"The documentary asserts that an extensive, 80-year cover-up has obscured government knowledge of advanced nonhuman intelligence (NHI) and, perhaps more significantly, reverse-engineering efforts involving technology recovered from crash sites."
A Landmark Moment for Transparency
In a rare display of bipartisan unity, members of Congress recently gathered to witness one of the most significant documentary screenings in modern legislative history. "The Age of Disclosure," (ad) a film featuring 34 current and former high-
ranking government, military, and intelligence officials, represents a watershed moment in the decades-long struggle to bring transparency to the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) issue. The congressional screening signals that the once-stigmatized topic of UFOs has transcended the realm of fringe theories and entered the halls of serious policy discussion.
"Farah’s doc features 34 senior
U.S. Government insiders, including figures in the intelligence and military communities, who
claim there’s been an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human
intelligent life and an arms race between powerful nations to
reverse-engineer uncovered technology from these beings."
Festival crowds are notoriously exuberant—it can be
hard to get a real read on a film’s potential for broader success or
acclaim even if the first time it plays for a crowd at a film festival
results in
By The Credits 3-10-25
cheers and guffaws. Yet sometimes, for some films, a festival crowd’s excitement
is as precise an indicator for a film’s impact as you need. This was the case
here in Austin this past Sunday, when director Dan Farah showcased his doc The
Age of Disclosure for the first time ever to a crowd. His film, years in the
making in a production that was kept entirely secret, was astonishing in every
sense of the word. Being a part of the audience that got to witness the result
of this secretive, deeply researched film felt truly special. And terrifying.
The Age of Disclosure has a real shot at being 2025’s defining documentary, and
could, should start a real, sustained conversation about what seems now an
obvious fact—we are not alone.
“So, a lot of ‘Nova’ programs that we make, we make when we think that
there is a sufficient level of curiosity in the zeitgeist that we can
actually help shed light on essentially. So, we certainly didn’t set out
to just say that UFOs are
aliens
or UFOs are not aliens. We really wanted to know what science thinks
about these things.”
With all the sightings of strange objects in the
sky, people have been wondering for decades what these things can be.
Whether it’s Roswell or Area 51, people have been convinced there have
been beings from other planets visiting Earth. PBS’ “Nova” series
examines the phenomenon of UFOs.
By Francine Brokaw
Standard-Examiner
3-3-2025
[...]
“Nova” co-executive producer Chris Schmidt explained about why this
documentary is relevant today: “So, a lot of ‘Nova’ programs that we make, we
make when we think that there is a sufficient level of curiosity in the
zeitgeist that we can actually help shed light on essentially. So, we
certainly didn’t set out to just say that UFOs are aliens or UFOs are not
aliens. We really wanted to know what science thinks about these things.”
During journalist George Knapp’s November 17, 2023 interview with
me—which will appear in a Netflix UFO documentary series later this
year—Knapp began by asking me whether I was aware that the late US
Senator Harry Reid had read my book,
UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons
Sites.
I reminded George that he himself had briefly mentioned that fact earlier in
the year. Knapp then elaborated, saying that Reid had once told him that
revelations contained in the book—regarding UFOs monitoring and even tampering
with US nuclear missiles—were one of the reasons the then-powerful Senate
Majority Leader had secretly authorized government funding for a covert
Pentagon UFO study in 2007. That project ended up being called the Advanced
Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), which later morphed
into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Although a number of factors led to Reid’s decision to fund the secret
program, according to AATIP’s former director, retired US Army
counterintelligence special agent Luis Elizondo, I must confess that it is
rather gratifying to know that my published research apparently contributed to
the creation of one of the US Government's formal, if classified,
investigations of the UFO phenomenon.
Beginning in 1973, I had sought out and interviewed former or retired US Air
Force personnel who had either operated or guarded nuclear weapons, regarding
their personal UFO encounters at ICBM launch facilities, missile warhead/bomb
storage depots, and other nukes-related sites. My interest in the topic
resulted from a UFO radar-tracking incident that I had inadvertently witnessed
at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, in 1967, involving mysterious aerial objects
maneuvering near missile sites outside of the base.
As of 2023, 167 USAF veterans and other military personnel have gone
on-the-record for me and UFOs and Nukes is essentially a compilation of
some of those individuals’ tape recorded testimony. Collectively, their
revelations about unknown, technologically-advanced observers’ persistent
interest in America’s nuclear weapons clearly indicate a potential threat to
US national security. Moreover, my investigations unquestionably confirm that
the UFO-Nukes Connection is longstanding, widespread and ongoing. Upon reading
the book, Senator Reid was understandably concerned by the veterans’ dramatic
disclosures and, according to George Knapp, decided that a new, covert
investigation of them was warranted.
