The Age of Disclosure: Who Actually Controls the UAP Secrets? — Dan Farah on Shane Smith’s show (2026-06-18)
Source: VICE News, Shane Smith’s interview show (SSHQ). Episode: “The Age of Disclosure: Who Actually Controls the UAP Secrets? w/ Dan Farah”. Host: Shane Smith (VICE co-founder). Guest: Dan Farah, director of the documentary The Age of Disclosure (now on Amazon Prime).
URL: https://youtu.be/MWM5AtR3n9o Published: 2026-06-18. Duration: 1:19:12.
Captured: 2026-06-18 via youtube_transcript.py (YouTube auto-captions). Speaker turns are approximate — the auto-caption stream marks a turn change with >> but does not reliably attribute host vs. guest; read attribution from context. Ad reads for the sponsor (Lucy nicotine) are left in place as captured.
What this is: verbatim auto-caption transcript of a promotional long-form interview for the film. It is overwhelmingly a restatement of the documentary’s existing claims; the recent (May-June 2026) declassification-dump items Farah cites are tracked elsewhere in the base (PURSUE releases, the May 14 DOAC roundtable, the 1948 Navy memo capture). New-info assessment: 2026-06-18-farah-shane-smith-interview-new-info.
Analysis: age-of-disclosure-documentary.
There’s been all kinds of UAPs seen over the years. There’s been crafts that look like flying saucers. Uh there’s been orbs, aerospace vehicles that look like tic tacs. You seem like a regular sane person and you make this documentary.
Age of Disclosure debuted at number one on Amazon Prime. The Age of Disclosure. Really good. Can’t recommend it enough. The Age of Disclosure. The Age of Disclosure. The Age of Disclosure. What’s the biggest surprise? It surprised me how in sync everyone I talked to was regardless of the fact that most of them didn’t know each other. They had different belief systems, but they all were saying the same thing. All right, here we go. I’m very excited about this. I know when I’m excited about a podcast because I have too many questions A and I want to ask them all at the same time. B. So, we’re going to relax. Cool. We’re going to go slow. We’re here with Dan Farah, Hollywood producer. Began your career as an assistant in ICM. Made a film, very, very, very famous film, Ready Player One, with a very famous guy, Steven Spielberg. So, you’re like a success in Hollywood. And then you make one of the best documentaries of all time, number one, uh, Doc on Prime. The American people are ready to receive the truth. Humanity is not the only intelligence in the universe to distill it because I’ve been following the sort of UAP UFO we’re not alone thing as a journalist you know I was a skeptic and you know let’s put some rigor into the study and what I had a problem with and this is why I like your film so much what I had a problem with is not the facts but the delivery of the facts everyone was crazy or looked crazy or was a wing nut. And so the the message was getting killed by the messengers. And then I watched your film which is bipartisan. It has everybody all the presidents. You have Obama, Clinton, Trump, you have Rubio, you have pretty much every senator and congressperson on the bipartisan committees for intelligence and you have NSA directors all saying it’s real. First of all, Dan Farah, thank you for being here. The film is The Age of Disclosure. I recommend everyone go see it. You can see it on Prime. It’s number one doc on Prime. Thanks for being here. Let’s get into it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Problem Spielberg. You do a film with him, Ready Player One. Then you do The Age of Disclosure, and that guy does Disclosure Day right around the same time. I am much more inclined now than I was when I made Close Encounters. to really believe that we’re not the only intelligent civilization in the universe. I think it’s great. I think it’s great. Yeah. So, first off, I think he’s the greatest filmmaker of all time. Hands down. Like indisputable. The greatest. Um, also my interest in this topic comes from his work. So, like I’m I’m 46. My childhood was the 80s and 90s and I grew up watching movies like Close Encounters and ET. Um, Close Encounters made the biggest impact on me. It’s hands down my favorite film of all time. And it really, you know, it captivated me. It made me interested about this topic, you know, made me think about those big questions like, are we alone in the universe? Does the US government in fact know more about this topic than, you know, pop culture suggests? You know, what’s the key thesis and close encounters, ET, TV shows like X Files is that the government does in fact know more about this or keeps the truth from the public. I constantly wished someone would make a serious sober doc about this topic and only interview people who have direct knowledge of it as a result of working for the US government, you know, cuz like you I I always felt like the coverage of this topic kind of felt short, you know, it wasn’t the right people talking about it and and even like the great docs made over the years, they would always have some weak link. They’d have somebody in there where just kind of like, okay, who’s this knucklehead, right? Um, so I always wish something like that existed. And then years later, um, when I was working with him on Ready Player One and I was on set and watching him direct in person, you know, just a few feet away, watching him construct scenes and and and and you know, put a story together and and do his thing. Um, I was just super inspired to want to direct something after years of producing. And and when I started thinking about what that would be, I kept coming back to this doc that I always wish existed. So that was sort of um you know simply put there would be no age of disclosure without the age of Steven Spielberg. That’s for sure. This episode is sponsored by Lucy. Get 20% off your first order when you buy online at lucy.co/quests with promo code questions. That’s lucy.co/questions with promo code questions. And if you don’t want to wait, check out their store locator and find where you can pick up Lucy near you. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age and every customer is age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. So, he’s doing disclosure day. It’s it’s timing, but it’s also timing, I want to say, in the zeitgeist cuz it feels like this was the area of sort of conspiracy theories and, you know, the edge, the periphery. Yeah. And now I would say partially at least due to your film, you have the government actually having disclosures and and and you know having data dumps uh you know a lot of it heavily redacted and we can get into what are they giving us but at least they’re giving us something and politicians are willing to go on the like Rubio is very surprised but like on the record and and which they haven’t been because of this ridicule phenomena. um which I want to get into later. That’s more uh down the line. But um you know, how did you get uh some of the big names to to to come up and and be public about you know that the that they know that this that these things are happening, that they’re aware of the information and to go on record. Yeah. So, when I first decided I wanted to try to make this film, uh, a film that would be the most credible doc ever made on the topic, um, I I got some introductions to a few intelligence officials who had worked on this topic for the US government and spent months getting to know them, earning their trust. Amongst those was Jay Stratton, who was the director of the US government’s UAP task force, the largest whole of government investigation ever of UAP and nonhuman intelligent life. Um, and in these private private meetings, I started sharing my vision for the age of disclosure. And I learned in those conversations that the reason people like Stratton or Rubio hadn’t gone and spoken out um about everything they legally could is simply they just didn’t have they never got presented the right form to do it. None of them wanted to go and participate in some big streamer or movie studios documentary because they knew it would be sensationalized. They wouldn’t they would be intercut with random people. Uh there’s just so many ways that could go wrong for them, right? Um no one wanted to go on a