Aliens are real and there's a cover-up, new documentary aims to prove

Thirty-four senior officials detail government secret-keeping around UFOs in the explosive documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” which had its world premiere at SXSW.

AUSTIN — What if the big question surrounding the existence of aliens wasn’t whether they exist but why the U.S. government has been hiding this information from the American public for so long?

And what if, in hiding that information, our own leaders were putting us in danger of annihilation?

The congressional hearings of 2022 and 2023 into greater government disclosure about UFO encounters were just the beginning, according to Dan Farah, director of the explosive new documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” which debuted at SXSW on Sunday.

Farah interviewed 34 high-ranking members of the U.S. government, military and intelligence communities — focusing only on those who say they have direct knowledge of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, the more official — and, one assumes, less prone to ridicule — acronym for UFOs) through their work.

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The resulting film asserts that the U.S. government has been hiding evidence of alien encounters for 80 years — as well as a secret program to reverse engineer the technology in retrieved UFO crashes, which has become a cold war arms race with Russia and China in the lead, some interviewees claim — creating an existential threat not just for America, but for the planet.

Farah’s aim was credibility and nonsensational dissemination of information, he said at the premiere.

Still, critics have argued that the film puts a legitimizing gloss on unfounded theories simply by saying them with conviction. “My problem with ‘The Age of Disclosure’ isn’t the lack of opposing voices,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg. “It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.” (Producers are seeking a distribution deal.)