Review of "Age of Disclosure": An "Ancient Aliens" Episode with Better Lighting

​For all the bluster surrounding Age of Disclosure, the new UFO disclosure documentary, the most telling part of the entire film comes in the first few minutes, when we plunge into a bunch of storytelling valorizing Lue Elizondo’s now-familiar story of leaving the Pentagon to promote UFO research. In other words, you know from the very first moments that if this documentary had anything other than the same old stories we have heard for nearly a decade, filmmaker Dan Farah would have put it first. Instead, we get an episode of Ancient Aliens with better production values—but the same amount of evidence, and, indeed, in most cases, the same supposed evidence that already appeared on Ancient Aliens.

​Age of Disclosure has the format of a prestige documentary, with a dramatic orchestral score, stately b-roll of Washington’s monuments and military equipment, and sober-sounding talking heads staring off to the side of the screen while speaking slowly and quietly in nineteenth-century paneled rooms. But it is not a fair or balanced documentary. Instead, it is something of a Triumph of the Swindle, using the form of PBS documentary without the ethical foundation of fairness or balance that governs traditional media.
 
That’s not to say a documentary has to be neutral. HBO’s Thoughts and Prayers this week had a very strong point of view, but you also came away understanding both sides. Instead, Age of Disclosure lies through omission. To make its talking heads seem sober and serious, it selectively purges the historical record even of facts that the talking heads themselves have made public. Eric Davis says, for instance, that high-ranking military officials were too concerned about their “reputations” to take UFOs seriously, and Lue Elizondo claims that “religious beliefs” led national security officials to limit UFO research. Yet the documentary carefully omits information that would damage the reputations of its talking heads, such as Elizondo’s claim, detailed in his own memoir Imminent, that he has psychic powers and can appear as a glowing angel to intimidate the targets of his telepathic warfare (Elizondo is an executive producer of the film), or Jay Stratton’s claim to be stalked by various supernatural entities and folkloric monsters. Nor does the documentary disclose the talking heads’ many media deals, current government contracts, and other potential conflicts of interest. 

The falseness of the documentary extends deep into the interviews. Having watching the various talking heads across dozens or even hundreds of media appearances over the last eight years, it is easy to hear in their voices where they have been coached about phrasing and where it sounds like they are reading from scripted material. There is a flatness to what several of them say, a careful rehearsal that robs its of its immediacy. Elizondo provides bridging narration that is quite obviously scripted. He is not presented as the narrator, but he serves the function.

​(The film received an elaborate roll-out across the mainstream media, with the interviewees in the film promoting the documentary across cable news as though they were actors on a junket hawking their latest action-thriller, an unprecedented campaign for a documentary.)
 
The film claims that the Chinese and Russians have reverse-engineered alien spacecraft and have deployed this technology against America. No evidence is offered, and the film does not bother to interrogate whether such claims could serve a propaganda purpose to generate financial support for defense contractors who would benefit from any effort to “catch up” to imaginary Chinese UFO wonder-weapons.
 
The talking heads also assert that the heads of various agencies have no knowledge of UFO crashes, but only the bureaucrats in the “deep state” keep and hide this knowledge. Davis tells stories about George H. W. Bush, who is conveniently dead, supposedly knowing about all sorts of UFO crashes, and Elizondo reads a script asserting that the Vatican is “very well aware” of space aliens before opining that “everything” you’ve been “taught” in school about the “history of our species” is wrong—the same claim that Ancient Aliens and Graham Hancock made good money peddling, and which, of course, none of them can offer any convincing evidence to support. Elizondo doesn’t bother to defend the Vatican claim, and this is an ongoing problem in the film. Many assertions are thrown out, insinuations made, and nothing provided to defend those claims. We are simply asked to believe them because a guy who thinks he can turn into a glowing angel or a guy who thinks werewolves visit his house said so.
 
Similarly, the film treats familiar UFO stories that have long suffered from a lack of evidence as obviously true, whether this is the Roswell crash of 1947, UFOs allegedly turning off nuclear weapons, or the supposed Holloman Air Force Base UFO landing that Robert Emenegger seemingly invented for UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, a film covertly commissioned as campaign propaganda for Nixon’s 1972 reelection effort. (The film ran late and was not released until 1974.) I bring this last one up because Age of Disclosure specifically accuses the government of “funding” Hollywood films that created a “ridicule factor” around UFOs without mentioning that pro-UFO propaganda also suckles at the government’s teat.
 
Hal Puthoff offers some stories about how UFOs fly in space-time bubbles, a claim that has no evidence and is entirely fabricated from some very intelligent people deluding themselves into thinking that their hypothetical explanations for imagined objects that they themselves admit cannot actually be observed to be alien spacecraft are in fact scientific revelations. At heart, though, Puthoff and Davis make a very stupid argument: We can’t photograph or effectively track any alien spacecraft where pilots tell us they’ve seen blobs in the sky, so the pilots can’t be mistaken and the aliens must have super-science that lets them fly in space-time energy bubbles that prevent us from detecting them. Don’t you see? It’s true because there is no proof!
 
As the film grinds toward its final act, a potential purpose behind the film starts to become obvious. Davis and Puthoff make the case—again, based on no evidence—that UFOs can create 100 times the daily power generation of the entire country. In short, they are a new, magical source of free energy, if only some government agency would just pay everyone involved magical amounts of money to spend the next few decades furiously trying to recreate the imaginary science behind the post hoc hypothesis used to explain why we can’t see the fantasized spaceships that cannot be proved to be flying our skies. Even in the last act, when the film claims to examine the motives behind the aliens—again, these are aliens that cannot be shown to exist—it all keeps coming back to “energy” and the need for the government to spend lots of money on hypothetical sources of infinite energy to warp space and time, create wonder-weapons, defeat China, and power all our A.I. data centers forever.
 
Near the end of the movie, Elizondo speculates that the government will assassinate him for revealing too much (of what, one wonders, given that the psychic superhero has said nothing of evidentiary value), but Elizondo’s near-hysterical shout that the aliens are “interested in our rapid progress” toward unlocking secret energy sources makes it seem more likely that this is all an elaborate pitch to fund pseudoscientific research into some new free energy scam.
 
The film ends with the requisite Millennialist idea that humans are sinful and violent, and only the divine extraterrestrials can provide the moral guidance to allow us to make use of the “energy” peacefully. Chris Mellon delivers the moral coda of this social Darwinist faith: “Self-preservation is number one!” He points his finger up at the ceiling, unintentionally reinforcing both the religious imagery and the late capitalist undercurrent. Puthoff, a former high-ranking Scientologist, claims that UFOs will “change the human character” and lead us to spiritual and social happiness—just as L. Ron Hubbard prophesied.
 
By the time the film is over, the viewer has seen no evidence that is new, no stories that had not been told many times before, and nothing convincing to those who have not already convinced themselves. What a waste of time.