A new documentary argues that aliens are real. I'm convinced. | Opinion
"Six minutes into the screening of the UFO documentary, the audience reacted audibly.
“I have seen, with my own eyes, non-human crafts and non-human beings,” Jay Stratton, the former director of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, had just said on the screen.
A collective gasp — the kind that follows a shocking plot twist in a horror flick — rang through Austin’s Paramount Theater. Evidently, the attendees at this South by Southwest premiere of “The Age of Disclosure” were not UFO true believer wackos. True believers would not have been moved by this stunning revelation because, well, duh.
But then, director Dan Farah didn’t make this documentary just for the true believers. He approached the subject with journalistic rigor, interviewing 34 senior members of the U.S. government — people in the military, intelligence and science.
All those people testified about their direct knowledge that intelligent life exists outside of our planet.
Many in the Austin audience, it seemed, were shocked, perhaps even persuaded that our federal government could harbor earth-shattering secrets about non-human intelligence.
I wasn’t one of the people who gasped. I’m not certain that there’s life on other planets, but I’ve had a healthy fascination with the possibility ever since Elliott and E.T. levitated through the sky on a bicycle. And I’ve been frustrated by the lack of serious attention that the question has received.
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
In the theater, I wished some of my colleagues were watching with me. My mind wandered back to an editorial board meeting in the summer of 2023. I could practically hear my editors’ eyes rolling. Is Nick really pitching an editorial on aliens?
Yes. Yes, I was.
I had just watched a News Nation interview with David Grusch, a decorated former U.S. intelligence officer with high-level security clearance. He said he had firsthand knowledge that the government has, for decades, withheld information about UAPs — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, for the uninitiated. For me, the interview was catnip.
My pitch for Houston Chronicle editorial was simple: Here was a credible federal whistleblower making mind-blowing claims. Why not call on Congress, astrophysicists and other scientists to interrogate his claims? Who better than the paper of record for “Space City” to weigh in on the possibility of a massive government cover-up of non-human space crafts, technology and perhaps even alien bodies?
I reminded the editors that in 2019, the New York Times had put UAP sightings by Navy pilots on the front page. And that Serious People at NASA are actively exploring and researching the potential for intelligent life in our solar system and beyond.
Still, I assumed that the editors wouldn’t go for it. Journalists, like academics and even many scientists, are often unwilling to investigate the possibility that we’re not alone in the universe. The stigma of being seen as flaky or weird is, evidently, too powerful to interrogate the possibility that credible whistleblowers like Grusch might be onto something.
Perhaps to my detriment as a Serious Journalist, I have no such shame or trepidation. And perhaps against my editors’ better judgment — or just to get me to shut up about aliens — they greenlit my pitch. The editorial was published. And, yes, I still have a job. Why do you ask?
‘Humanity’s greatest secret’
The documentary blew me away. I think it has the potential to do for UAPs what Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change — to reframe an issue dismissed as niche science into a national security issue worth intense scrutiny and public debate.
“I just felt this was, hands down, the biggest story in the history of humanity, and I wanted to be a part of telling it,” Farah told me in an interview the day after the premiere.
A story this big is only as strong as its protagonists. Farah features two central characters: Stratton and Luis “Lue” Elizondo, a former Department of Defense official and a member of the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. How much of “Age of Disclosure” you’re willing to believe depends mostly on how credible you find them. But it’s clear both have put their reputations and decorated careers in military intelligence on the line in order to reveal, in Elizondo’s words, “humanity’s greatest secret.”
Their revelations are as dizzying as the spacecrafts the government has allegedly tracked. Many of those crafts, Stratton and Elizondo claim, have been surveilling sensitive military and nuclear facilities. Most of the spacecrafts have eluded captivity, they say, but the few that have crashed and been recovered contain technology so powerful that it has triggered an arms race with Russia and China to see who can reverse-engineer it the fastest. This technology is kept under wraps, they claim, by a Deep State “Legacy Program” controlled by the Pentagon and C.I.A. — a sub-agency so secretive that even presidents aren’t fully briefed on its findings.
“The first country that cracks this technology will be the leader for years to come,” Stratton says in the film. “This is similar to the Manhattan Project: We developed the atomic weapon, we won the war, and it made us a superpower for almost a century now. This is the atomic weapon on steroids.”
I get it. This sounds nuts. But the strength of "The Age of Disclosure" is that it overwhelms the viewer with corroborating testimonials.
Don’t believe Stratton and Elizondo? What about Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirming repeated instances of “something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours”?
Not convinced? Here are several Navy pilots who spotted spacecrafts allegedly traveling at speeds up to ten times faster than the fastest military airplane.
Still not buying it? Here’s Stanford University pathologist Garry Nolan describing the internal and cerebral scarring he’s observed in medical scans of military and intelligence personnel who have had “direct interactions” with UAP. And for good measure, here’s a Naval and Air Force intelligence officer who still experiences biological side effects from his encounter with a UAP.
“You have an anecdote that is accompanied by medical data, that's something that I can hand to another scientist, another doctor, and say, ‘Here it is. You explain it,’” Nolan says in the film. “We can argue about what the conclusion is, but we can’t argue that the data isn’t real.”
But I do worry that critics will point to the lack of a “smoking gun” — say, a new image or video of a spacecraft or an extraterrestrial being — that would capture people’s imagination. Even the insiders in the film caution that they can’t reveal everything they know. Stratton says the most explosive evidence is still classified. He and Elizondo believe revealing just enough declassified information will force the media to pay attention.
To me, these flaws only heighten the need for more disclosure. Farah told me that the Trump administration is “very excited” about the documentary and wants to “facilitate disclosing more about this topic to the public.”
For now, I hope the film gets a wide release. Go see it. Absorb the information. Probe the credentials and qualifications of the interview subjects. Mine military, intelligence and science sources to interrogate these claims. If, after thorough investigation, you still don’t believe this will be the paradigm shift in our understanding of the broader universe, so be it.
Just don’t laugh it off. The truth is out there."
To read Nick Powell's Q&A with director Dan Farah, go to HoustonChronicle.com.
March 17, 2025
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion...221720.php
Mar 17, 2025 08:32 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 17, 2025 10:09 PM by Magical Realist.)
