The Age of Disclosure

The Age of Disclosure is a UFO documentary that has been hyped as a form of soft disclosure. It covers the modern UFO phenomenon, tracking Lue Elizondo and Jay Stratton as they launch a government UAP program, discover the secret legacy crash retrieval program, and work together to put inform Congress, all to change the culture of the DoD to take UFO concerns seriously.

TL;DR: The documentary is a very good summary of the current state of UFO information. It doesn’t have a lot of new information for people who are deep in the UFO weeds, but would be a great onboarding point for any tolerant friends in your life who may be interested.

The Hype

It was an official selection at SXSW. It’s the top documentary on Prime Video right now.
Director Dan Farah: “There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle as they say. I've been getting messages from senior senators and people that are involved in the administration all weekend, saying basically 'the doors have just been blown open' and 'the government doesn't have any choice but to walk through it in some regard… I think it's only a matter of time before we see a sitting president step to the microphone and tell the world we're not alone in the universe. And that the US intends to lead the way in this new chapter for humanity. I think that is going to happen as a result of this movie. The only question is when. I don't think we're too far off from that point”
Rep Nick Begich: “Age of Disclosure is totally making rounds. I know several members have watched it over the break. I watched it… It’s very well done… What they did was they took years of testimony and condensed it down into a digestible format. I think they did a great job doing that, because you got a lot of people on the record talking about what they know or what they suspect or what they’ve been told about this issue.”

The Film

Opening Statement:
- Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves: “The objects have been detected everywhere Navy operations are conducted all across the world.”
- Former Navy pilot David Fravor: “The technology that we faced was far superior to anything we have currently or we’re gonna have in the next 20 years.”
- Rep Andre Carson: “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way.”
- Sen Chuck Schumer: “The US Government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades, but has refused to share it with the American people.”
- Caption: “Everyone interviewed in this film has direct knowledge of UAP as a result of their work for the US Government. While some of their knowledge is classified, they are now breaking their silence with what they can lawfully disclose.”
Establish Credentials:
- Ryan Graves: “I spent 11 years in the US Navy as a fighter pilot.”
- David Fravor: “For 18 years, I flew fighters for the US Navy.”
- Chris Mellon: “I spent 20 years working in the US intelligence community.”
- James Clapper: “I served as the fourth Director of National Intelligence.”
- Jim Semivan: “I spent 25 years as a senior official with the CIA.”
- Tim Gallaudet: “I retired from the Navy as a one star admiral after 32 years of service.”
- Hal Puthoff: “I worked on highly classified UAP programs for the government as a senior scientist.”
- Karl Nell: “I spent 32 years in and out of government in national security.”
- Eric Davis: “I’ve worked 28 years as an astrophysicist on highly classified UAP programs for the US Government as for the defense industry.”
- Garry Nolan: “I’m a professor in the department of pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and for the last ten years or so, I’ve been working with the Department of Defense and people in the CIA on the UAP topic.”
In a Nutshell:
- Chris Mellon: “I’ve come to the conclusion that we are not only not alone in the universe, but we have been discovered by an intelligence from some other part of the universe.”
- Hal Puthoff: “There’s evidence we are not alone.”
- Eric Davis: “Humanity is not the only intelligent species in the universe.”
- Ryan Graves: “We’re not alone in the universe.”
- Tim Gallaudet: “Humanity is not the only intelligence in the universe.”
- Jim Semivan: “UAP are real, they’re here, and they’re not human.”
- Hal Puthoff: “There are other intelligences that have highly advanced exotic craft interacting with the human population.”
- Chris Mellon: “They are here, this is real, it’s happening, it’s happening now.”
- Karl Nell: “Non-human intelligence exists, it’s been interacting with humanity, and it’s been doing so on this planet for a long time.”
- Garry Nolan: “We are not the only intelligent life form in the universe. There’s something here on the planet with us that is intelligent and more intelligent than us.”
- Chris Mellon: “This is the biggest discovery in human history.”
Opens with Lue Elizondo and Jay Stratton discussing their careers, hearing UAP reports, and starting the program that became AATIP. They discuss uncovering the secret Legacy UAP crash retrieval program.
- Stratton: “While we were trying to overcome all of these hurdles, we discovered another deeply hidden and much larger UAP program.”
- Elizondo: “This program was so sensitive that it was withheld from the Secretary of Defense, Congress, and even the President of the United States. This program is referred to as ‘The Legacy Program.’ This program had been capturing, retrieving, and reverse engineering UAPs since at least 1947.”
Eventually they realize that the only way to change the DoD is via Congress, so Lue quits to work outside while Stratton stays inside and forms the UAP task force. The film omits any mention of TTSA or Tom Delonge, discussing only “media attention” and including footage of interviews with Elizondo
Stratton mentions that media attention led to hill attention and requests for briefings, and introducing Congress to internal witnesses for private testimony. Elizondo and Mellon, together with Stratton, work with Congress to set up public hearings and whistleblower protections, which culminate in Grusch’s testimony.
They discuss disinformation pushback from the Legacy Program in the form of attacking Elizondo, interfering with the funding for the UAP task force, shutting down any attempts to communicate with members of the Legacy Program, as well as making legal donations to members of Congress with the expectation that they will interfere in Congressional attempts to open the topic.
No mention of AARO at all
Film ends on kind of an odd note, with a brief aside about the threat narrative, the possibility that alien energy tech could save the planet, and a discussion of amnesty as the path forward.
Closing caption: “In 2025, Senators Schumer, Rounds, and Gillibrand once again proposed their bipartisan UAP Disclosure Act with the hope of it finally being signed into law. Their efforts continue to receive pushback.”

