SXSW 2025: Dan Farah’s “The Age of Disclosure” Stuns Crowd With Shocking Alien Doc
Festival crowds are notoriously exuberant—it can be hard to get a real read on a film’s potential for broader success or acclaim even if the first time it plays for a crowd at a film festival results in cheers and guffaws. Yet sometimes, for some films, a festival crowd’s excitement is as precise an indicator for a film’s impact as you need. This was the case here in Austin this past Sunday, when director Dan Farah showcased his doc The Age of Disclosure for the first time ever to a crowd. His film, years in the making in a production that was kept entirely secret, was astonishing in every sense of the word. Being a part of the audience that got to witness the result of this secretive, deeply researched film felt truly special. And terrifying. The Age of Disclosure has a real shot at being 2025’s defining documentary, and could, should start a real, sustained conversation about what seems now an obvious fact—we are not alone.
As we wrote last Friday, Farah’s documentary comes at the right time for UFO enthusiasts as the past few years have seen a significant swerve in the way people think, and talk, about the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth. Even the term UFO, long associated (by design, in fact) with quacks and fringe figures, has been replaced by the more appropriate UAP—unexplained aerial phenomena—as more and more senior officials in the government, military, and intelligence communities have come forward in recent years to tell us there have been countless run-ins with UAP, by Air Force and Navy pilots, by civilian pilots, by soldiers and scientists stationed at military bases and nuclear missile sites, and more. Whatever you think about the weirdness that was the recent New Jersey drone situation, the revelation that U.S. Air Force pilots had, on camera, experienced run-ins with aerial phenomena they couldn’t classify or understand has led to high-level congressional sessions and, for the first-time ever, the admission from the U.S. government that they are studying UAPs.
Farah’s doc features 34 senior U.S. Government insiders, including figures in the intelligence and military communities, who claim there’s been an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life and an arms race between powerful nations to reverse-engineer uncovered technology from these beings. The Age of Disclosure is centered on several central figures in the movement to force the U.S. Government to come clean with the American people about our contact with non-terrestrial species. What’s more, the doc reveals the highly compartmentalized and top-secret programs within the U.S. Government, so secretive, in fact, the President of the United States isn’t always aware of their full extent, that have been conducting research on recovered UAP material, including biological bodies of humanoid life-forms.
Yes, bodies.
Central to the story is Luis Elizondo, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who worked in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Putting both his career and his life at risk, Elizondo has come forward to reveal that he was the director of a now defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) for the Pentagon that researched UAP threats. Elizondo is privy to top-secret details he couldn’t share with Farah, but he did everything else in his power without breaking the law or his oath to uphold the constitution by walking the director, and the viewer, through decades worth of contact between military and intelligence operatives and intelligent, non-human lifeforms and craft.
Elizondo’s claims were rebuked by a government that has long smeared anyone attempting to reveal the extent of government programs dealing with non-human intelligent life. The media has often aided and abetted the government’s efforts to discredit Elizondo and paint all whistleblowers as cranks or people with an ax to grind.
Elizondo is hardly alone now, however. In fact, his voice is now part of a chorus of top officials who are backing him up, including high-ranking politicians and highly regarded scientists who worked on government programs dealing with UAP. These include Timothy Gallaudet, an oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral in the United States Navy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Mike Rounds, Jay Stratton (former DIA official, Director of the Government’s UAP Task Force), General Jim Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence), Mike Gold (NASA UAP Study Team member), Brett Feddersen (former Director of Aviation Security on the White House’s National Security Council), Jim Semivan (former senior CIA official), Representative Carson, Mike Gallagher (former Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party), Christopher Mellon (former Department of Defense official), and senior scientist from multiple Government UAP programs, including Dr. Garry Nolan, quantum physicist Hal Puthoff Ph.D., astrophysicist Eric Davis Ph.D.
The force of all this testimony from knowledgeable people with varying areas of expertise and spheres of responsibility is truly shocking. One of Farah’s aims was to take the idea of intelligent alien beings coming into contact with humans out of the realm of science fiction and into the much scarier world of irrefutable fact. The Age of Discovery not only annihilates—for this viewer, anyway—the assumption that aliens are not real, but also offers perhaps equally shocking theories on how these beings are able to move the way they do and what they might be trying to tell us. The UAPs that have been caught on multiple, high-tech sensors by the U.S. military (over and over and over again) have moved at angles and speeds that completely obliterate the fundamental laws of physics. Yet, one of the most thrilling parts of the film is watching some of the smartest humans on the planet start to piece together how they might be doing it, and why their theories would make the UAP movement not only possible, but sensical.
As for their intentions, that’s where The Age of Disclosure is scariest. There has been so much UAP activity in and around nuclear sites and military bases, sometimes interfering with our nuclear capabilities, that it’s hard to argue these encounters are purely playful or curious. The experts Farah has assembled, the seasoned military veterans who have come forward to testify to the reality of UAPs, are in agreement that this behavior reads as a coordinated effort on the UAP’s part to do reconnaissance and research on our capabilities, perhaps out of their own feeling of existential threat, having assessed us as unreliable and more than capable to destroy ourselves, and perhaps them along with us.
There are many, many shocking twists in The Age of Disclosure that are worth experiencing for yourself without warning. If the SXSW audience is a good measure, seeing the film with a large group of people will all but guarantee you the experience of your fellow human beings gasping in astonishment. The Age of Disclosure is a truly remarkable, truly terrifying doc, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Take heart in the fact that not once has a UAP fired upon a civilian or military plane, even when they’ve been fired upon. And, given their highly advanced technology that is perhaps decades or centuries ahead of anything we can produce, they’ve not once used that technology against us. Perhaps they don’t want to harm us at all, but, assuming they’re as intelligent as their technology suggests they are, it’s very understandable, even logical, that they’d been wary of us. We have not been the best stewards of our remarkable planet, and we have not taken care of each other all that well, either. Wouldn’t you be cautious interacting with a species like that?
