannot protect anyone because we know nothing about it.”

He says the race intensified when the United States learned that other countries, such as Russia, had seized and taken back UAP technology. “We are now at a point where those who govern our country are not aware of the facts,” he added. “These people need to be aware of important information like this that is of great importance to us. And at a fundamental level, the public deserves to know the truth about basic facts, such as that we are not alone in the universe.”

It’s clear that there’s little room for pushback or skepticism in the Age of Exposure, especially since there’s not a single detractor to thwart the film’s multitude of determined interviewers. Farah, on the other hand, does not see the need for these voices to overshadow the flow of the documentary. “I think when people watch this movie, they will realize that the stigma around this issue is completely irrational, pointless, and not good for humanity,” he said. “We need the scientific community, not just in the United States but in every nation, to accept the fact that this is a real situation, that this is a valid area of ​​research, and that they need to use their brainpower to learn about it and answer the many big questions that remain.”

Testimony is ultimately what the film is based on, and the only “evidence” it can really offer. For Farah, this is more interesting. He believes the “strongest evidence” is “credible people who have risked their name and reputation at great risk to tell you what they know.” As for the videos and photos, the director says he will do little to silence claims that they are all a hoax. “You can put a picture or video of the most extraordinary thing on the cover of a major news broadcast or big factories on television, and half the human population will tell you they think it’s artificial intelligence or visual effects,” he said.

As more people like Elizondo and Stratton speak out about their experiences, Farah hopes it will encourage more people who have been silenced in the past to come forward with the truth. “For far too long, the public has been lied to, kept in the dark, and completely misled by a massively funded and very sophisticated disinformation campaign,” Farah said.

“I think it’s only a matter of time before a sitting U.S. president takes the podium and tells the world that we are not the only intelligent creatures in the universe, and that the U.S. government plans to lead this new era by ending the age of secrecy and ushering in the era of transparency.”

• The Age of Explanation is out now in the US and the UK’s history is to be revealed