It’s been said there are two kinds of people: those that believe in UFOs and those that don’t. There’s a third kind: people who don’t have to believe in UFOs because they know they’re real.

The Age of Disclosure Credit: Courtesy of Vincent Wrenn

Solid evidence about extraterrestrial, subterrestrial, subaquatic, or trans-dimensional visitors to the tiny sliver of Earth we humans occupy has been in scant supply. According to The Age of Disclosure, that’s not by accident or because there’s none to be found, but because of deliberate and determined efforts to procure and hide the evidence.

For any UFOlogists (or Gen-Xers who put the “X” in The X-Files) this is not exactly a huge revelation. However, what Age of Disclosure has that the average alien encounter documentary doesn’t is that, rather than a bunch of hicks who saw sumthin’ on a country road, their witnesses have a greater gravitas. Admirals, nuclear physicists, research biologists, senators, and even Secretary of State Marco Rubio all state the U.S. government has been not simply investigating UFOs (or more correctly, unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP as the U.S. military term dubs them) but has recovered materials and bodies from the crash sites. More worryingly, the number of times UAP have been detected, sighted, and even caught on thermal cameras is growing dramatically.

For doubters, this is the level of witnesses they’ve demanded for years. Director Dan Farah returns to South by Southwest after acting as a producer on the 2018 Steven Spielberg-directed headliner Ready Player One, and brings with him testimony from 34 senior public servants, elected officials, and retired and active service personnel. They all say, yes, there are craft of non-human origin and, yes, governments have spent the entire atomic era retro-engineering crashed vehicles. That may be the kindest interpretation, as more than one source muses that these vehicles have potentially been placed for us to find. Whatever’s happening, something is watching us seems to be the conclusion.

At the center of the story is the charismatic and quirky figure of Luis Elizondo, well known in UFO circles as the former director of Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. That now-defunct U.S. Department of Defense program was so secret that the government didn’t even admit it existed until five years after it was dissolved (unless it’s actually covertly still operating), and after a long disinformation campaign to discredit Elizondo.

The Age of Disclosure is a little oddly toned: anyone who followed the 2023 congressional hearings before which several of Farah’s talking heads appeared will know most of this anyway. A lot of people may file it away as “odd but interesting” and forget that high-ranking military officials testify, on screen and before lawmakers, that U.S. forces have recovered non-human biologics (aka bodies) from crash sites. Moreover, the presumption is that other nations have done so too, and so we are presented with the chilling idea that we’re in a terrestrial arms race with interstellar ramifications.

If these wheels-within-wheels machinations sound like the stuff of conspiracy theories, well, sometimes that’s just how the world works. And just because a conspiracy sounded wacky and was adopted by fringe theorists, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real (consider: MKUltra, Area 51, the Stealth Bomber, etc.). Farah keeps the crazies out of arm’s reach, even if some may find Elizondo’s optimistic kookiness a little much to bear. He’s a mash up of Larry the Cable Guy, Johnny Cash, and your favorite high school teacher in his amiable yet well-informed lecturing style. Yet for those that subscribe to the Hart–Tipler conjecture about the impossibility of life anywhere in the universe beyond Earth, he’s going to be a big part of why they don’t believe what’s presented here.

But Farah and Elizondo aren’t necessarily as interested in convincing audiences that they’re right about UAP as they are about highlighting the change in government attitudes. It’s not that they’ve known about these incursions by unknown entities for decades, because we’ve known they’ve known for about as long. It’s that they’re finally admitting what we’ve known all along: that they and we really need to keep watching the skies.

The Age of Disclosure

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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.

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The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.