‘So many stories but so few facts’: Skeptics push back on mysterious UFO documentary | Documentaries

It has been hailed as a game-changer in public attitudes toward UFOs, ending a culture of silence around claims that had previously been dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists and lunatics.

The Age of Disclosure was boosted in its efforts to shift talk about aliens from the fringes to the mainstream with a showing on Capitol Hill and significant commercial success. It broke the record for the highest-grossing documentary on Amazon Prime Video within 48 hours of its release, Deadline reported this week.

But not everyone was impressed by the film’s claims that UFOs – now called UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) – are real and that governments have been hiding the evidence for decades. Many skeptics have taken to the Internet to respond to The Age of Disclosure, saying it has been overhyped and fails to provide new or convincing evidence.

In its telling, the documentary has impressive production values ​​but rehashes familiar decades-old infrared video footage and insufficient anecdotal experimental testimony to support extraordinary claims about alien technology.

“All we have are grainy photos, grainy videotapes, and anecdotes from people saying they know someone who knows something, or they know someone who said they saw a spaceship, or touched aliens, or worked on spaceship engineering and so on,” Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, says by phone from Santa Barbara, California.

“But if I said, ‘Who is this person you talked to?’ ‘Well, I can’t tell you.’ Where was the spaceship? I can’t tell you. Do you have any pictures? ‘No, but here’s this grainy video of the spot taken from a Navy pilot 14 years ago off the coast of San Diego. This is kind of weird. It’s hard to say what it is but it could be aliens.

“From a scientific standpoint, none of this is of any value except that well, there might be something interesting here, let’s go figure it out. It’s no different than the whole hunt for Bigfoot, and Sasquatch, and the Yeti, and this whole thing,” adds Shermer, who for 30 years has taught college and university courses in critical thinking and has written books including Why People Believe in Strange Things.

Directed and produced by Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure explores the 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and the secret recovery and reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology. It includes interviews with 34 people from US government, military and intelligence backgrounds.

They include Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Their presence is seen as giving the film heft and helping reduce the stigma that alleged UAP witnesses have long felt.

In an interview last week with Fox News, Rubio was asked about his claim in the documentary that unidentified entities operate in the airspace above restricted nuclear facilities. He did not attack the documentary or seek to disavow his statements, but he did seek to add some context.

“First of all, I don’t deny it,” Rubio said. “I almost did an interview, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the Senate. So it wasn’t recent. The second point I would make, I was describing the allegations that people were making… I was describing what people had told me, not things that I had direct knowledge of in that regard. A little bit of selective editing, but that’s okay because you’re trying to sell a show there.”

Skeptics argue that UAP sightings are best explained by a combination of misidentification of ordinary objects (balloons, satellites, drones), perceptual errors in low-information environments, secret ground technologies and misunderstood optical and sensor phenomena.

Jason Colavito, author of Worshiping Alien Gods: HP Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, comments: “Although I cannot offer a single explanation for UFOs, or say conclusively that no UFO has ever been an alien spaceship, every UFO ever identified has turned out to be an ordinary object – whether natural or man-made – and there is no reason to doubt that any of the objects seen in this film are anything other than that.“

Colavito has been left out cold by the era of disclosure. “I found the film to be an episode of ancient aliens with better lighting,” he says. “It was a reworking of material that had been used many times before. I thought it was old stuff in a cool new package. A lot of people I’d seen in interviews for Ancient Aliens, on NewsNation and on other platforms actually came out saying the same thing.”

“The only thing that’s surprising is that they’ve actually gone to some of the most extreme and ridiculous pseudoscientific claims they make about us not being able to clearly photograph UFOs because they exist in a quantum bubble in space-time that distorts all the light around them so we can’t see them. This is clearly a retrospective interpretation. These are things that very smart people have been fooled into believing are true in order to justify the belief that they actually went into the process of latching on to them.”

Colavito notes that the film had an extensive and expensive publicity campaign, including a Hollywood-style premiere. He sees this as part of a sophisticated media campaign aimed at securing government funding for defense contractors and their associated research centers.

“One thing that surprised me was how much of the film seemed like an advertisement for investment in UFO-themed energy research. This is where you have to consider the issue of how many of the speakers in this documentary have government connections, not only because they previously worked in government, but who are currently benefiting from the work they do to promote UFOs.”

“Luis Elizondo [an author and UAP disclosure activist who also serves as an executive producer on the film]For example, he works for a defense contractor, or at least did until recently, and many others also have current or past relationships with defense contractors and other companies and entities that make money from government contracts and government investments.

But despite all the headlines and TV attention, Colavito doubts the hype will last. “It’s already fading from coverage,” he says. “This was the kind of thing that had a big publicity campaign leading up to it, but then, once people started seeing the actual product, interest quickly declined because there was nothing new and nothing compelling in the movie. There were a lot of stories but very few facts.”

Joshua Simiter, director of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, had only seen the trailer for The Age of Disclosure and wasn’t impressed. “I guess the word is disappointed when you see that their primary evidence is all the grainy infrared videos.” He says. “There’s a lot of money to be made by keeping things in the horror category. That’s basically what’s going on here.”

Simiter, who worked on a NASA team studying the origin of UAPs, believes the film is unlikely to create a lasting cultural shift or mainstream acceptance of its claims. Instead, it is the culmination of a recent period of increased interest in UAPs.

“We’ve been in the UAP bubble for the last eight years, and a lot of this evidence given by pilots is very old evidence dating back to the 2000s. We’re at the end. This production was an attempt to grab the last bits as we emerge from the current UAP bubble.”