The documentary “The Age of Disclosure” presents itself as a tell-all by people who have worked with the U.S. government on matters related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, or U.A.P., the revamped name for unidentified flying objects. Now these individuals are breaking their silence, the opening text explains — as much as they can, anyway, without divulging conveniently classified information.
The de facto leader among the movie’s talking heads is Luis Elizondo, who ran a Pentagon initiative called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program until 2017, when he resigned to protest what he saw as excessive secrecy. Since then, Elizondo has written a memoir and testified before a House subcommittee, and he is an executive producer on this film.
Directed by Dan Farah, a producer on “Ready Player One,” “The Age of Disclosure” follows a time-honored method of easing viewers into its incredible assertions, mixing out-there concepts with ideas that have the ring of truth. Surely some anomalous phenomena exist; surely they have the potential to become national security threats. And it is not surprising to hear that the government might classify certain details that should be public. The bipartisan, high-profile figures who sat for interviews (including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and former Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, now the secretary of state and national security adviser) lend credibility to the proceedings.
But “The Age of Disclosure” sneakily slips from those officials’ arguments for transparency into the realm of pure speculation. If you don’t believe that extraterrestrials surveil our planet in bubbles that can warp time and space, the movie suggests that you’ve simply fallen victim to a government disinformation campaign intended to make people skeptical of U.A.P.s. (Hasn’t Hollywood, described as part of that effort, done precisely the opposite?) Question the film and you’re a chump, it implies. But anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump of a different sort.
The Age of Disclosure Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.
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