‘This might be the one thing that could bring parties together’: UFO film director on the surprising bipartisan support in Congress

For decades, talk of UAPs—unidentified aerial phenomenon, for the uninitiated—was relegated to conspiracy forums and X-Files reruns. Not anymore. The Age of Disclosure, which premiered to a standing ovation at South by Southwest this month, reframes the conversation with journalistic clarity and a big assist from some of the most powerful people in government going on the record. With critics and audiences alike buzzing over the documentary, director Dan Farah is pushing the UAP conversation out of the shadows and into the mainstream.

That momentum is owed in large part to the fact that Farah (who is otherwise best known as a producer on the 2018 adaptation of Ready Player One) didn’t just scrape the surface, he went straight to the top. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Mike Rounds, former National Intelligence Director Jim Clapper, and dozens of other  government officials lend their voices to a film that’s less “little green men” and more national security urgency. If disclosure feels like a cultural inflection point, that’s because it just might be.

Fast Company spoke with Farah about how he landed these interviews, what shook him the most, and what happens if the truth really is out there.

What sparked your interest in UAPs? It’s not a subject you’ve really explored in your filmmaking before.

I’ve been interested in this topic my whole life. I’m 45, so my childhood was the ’80s and ’90s, and I grew up watching movies like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s just always been a lifelong interest. They made me curious about big questions: Are we alone in the universe? Does the U.S. government know more than they shared with the public? 

I was doing research on the topic a few years ago, and I started getting introduced, through some mutual friends, to people who have worked on this topic for the U.S. government. I started to realize that this is very serious and has incredible bipartisan support at the most senior levels of our government. At a time when Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on anything, Democratic and Republican leadership agree this is an extremely important topic and should be taken extremely seriously. The average person doesn’t know that Senator Schumer from the Democratic Party and Senator Rounds from the Republican Party co-sponsored the UAP Disclosure Act that attempted to bring this information out to the public. When you read the language of that act, it’s shocking. They’re talking about technology of nonhuman origin, they’re talking about all these things that seem very extraordinary but they’re taking it very seriously. 

The more I learned about it, and the more I became excited and motivated to make a credible, non-sensationalized documentary on the topic. When I started socializing my vision for it within intelligence, military, and government circles, I started to get a lot of support. 

Why do you think they offered that support? Why did they agree to sit down for an interview?

I think I was presenting an opportunity that they hadn’t heard before. I was committed to making this independently so they didn’t have to worry about a studio or a network sensationalizing it. I gave the interview subjects strength in numbers: I was setting off to interview dozens of people and wasn’t asking any one person to go out on a limb.

I had the support early on of a lot of people who were very influential in that space, including Luis Elizondo, Jay Stratton, Christopher Mellon. They all really believed in what I was trying to do, and not something to do in a “Hollywood” way.

Now, something to keep in mind: Almost all the people I interviewed have knowledge on this topic at a classified level that they obviously cannot talk about. But there’s a lot of information that they can talk about, and historically they’ve just been discouraged from doing so, or they haven’t had a comfortable opportunity to share what they can lawfully disclose. 

To the best of your understanding, why has the government been so secretive? 

Historically, there have been understandable and valid reasons for secrecy. And there are also very valid reasons now for making some of the information more known to the public. 

For you, what was the most interesting discovery during this process?

An interesting realization that came out of this is just a reminder of how our government works in general. Our elected officials largely pay attention to what their constituents tell them that they want them to pay attention to, right? So there’s a lot of very senior leadership in our country that knows this is a very serious situation, and they’re not really putting their bandwidth toward it because they’re worried about an historical stigma around the topic, and they’re not sure it’s one of the top issues for their constituents. 

I have great respect for the leaders of both parties right now who are taking it very seriously and putting themselves out there like Secretary Rubio, Senator Schumer, Senator Gillibrand, and on the House level people like you Representative Carson, Representative Garcia, Representative Luna—these people are really putting themselves out there.

The film comes at a moment when our two major parties can’t seem to agree on much. I wonder what kind of political implications mutual acknowledging of the issue would have. 

This might be the one thing that could actually bring parties together—and maybe bring adversarial nations together: the acknowledgement that we’re not alone in the universe. But as the documentary points out, there’s also a lot of negative things that could come out of disclosure—it’s just another thing that nations could fight over.

It’s really interesting to think about the fact that people who participated in the documentary share this extremely significant information that has extremely high stakes and impacts us all. And it’s very serious, yeah, but there’s still so much information they have that is informing their opinion that they can’t disclose, and you wonder what that is.