single news program like a Fox or CNN. The country is so bifurcated and you know it’s in its point of views like you know half the country watches one, half country watches the other. Also at most you’re going to get five or six minutes. The anchor is not really going to have any real understanding of the situation. The conversation will be all over the place. you know, it’s a very difficult arena to present these ideas, these these the this information. And so, they just really didn’t have a way to do it. On top of that, none of them wanted to be the one guy out on a limb saying these extraordinary things and being subject to the the push back and the ridicule, right? There’s a very real disinformation campaign that has sort of ruled the day over the last 80 years. And anyone who sticks their head up and starts to tell the public the truth gets gets repercussions. uh a lot of these people have had their lives in danger. A lot of them have their careers ruined, their reputations ruined. So, no one wanted to be the one guy out on a limb being subject to that, right? And so, what I when I started to learn the reasons why they had not stepped out the truth uh in the way that they could, uh I started presenting basically a solution to that. Uh I started to socialize in this community of people that I would make this movie completely independently. I would independently finance it. Uh every we’d make it in complete secrecy. everyone would sign strict NDAs. I would make everyone who participates aware of who else is participating and what is being revealed. So there’s no, you know, there’s no surprises and um we would keep it only people who have direct knowledge of this topic as a result of working for the US government in some capacity, whether that’s military, intelligence community, defense contractors. And so the bar would be there. They wouldn’t have to worry about being intercut with some, you know, dude from the History Channel. And um no knock on the History Channel, but just this is a different thing, right? Shout out to Ancient Aliens. And it would be handled very seriously. incred in an incredible fashion. A fantastic job. And so, thank you. And so, basically that that sort of game plan caught wind and I started getting passed around, you know, eventually to senior senators like Rubio and Rounds and Gillibrand and people from the White House National Security Council and it started to build momentum. And then a really interesting thing happened like at a point in this process essentially my doc became the plan for disclosure. So people like Rubio who were aware of a lot of information and their teams around them decided the way he would bring about disclosure is by participating in this documentary. And everyone knew that this was going to take time to put together. You know made this over the course of a few years in secrecy but everyone felt like you know it was worth you know doing it right taking the time to do it and that this would be the way to bring about change. I was told early on that the release of the dock would be followed uh within a few months by a presidential action and that’s exactly what happened. The movie came out 11:21 November 21st 2025 and on February 19th Trump issued a presidential directive instructing all federal agencies to identify evidence of UAP and non-human intelligent life and to declassify it. and this process got got put in motion to go into the complexity and nuance of it. Rubio, when you’re talking to him, um, says, you know, there’s the government and there’s there’s the government. There’s people who have had the job for 30 years. Um, you know, they’re they’re bureaucrats uh that that don’t feel they’ve seen guys like me come and go and they don’t they don’t feel, you know, that I have the need to know. There’s presidents, there’s other people that’s been told they don’t have the need to know. It’s literally the definition not to add conspiracy onto conspiracy but it’s literally the definition of a deep state. It’s like look there are people there are career technocrats bureaucrats who are just making these decisions. So people are like well if the government knows why doesn’t the government tell us? Yeah. And legacy program which starts uh as a CIA uh air force uh defense contractors but the department of energy. Well I got that I’m coming. But smartly they do the department of energy. Why? Because they have all the atomic secret war act things so that they can keep it secret and they can keep this. So there’s the government and the government. So you’ve got these four four agencies. What does the what what does the legacy program do? What was it designed to do? And if tell me the beginning of it because it was the start of the CIA and all. So, so a number of the interview subjects in my doc uh reveal that a program referred to as the legacy program has gatekept this information for basically 80 years. And that program involves elements of the CIA. It’s not the CIA as a whole. It’s certain people within the CIA. Um certain elements within the Department of Energy, certain elements within the US Air Force, and then private defense contractors. So um that means companies like Lockheed Martin or North of Grumman um and uh this program uh is the people in my film explained it’s quarterbacked by the CIA. So they’re like operational control and all the other players serve certain purposes. So they explain that the air force is actually uh like sort of like in control of field operations like doing actual retrievalss of crashed UAP traveling them back to wherever they store them, you know. So if a if a UAP, a UFO crashes, it would be elements of the Air Force that go and retrieve it. They can also use other branches of the military special forces like they could use a Navy Seal team if they needed to, but they they retrieve this technology. And then um Department of Energy plays the role of first off they they’re the experts on anything that gives off massive amounts of energy. Um but they also have um a classification system that sits outside of the intelligence community’s classification system and basically just can allow them to keep secrets easier, right? Um and then defense contractors they play the role of um the reverse engineering work to try to reverse engineer this technology uh because they’ve got all the best engineer you know private the private sector the contractor world is where all the best engineers are and the people who are you know the best at identifying how this technology could work and then trying to reverse engineer it. So Rubio explains in the film how over the years you defense contractors have gotten a lot of control of this situation within within that that that that org chart, that organization known as the legacy program because um he breaks it down. He says, you know, imagine you’re a defense contractor and you’re given some technology in the 40s that the government can’t figure out and there’s a government overseer of this very secretive project to figure it out. The contractor stays constant. They keep working on it. That that government overseer, he retires or he dies. Another guy comes in. He he knows the project exists, but he doesn’t know the real origin, backstory of the program. He doesn’t know everything they’ve figured out. Um he’s just aware it’s there. Uh then that guy retires or dies. And then another guy comes in. Again, the contractor staying constant. They’re staying, they’re working away at this thing. They’re aware of all the information. But then, you know, the third overseer, he doesn’t even know the project exists. Then you jump forward to like you know 50 60 years and the people who were in the position the elected positions to of government oversight right they have absolutely no idea any of this even exists or did exist right and so he breaks this down and my the the Rubio interview was was a special one for me because um you know he he really understood the full picture better than any elected official at the time. He was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He he and the rest of the committee had learned about the reality of the situation. They learned the extent of the cover up. They signed agreements that they would face jail time or in some cases