How the book came to the senator’s attention is rather intriguing. While
writing it, in 2005, I had sought the assistance of a physicist when composing
a chapter on faster-than-light (FTL) space travel, the assumption being
that—should UFOs indeed turn out to be extraterrestrial spacecraft—the
entities operating them would likely utilize exotic propulsion modes to travel
between their worlds and ours. I emailed several physicists who had written
peer-reviewed papers on FTL, to seek their input. The person who ended up
working with me was Dr. Harold “Hal” Puthoff. As the public now knows, Puthoff
became AATIP’s scientific advisor in 2007.
The first edition of UFOs and Nukes was published in July 2008. At that
time, it was only available at
my website. In December of that
year, Puthoff unexpectedly emailed me and asked that I overnight-ship four
copies to him. When I checked into the delivery charge involved, it turned out
to be more than a hundred dollars. I quickly wrote back to Puthoff, suggesting
that I simply ship the books via US Postal Media Mail, which would take five
days, but would be a much cheaper solution. Upon receiving my response,
Puthoff immediately called me and said that he had an upcoming meeting with
some “movers and shakers in Washington” two days hence, and he wanted to
distribute copies of the book to them. At that, I rush-shipped the order.
Years later, when the now-famous bombshell article exposing the existence of
AATIP appeared in The New York Times, on December 16, 2017, Hal Puthoff was
identified as a member of the secret project. Stunned, I wrote to him shortly
thereafter, asking him whether he remembered the overnight-shipping episode in
2008. He confirmed that he did and then told me that AATIP director Lue
Elizondo had been one of the recipients of my book.
(In 2021, during
a podcast, Elizondo confirmed that AATIP had utilized UFOs and Nukes during its
own investigation of nuclear weapons-related UFO activity, and said that I had
done “a fantastic job” researching the subject.)
In any case, in 2017, when I asked Puthoff who had received the other three
copies of the book during his 2008 meeting with the “movers and shakers”, he
declined to answer. Now, given George Knapp’s recent comments to me, I am
certain that one of them was US Senator Harry Reid.
"Billed in Netflix press materials as a 'detective story,' Encounters relies on both firsthand accounts and also the testimony of various scientists and military officials to delve into reports of suspected extraterrestrial phenomena."
The upcoming docuseries is the latest in recent years to explore UFOs in the wake of a 2017 article in the New York Times that first exposed a shadowy Pentagon program to study
what the government officially refers to as UAP, short for unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Directed by Yon Motskin, each episode of the series produced by Stephen Spielberg's Amblin Television, Boardwalk Pictures and Vice Studios explores a separate report of a mass sighting in a different part of the world.
Chris Mellon is a member of Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy and claims
he got the videos "in the Pentagon parking lot."
In the recently released
UFO documentary The Phenomenon, Chris Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence, stated that he was the source who provided the New York
Times with the three infamous UFO videos it published in 2017.
Lt. Col. Robert Friend was in charge of Project Blue Book, the military’s
famous UFO study.
A retired Air Force official in charge of one of its
most famous UFO research efforts said before his death last year that
the effort may have been scuttled not because it was fruitless, but just
the opposite.
By Ed Mazza The Huffington Post
10-15-20
In a clip from the new documentary “The Phenomenon,” Lt. Col. Robert Friend
pointed to the sudden closure of Project Blue Book in 1969.
Tucker Carlson: It’s ‘Outrageous’ the Government Is Still Hiding Evidence of UFOs
As he often does, Tucker Carlson took a break from talking politics for a few minutes at the very end of his Fox News show on Friday night — to talk about aliens and UFOs.
By Phil Owen The Wrap 10-9-20
The last time Tucker talked about aliens on his show was mid-September, when we got the the news that there is very likely some form of life on Venus. This time, the topic was prompted by the release of an obscure new documentary called “The Phenomenon” — which claims to be, according to the product description on Vudu, “the most credible examination of the global mystery and cover-up involving UFOs.”
Former U.S.
Senator Harry Reid
repeated claims in a new documentary that UFOs interfered in U.S nuclear
weapons facilities – even prohibiting the weapons’ launch altogether.
In the documentary “The Phenomenon” that released Tuesday,
By Laura Widener americanmilitarynews.com
10-6-20
Reid said, repeating claims told to him, “If they had been called upon by the
president to launch [the nukes] they couldn’t have done it.”
