AUSTIN — What if the big question surrounding the existence of aliens wasn’t whether they exist but why the U.S. government has been hiding this information from the American public for so long?

And what if, in hiding that information, our own leaders were putting us in danger of annihilation?

The congressional hearings of 2022 and 2023 into greater government disclosure about UFO encounters were just the beginning, according to Dan Farah, director of the explosive new documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” which debuted at SXSW on Sunday.

Farah interviewed 34 high-ranking members of the U.S. government, military and intelligence communities — focusing only on those who say they have direct knowledge of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, the more official — and, one assumes, less prone to ridicule — acronym for UFOs) through their work.

Ryan Graves, Americans for Safe Aerospace executive director, from left, U.S. Air Force (Ret.) Maj. David Grusch, and U.S. Navy (Ret.) Cmdr. David Fravor, testify before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing in 2023 on UFOs. Nathan Howard/Associated Press

The resulting film asserts that the U.S. government has been hiding evidence of alien encounters for 80 years — as well as a secret program to reverse engineer the technology in retrieved UFO crashes, which has become a cold war arms race with Russia and China in the lead, some interviewees claim — creating an existential threat not just for America, but for the planet.

Farah’s aim was credibility and nonsensational dissemination of information, he said at the premiere.

Still, critics have argued that the film puts a legitimizing gloss on unfounded theories simply by saying them with conviction. “My problem with ‘The Age of Disclosure’ isn’t the lack of opposing voices,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg. “It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.” (Producers are seeking a distribution deal.)

Declassifying UFO data has proved to be one of the most bipartisan issues in the country. Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) was a leading voice in the UFO disclosure movement until his death. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears in the film alongside Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) and Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), all raising the alarm that UFOs need to be thoroughly investigated. Are they nonhuman, or simply just suspicious balloons or drones? The point is that U.S. national security depends on knowing what they are and who sent them.

“We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours. And we don’t know whose it is. … Just that statement alone deserves inquiry, deserves attention, deserves focus,” Rubio says in the film.

Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray points to a video display of a UAP during a 2022 hearing of the House Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee on “unidentified aerial phenomena.” AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Jay Stratton, the former director of the Pentagon’s UAP task force, lays out the stakes of the United States keeping its UAP secrets so closely guarded that various agencies can’t communicate about it.

“The first country that cracks this technology will be the leader for years to come,” Stratton says in the film. “This is similar to the Manhattan Project: We developed the atomic weapon, we won the war, and it made us a superpower for almost a century now. This is the atomic weapon on steroids.”

The list of people who spoke with Farah is long and formidable, including James R. Clapper Jr., former director of national intelligence; Mike Gold, a member of NASA’s UAP study team who testified before Congress; and Tim Gallaudet, former chief oceanographer for the Navy who also testified before Congress.

Farah said at the premiere that he’d met with 10 others who declined to be filmed, including politicians and intelligence officials who thought their reputations would be destroyed or who were “fearful about retaliation from those who do not want this information revealed [or] fearful for their lives,” Farah told The Washington Post.

Most prominent of all is Luis “Lue” Elizondo, the former Defense Department official and member of the now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) who also testified before Congress. He says he’s driven by a sense of duty to the American people not to keep hidden from them information that “could change the trajectory of our species.”

Serving as the film’s main character and narrator, he alleges the existence of the Legacy Program, which contains 80 years of classified data on the existence of UFOs that career bureaucrats have kept from presidents. (Rubio repeats this: “Even presidents, it seems, have been operating on a need-to-know basis.”)

In the film, Elizondo says that he’s come to believe that extraterrestrials are trying to study our military and nuclear capabilities.

Not having this information out there, even if it’s just known across the government, he posits, could lead to a situation like Sept. 11, 2001, when America was caught off-guard for a mass attack, despite plenty of unheeded warnings that something like that was coming.

We are not alone

“The brilliance of what Dan Farah did was to quietly go behind the scenes and talk to 34 people and say, ‘Okay, if you all come out at the same time, then you don’t have that stigma associated [with talking about UFOs],’” physicist and parapsychologist Hal Puthoff said at the screening.

Puthoff, who started investigating paranormal phenomena in the 1970s and doing government-funded UFO-related research in the mid-2000s, was onstage with his colleague at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, scientist Eric Davis. Davis is the author of the famous (at least among the UFO cognoscenti) 2002 Wilson/Davis memo that was leaked in 2019.

It’s essentially a transcript of notes of an alleged two-hour conversation between Davis and Thomas R. Wilson, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In it, Wilson confirms that he discovered there were programs focused on reverse engineering UAP crash retrievals, but that even he wasn’t allowed to know what was happening in them, as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Defense Department at the time. Davis has verified the memo is real on social media, saying Wilson said he would deny ever meeting Davis, which he reportedly did.

According to the interviewees, the United States has been secretly working to capture UFOs since 1947.

“I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings,” Stratton, the former head of the UAP task force, says in the film.