some people claim it would cost them their lives if they spoke out about these things. He really wanted to inform the public in the best way he could. And so the tone of his interview with me was very much like let me let me tell you how the world works. Even presidents have often been operating on a need to- know basis. That’s certainly true from a historic standpoint. The rationale, the justification was the president shouldn’t know about these things because that way the president always has deniability. All they need is a nod in this direction or in that direction. But that begins to ramp out of control. Frankly, I don’t even know a president would know who to ask. You could go to the director of the CIA nowadays, uh the director of national intelligence and ask them, and even that person may not know. It’s like, “All right, kid. Let me tell you the world works. And he’s just very matter of fact. And he breaks down how, you know, the truth has not only been kept from the public and Congress, but from sitting presidents. And he, as you, as you mentioned earlier, he breaks down as how these career bureaucrats can sit there in these positions of power for 20, 30 years um within like CIA or Department of Energy or the Air Force. They’re unelected bureaucrats and they can just gatekeep information and they they have this attitude of well, we can just wait out any administration. So that’s what’s happening right now. even following President Trump’s directive, a lot of these federal agencies, they’re they’re not turning over the evidence they have or they’re just playing dumb and saying, “Oh, we don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s there’s no there there.” Yeah. I liked one of your things which is um the Navy and I’ve interviewed a couple of the pilots, but the Navy started having, you know, we, you know, we’re having our pilots seeing these things. We’re reporting them. We’re recording them. The controller had told us that these objects uh had been observed for over two weeks, coming down from over 80,000 ft, rapidly descending to 20,000 ft, hanging out for hours, and then going straight back up. For those who don’t realize, above 80,000 ft is space. You know, they’re coming to bases, etc., etc. And the Air Force because it’s part of the latest are like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re not seeing any of that stuff. And the Navy has more and more and more various different groups are seeing more and more. And the Air Force is saying, oh, nothing to see. And it’s been that way for a long time. So, one of the pieces of evidence that was actually released la just last week la this past Friday 4 days ago um was a memo from 1948 internal memo from the US Navy where the commander of all naval operations was essentially instructing the entire naval force uh to be on the lookout for UAP because there was an increase in flying saucer sightings at the time And in the memo, it says that the head of naval operations is instructing everyone to report what they see, not up the naval chain of command, but to the air force. And so, you can just see how like the system was put in place where like, hey, we’re we’re controlling this situation. We message out to all the other branches of the military. We’ve got this, you know, and then they can get the information and they can lock it down. So there’s there seems to be an all like a sort of fight um where some people are saying hey look these UAPs exist. Now let’s get back to when we talk about this stuff and the legacy program. This isn’t like rumor myth and innuendo. These are the top government officials saying yes this exists and yes we have seen proof that this exists. I just want to be clear about that. Yeah. One of the reasons why it’s happening now is people are saying, “Hey, our safety, our security, our sovereignty are being challenged by these entities that that are UAPs that we don’t that aren’t on they’re not on any flight plan. They’re not on anything. So, we have to figure it out because hey, this is a threat.” Sane, right? That’s a good reaction for our politicians. They are then met with this resistance, the uh the ridicule, the the legacy program. So there seems to be a sort of internal war going on. Maybe explain. Yeah, 100%. There’s there’s a there’s a tug of war happening behind the scenes. There’s a number of officials who have learned the truth and want to make it a national priority. Um those people have made it a national priority. They want to keep it a national priority and they want to they want to inform the public um of the truth. Right? Then there’s people behind the scenes who are completely opposed to that. They think secrecy is the best path forward. Uh they don’t think the American public needs to know the full picture. Um they don’t want to lose any uh control of the information they have now. You know, in in that arena, um power comes from control of information and and the people who have been gatekeeping this, they don’t want to um they don’t want to lose the control and power they have. Um there there there have been some some people who have been involved in keeping the secret uh legitimately think the public can’t handle the full truth. Uh I think my documentary shows people can right people aren’t watching this movie and you know jumping out of windows losing their minds. They’re it makes them more curious. They want to know more, you know. Um I think we can handle the truth. So I think that that sort of like battle’s being waged in small private rooms right now. Um and then you know people people tend to uh mistakenly view the government as like this big whole you know all as one right as if it moves in lock step. It it doesn’t even with a presidential directive to identify this evidence and declassify it. It all of these gatekeepers within all these different silos of the national security kingdom. you know, these like 1920 agencies, they all they’re all their own little kingdoms, right? And within those kingdoms, there’s differing opinions, too. You know, um there’s people who keep secrets from their own colleagues within these federal agencies. So, the process of getting the biggest secret of all time out of each of these is is is complicated and challenging. One thing I’ve learned about spending half my life in airports, hotels, and long drives is that everybody has some little ritual that gets them through the day. Lucy makes nicotine gum and pouches, and they’ve got everything from mint to mango to espresso and apple cider. Whatever your preference is, they’ve got it covered. Now, I’ve checked out the gum recently, and one thing I liked is that the flavor actually sticks around. It doesn’t feel like it’s gone in 30 seconds after you start chewing it. The breakers are exactly what they sound like. There’s a capsule inside that you crack when you want another hit of flavor. Get 20% off your first order when you buy online at lucy.co/questions with promo code questions. That’s lucy.co/questions with promo code questions. And if you don’t want to wait, check out their store locator and find where you can pick up Lucy near you. And here comes the fine print. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age and every customer’s age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Bro, if I lean in like this, am I am I screwing up your frame there? So, I’m getting ready right now to interview Dan Farah, who’s the producer and director of the age of disclosure, which is a fantastic doc about the disclosure around UAPs and non-human intelligence known as UFOs and aliens. The Trump administration has done dumps of whistleblower testimonies, congressional reports, military memos, court records. So, I just got a lot of these documents. I put them into my PDF space, which is Adobe Acrobat. And I’m asking it some questions. There’s the sort of holy grail of documents. It was rumored for many, many years that there was a pictures of UAPs on the moon taken by the lunar lander. And in fact, the UAP from the lunar lander, the picture of it was in that dump, which is crazy. It’s the beginning of all other stories. Does God exist? Is God an alien? Are we alone? How long have they been here? It’s crazy, crazy, crazy. So, I made a PDF space. I’m going back and forth with it to sort of digest these documents so I can sound smart with my interview with Dan Farah, producer, director of the age of disclosure. Why? because it’s an age of disclosure. We’re disclosing the truth. Bango. People would say, “Well, that’s one of the things like whenever it was brought up before, uh, well, you think all these people are going to keep this secret, like thousands and thousands of people. We can’t keep any secrets.” Blah, blah, blah. A B, I don’t think people understand you could keep a secret if it was for national security or national secrets. Have you a war or something, which a lot of people like, well, China has stuff. we have so which I want to get into like the stuff isn’t just coming to us it’s going to other people and they’re reverse engine a big part of the rhetoric however to go back to your point the biggest uh story that you you know that that that we’re trying to break here why because the minute someone says or unequivocally we say here are you know here’s the the the the UAP like the actual physical one or here are the biologics or here’s something whatever that’s like Okay. What is God? You know, was was God alien? Like like you know, how long have they been coming here? How long have they been living among us? What’s the technology? Because if you look at humankind, it goes like this. And then World War II, we’re splitting atoms and we’re going to the moon. We’re all these things. You’re like, “Wait a second. We had this. Everyone was riding a horse.” And then boom, all of a sudden we’ve got spaceships. You know, and so what does that mean? You know what I mean? And so that the to me the reason why I’m interested in it is if you break the story then it becomes interesting. So first of all there’s well why did you keep it from us for so long and I you can tell why because they’re like well the fabric of religion of law of our our shared history goes out the window. Also who there’s there’s the halves and the have nots. So, if we have the technology, maybe the Russians, maybe Well, we know that’s one of the big one of the big things revealed, one of the big things revealed in the documentary is that the people that have been gatekeeping this information, they’ve also been involved in a highstakes secret cold war race with adversarial nations like China and Russia to try to reverse engineer this technology of non-human origin. And the people in my film refer to it as the Manhattan Project on steroids. The stakes couldn’t be higher, right? Um, we won the atomic race. We built the bomb first. We used it to end World War II and we became the, you know, essentially the dominant superpower for the next hundred years, right? Is all a ripple effect of that, right? And multiple people in my film said, uh, they articulated it as as as whoever wins this race will be the leader for the next century. Um, because at the core, this technology is a new energy source. It’s the key to interstellar travel. It’s it’s the key to um, you know, it’s a it’s a solution to the energy crisis, right? uh also it can be used to make the most destructive weapon of mass destruction ever. Yes. So you can understand why there are gatekeepers of the information saying like we need the technology a b to to so with the with the race though here’s the two sides. So one one the people who want secrecy they say we should not tell the public what we know and don’t know cuz then we’re also telling our adversaries what we know and don’t know and they just like religiously believe that that is the best path. Right? Then you have people on the other side saying that made sense in the early days of this process during the Cold War. But that doesn’t make sense now because it’s gone so far that the average scientist doesn’t even know it’s real. They don’t know it’s a valid area of inquiry. How can we win a technology race when 99% of the scientists in our country don’t even know it’s a valid area of inquiry? Right. Who who wins? Like what h is there going to be we talk about uh the age of disclosure? We talk about disclosure day. It’s disclosure. Is there going to be disclosure? I think I think that I think the people that are lobbying for more transparency are going to win. I just think it has too much momentum. I think it’s going to play out over the next year or two. But what do we find out? I think we’re going to get to a point where the government acknowledges the retrieval of technology of not in human origin and the fact that we’re in this this high stakes technology race. I think we’re going to get there. It’s going to take a while and I’m not sure whether, you know, whether the big moment we we build up to will be this presidency or the next presidency, but I I I think I think we’re on the path to that that happen. You talked about um sort of uh forgiveness or leniency or amnesty. Yeah. So, it’s a big thing happening right now. Um, a number of the people that have been involved in gatekeeping this information and involved in the cover up, um, they’ve told members of senior members of Congress and senior members of the intelligence community in confidential settings that they’re afraid to come forward with what they know because they fear the repercussions. They fear that they will they will be held accountable. Uh, worried about going to jail. They’re worried about their careers ruined. Uh and so um there’s a brewing support uh inside of even the White House right now to offer amnesty to these people. And um some senior members of the cabinet are actually messaging this to the intelligence community that they’re not looking to punish anyone. It’s not a it’s not a witch hunt and that they can offer protections to people who come forward. And so, uh, I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the near future we see like another presidential directive to to offer blanket amnesty. I think that’s kind of where, uh, certain members in Congress are trying to push it to go to that place. Um, so it’s very wellnown and there’s no no doubt about it. It’s a presidential directive. If you have information about this cover up, you can come forward and you won’t be punished. Um, I have heard uh some members of the cabinet are uh trying to put a clock on that. So it’s like if you come forward in the next six months and tell us what you know, you won’t you won’t be punished no matter what you were involved in, right? But if you don’t and we find out after, then you will be held accountable, right? And what do you think? Okay, let’s say there’s amnesty and let’s say some of the sort of DP staty kind of people come out and and and and there are uh you know there are there is real disclosure. What what kind of things do we find out? I mean, I think look, a number of the people in my film reveal that they have learned that there have been retrievalss of crash craft of non-human origin. In many cases, there were non-human bodies in in those crash sites, biologics, biologics, and they were um also retrieved. And so, I think the most we could hope for is an acknowledgement that that’s been happening, that we know we’re not alone. The government has kept it secret for many years for what they believed were valid reasons. and now there’s a level set happening. Um, I think that’s the most we could hope for. Um, I think that we could also hope that they they’re honest about the the technology race that’s happening right now with Russia and China so that we can put the right resources towards it. Um, you know, a lot of people in my film talk about the space race and how in hindsight maybe we wouldn’t have won the space race if Kennedy didn’t step to the microphone and do that big speech he did at Rice University where he made it clear to the average American that like first off getting to the moon was a realistic thing, right? That’s possible because in the context of that time there’s probably a lot of people in America who think we couldn’t get out of the atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah. But also like you know your average person in middle America at the time you tell him you know humans can get to the moon that just sounds bonkers right so like you had a president step the microphone and say yes that’s a valid thing we can achieve and we’re