New Claims

Main players in the Legacy program
- Elizondo: “The main players in the Legacy Program have long been the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Air Force, the Department of Energy, and major defense contractors. The CIA is responsible for the oversight of the overall effort.”
- Davis: “The Deputy Director of Science and Technology at the CIA controls the UAP crash retrieval portfolio.”
- Elizondo: “The US Air Force is responsible for field operations. These are the folks that are responsible for deploying within a moment’s notice anywhere in the world to go secure and retrieve crashed UAP.”
- Puthoff: “We have intelligence teams quickly notified if there’s some UAP event that might involve a crashed vehicle or pieces from a crashed vehicle… They’re so well organized that they basically can get to a site, gather material, whatever it is, and once it’s in their possession, they have the authority to classify it.”
- Elizondo: “The defense contractors are responsible for the exploitation and the reverse engineering and analysis of the materials.”
- Davis: “They provide technical and advisory services that the government doesn’t have.”
- Elizondo: “And last but not least is the Department of Energy. They are the world’s experts in anything that is related to either atomic or nuclear technology, or anything that gives off radiation. But there’s another advantage, because the Department of Energy has its own security classification system, well outside the overview and oversight of traditional classification systems like the Department of Defense or the intelligence community.”
- Davis: “They’ve used the security and classification language in the Atomic Energy Act to hide the Legacy crash retrieval program.”
Multiple species
- Elizondo: “On numerous occasions, these retrievals included the bodies of non-humans, some sort of intelligent being that is not human.”
- Puthoff: “The intelligence officials that have briefed on these crash retrievals have talked about a number of different species having been observed to be associated with the crash. Bodies recovered are not all of the same type.”
- Davis: “I’m aware of at least two advanced non-human species, one of which made contact with the Legacy crash retrieval program. The other of which, the bodies were recovered by the crash retrieval program in various programs.”
FAA doesn’t use radar anymore?
- Stratton: “In addition to the national security concerns, this violation of all nation’s sovereign airspace presents a safety of flight concern for all military and civilian avation. And the even scarier thing is that the Federal Aviation Administration stopped using radar to track our air travel. They only track aircraft, predominantly commercial and civilian, that are squawking, so they’re actually putting a signal into the system saying, ‘here’s where I am.’ The only way they know the UAP are there is if the pilot sees something and says something. The fact that the FAA is not tracking UAP is putting American lives at risk every day.”
25% mortality rate from UAP exposure
- Nolan: “Two individuals who represented themselves as being with the CIA and an aerospace company came to me and asked for my help. They had data of military personnel, intelligence officials, and others associated with the Department of Defense who had direct interactions with UAP, and because of that interaction suffered some kind of medical harm… These people had scarring inside of their bodies and inside of their brains. And if you think about it, if you get too close to the back end of a jet engine, or too close to the transformer system that’s powering your neighborhood, there’s energy coming out of those things. Those are just human technologies. Now imagine you’ve got something which is a more advanced technology, which is generating some kind of field that allows these objects to move. You can imagine if you get too close to it, you are gonna get harmed.”
- Mike Flaherty: “I spent ten years as an intelligence officer for the Navy, and before that six years as Air Force intelligence, and I spent time on the UAP task force. I’m one of the intelligence officials that has experienced biological effects of encountering UAP. Since my first encounter, I’ve observed other craft, orbs, we’ll call it exotic energy fields. Unfortunately, those of us who have investigated it, we become part of the investigation, or investigated by our colleagues. The population had about a 25% mortality rate within seven years of having an interaction. Probably important that the public understands that this is more than just an aerial phenomenon.”
Secretary of the Treasury Briefing
