‘The public has been lied to’: Secretly produced documentary insists aliens exist | Documentaries

DDirector Dan Farah grew up with aliens. When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, popular culture was full of extraterrestrial sightings. “How can you be a kid watching movies like ET and Close Encounters, and TV shows like The X Files, and not end up curious about whether or not we’re alone in the universe?” He said in an interview with The Guardian. “And whether or not the United States government is actually keeping secrets from the public.”

Farah’s exposure to otherworldly beings in imagination sparked an interest that has now turned into a professional endeavor, and the subject of his first documentary, The Age of Disclosure. Here, Farah explains that the United States has, for decades, been hiding a pipeline of information related to UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) — the renamed acronym for a stigma-laden UFO.

It would be easy to assume that this is what the Reddit forums are talking about, and in some ways the documentary’s pseudo-narrator, Luis Elizondo, could come across as some sort of conspiracy theorist at first glance. Armed with a blackboard and a piece of chalk, he works to persuade the viewer, wading through tons of overwhelming military and intelligence jargon, like “hypersonic speed” and “trans-Mediterranean travel,” with undeniable passion.

But there’s a reason Farrah was drawn to Elizondo (who also serves as an executive producer on the film). He’s got real credentials. A former Pentagon official who helped lead the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), Elizondo eventually left his position in 2017, claiming that the department was hiding vital information from the public. He also claims there is an “aggressive disinformation campaign” from the Department of Defense to discredit his work.

Taking care to “only interview people who have direct knowledge” of these programs from working within the U.S. government was a north star for Farrah — who has worked as a producer on several films, including Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. During the filming of The Age of Disclosure, as more former officials and experts joined, it helped convince others to participate.

But Farah ran a tight ship over the three years it took to make the film. “Everyone’s names will be kept silent until this is finished,” he said, noting that he was only telling documentarians who had agreed to participate in order to make them comfortable. “We were making the film in secret, so this information about who was in it wouldn’t be released until we finished this film, and those people I was getting close to would be safe in numbers.”

Farrah also chose to make the film independently, away from a studio or streamer. “None of them wanted to be involved in a big commercial documentary,” Farah explained. “They’ll be afraid to bring it up. They’ll be afraid to reach out to someone who’s not at their level, who might undermine them.”

Its first major commitment came from Guy Stratton, one of the defense officials who founded AATIP. He had an established career investigating UAP and non-human intelligence life on behalf of the government, and was responsible for briefing senior lawmakers in Congress and the White House. “I saw with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings,” Stratton says plainly at the beginning of the film.

After Stratton agreed to “break his silence,” it had massive “ripple effects” on the rest of the film, convincing others to come forward. When current Secretary of State Marco Rubio agreed to participate, this escalated matters. “The next thing you know, General Jim Clapper was participating,” Farah said of the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, who sat down for an interview.

The sheer wealth of contributions, 34 to be exact, from members of Congress from across the political spectrum, as well as people with rich national security experience—many of whom would balk at the prospect of a successful news channel, let alone an independent documentary—certainly lends a veneer of credibility. You will immediately encounter a propulsive musical group and a large group of former military and intelligence officials hidden in armchairs. They all provide brief biographical summaries, explaining that we are not alone, and why the American public should know more about it.

“this [UAP] “Technology does things we can’t do if we don’t know what it is or what it’s for or what it’s used for,” says a former director of aviation security at the National Security Council. The former chief scientist at AATIP claims that those tasked with ensuring information about UAPs does not leak “will use any tool they can find to try to persuade people not to come forward”. Meanwhile, a former defense official points out that if we are able to understand the technology we will be able to realize that it opens the door to many “potentially beneficial impacts, including clean energy.”

In many ways, Rubio makes one of the most compelling arguments. He says much of the research and intelligence on UAPs is done on a need-to-know basis, leaving incoming administrations out of the loop on the details. “But it’s starting to get out of hand,” he adds, leading to a lack of transparency that could give U.S. adversaries a head start by analyzing UAP technology. It’s a theory that seems more convincing coming from well-known foreign policy hawks, who have spent time in the Senate leading bipartisan efforts to understand more about UAPs.

The geopolitical arms race to reverse engineer UAP technology is, as Farah saw it, one of the biggest reasons behind the alleged cover-up. “You can’t tell your friends without telling your enemies,” Farrah says in our interview, reciting one of Stratton’s lines in the documentary. He traces a line from Roswell’s debunked 1947 Alien Crash Retrieval (generally considered the genesis of modern UAP conspiracies) to what he sees as an ongoing effort to withhold information – for fear that enemies will learn how much the United States knows about extraterrestrial life.

“Put yourself in the shoes of American government and military officials in the 1940s,” Farah said, explaining that the Truman administration, after its victory in World War II, could not say to the American people that “we are in another conflict from which we cannot protect anyone, because we do not even know anything about it.”

He says this race escalated when the United States discovered that other countries, such as Russia, were seizing and reclaiming UAP technology. He added: “Here we are now, where the people running our country do not realize the facts.” “These people are supposed to be aware of important information like this that carries significant risks for us. On a basic level, the public deserves to know the truth about basic facts, as if we are not alone in the universe.”

In The Age of Disclosure there is clearly little room for pushback or doubt, particularly as there is not a single critic in the film to act as a foil to the large number of assertive people interviewed. Farah, for his part, does not see the need for these voices to cover the broad outlines of the documentary. “I think when people watch this movie, one of the things they’ll realize is that the stigma surrounding this topic is completely irrational, it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s not in the best interest of humanity,” he said. “We need the scientific community, not just in the United States, but in every country, to accept the fact that this is a real situation, this is a valid area of ​​investigation, and that they should put their mental energy toward learning about this and answering the many big questions that remain.”

Testimony is ultimately what the film hinges on, and it’s really the only “evidence” it can provide. For Farah, this is more urgent. He believes the “strongest evidence” is “that credible people are putting their names and reputations on the line to tell you what they know at great risk.” When it comes to the video and photos, the director points out that it won’t do much to quell claims that it’s all a hoax. “You can put a photo or video of the most bizarre thing on the cover of a major news publication or on major TV, and half the population will tell you they think it’s artificial intelligence or they think it’s visual effects,” he said.

As more people, like Elizondo and Stratton, speak out about their experiences, Farah hopes it will encourage more people who have been silenced in the past to try to uncover the truth. “The public has been lied to for far too long, kept in the dark, and completely misled by a highly funded and highly sophisticated disinformation campaign,” Farah said.

“I believe it is only a matter of time before an American president takes the stage and tells the world that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe, and that the United States government intends to lead this new chapter by ending the era of secrecy and beginning the era of transparency.”