The movie’s most frustrating aspect, though, is that these experts can’t actually reveal most of that evidence because it’s still classified.

Stratton said at the screening that he’d spent countless hours pushing the executive branch and Congress to free some of this information: “And in those countless hours, I have given them information. I have given them not only the existence of nonhuman intelligence but the address to go look to see and they were denied access.”

Elizondo says in the film that he and his colleagues at AATIP “discovered that there actually was another deeply hidden and much larger UAP program. This program was so sensitive that it was withheld from the secretary of defense, Congress and even the president of the United States.” That was the program to capture alien technology and reverse engineer it – and it had been going on since 1947.

“On numerous occasions, these retrievals included the bodies of non-humans, some sort of intelligent being that is not human,” he says in the film. And there are multiple species, he alleges.

Later, he adds, “UAP have both deactivated and activated nuclear weapons in both the United States and Russia.”

The observables

Farah talks to multiple members of the military who say they’ve seen with their own eyes flying vehicles that defied the laws of physics.

Some talk about seeing a square red object the size of a football field hovering off the coast near Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, before it darted off across the mountains. Some military pilots talk about seeing giant flying black cubes with clear spheres around them. The theory is that these objects operate as bubbles in which the laws of time and space do not apply — which is how beings traveling inside those vehicles at tens of thousands of miles per hour can survive.

In this image from video taken in 2015 and labeled Gimbal, an unexplained object is seen at the center as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. “It’s rotating.” Image courtesy of Department of Defense via AP

How else could anyone explain the white, oblong “Tic Tac” UFO that U.S. Naval pilots spotted off the coast of Southern California in 2004, which sped off at an estimated 32,000 mph? The fastest aircraft made by man max out at less than 5,000 mph, if manned, and 7,000 mph if unmanned, while UFOs described in the film reportedly seemed to be traveling at 10 times that and could screech to a halt in midair and reverse course at crazy angles that even our finest pilots could never achieve in any jet ever made.

Commander David Fravor, the Top Gun fighter pilot sent to investigate that flying ellipsoid — nicknamed for the breath mint it resembled on the radar screen — says he and three others observed it for five minutes before it sped off as they came in for a closer look. What worried him most about UFOs, he said at the screening, is that the United States has not cracked the code on reverse engineering, and we’re at least 20 years away from getting there.

“That’s disheartening,” he said. “The worst fear is that if an adversary gets it — North Korea, China, Russia — before us, because it is so game-changing.”

Gallaudet, the formal Naval oceanographer, says in the film that UAP have been observed in the ocean and that if aliens are already here, that’s where they’d be hiding, since 80 percent of the world’s oceans remain unexplored. He’s pushing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to team up with NASA and the DOD to ramp up ocean exploration.

“I think our whole American scientific enterprise needs to get behind this and take it seriously,” Gallaudet said at the premiere. He added that he’d spoken with his friend Michael Kratsios, a senior technology policy adviser to President Donald Trump, about putting UAP research at the top of the White House’s R&D priorities memo, which means each agency will have to take it seriously.

The why and consequences of it all

If all of this information is vital for Americans to know, why don’t we know it?

For one, Elizondo and Stratton emphasize, there’s a fear that this information, particularly the progress made with reverse engineering alien technology, could get into the hands of U.S. adversaries (or perhaps now frenemies) like China and Russia, who could use it against the United States or throw world order into jeopardy.

There’s also the fear of mass panic that this information might unleash, like in 1938 when Orson Welles’s radio play “The War of the Worlds” led some Americans to believe that martians really were invading.

The scientists among the film’s experts say that there could be a real humanitarian benefit to opening up this information. The combustion-free energy used to power UAPs – they’ve been reported to move at supersonic speeds with no signs of emissions or propulsion mechanisms – could be the biggest breakthrough in clean energy since nuclear power and eliminate the need for fossil fuels.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), who’s now on the U.S. House task force for the declassification of federal secrets, said at SXSW that he just wants all he information out in the open as soon as possible.

“I am one of those crazy Christians in the world. I mean, I’m a fundamentalist. I believe Jesus died on the cross for my sins, and I don’t hate anybody that doesn’t,” he said. He’s not afraid of alien life, he said. “I think it’s just another one of God’s creations.”

What he is afraid of is the government — specifically NASA and the CIA — taking more of your tax dollars to pay for research on proving the existence of UAPs when it’s already been proved. “As we say in East Tennessee, it’s as crooked as a dog’s tail,” he said.

What’s key, says Brett Feddersen, former director of aviation security on the White House National Security Council, is starting an official program for where military and commercial pilots can report what they’re seeing out there, like the Department of Homeland Security’s “If you see something, say something” campaign. Civilians, too, should be involved.

Even just the existence of such a program could erase the stigma of speaking out, and would at least help protect planes from strange flying objects in their paths. “If you see something or you know someone who has, don’t be afraid,” he told the audience. “It’s hard to identify things, but let the professionals take it and make sure you pass it along.”