'It’s not a question of belief': the film examining government UFO records
The Phenomenon studies the history of UFO claims from the 1940s to this
summer’s revelation of a Department of Defense investigation into military
sightings
The question of unexplained phenomena and
Unidentified Flying Objects have long fascinated the public, as the
subject of feverish American news coverage in the years post-second
world war and too many films and investigative documentaries
By Adrian Horton The Guardian 10-7-20
to count, all landing on speculation without certainty. But the frenetic,
oxygen-sucking rollercoaster of headlines in the Trump administration has
overshadowed a cascade of strange evidence released by the government in
recent years: in 2017, the New York Times revealed the existence of a shadowy,
partly classified government program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFO reports from deep
within the Pentagon.
This is the grounding fact presented in The Phenomenon, a documentary from
longtime UFO enthusiast James Fox which updates longstanding extraterrestrial
theories with recent government regulations....
“The day the sun didn’t come up was so surreal. I
mean, it was literally apocalyptic. There was this orange glow in the
sky all day, the sky was orange and dark and everybody was walking
around like they were in some matrix. It was eerie and spooky and
unsettling, and it was like, let’s get the hell out of here, man, we
can’t even breathe fresh air.”
James Fox is doing the
phoner from somewhere in Arizona, where the choking ashes from
multiple conflagrations near his home in
By Billy Cox De Void
10-6-20
northern California aren’t filtering through the seams and powdering the
pillows. He and his family left the state a couple of weeks ago; with any
luck, the weather will have taken a more rational turn when they return home
in November.
This is a huge moment for the director of “The
Phenomenon,” which is premiering online today following 7½ years of
soul-searching and turmoil during its bumpy production schedule. The
documentary – Fox’s fourth on UFOs – is drawing
rave endorsements
from some of its featured subjects, including the likes of Bill Richardson,
John Podesta, Chris Mellon, Jacques Vallee (“the most credible documentary
ever made about UFOs”) and
Luis Elizondo. But, after being plagued by budget shortfalls, transient partnerships, the
collapse of a major distribution agreement that might’ve translated the film
into 50 languages and opened in nearly 200 countries, and (of course)
COVID-19, Fox sounds exhausted by the ordeal.
“I’m not trying to
sound melodramatic, but that film nearly killed me. In every way,” he says.
“Mentally, physically, psychologically, like I was in the ring with a monster
and I was literally just trying to survive to the next round.”
There’s a load to unpack in this 101-minute treatment of The Great Taboo, and
enough material in storage for an additional five-part mini-series. But maybe
the greatest source of Fox’s anxiety was the ending, which culminates with a
textbook Close Encounter of the Third Kind incident involving African
schoolkids in 1994. If UFO hardware, videos and radar tracks get clogged in
the windpipes of the American mainstream, purported interactions with the
voyagers themselves are the subculture’s gaudy emetics. When he first heard
about the faceoff, Fox’s instinct was to run the other way.
“If you’ve seen any of my work, you know I don’t do CE-3 stories, I cover CE-1
and CE-2,” he recalls. “And knowing full well that most of the high-profile
officials I interviewed for the film wanted to see the whole documentary
before they signed off on it, I knew that going there would be a slippery
slope, and incredibly challenging.”
Fox learned about the Zimbabwe playground incident in the 1990s, when he was
“naïve enough” to think he could cop an interview with Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg’s intermediary, a mutual friend, got back to Fox and told him Mr.
Hollywood wasn’t interested in chatting. However, she added, “he does want you
to know there’s an incredibly compelling landing case in Africa and you should
look into it.
“And I thought, there’s no way a UFO could land in broad daylight at a school,
where the occupants could get out and interact with children, without the
entire world knowing about it. And I thought, if I was gonna dismiss it that
quickly, the general public was gonna dismiss it even quicker.”
But after taking a look at the footage recorded in the immediate aftermath,
with the young eyewitnesses struggling to make sense of what they saw, Fox was
a fish on a hook, and with a major dilemma: How to get the most credible
authorities in his documentary to consent to participate in a film that ends
with a CE-3 kicker? “To have to cut any of them out because of this,” he says,
“would’ve been devastating.”
None bailed. In fact, off-the-record accounts of high-strangeness imparted to
Fox by some of those same folks suggested that maybe what happened in Zimbabwe
was more palatable than he initially believed: “What I learned from meetings
with some of these high-level people shocked me, in terms of the evidence
they’ve seen, and the evidence that’s not been released. I think about this
almost every day. And as (retired Senator) Harry Reid says in the movie, what
ended up on the front page of the New York Times (12/16/17) is just the tip of
the iceberg.”