going to make it a national priority and then he articulated why it was important that it stay a national priority and that we went he says I think this is almost word for word Kennedy said uh space technology like nuclear technology has no conscious of its own it’s up to mankind whether it’s used for good or evil and that’s why he believed it was imperative the US play a role in leading in space so that the the technological progress and breakthroughs that come from it can be used for the betterment of mankind and not to create a new sea of war. That’s how he articulated it. And you watch that speech, you’re like, okay, this all makes sense. Like let’s make it a national priority. Let’s go. You know, and I and and it get it got brought up in a lot of my interviews and my my private conversations as a reference point of what needs to happen here. There needs to be a level set where the American public is told this is a real situation. These are the stakes. This is why it’s important. We’re focusing on it and we put resources towards it. And that could lead to so many amazing breakthroughs. You know, Rubio, this isn’t in the in the film, but in our conversation, uh he he he went on for a few minutes about how um the space race had a single mission, get to the moon, right? But off the back of it, there were thousands of inventions that were discovered and um you know, breakthroughs that that impacted our everyday life in many ways. And his point was we don’t know what’s going to come off the back of taking this more seriously and making it a national priority. You know, we might solve, you know, the the short-term questions, but we might also discover things that could prove unbelievably revolutionary in the long term. And so, you know, I actually found it really relieving that people at his level were thinking about it like this and being so thoughtful and um prioritizing the bigger picture. Um even though it wasn’t a hot topic that like his voters were pushing him to focus on, he knew it was important. And there was a lot of people throughout throughout my interviews that that um that articulated that. And I think it’s a lucky break that he ended up in the position he is now where after, you know, while I was still finishing the film, he became Secretary of State and National. Maybe he’s the next president and and we do get disclosure. I mean, look, to go back to you, like you’re saying it’s the biggest story out there, which I mean, it’s the biggest story out there on steroids, you know, because it starts so many other stories and like the the 69 Kennedy, you know, moonlanding. It’s still part of our culturals, I guess, because now you’re seeing a series like Star City, which is if Russia had got there first and and you’re like, “Hold on a second. This happened when I was born, like the year I was born.” Like, it’s still part of our zeist. And the fact that, you know, to the victor, go the spoils and we won and what would happen if Russia would have won. That’s onetenth 1 millionth of what would happen if Yeah. That’s what I love about your film is because finally it seems that people in power, you know, that the highest form the highest government including presidents are saying, “Yes, this is true.” So I want to get to this, which is the nuance of it. So you have Obama sitting there saying, “Yeah, you’re talking to Clinton or you have footage from Clinton.” You know, obviously Trump is is is doing the the sort of data dumps, but it’s still like we’re sitting here having this discussion as if it’s a fade to complete, but I’d say 90% of the people in the world on maybe more are saying, well, it’s not proven. Yeah, it’s going to be it’s going to be a process. Like that’s why I called the movie the age of disclosure because it wasn’t the moment of disclosure. It’s it’s this this age this process. I knew I knew disclosure would be a process. it it’s going to have a lot of milestones and it’s going to have a lot of push backs and hurdles but um in the end um I think you know 20 years from now we’ll look back and it’ll be this relatively small period of time that we’ll we’ll view as the age of disclosure the period where this all you know the truth came out and the public went through the process of accepting it and then and challenging it and then getting to the point where they just accept it as reality and all major cultural changes have required that you know I mean if you make a short list of all the major cultural changes that have happened in America, you know, from women’s rights to um all all civil rights uh civil rights movement. Um you know, any any kind of change takes takes a there’s a moment where it’s a process, but then you get to the other side. And I think I think we are going to get there and and I think it’s okay that a lot of people, the average people, you know, you know, watch something like the age of disclosure and like makes them sit up straight in their chair and they’re like, “Okay, this is this seems very real.” and serious, but I still have all these questions. That’s fine, you know. Um, and I think and I think it’s it’s important we all hold the government accountable and make them provide more of the answers, you know, but I do think I do think we will get there. And and now you see an acceptance in the scientific community as well. That’s a sea change that’s happening. Um, I read like a week ago, I really can’t remember which university it was, but some university was the first to um put a put a a a class around UAP and this the situation. I think we’ll start to see that. I think it’ll get into academia and it’ll get more into the scientific community. So, we’re in Hollywood. You made a very famous Hollywood film, A Ready Player One. Hollywood, to go back to the ridicule, has been in sort of inspirational on one side, the ETSs and the and the and and you know, science fiction as as a genre, Ghost Encounters, Bangkok. No, I got it wrong. Anyways, but also Hollywood has been used for the ridicule. Hollywood has been used to say, “Look, that’s just it’s just fake. It’s just it’s it’s been made up. It’s been some of the people in my film in my documentary, um, they go on the record saying that, uh, early in the in in the history of this topic in late 40s, early ’50s, uh, the CIA, as a way to prevent people from looking into it and asking questions, they created this cultural stigma, this idea that, you know, you’re kooky if you look into this. If you say you saw, you know, something otherworldly, you must be out of your mind. You’ll have your career ruined, your reputation will be ruined. Um, they put that out into the culture in a very manipulative way. Essentially, like a very sophisticated disinformation campaign. Yes. And it got compounded over the years. And then some some folks in Hollywood were were tasked with creating content that would make this topic look silly and undermine it. Who knows if they even knew, you know, how they were being used, you know, but the result was um the compounding of this disinformation campaign over the years. And then you get to the point where, you know, before the age of disclosure came out, I think the average American still just thought this was all nonsense, right? um Rubio and and some of the Navy fighter pilots uh talk about in the film how up until recently there there wasn’t enough of a reason for a sitting senator or a senior fighter pilot to speak up about what they what they saw because you know they just they’ll be subject to the stigma. And so one of the big objectives for the documentary um for the people who participated was to um put a nail in the coffin of the stigma and really just end it once and for all and make people realize that that’s that’s insane. It’s it’s it’s like it’s like questioning whether terrorism is real, right? It’s like you wouldn’t even have that thought, right? Everyone is saying yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s real. But I would still say that the majority of the people don’t believe it’s real. What can we expect to maintain a strategic advantage when 99.999% of all scientists here in this country don’t even think it’s real? Science moves forward on the basis of exchanging information and when it’s all tied up and held down, you just can’t