Are we living in the Age of Disclosure? We’re certainly living in the age of the documentary film, The Age of Disclosure (Prime Video).

Passionate disclosurists such as Danny Sheehan and the New Paradigm Institute energetically plugged the film’s debut along with plugging Global Disclosure Day (October 19, 2025), as if they were readying us for the imminent Apocalypse. Podcaster Colin Cowherd interviewed Dan Farah, director of The Age of Disclosure, because it was “the number one movie on Prime.” The fanfare leading up to the film’s debut in late 2025 excited audiences with the equivalent of Chicken Little’s, “the sky is falling.” Would we learn secrets kept by the Pentagon for 80 years? Would we learn that the US government has retrieved crashed space ships and dissected alien biologics? Would we learn of reversed alien technology that jump-started AI and related industries? Would we learn that AI dispensed military secrets that make the American military the most powerful on our planet?

My wife, Karen, and I raised the drawbridge, posted lookout guards on the parapets, starved the crocodiles in the moat to make them aggressive to intruders. Then we sat down in our television room undisturbed to watch The Age of Disclosure. Nobody interrupted us. We chomped on our popcorn with eyes glued to the screen.

What we saw, disappointingly, was the same ol’ material we’ve been viewing for nearly eight decades. The film’s central question was this: are UAP (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) real? Well, this question was answered already in Donald Keyhoe’s 1950 best seller, The Flying Saucers Are Real. Nothing in this 2025 documentary said anything qualitatively new that had not been part of the discussion for three-quarters of a century. Same ol’ criticism of government conspiracy. Some newer cases, to be sure. But structurally the same ol’ documentation of sitings aimed at stressing their importance.

“Here we go…again,” writes Skeptic editor Michael Shermer.

“Another documentary film about how disclosure of alien contact is imminent….The Age of Disclosure is packaged and produced so well that naïve viewers may come away thinking that something strikingly original, shockingly new, and world-shaking is about to be loosed among the world….We have been hearing of pending disclosure for half a century and are always left wanting….Alas, it is not to be. Every fact, opinion, or anecdote in the film has been rehearsed elsewhere in recent years.”

One kinda new theme surprised me. The Age of Disclosure introduced a new hero, Luis Elizando. My wife and I could put three handfuls of popcorn into our mouths during each long scene where we watched Lou silently staring up at US government buildings, pensively pondering the significance of contact with nonhuman extraterrestrial civilizations.  Sigh. Might Elizando become a new shaman, connecting earth with what lies beyond the heavens?

Shermer and I agree on another point. For a superior film on the same theme, try James Fox’s films, such as  The Phenomenon.

In a Substack post, “UAP disclosurism compromises US national security! Really?,” I attempted to formulate the puzzles and paradoxes endemic to the UAP Disclosure movement. Like rear wheels spinning in a Minnesota snow bank that prevent the car from moving forward, ufologists have been spinning the same responses to unanswerable questions from generation to generation. Are UAP real? Why is the government hiding the truth? Are we being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences? Are aliens already living among us?

Here is the kind of thing we keep running into in disclosurism. Popular UFO columnist Ross Coulthart claims that a crashed alien spacecraft was so large that the only option was to construct a building around it in the country where it was found. Now, that’s exciting news. Just where is it? Can we go take a look? No. Coulthat told an interviewer on the Project Unity Podcast that he knows exactly where the craft is, but he won’t say. It is my observation that the cloak of secrecy increases our feeling that UAP are important. So disclosurists repeatedly offer the same cocktail: tease and postpone; tease and postpone; tease and postpone.