Among the angles in Fox’s odyssey that will likely never see the light of day
is how he managed to nail down the Zimbabwe story. He promised never to air
that part of the journey, but the way it happened reinforces Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s famous truism, “There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it
doesn’t matter who gets the credit.” Because with one stroke of generosity
that will not appear in the credits, “The Phenomenon” was allowed to become
something more than just another UFO tale.
“Now that I’m a dad,” says Fox, who has a 6-year-old son, “I look at children
differently. I care about their future. There’s a very powerful environmental
message in this film. I didn’t create it, I just highlighted it.
“We need congressional hearings. This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea, this is
something that’s realistically possible, based on some of the meetings I’ve
been in. And the only way we’re gonna get any traction with elected officials
is to rattle their cages. They need their constituents to rattle their cages.
That’s it.”
Released on Tuesday, James Fox's new documentary The
Phenomenon, offers a historical inquiry into UFOs. Or what the U.S.
Military refers to as "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."
[...]
By Tom Rogan www.washingtonexaminer.com 10-5-20
Centering on more credible witnesses, such as military observers, Fox documents
how UFOs are not something new. He examines the so-called "Foo Fighter" wave of
UFOs that were seen by American pilots over Europe and the Asia-Pacific during
World War II. Fox also studies the heavy occurrence of UFOs in and around
nuclear sites. The correlation of UFO reports and the development of the atomic
bomb is seen by some analysts as a critical point of note. Again, Fox breaks
news here, getting former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the record as
saying that UFOs have, on occasion, even interfered with U.S. nuclear weapons
systems (note that the U.S. Navy's aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered). This
nuclear interference has been previously — and extensively — reported by Robert
Hastings. However, to have Reid, who was instrumental in the forming of the
Pentagon's 2009-2017 UFO program, corroborate that reporting is important for
its political salience. On that point, we should note that Sen. Marco Rubio,
current Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now demanding a new
Pentagon report on UFOs.
Twenty-four minutes into the
long-awaited documentary
“The Phenomenon,” director James Fox foreshadows its final act with a
look back at what happened outside Australia’s Westall School in 1966.
That’s when several hundred students came swarming out of their
classrooms upon hearing about a disc-shaped UFO stunting in broad
daylight over the power lines near the athletic field. They watched it
descend below the treeline, rise again, turn on its broad side, and zip
away at a crazy velocity.
By Billy Cox De Void
9-29-20
Fifty years later, a handful of those eyewitnesses reconvene to share not only
their sighting experience, but how they watched local and federal authorities
cordon off the landing area to conduct an investigation. They were also warned
by the administration during a subsequent school assembly that they hadn’t seen
what they said they saw. Even today, a faculty member who watched that event
unfold agreed to go on camera only after being assured of anonymity. For anyone
who’s followed the mystery for any length of time, stories like these are
generically familiar. Indeed, much of the setup follows a conventional arc with
names (from Gen. Roger Ramey to John Podesta), places (Roswell, Bentwaters,
Malmstrom AFB) and events (from Kenneth Arnold’s “flying saucer” sighting in
1947 to the 2004 Tic Tac incident off California) that are staples of the UFO
timeline. But Fox is targeting a much larger audience, and establishing baseline
frames of reference for the uninitiated is absolutely critical for the emotional
wallop “The Phenomenon” packs at the end.
With American democracy on
the ropes and institutional norms degenerating into banana-republic spittle,
convincing audiences to divert their attention, if only momentarily, to what has
long been libeled as freak-show culture is a big ask.
It’s always been
a big ask. However, the fringe is also deteriorating, and things are happening
quickly now. Whether it’s the formation of the Pentagon UAP Task Force or the
anticipated release of the military intelligence report on UFOs to the Senate,
the landscape on the other side of the election is already evolving into
something for which we are unprepared. And “The Phenomenon” forces us to go even
deeper, to maybe even reassess the longstanding status quo on UFOs, as maybe a
crime against nature – human nature.
To be sure, Fox delivers twists that may take some cognoscenti by surprise.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon, for
instance, recalls how Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper broached the UFO subject
with President Clinton during a Cabinet meeting. Dispatched by SecDef William
Cohen to learn more, Mellon remembers hitting the wall when a USAF colonel told
him the pertinent records had been “cleaned up or thrown out to save space.”
Mellon goes on to recount how “somebody bent the rules” to get the
celebrated F-18 UFO chase videos to him in the parking lot of the Pentagon. He also professes how
“extraordinarily disappointed” he was in the NY Times groundbreaking story of
12/16/17, which showcased the videos and exposed the existence of the $22
million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Instead of focusing on AATIP, Mellon says, “the real story, in my mind at least,
should’ve been, these things are real, they’re here, this is happening now.”
