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.<\/p>\n
The Age of Disclosure<\/a> 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\u2019s Prime Video within 48 hours of its release, Deadline reported this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n But not everyone is impressed by the film\u2019s claims that UFOs \u2013 now called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Michael Shermer,<\/a> the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, says by phone from Santa Barbara, California: \u201cAll 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBut if you say, who was this person you talked to? \u2018Well, I can\u2019t tell you.\u2019 Where was the spaceship? \u2018I can\u2019t tell you.\u2019 Do you have any photographs? \u2018No, but here\u2019s 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\u2019s hard to say what it is but it could be aliens.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Shermer, who for 30 years taught college and university courses in critical thinking and has written books including Why People Believe Weird Things, adds: \u201cFrom a scientific point of view, none of this is valuable other than well, there might be something interesting here, let\u2019s go find out. It\u2019s no different from the whole search for Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, that whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 but he did seek to add some context.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst of all, I\u2019m not disavowing that,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cIt was an interview that was done almost, like, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the senate. So it wasn\u2019t recent. The second point I would make, I was describing the allegations that people have come forward with \u2026 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\u2019s okay because you\u2019re trying to sell a show there.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Jason Colavito<\/a>, author of The Cult of Alien Gods: HP Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, comments: \u201cWhile I can\u2019t 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 \u2013 either natural or human made \u2013 object, and there\u2019s no reason to suspect that any of the objects seen in that movie are anything but that.\u201d<\/p>\n Colavito was left cold by The Age of Disclosure. \u201cI found the film to basically be an Ancient Aliens<\/a> episode with better lighting,\u201d he says. \u201cIt 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only surprising thing was that they actually went into some of the more extreme and ridiculous pseudoscientific claims they make about how we can\u2019t photograph UFOs clearly because they\u2019re in a space time quantum bubble that distorts all the light around them so we can\u2019t see them. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A still from The Age of Disclosure. Photograph: YouTube<\/p>\n \u201cOne 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\u2019s 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\u2019re doing promoting UFOs.<\/p>\n \u201cLuis Elizondo<\/a> [an author and UAP disclosure activist who also serves as an executive producer on the film], for example, works for a defence contracting company<\/a>, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n But for all the headlines and TV attention, Colavito doubts that the buzz will last. \u201cIt\u2019s already fading from coverage,\u201d he says. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n