‘The Age of Disclosure’ Review: Dan Farah’s Polished Doc Legitimizes Unverifiable Theories About UFOs

In documentaries, “accuracy” is informational — the presentation of data or testimony in a way that’s persuasive and unimpeachable.

“Legitimacy,” however, is aesthetic — the presentation of data or testimony in a way that looks truthful.

Dan Farah‘s new documentary The Age of Disclosure is big on “legitimacy.”

Almost nothing in The Age of Disclosure is “new,” per se. The documentary uses 34 talking heads from various levels of the government, military and intelligence community to allege a deep state conspiracy covering up interactions with non-human intelligent life and technology of non-human origin going back 80 years. Many of the people in the documentary have testified before Congress about what they say they know, and more than a couple of them have been in previous documentaries and docuseries recounting their stories with the same level of personal conviction.

What’s likely to set The Age of Disclosure apart, at least for some viewers, isn’t that it’s more accurate than your average Unsolved Mysteries or Ancient Aliens-style quickie, but that it looks more legitimate.

Over 109 minutes — and it feels much longer — The Age of Disclosure tackles its topic with utmost certainty and sincerity, its interview subjects treating everything they say like it’s established fact, not requiring corroboration or confirmation.

It took nearly an hour into the documentary before Farah’s debating tactic began to get on my nerves, before it became clear that the approach is a rhetorical dead end.

Of course, that’s just what somebody in on the deep state conspiracy would say about a documentary that blew the lid off of the deep state conspiracy, so you can feel free to ignore me. TV critics, after all, have a deep investment in only believing that the truth is out there when it’s being delivered by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and the proceeds are benefiting wealthy oligarchs.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news in recent years, you’ve perhaps noticed the growing willingness from people at some level of power to discuss the existence of what we used to call UFOs, but now call Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), presumably because the term “UFO” was accompanied by decades of stigmatizing and science-fiction coating.

With Lue Elizondo, member of the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and Jay Stratton, director of the Government’s UAP Task Force, among the primary guiding forces, the doc leads us through the existence of UAPs; the recent efforts to legitimize investigations into those UAPs; the powerful figures who have become the public face of those investigations; and the even more powerful figures working behind the scenes to delegitimize those investigations in order to keep people from ever learning the truth.

The title refers to the point at which some figure of authority will finally come forward and tell the American people what we deserve to know. It’s fully assumed that if disclosure were to occur, it would emanate from the United States.

The assembled talking heads include several military figures who previously testified to Congress about their experiences with UAPs, several scientists who have worked with the UAP Task Force, and a whole bunch of politicians who have to be very, very careful about how credulous they appear. Those include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Mike Rounds and a whole bunch of congresspeople.

Regardless of your ideological stripe, you’re supposed to find it legitimizing for each of the fringier figures in the documentary to be proximate to a sitting secretary of state, a former director of national intelligence (General Jim Clapper), or a sitting representative who has recently reopened the investigation into the Kennedy assassination (Anna Paulina Luna). OK, so maybe “legitimizing” is a little self-selecting, like the news clips corroborating how mainstream some of the documentary’s claims are — clips that lean heavily into News Nation exclusives.

Even the documentary’s heroes seem impressed with how they’re being treated. At one point, one of the science-y guys is amazed to be conducting interviews in the Senate building. Each interview is filmed in the most official or book-filled facility possible, because Farah knows that those backdrops suggest something that filming in a dark basement or in front of a yarn-filled conspiracy wall would not.

Blair Mowat’s score adds sobriety at every turn, even when it’s accompanying generic stock footage — or images of Lue Elizondo wandering through different Beltway landmarks, making it clear that this is a man who, in repose, seeks out the wisdom that can only be found inside the Jefferson Memorial.

My problem with The Age of Disclosure isn’t the lack of opposing voices. It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted. If somebody insists, without evidence, that there’s an underground bunker somewhere with a thousand alien bodies and 50 alien spacecraft, it’s impossible for anybody to refute, because what are they going to say? “No there isn’t.” Or “Well, you just don’t have the clearance to know.” If someone insists, without evidence, that people they can’t name were killed to keep certain things they can’t say secret, what are you going to say?

Any time somebody mentions vague events or details that have long been in the public record, they’re quick to mention how much more they know that they can’t disclose. And what can you say to that? “Nuh-uh”? Any time anybody starts sounding really wild, that’s a good time to mention that the Deep State — or the so-called “Legacy Project” — has been spreading disinformation forever, calling anybody who dares to make claims a crackpot.

It’s one thing for interview subjects to treat the details of Area 51/Roswell as established fact — you’ll never see a better embodiment of the actual definition of “begging the question.” But when the scientists start doing the same for speculation on how UPAs defy various terrestrial physical laws, I went from being intrigued and generally buying what Farah was selling to realizing this is just a basic cable exploitation doc done up with a fancy gloss.

Once wanton speculation was the order of the day, I wish more time could have been spent on the ramifications of the title: What would “disclosure” look like, practically? What would the economic and sociological and geopolitical ripples look like? What’s a feasible timetable for disclosure and its impact?

But no, The Age of Disclosure is more interested in nebulous phraseology like “the greatest paradigm shift in human history.” Some viewers will happily celebrate the fantasy, when it looks this legitimate.