“The Phenomenon” also takes us behind the scenes and gives us tantalizingly
brief glimpses into the research underway right now on purported UFO debris
collected “as far back as 1947.” French physicist/computer scientist/pioneer
UFOlogist Jacques Vallee says colleagues are investigating material that is
manufactured, not natural, by employing technology that allows researchers to
peer into atomic structure so deeply it is “impossible to fake.” Stanford Med
School microbiology professor Garry Nolan displays the “multiparameter ion beam
imager,” and discusses how it determined that the samples’ isotopic compositions
are unique to any metals known on Earth.
“If you’re talking about an advanced material from an advanced civilization,
you’re talking about something that I’ll just call an ultramaterial, right,”
Nolan tells Fox. “It’s something which has properties where somebody is putting
it together at the atomic scale. So we’re building our world with 80 elements,
somebody else is building the world with 253 different isotopes.”
But beyond isotopic ratios, a discussion of threats to the superpowers’ nuclear
arsenals, and the bureaucratic intrigues, “The Phenomenon” poses an even more
fundamental question: More than 70 years into the “modern” UFO era, where have
the morals or ethics of denial and obfuscation left us? In a more recent version
of what happened at the Westall School in Australia, Fox leads us to the Ariel
School in Zimbabwe, and into the life-altering mass encounter that went down in
1994.
Using a remarkable anthology of contemporaneous BBC video testimony from dozens
of schoolkids discussing what they saw 26 years ago, Fox reunites a handful of
those students for interviews as adults. All have had decades to contemplate
that moment, an experience which diverged sharply from your average
lights-in-the-sky fare. They reported seeing small beings outside the vehicle,
the apparent occupants, with large heads and huge, hypnotic black eyes. Many
received telepathic messages, largely dystopian, about the fate of the Earth and
technology’s role in its sickness.
Most poignant are the interviews conducted by the late Harvard psychiatrist John
Mack, whose onsite empathy and compassion in 1994 clearly moved some of those
kids to extraordinary reflection. To her credit, unlike in Australia, at least
one Ariel School official encouraged the children to “say exactly what you want
to say” as cameras assembled for interviews. Decades later, however, at least
one of the alums admitted to having misgivings about sharing her experience so
freely, “being so young and not even being allowed time to able to comprehend
what we had seen.” She added, “Our teacher certainly didn’t believe us, so that
was a big deal because we had to continue going to school there.”
By time Fox’s production team arrived in rural Ruwa, former Ariel teacher and
current headmistress Judy Bates had her own on-camera confession to make all
these years later: “I wanted to apologize, I should’ve taken more notice, but I
didn’t. I was more concerned about me and not them, and what was going on in my
own personal experience.” Her verdict: “Aliens visited us – and that’s about
it.”
Fox knows the Zimbabwe material is dynamite, and he’s smart
enough to back off and let the images breathe. It’s not so much what the kids
said back then as how they said it. They struggled to articulate what was going
on behind their eyes, and they expressed themselves with a halting uncertainty
that seemed to wobble between wonder and trauma. The adults failed them then,
just as they failed the Aussie kids in 1966, as well as countless others who’ve
been ostracized and doubting their sanity since whenever this all started.
Bottom line, “The Phenomenon” is a call to action. Fox puts an urgent human face
on the current momentum towards transparency, and he leaves us with a small
window into the price we pay for doing nothing. Someday, if and when the veil
parts, we may regret having peeked. But the consequences of being shielded from
the view are self-evident. And time is running out.
James Fox's feature exploring 70 years of history behind proving UFOs
exist will now have a digital release on Oct. 6.
UFO documentary The Phenomenon, which takes
an expansive look across 70 years' worth of history behind proving the
existence of UFOs, right up to the latest discoveries, has a new trailer
and release date.
By Alex Ritman The Hollywood Reporter
9-15-20
The feature — from director James Fox — was originally slated for a wide North
American theatrical release via 1091 Pictures this fall, but due to the COVID-19
pandemic will now premiere worldwide on all digital platforms on Oct. 6.
If aliens exist, eventually we’ll know about it. How will we find out? What will they want? These are the kinds of questions that spark our imaginations every single day. Could the revelation possibly come in the form of a documentary? If the
By Germain Lussier
Gizmodo
2-2-20
language being used to promote The Phenomenon is right, maybe it will.
Directed by James Fox and narrated by Peter Coyote, The Phenomenon is a new documentary that covers over 70 years of UFO history.