make progress. The people who have seen the evidence, the people who have have have seen the documents or have seen they’re going on the record and saying it, yet we still don’t believe it. I think there’s a sea change happening. I really do. You know, there was a CBS News put out a survey like a week ago. Um, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was like overwhelming uh majority of people they surveyed believed a we’re not alone in the universe and b that the US government knows more than they’ve told us. And I think I think there’s a a sea change happening. You said it’s an age because it’s going to take some time, but like we had the JFK uh sort of, you know, dump. Nothing really came out. A lot of heavily redacted stuff. Epstein files, a lot of redacted stuff. Uh and then and then here like everyone’s waiting and waiting and waiting. It’s just redacted and redacted and redacted. And you know, we’re we we you know, Vice back in the day was very very good uh at at FOYA. And you know, we’re we’re sort of foying some stuff now, but it’s it’s definitely the hardest and and as you say, you know, the sort of bestkept secret and FOYA can’t get everything because a lot of a lot of a lot of um what’s been covered up has been moved to the possession of defense contractors. Those are private companies. You can’t foyer Loheed Martin, right? Um and the Department of Energy has its own classification system that’s not very easy to to foyer. It’s basically the same classification system that’s used to guard nuclear secrets, right? So there’s not there’s not a process for the average person to file a FOYA and get nuclear secrets, right? So um yeah, so it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s difficult to get to through FOYA. But I think also what’s happening right now, I think there are still some people within the White House that want to put this secret back in a box and bury it for another 80 years. They don’t want to deal with it. Well, let’s get into that because there’s some really interesting stuff in the dog. One is the sort of oblong or not oblong squareish rectangular matte black large Walmart super Walmart store size things the size of a football field almost rectangular in shape. It was just floating there. No propulsion system, no windows. It was matte black. We observed it for another 45 seconds and then it shot off thousands of miles an hour up the coast. I talked to all the direct witnesses over a dozen people and even from their different vantage points they all told the same story. They all saw the same thing that go over military bases or over uh you know atomic sites or or or missile sites uh on both sides. And so and I believe at some point Russia and America had to have some sort of treaty about this because uh uh we’ve been you know there’s there’s been many many I don’t know what to call them probes or checking us out or I don’t know you could like maybe explain a little bit about that and this is two-parter reverse engineering weaponry andor all this stuff is so China and their position in that um because you know it’s was Russia and America but now China a number of the people in the documentary revealed that there has been ongoing UAP activity over our nuclear sites and our um military sites sensitive military sites uh since the late 40s and there’s a lot of focus on our weapons of mass destruction and what’s been witnessed is pretty extraordinary everything from orbs to crafts to giant giant crafts. Uh you know, we’re we’re we’re in Malibu right now and just up the coast um about 2 hours is Vanderberg Air Force Base over near Santa Barbara and in the documentary a couple Air Force security guards who have the job of guarding missile silos on this superclassified base. They went on the record talking about an event that happened not that long ago where a giant UAP came off the coast and over Vanderberg and half a dozen Air Force security guards all stood there looking up at this extraordinary thing and then they witnessed it shoot off at thousands of miles an hour up the coast like a giant they described as a giant matte black craft the size of a football field. no windows, no visible means of propulsion, no lights, and just this extraordinary thing that they all witnessed. And so there’s there’s been a lot of activity. Um, and it’s consistently been reported uh over the years. Aren’t they saying too that there’s a possibility that you know the orbs that are we’re seeing more and more that move and they can go into the water and they can go in you know three and they go into space and they can do this and they move with you know they defile all the physics that there’s one possibility that they are from a foreign nation but they’ve been they’ve had reverse engineering because they’ve you know got some technology and that’s one of the theories which is leads to okay if we’re going to defend ourselves Shouldn’t we know the truth? Yeah. I mean, look, the the one of the big drivers for disclosure is this cold war technology race, right? There’s a fear that if we don’t, you know, Rubio literally says this in the film. He basically says, “If we don’t get our act together as a nation and take this more serious and put more resources towards it, we’re going to wake up one day and we’re going to find out that China got there before we did.” And by got there, he means fully reverse engineered this technology. And he says, “And we won’t know how they got there or when they got there, but we’ll be screwed.” Right? And so there’s a fear of that, you know. Um he also articulates how throughout uh American history, the greatest intelligence of failures have come from a lack of imagination. The idea that like an adversary can’t do something just because we haven’t experienced it yet or seen it. And he makes a couple great analogies like uh Pearl Harbor. We didn’t think they could attack us, you know, get our torpedoes, their torpedoes through the straits and hit us. But then they figured out how to do it and Pearl Harbor happened. you know, uh, 9/11, we never imagined terrorists would fly to the homeland and learn to fly commercial airlines and then use commercial airplanes in a terrorist attack until they did. Our lack of imagination hurt us. Yeah, lack of imagination hurt us. And so he doesn’t want that to happen on on this front. So that’s a big driver here which is like we need to be ahead of this seems pretty reasonable you know and and and and I think and what’s also happening is that’s getting support because whether you can wrap your head around the fact that this is not human intelligence or not the fact that there are aircraft in our most sensitive restricted airspace that are not ours and we don’t know exactly whose they are and what their intention is that alone is a problem. That alone requires, you know, attention. That’s enough right there. You know, um, and so I’m sorry. Then that’s admitted to the highest levels every that’s generals, presidents, senators. Rubio says it on camera. He’s literally the second most arguably the second most powerful guy in the world. He’s the national security adviser and the secretary of state at the same time. That’s happened once in US history. It was Henry Kissinger in the late ‘7s for two years. No one else in American history has had both those jobs at the same time. Yeah. And he’s saying that. That’s what he’s saying. It brings up every question. What do you think happens? Okay, just close your eyes and be like, okay, what happens after there is disclosure? Full disclosure. There you go. I think it changes everything. I think academia and the science community start treating this like a valid area of inquiry and putting their bandwidth towards it and their resources towards it. Money start more much more money starts going towards it and then that’s when breakthroughs happen. You know, it’s just like every other aspect of our life. All the medical breakthroughs we see happening. Why? It’s because brain power and money was put towards it, right? Um why have we uh fought back against terrorism so effectively? Because after 911, we threw a ton of money and resources at counterterrorism. We literally created the the director of national intelligence position to organize the intelligence