Director Dan Farah grew up with aliens. As a child of the 80s and 90s, pop culture was awash with extra-terrestrial sightings. \u201cHow can you be a kid watching movies like ET and Close Encounters, TV shows like The X Files, and not end up curious about whether or not we\u2019re alone in the universe?\u201d he said in an interview with the Guardian. \u201cAnd whether or not the US government does, in fact, hold secrets from the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farah\u2019s exposure to otherworldly beings in fiction kickstarted an interest that\u2019s now morphed into a professional quest, and the subject of his documentary debut The Age of Disclosure. Here, Farah makes the case that the United States has been hiding, for decades, a font of information related to UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) \u2013 the acronym rebrand of the stigma-ridden UFO.<\/p>\n
It would be easy to assume this is the stuff of tin-foil hats and Reddit forums, and in some ways the documentary\u2019s pseudo-narrator, Luis Elizondo, could come across as a type of conspiracy theorist at first glance. He\u2019s armed with a blackboard and piece of chalk, working to sell the viewer, running through a lot of overwhelming military and intelligence jargon, like \u201chypersonic velocity\u201d and \u201ctrans medium travel\u201d with undeniable passion.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a reason why Farah gravitated towards Elizondo (who also serves as an executive producer on the film). He\u2019s got genuine credentials. A former Pentagon official, who helped lead the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), Elizondo eventually left his role in 2017, claiming the department was hiding vital information from the public. He also claims there was a \u201cpowerful disinformation campaign\u201d from the Department of Defense to discredit his work.<\/p>\n
Making a point to \u201conly interview people who have direct knowledge\u201d of these programs from working within the US government was a north star for Farah \u2013 who has served as a producer on several films, including Steven Spielberg\u2019s Ready Player One. While filming The Age of Disclosure, as more former officials and experts got on board, it helped to convince others to take part.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But Farah ran a tight ship over the three years it took to make the film. \u201cEveryone\u2019s names would be kept silent until it was done,\u201d he said, noting that he only told documentary subjects about who had agreed to take part in order to make them comfortable. \u201cWe would make the movie in secrecy, so this information of who\u2019s in it would not get out there until we were done with this film, and these people I was approaching would have safety in numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farah also opted to make the film independently, unattached from a studio or streamer. \u201cNone of them would ever want to participate in a big commercial documentary,\u201d Farah explained. \u201cThey would be afraid of it being sensationalized. They would be afraid of being intercut with someone who was not on their level, who would undermine them.\u201d<\/p>\n
His first big commitment came from Jay Stratton, one of the defense officials who started AATIP. He had an established career investigating UAP and non-human intelligence life on behalf of the government, and was responsible for briefing senior lawmakers in Congress and the White House. \u201cI have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings,\u201d Stratton says plainly at the beginning of the film.<\/p>\n
After Stratton agreed to \u201cbreak his silence\u201d it had tremendous \u201cripple effects\u201d on the rest of the film, and convinced others to come forward. When the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, agreed to take part, that escalated things. \u201cThen next thing you know, general Jim Clapper was participating,\u201d Farah said of the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, who sat for an interview.<\/p>\n
The sheer wealth of contributions, 34 to be exact, from members of Congress across the political spectrum, as well as people with rich national security experience \u2013 many of whom might balk at the prospect of a cable news hit let-alone an independent documentary \u2013 certainly lends a veneer of credibility. Off the bat you\u2019re confronted with a propulsive string score, and a supercut of former military and intelligence officials ensconced in armchairs. They all offer brief summaries of their CVs, spell out that we are not alone, and why the American public ought to know more about it.<\/p>\n
Dan Farah. Photograph: Dia Dipasupil\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cThis [UAP] technology does stuff that we can\u2019t do, and if we can\u2019t figure out what it is or what it wants, or what it\u2019s being used for,\u201d says a former director of aviation security at the National Security Council. The former chief scientist for AATIP claims that those who are tasked with ensuring information about UAPs doesn\u2019t leak \u201cwill use whatever tool they can find to try to convince people they shouldn\u2019t come forward\u201d. Meanwhile a former defense official notes that if we\u2019re able to understand the technology that we\u2019re observing, it opens the door to so many \u201cpotentially beneficial impacts, including clean energy\u201d.<\/p>\n
In many ways, Rubio offers one of the more convincing arguments. He says that much of the research and intelligence about UAPs is on a need-to-know basis, with incoming administrations being left out of the loop on the details. \u201cBut that begins to ramp out of control,\u201d he notes, leading to a lack of transparency that might give US adversaries a head start by analyzing UAP technology. It\u2019s a theory that sounds all the more convincing coming from the noted foreign policy hawk, who spent time in the senate spearheading a bipartisan effort to understand more about UAPs.<\/p>\n
The geopolitical arms race to reverse engineer UAP technology is, what Farah came to see, one of the biggest reasons behind the alleged cover-up. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell your friends without telling your enemies,\u201d Farah says in our interview, reciting one of Stratton\u2019s lines in the documentary. He traces a line from the debunked 1947 Roswell \u201calien crash retrieval\u201d (generally considered the genesis of modern UAP conspiracies) to what he sees as the ongoing effort to withhold information \u2013 for fear of enemies getting wind of how much the US knows about extraterrestrial life.<\/p>\n
\u201cPut yourself in the shoes of US government and military officials in the 40s,\u201d Farah said, explaining that, fresh off a second world war victory, the Truman administration couldn\u2019t tell the American people that \u201cwe\u2019re in another conflict that we can\u2019t protect anyone from, because we don\u2019t even know anything about it\u201d.<\/p>\n
He says this race escalated when the US found out that other countries, like Russia, were capturing and retrieving UAP technology. \u201cHere we are now where the people who run our country are not aware of the facts,\u201d he added. \u201cThose people are supposed to be aware of significant information like this that has high stakes for us. And at a base level, the public deserves to know the truth about fundamental facts, like we\u2019re not alone in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In The Age of Disclosure, it\u2019s clear that there is little room for pushback or skepticism, particularly since there\u2019s not a single detractor in the film to serve as a foil to the plethora of resolute interviewees. And Farah, for his part, doesn\u2019t see the need for those voices to cloud the documentary\u2019s throughline. \u201cI think when people watch this movie, one of the realizations will be that the stigma around this topic is completely illogical and makes no sense and is not good for humanity,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need the scientific community, not only in the United States, but in every nation, accepting the fact that this is a real situation, this is a valid area of inquiry, and that they should put their brain power towards learning about this and answering a lot of the big questions that remain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Testimony is ultimately what film hinges on, and it\u2019s really the only \u201cproof\u201d it can offer. This, for Farah, is more compelling. He believes that \u201cthe strongest evidence\u201d is \u201ccredible people putting their name and reputation on the line to tell you what they know at great risk\u201d. When it comes to video and photos, the director notes that it would do little to quieten claims that it\u2019s all a hoax. \u201cYou could put a picture or a video of the most extraordinary thing on the cover of a major news publication or on major plants on TV, and half the human population would tell you they think it\u2019s AI or they think it\u2019s visual effects,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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 attempt to reveal the truth. \u201cFor way too long, the public has been lied to, kept in the dark, completely misled by a heavily financed and very sophisticated disinformation campaign,\u201d Farah said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is only a matter of time before a sitting US president steps to the podium, and tells the world that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe, and that the United States government intends to lead in this new chapter by ending the era of secrecy and beginning the era of transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Director Dan Farah grew up with aliens. As a child of the 80s and 90s, pop culture was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-301207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}