Review: Have Aliens Visited Earth? This Documentary Says Yes.

The Age of Disclosure, a documentary by Dan Farah, promises to prove that the U.S. government is hiding evidence of alien visits to Earth. Farah gets an impressive 34 government officials and advisers on the record about the alleged cover-up—even Secretary of State Marco Rubio winks at the conspiracy theory, without outright endorsing it—but the film is frustratingly thin on specifics.

Many of the officials claim they cannot share more evidence for or details about the claimed alien encounters because they remain classified. The film’s most explosive allegation, that an alien species actually made contact with the government, is mentioned once and never revisited.

But while the film isn’t convincing, it does make for an unintended metacommentary on national security politics.

The original UFO craze was a product of the Cold War, with its secrecy, high-tech competition, and nuclear-powered paranoia. The Age of Disclosure is clearly a product of the war on terror and the mass surveillance age. The whistleblowers speak in overwrought intelligence jargon, as photos of their early careers fighting in the Middle East float across the screen. They complain that the national security state is being prevented from dealing with threats. “There’s this hidden hand that is blocking all of these actions,” former intelligence officer Jay Stratton claims. “A subversive government overriding the real government.”

The eagerness of so many government insiders and national security hawks to talk about UFOs is itself somewhat suspicious. Early in the film, former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.) posits that UFO sightings could be part of “a robust counterintelligence program to cover up for a U.S. government effort that has fallen away from congressional oversight.” That is an interesting line of inquiry, and Farah fails to follow up on it.