community more. We we Congress appropriated a silly amount of money towards, you know, every imaginable counter terrorism measure they could come up with, right? So, you know, when you apply brain power and money and make something a national priority, you see you see great results. That’s that’s what happens. So, I think we’ll see tremendous results. And this technology, if it’s used correctly, could revolutionize the way we live. It could solve the energy crisis, you know, could change the way we all, you know, rely on oil and gas. It could it could, you know, expand our horizons in that it could lead to interstellar travel. It would no longer be about um you know these these very conventional space exploration efforts that are happening right now. It would change everything. Um now at the same time that technology could be used to create weapons of mass destruction. And so there’s a humanitarian issue to navigate right like to make sure that this information is shared with the world in a in a responsible way. you can’t you can’t also you know basically be telling bad actors how to make you know weapons of mass destruction in their garage. So but you know we’ve handled that with nuclear technology like there’s you know not everyone knows everything about about that. Um some stuff is kept secret and so there’s there’s undoubtfully a responsible way to roll this out and and change everything. Um but one one thing I want to circle back to uh orbs. There’s been all kinds of UAP seen over the years. There’s been crafts that look like flying saucers. Uh there’s been orbs, aerospace vehicles that look like tic tacs. They’re like big logers shaped white round smooth as tic tacs. But the orbs specifically, they’re not a new thing. They’ve been seen since World War II. Allied pilots were reporting seeing orbs flying next to their their airplanes. And they describe them um performing evasive maneuvers as if they were intelligently controlled. Um they describe them, you know, moving in line with the airplanes. Like it’s a very real thing that there’s tons of documentation of it. Um even astronauts in some of the early space missions reported seeing orbs out the window in space, right? Um so I think the idea that those are made by an adversary or anyone in America is completely bananas because the last 100 years wouldn’t have played out the way it did if that was the case. First off, we wouldn’t have stayed in World War II. We would have won World War II in in an instant, right? And if it was another country, they they would be the dominant country on the planet right now. Um, so I don’t think there’s anyone in a leadership position in the United States government right now that thinks orbs are man-made. What is the prevailing consensus of what they are? Are there like probes watching us or There’s a few different opinions. Some people think they’re sensors from somewhere else. They’re like advanced sensors, uh, probes. Um, some people think they might be, as extraordinary as it sounds, another form of life that has existed alongside us and we just didn’t know about them. Um, and then some people uh think that they are transportation vehicles, that there’s actually something else inside them. Yeah. Um, you know, in in in my film, some of the leading scientists on this reveal how they figured out they figured out how UAP work and how they’re creating an immense amount of energy in a localized area and they’re creating essentially a bub a bubble around a craft and it allows them to operate the way they do. Um, basically the bubble separates the craft from the environment around it. So our environment has no no impact on it. That’s why these things can be transmedium. They can go from space to air to water seamlessly. Um, inside the bubble, they might be going one speed, but to us it looks like they’re going another speed. Um, that that technology also because of how much energy it’s giving off, it would make the craft appear very bright. So, some people have applied that same thought to the orbs and and said, well, maybe that’s just the harnessing of an immense amount of energy in a small localized area. That’s why we see this bright orb, but inside it there might be a craft that’s 50 feet wide, right? Um there might be a being in there or it might be something that no one no one’s well imagined. There was a big mathematic. So to get a bit more metaphysical um you know recently we’re sort of upsetting math and and and the laws of physics by saying you know 90% of the universe is dark energy dark matter because you know the the the gravity wasn’t enough and therefore if there’s dark energy dark matter then we go into quantum physics and quantum computing which is there’s infinite possibilities and infinite universes and all this stuff. Okay, where I’m getting to is uh we’re just sort of coming out of the pond to look at this stuff. Isn’t there a school of thought thinking that to go back to the ma it’s mathematically more possible that we’re in some sort of simulation than than the only planet that’s ever sort of had evolution and water and single cell amiebas and all this stuff. Okay, there’s there’s one that’s interdimensional. It’s there’s there’s you know maybe they’re humanoids from the future. Maybe it’s a sort they’re coming back in time maybe. So maybe explain a little bit about that. So I think one of the big questions once you accept the fact that this is real non-human life intelligent life exists and has been here and most likely is nonhuman in its present stage. Yeah. Yeah. So once you accept that then then origin where where are they from becomes the next big question right um I don’t think there’s anyone uh alive who knows for sure the answer to that but I think the the the possibilities include extraterrestrial obviously from some other planet um interdimensional is something that is talked a lot about uh amongst people in our in our military intelligence community and government as a possibility ility. Um, and then the third, uh, being a another life form that’s existed here on Earth, uh, the entire time and we just were not aware. Um, which is totally a possibility. So, we discover new things about Earth all the time. Well, to interrupt, I loved maybe the most esoteric and weird guy that you had in the documentary is the the head of naval cgraphy of the of the Oh, yeah. Admiral Tim Galedet. talked about how um you know 70 something% of the planet is ocean and we have barely mapped um the the bottom of our oceans. Uh he makes an analogy. He says we’ve we’ve uh we’ve um mapped the surface of the moon in more detail than we have the surface of our the bottom of our own oceans. And and then he, you know, it closes his point by saying, if I was a more intelligent species from somewhere else and I came here and I wanted to hide from humanity, the most obvious place to do it is in our oceans. And and that’s really interesting because a lot of the activity is seen over our oceans. And for 80 years, um, people have been reporting seeing UAP coming in and out of the ocean. and the technology argument because it’s like they can they can go into the water and they can do this and if they were conventional, you know, it would it would displace X amount of water or there’s no way it could do this or be he can’t keep the same speeds. Can’t keep the same speeds and all this stuff. And so that’s very There’s also reports of activity under the water. Yeah. from submarine commanders who, you know, off the record tell people in the intelligence community, you know, something went by the submarine at 100 miles an hour. Um, we don’t have anything. Yeah. Because they have the most sophisticated sort of, you know, sensors and and and listening devices. And wasn’t there a thing and you have to I think uh he’s a naval pilot and he said, “Yeah, we swapped out our radar from this.” Yeah. So the so so fighter pilots um in the Navy specifically um this is about 10 years ago they upgraded their their radar systems so they started seeing more stuff on their radar uh that they couldn’t see before cuz they didn’t have the right tools to see it right and from that point on it became uh he I think the words he used he said it became uh ubiquitous like we’re seeing these things every single day and we’re contending them with them as like just a set of circumstances that are there all the time. Yeah. And and you know that’s another interesting thing like you know as we evolve technologically we we we we create instruments and devices that allow us to see things we couldn’t see before you know um and that’s not just about this topic it’s all all topics like that’s how medical science works too right we we we develop new tools and they they they uh inform us of things we didn’t know about. Um, so it’s highly likely that we’re dealing with an form of of life that’s been here all along. There’s full continents that we don’t even like Antarctica. Antarctica is a giant mystery box. It’s an entire continent that like is almost entirely locked off. Like you can’t you can’t fly over huge huge areas of it. I have flown over it. How many shots are you doing as we fly? Each system has a laser that fires 3,000 laser shots per second. 