A new documentary about aliens hangs between revelation and speculation

Even after Dan Farah's documentary, we remain where we have always been - cataloguing mysteries and arguing over possibilities about extraterrestrial life

The Age of Disclosure arrives during a period of acute public interest in unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), met by predictably cautious official pronouncements. Director Dan Farah, steeped in the cinematic mythology of E.T. and The X-Files from his growing up years in the ’80s and ’90s, presents his documentary not as conspiratorial froth but as a compilation of testimony from insiders who suggest the United States has quietly accumulated decades of information, and potentially material, suggesting non-human intelligence.

 

Mr Farah has stacked his cast with serious operators. The documentary pulls in 34 contributors, a mix of Congressional figures and long-time national security officers whose job descriptions usually keep them far from speculation. Their presence gives the film an air of institutional weight that conspiracy fare normally lacks.

 

Jay Stratton, former director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, appears on camera to declare that he has seen with his eyes “non-human craft and non-human beings”. Eric Davis recalls the Soviet recovery of humanoid bodies in 1989. And Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, warns that UAP intelligence is so tightly compartmentalised that “much of it is restricted even from presidents.”

 

In an era where every minor mishap is filmed in high definition grainy UFO videos have lost their sting. But those with decades of top-level security clearances are considerably harder to dismiss. Mr Farah assembles stories of craft “the size of football fields”, objects plunging from air to sea without slowing, and a handful of nations supposedly racing to reverse-engineer technologies that refuse to obey known physics. The implication is sweeping.

 

Yet the film’s certainty is also its structural flaw. There is not a sceptic in sight.  And the absence is striking. As social scientist Frank J Sulloway once dryly noted: “Anecdotes do not make science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten”.

 

Carl Sagan’s old reminder that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, too, hangs over the documentary.  Even Occam’s Razor seems dulled by 80 years of alleged crash retrievals lacking any independent proof.

 

Scientific bodies have repeatedly urged caution. In 2024, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported no evidence of crash retrieval programmes, chalking dramatic accounts up to misinterpretation or recycled rumour. Nasa reached much the same conclusion. UAPs remain puzzling largely because the data is poor. And years of hoaxes, more recently Jaime Maussan’s alien mummies, have done little to strengthen public confidence.

 

Mr Farah, however, insists sceptics are missing the point. Release physical evidence and it will be dismissed as AI fakery; testimony, paradoxically, has become the more dependable currency. It is a view that will reassure some and puzzle others, particularly those who think the burden of proof should rest slightly higher than anecdote.

 

Judging the plausibility of any of this requires a brief detour through what science actually says about extraterrestrial life. Statistically, life elsewhere is highly probable. The Drake equation does not tell us how many civilisations exist; it merely illustrates the scale of our ignorance. Adjust the variables generously and the galaxy brims with neighbours; tighten them and we may be catastrophically alone.

 

Then comes the Fermi Paradox. If life is common, where is everyone? There is no shortage of explanations. Civilisations may be rare, short-lived or disinclined to advertise themselves. A 2015 analysis suggests Earth might simply be early to the party: Life here could have emerged before many habitable planets finished forming, leaving the universe with little time to crank out technological species.

 

Life may be plentiful but microbial, or dominated by post-biological intelligences invisible to our methods. Fringe theories go further, positing cryptoterrestrial species hiding in plain sight, although such ideas remain firmly on the imaginative end of the spectrum.

 

But Mr Farah’s focus is sharper. Not whether alien life exists, but whether the US government has been sitting on evidence for generations. Until a verifiable artefact appears, his documentary floats somewhere between earnest revelation and highly polished speculation.

 

The Age of Disclosure reflects a mood in which curiosity and suspicion run in parallel. Its witnesses speak with conviction; its conclusions stretch well past what can be proven. And so we remain where we have always been — cataloguing mysteries, arguing over possibilities and wondering whether anything out there intends to answer.