Filmmaker Dan Farah discusses his UFO/UAP documentary ‘The Age of Disclosure,’ which premieres at SXSW this weekend: “None of the government leadership I spoke to are debating whether this is real.”
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 The Age of Disclosure stand out among the thousands of previous UFO film and TV documentary efforts over the past 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 anomalous 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 intelligent life” exists, 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 an intelligence failure like the one that led to 9/11 — or much worse.
From there, Disclosure spins a deft narrative that details an alleged 80-year cover-up 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.
“I hope I made a film that makes the public aware of a very serious situation that impacts us all,” Farah says. “I had multiple senators tell me that they thought my documentary would be one of the most effective tools for helping make the public aware of the truth in a way that could get the rest of the government to take this topic more seriously.”
Farah also hopes for more traditional metrics of filmmaking success, with his team currently on the hunt for a distributor. The movie’s trailer (below) hit 18 million viewers across all platforms, half of which were international. “There’s a universal audience that has been invested in the topic and it’s been growing since the 1940s,” says Farah, who points out that the UFO forum on Reddit has even more subscribers than the ones for Harry Potter and Marvel.
Below, Farah took our questions. The director is passionate about this subject and also exceedingly careful in selecting his words, which is understandable. Having your debut film premiere at a major film festival is cause for anxiety enough. To also have it also be a project that claims to answer one of mankind’s biggest existential questions while tackling sensitive national security issues is quite another. As a first-time director, Farah has jumped straight into the deep end of the pool — which might also contain aliens.
How were you able to convince so many of credentialed voices to go on camera to talk about this for your first film?
I was researching this topic a few years ago and I met several very senior former intelligence officials through a friend of mine, who I will keep as an anonymous source. It started with [former Department of Defense official] Luis Elizondo and [former director of the U.S. government’s UAP task force] Jay Stratton, who were really key in opening doors for me. I told them I wanted to make the most serious and credible and sober documentary ever made about this topic. My goal was to only interview people who had direct knowledge of the UAP topic as a result of their work for the U.S. government and who would share what they can legally disclose. One by one, I would get introduced to another high-level person who had worked on this topic, and each would end up introducing me to someone else. I went down a rabbit hole, and what followed was the most revelatory and interesting experience of my life.
What kind of reactions did you get from officials when you approached them?
There was a consistent positive response to the goals I had — from intelligence officials to senators to military officials. Everyone felt it was important to bring this information to the public in a credible and serious fashion. They said they had never been presented with an opportunity like this. There was also strength in numbers. By participating in a documentary that interviewed so many credible people, it gave them all cover, essentially, so they didn’t have to go out on a limb by themselves to share this information.
Your film actually reminded me a bit of another documentary — Al Gore’s climate change film An Inconvenient Truth.
There’s some overlap [in that global warming was also] a topic that was considered pseudoscience and fringe, and there was a stigma around scientists talking about it. Then An Inconvenient Truth had credible people bringing attention to a very real and serious situation that has global stakes. It’s the same thing here, but arguably with higher states, frankly, because there are potential existential threats on multiple fronts — there’s what humans could do with this technology if it’s used for bad, and what the intentions are of non-human intelligence.
Were you nervous about making this? Did you take any secretive steps when filming?
There are people who want the topic to continue to be kept from the public entirely. So I went to great lengths film to make this documentary in secret over the last two-and-a-half years. I kept it very under the radar, and everyone working on it was under NDAs.
And not everyone I talked to ended up being in the film. There were a number of government and intelligence officials who ultimately decided it wasn’t in their best interest to participate. Certain officials were afraid of the historical stigma around the topic and how it might impact their reputation. Several officials ultimately decided they would be in danger if they participated in this documentary, even sharing what they legally could, and that’s not a position I would ever want anyone to be in. Also, at no point did I ever ask anyone to share classified information. I would never do that. But what is interesting is that there was a huge amount of fascinating information that could be lawfully disclosed that historically people were just discouraged from talking about.
Were any of your sources threatened for their participation?
Yes. Some of them were told very clearly there will be consequences for them — that that they would be in danger — if they participated in not only my documentary, but any documentary. But while my interview subjects want to see the truth be brought to the public, they also 100 percent agreed that there are a lot of elements on this topic that should remain classified and should never be made public because it’s in the best interest of national security. Now that I’ve learned about the landscape, I agree with that. But there are these fundamental facts — like that we’re not alone in the universe — that everyone feels like the public has the right to know, and it’s also in our best interest to make known so that there’s no longer this antiquated, unjust stigma that is making our country fall behind in how seriously this topic is taken.
The hypothetical counterargument that I can think of is, once you let the cat out of the bag, the questions and media interest will be insatiable and won’t stop, and everybody will just keep digging until they strike something they definitely don’t want out there.
Luis Elizondo says a really interesting line in the documentary about how it’s ironic that the people who created the stigma to cover this up — labeling anybody who talked about it wacky and nuts — unintentionally ended up creating a new national security threat — which is the stigma itself. Because the stigma is not as strong in other countries, and we’re competing with those countries. So how can we, as a nation — our scientific community, our academia community — how can our communities contribute toward the United States succeeding on this front when 90 percent of them don’t even think it’s real?
There’s a scene in the documentary that I find especially impactful, where [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio talks about how a lack of imagination has historically led to all of the greatest intelligence failures and disasters — from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 — and that he doesn’t want that to happen again. He says in the film, “We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours. And we don’t know whose it is. That alone deserves inquiry, deserves attention, deserves focus.”
Prior to 9/11, we didn’t put enough money toward counter-terrorism, and our intelligence agencies didn’t share enough information. Everyone looked back and said, “We could have done this better.” My interview subjects point out that we’re now in a situation where that stigma around UAPs is creating hurdles for us to appropriately address this issue with a whole-government approach. There’s not the appropriate amount of funding going toward it and there’s not the appropriate amount of oversight.
Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pressured Trump last month to release UFO files after the president pledged to release the JFK files. I’ve never gotten the impression that Trump seems all that excited to do that, he kind of dances around the subject. Which is interesting because that’s how all the living past presidents seem to react when asked about this subject. Like they don’t outright deny there’s something there, but they keep their reaction light, and bounce it away.
Well, Schumer has very aggressively fought for disclosure on the UAP topic. Most people don’t know that for the last two years in a row, Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds co-sponsored the UAP Disclosure Act, which then-Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also endorsed. The act had very specific language to try to use the law to bring about disclosure. Schumer literally included a quote saying, “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.” This is very specific language. When you read that, any average person would say to themselves, “Oh my God, is this real?” Yes, it is real.
Something else that I found really eye-opening is how truly bipartisan this topic is at a time where Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on anything. The leadership of both parties are completely aligned on how serious this is. None of the government leadership I spoke to — who have access to very sensitive classified information — were debating whether this is real. None of them. I had multiple senators tell me that they thought my documentary would be one of the most effective tools for helping make the public aware of the truth in a way that could help them get the government to take the topic more seriously.