The new film Age of Disclosure is both a little boring and very important, which is the opposite of the case with most prior UFO documentaries. Such films have tended to parade shocking but obscure or poorly sourced claims, ultimately probably having little impact on the ongoing debate about whether aliens have visited humanity.
Age of Disclosure, by contrast, bombards the viewer with dozens of high-level government officials—including several U.S. representatives and senators as well as a former CIA director and Marco Rubio, current secretary of state—all espousing or strongly alluding to, without a hint of the smirking humor of old, what is perhaps becoming the new conventional wisdom: namely, that the government has crashed alien spaceships in its possession, along with what are implied to be almost-but-not-quite-human pilots.
That last bit, the pilots, is especially baffling for any reasonably sophisticated sci-fi fan or student of evolutionary theory, since you’d think that if all this were true, we’d see an almost randomized array of species born of radically diverse extraterrestrial environments. If instead this is all some giant scam—a “sci-op,” if you will, as opposed to the usual “psy-op” or intelligence sector psychological operation—you’d think the hypothetical propagandists would put a little more work into making the aliens convincingly weird.
Are the agents in charge lazy and unimaginative, like 1950s moviemakers slapping jumpsuits and fishbowl helmets on the invaders and calling it a day, or later Star Trek writers just putting a couple extra brow ridges or antennae on each new alien species (or “biologics,” to use the ungrammatical-sounding phrase that crops up in footage of congressional-hearing testimony in the film)? Or is this really happening, embarrassingly implausible details and all?
Apparently, feuding Pentagon factions, deluded or not, debate the evolutionary and religious implications of increasingly sophisticated UFO reports, with some thinking the aliens’ apparent similarity to us could mean they are artificial constructs, earthlings from a parallel timeline, ancient species from hidden (possibly deep-sea) corners of our own world, or even our own time-traveling descendants.
This much is certain: If the old three-item short list of options for explaining the UFO phenomenon was something like “real aliens, confused witnesses seeing mundane objects, or a colossal decades-long military-industrial-complex hoax,” it’s clear from Age of Disclosure that we can eliminate that second option, at least as the sweeping all-purpose dismissal of the topic we skeptics long thought it to be.
That is, if the aliens aren’t real, many billions of dollars seem to have been spent making it appear that they are, at least some of that money presumably bribing a lot of respectable and articulate science and government professionals. It’s not just duped bumpkins anymore. At some point—though the responsible skeptic must continue to await public, shared physical evidence before rendering a final verdict—it begins to look as if aliens are a simpler explanation than the vast and convoluted propaganda apparatus that would be needed to make the world appear this weird.
Then again, Nazi-turned-U.S. scientist Wernher von Braun is alleged to have said a half-century ago that as the military-industrial complex needed ever more justifications for its existence and expense, officials would likely turn from using communism as their main punching bag to using rogue states, then terrorists, then asteroids, and finally the threat of extraterrestrial invaders. Maybe all this is going according to (high-priced, utterly deceptive, long-term) plan and Age of Disclosure is the most official-sounding version of the lie yet formulated.
If so, we’re obliged to investigate that as intensely as ever we would have an alien lifeform detected on Mars, though. If the aliens are a scam, it’s perhaps the biggest of all time and must be exposed. Or maybe it’s all real, which will require more momentous decision-making.
If most of us were wrong on this topic for decades, it’s worth asking what else we may have been wrong about. It would be a mistake to pendulum-swing into believing every crazy claim you hear—not because that would be socially destabilizing but simply because you’d usually be wrong, and it’s helpful to stick to the truth and think about it carefully and cautiously. However, it’s not helpful to be over-confident that your current worldview is correct, especially if your real motivation for confidence, likely unstated or even subconscious, is merely that most people appear to be on your side and some of them seem pretty smart. That way lies the blind leading the blind, as with democracy and mutual funds.
If we were wrong about something as big as aliens, should manic conservative pundit Candace Owens be given a more sympathetic hearing when she claims French and Israeli agents have been hired to kill her, having already bumped off her old friend Charlie Kirk?
Should you tell your relatives at Thanksgiving dinner to prepare for the epistemic shock of learning that we share the universe, perhaps even this planet, with other highly intelligent species and that there may be no God refereeing it all? Alternatively, should you be more open now to the possibility that faith is akin to telepathic communication with aliens and thus perhaps a real source of knowledge alongside the usual lab tests and meteor samples?
If paranormal forces of some sort exist, should you patiently hear pundit Tucker Carlson out when he claims a demon attacked him in the night, scratching up his back, or if he admits he sleeps with his dogs, can you still conclude he’s an idiot regardless of what strange forces might exist on the fringes of our world?
Could the reality/paranormal show The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch be the most important show in human history, perhaps revealing a southwestern desert region in which multiple scientific methods of detecting electrical and magnetic anomalies buttress centuries-old Native-American claims about portals there to other realms—even if numerous other shows of that sort feature nothing more than amateur ghosthunters running around in the dark announcing that they felt a cold wind rush by?
“Just asking questions” gets a bad rap lately, but agnosticism provides some intellectually stimulating wiggle room that’s ultimately probably far more healthy than treating every debate as an opportunity to hunker down and fight the other side to the death. You can stay very skeptical and still find time to, say, see missing-persons expert Dave Paulides’ imminent new documentary American Sasquatch (the third film by that title, oddly enough, which makes me wonder anew why creative people don’t just do Web searches until they hit upon a title that hasn’t been used before). Is Bigfoot imaginary? Alien? A very large howler monkey subspecies? Off-grid savages who have begun to speciate? Do I look like I know?
But before you call him nuts, remember that now you have to accept that he’s not saying anything stranger than some of your congressional representatives, State Department officials, and most-credentialed military personnel are. Maybe it’s time everyone accepted ambiguity and got a little weirder.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