- Stratton: “Everyone in authority was paying attention to this topic. One very distinctive moment for me was briefing then Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. I got through my briefing, and at the end of the brief, he sat back in his chair and he said, ‘You know, Jay, you may wonder why I asked for this briefing.’ And he said ‘What are the economic impacts of the president going to the microphone and telling the world we’re not alone? I have to think about those kinds of impacts in order to prepare, if the president were to make that move.’”
Eric Davis and George HW Bush
- Davis: “I had a few private conversations with former president George HW Bush in 2003, in which he told me that when he became the CIA director in the Ford administration, he was not briefed on the Legacy UAP crash retrieval program. But he later found out about it, and he informed me that there were a number of crash retrievals that had taken place since the mid-1940s. And he also informed me of a UAP event that took place at Holloman Air Force Base in 1964, where three UAPs approached the base, one of them landed on the tarmac, and a non-human entity deboarded the craft that landed, and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel. And when he asked for more details, he was told that he did not have a need to know.”
27 person committee considered calling for Grusch and Elizondo’s execution
- Elizondo: “I received a call [from a friend], one of the staffers on the Hill, and he was very shaken up, and said, ‘Listen we had a very interesting meeting on the Hill.” An extremely, extremely, senior person in the US Government, in the intelligence community, told Congress, for the record, that there was a committee of 27 individuals, and I’m not going to go into code names here, that were mulling over the idea of using extreme measures to silence David [Grusch] and myself. To kill us. Now people say, ‘Oh, come on, that’s conspiracy.’ No, it’s not. We have done it before. Under certain circumstances, we have killed Americans without due process. If they are a clear and present national security threat, we can kill Americans. Now, it’s not done very often, but we can. Without a fair trial, they just, poof, disappear, right? So here I am. If I wind up a month from now, floating in the Potomac somewhere, you know what happened.”
- Matt Ford of the Good Trouble Show interviewed Elizondo after the movie came out:
- Ford: “In the movie, you discussed a plan that was under consideration by 27 people to have both you and David Grusch taken out… I was aware of this when this was occurring, and I can tell you separate of anything that Lue is about to say that this is accurate. This is not an exaggeration, this is not fiction. This is absolute fact, and I think this goes to illustrate the danger that people like Lue Elizondo, like David Grusch put themselves in when they come forward like this.”
- Elizondo: “I received three calls from separate people that were in that meeting. One of them was complete smash drunk. I guess whatever they heard bothered them very much where they went to the local watering hole right around the corner there in DC and decided to start drinking and that person gave me a call. Another one called me and I could hear them sniffling, and I thought they had a bad cold, but it turns out they were so upset by the conversation that they were crying and they were saying, ‘I can’t believe I just heard this here.’”
- Ford: “I had a conversation with an individual that was part of this classified briefing regarding this issue, and following the briefing, this individual went to the restroom and proceeded to throw up, they were so unbelievably upset about this.”

Marco Rubio Aftermath

The documentary includes maybe a minute or two of footage of Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying there have been “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.”
There was a bit of blowback because the film identifies him as Secretary of State Rubio, though the interview was done when he was a senator. At the time he gave other interviews, explaining why he found UFO whistleblowers compelling: “So we have people with very high jobs in the U.S. government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good. I don’t know the answer.”
In a Fox interview, given the opportunity to distance himself from the film, he stood by his remarks, saying “I’m not disavowing that… I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of… There have been things that fly over the airspace, restricted airspace, be it where we’re conducting military exercises or the like, and everyone in the government says they’re not ours. And so what I worry most about, just me personally, is that some adversary — another country, for example — has developed some asymmetric capability for surveillance or the like that we just are not prepared for.”
Then just a couple days ago, journalist Michael Schellenberger quoted a senior advisor to Marco Rubio saying “We are headed toward massive disclosure.”

References

Episode 80, posted on December 7, 2025