The Age of Disclosure | |
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![]() Title card, The Age of Disclosure | |
Directed by | Dan Farah |
Produced by | Dan Farah |
Cinematography | Vincent Wrenn |
Edited by | Spencer Averick Colin Frederick |
Music by | Blair Mowat |
Production company | Farah Films |
Release date |
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Running time | 109 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Age of Disclosure is a 2025 American documentary film which proposes the conspiracy theory [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has been subject to a decades-long government cover-up. [6] [7] [8] The film is produced and directed by Dan Farah. It received mixed reviews.
The film's narrator and main character is former U.S. Department of Defense official Lue Elizondo, who alleges the existence of a secret government program that has investigated and concealed evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence for over 80 years. It features interviews with a variety of people, including former and present US government officials, who claim "the United States has been secretly working to capture UFOs since 1947." [9]
The Age of Disclosure is the directorial debut of Dan Farah, who previously produced the science fiction and fantasy films Ready Player One and The Shannara Chronicles . [10] [11] Spencer Averick was the film's editor. [12]
Metacritic , which uses a weighted average , assigned the film a score of 52 out of 100, based on four critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. [14]
Christian Zilko of IndieWire stated, "As someone who has never been persuaded by anything I had ever heard about aliens before watching the film, I feel qualified to tell you that “The Age of Disclosure” is really, really convincing...The amount of military officials who share detailed, corroborating stories of alien encounters, and congresspeople who vouch for the credibility of their claims, make this feel like a documentary with front-page news potential...Of course, there’s still the problem of never being able to see this classified evidence, and each viewer will have to decide how many generals swearing that they’ve seen aliens with their own eyes is enough to convince them." [15]
Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote, "The title of the film refers to the idea — or is it merely the hope? — that we now live in an age when the government is being pressured to shed its secrecy. The people want to know, and the film says: We will know. But if that's the case, then when are we actually going to be shown something that looks like more than a dupe of a dupe of an old video game depicting a blurry black dot of an alien spaceship cruising over water at what looks to be about 300 miles per hour? I'll believe it when I see it." [12]
In a separate Variety article discussing the film, Selome Hailu wrote, "It’s not hyperbole to say that “The Age of Disclosure” — and the conversations it creates — could change the world." [16]
Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , Daniel Fienberg called the film a "sensationalistic wolf in understated sheep's clothing" and opined that "almost nothing in The Age of Disclosure is 'new,' per se" but that the quality of its production values set it apart from similar films of the genre and that "some viewers will happily celebrate the fantasy, when it looks this legitimate". [2]
On Collider Nate Richard wrote that the film "delivers some fascinating information" but was "executed in the most bland way possible" and that "the pacing makes the movie feel like you're watching a college PowerPoint presentation". Nonetheless, Richard stated that there have "been far worse docs on the subject of UFOs". [17]
Bryan Abrams of the Motion Picture Association wrote that the film "should start a real, sustained conversation about what seems now an obvious fact—we are not alone". [18]
Joshua Semeter, a professor of electrical engineering at Boston University who served on a NASA panel charged with studying classified evidence for the existence of UFOs, said that, while he watched the film's trailer, he would probably not view the entire movie as he had already seen plenty of "testimony-based documentaries" on the subject. Semeter opined that he felt the film would probably be successful in gaining distribution on "a UFO channel on cable". [19]
If these wheels-within-wheels machinations sound like the stuff of conspiracy theories, well, sometimes that's just how the world works.
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: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)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.
It's a stigmatized topic often associated with conspiracy theorists
Farah is a little too willing to let his subjects veer into conspiracy territory at times...eventually succumbs to the Achilles heel that brings down so many promising conspiracy theories...
What sounds like a conspiracy fever dream is from a documentary, "The Age of Disclosure," which recently debuted at the SXSW Film Festival, in Austin, Texas