3,000 laser shots per second. So, it’s pretty accurate. Uh, it’s extremely accurate specifically for ice mapping. Wow. There’s not a lot in Antarctica. I’ll just say they are finding stuff underneath the ice sheets now, which is very interesting. They’re finding out all kinds of interesting My point is there’s lot there’s lots of undiscovered uh uncharted territory. I agree with you. And the ocean the ocean being because we can’t go very far down at all. Yeah. And obviously if we spent the amount of money we’re spending to go to space on on going we could. But in any case, Congressman Carson talks about it in the film too. Yeah. And Congressman Carson was on the House Intelligence Committee. He chaired the first hearing on UAP and he was on the House Committee on the CIA. Serious guy, great guy, very smart. And in the film he talks about this activity, this otherworldly activity coming in and out of our oceans. and how it it might it might lead to us learning about a lot of life that exists down there, which why would we do that? Like it’s a lot of it is just logical. And to go back to serious guys, I I met uh Clapper who was the head of the Yeah. General James Clapper. Serious guy. Very serious. The opposite of what you would think of as a you know, as a as a sort of conspiracy theorist. The opposite. This is a serious guy. Very impressed by him. And he’s in the documentary. Yeah, this is the first time he’s ever participated in anything like this. Uh he told me he thought it was really important to participate and share what he could. Um he was the head of Air Force intelligence. He was the director of national intelligence. Uh he was the head of several other agencies. His resume reads like a Marvel character. It’s just incredibly successful, serious uh high level intelligence career. And my last job in the air force was chief air force intelligence prior to becoming director of the defense intelligence agency. When I served in the air force uh there was an active program to uh track anomalous uh activities that uh you know we couldn’t otherwise explain. Many of them connected with uh ranges out west notably um Area 51. and um he on on on camera admits that despite the Air Force saying that they have had no involvement in this uh this issue uh and pretending like there’s no there there he admits that when he was the head of Air Force intelligence they had an active program to investigate UAP. Um yeah, pretty big deal. And then he also goes on the record and says that UAP activity over Area 51 is real. Yeah. And I thought that was really impactful because for the average person, Area 51 is like the ultimate conspiracy. They think it’s like, you know, kooky to this super serious guy saying, “No, no, that’s real.” What’s the biggest surprise like you for you personally that you’re you go out there again uh as just a regular person who’s who gets into it by being a filmmaker and then all of a sudden people are telling you their secrets. People are telling you Area 51 is real. People are telling you, “Oh yeah, the the the the Air Force were lying. And by the way, he’s the head of the NSA.” Like you’re sitting there going, “Okay, so you you must have been given a lot of information, secrets, etc. What’s the word? I don’t want to say as a headline, I would say it surprised me how in sync everyone I talked to was regardless of the fact that most of them didn’t know each other. right? They had different ideological and political belief systems, points of view. Um, but in all my one-on ones, they all were saying the same thing. They were all completely in lock step. Interesting. And notably, um, it was extremely bipartisan from the beginning. You know, we live in a time where Republicans and Democrats in our country can’t really seem to agree on anything, even if they’re even if they’re family members, you know, and uh you know, everyone argues over everything, but this this is something that the leadership of both parties are taking extremely serious behind the scenes. I mean, I I had plenty of off the records with Senate leadership, with people within the White House, um senior leaders within the intelligence community. None of them is questioning, not a single person I met is questioning whether this is real. They’re all way past that and and very much on the same page about it being a very important issue. So, fate to complete. They were all, you know, this is real. This is happening, but let’s move on. Yeah. Uh to to to what we should do about it. Um we haven’t gotten into the big one. So, we got into like a lot of the um uh politicians and big names, right? We got into legacy a bit, but what about ATIP? Tell tell me a bit about that and your two guys from there because they’re amaz both of them are great. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, two of the two of the, uh, main interview subjects, um, a guy named Jay Stratton and a guy named Lu Alzando. Um, Jay, uh, was working as the head of air and space warfare at the Defense Intelligence Agency. His job was basically to know every conventional aircraft that we are ad our adversaries have in air, space and water and um every technology not just aircraft every technology and um and to know what our black program so more secretive than classified programs are like most deeply hidden programs have on the road map for the next 40 years and what our adversaries have on their road map for the next 40 years so that he could identify anything that is seen in airspace or water. That was his job, right? And one day, one of his colleagues, a guy named Dr. James Lowsky, walks into his office and says, “I got to show you something.” Pulls him into a into a skiff and shows him a video of a triangle craft hovering over a missile site on a on a military base, restricted airspace. And his colleague is hoping that Jay can tell him, you know, what this is. Maybe it’s one of our secret programs that’s like, you know, in a testing phase and Jay knows right off the bat that’s nothing that we are even close to building in the next 50 years and none of our adversaries are. It’s not that’s not from here. And so he goes all over the place trying to find um a UFO program. He just assumes there must be one, right? And he went all over the government, the military, a UFO program that we run. Yeah. Yeah. To to who like who handles this stuff basically? like, you know, this this isn’t this isn’t ours. Like, what do we do with this, right? And so, um, he couldn’t find one. And to the best of his his knowledge, um, there hadn’t been an actual government program since the closure of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which was their investigation in um, decades prior. Um, we know in hindsight that was a a BS thing. It was like stood up to make the public think we’re we’re looking into this. And then their conclusion was there’s nothing here. You don’t have to worry about it. and they kind of just put the secrets back in a box and buried it for decades more. Um, but to his knowledge, there had not been any real government investigation since since then. So, him and his colleague Jim, they started a new program called OAP. And OAP got its funding from Senator Harry Reid and some of some of his colleagues. Senator Harry Reid was the Senate Majority Leader at the time. He really got behind them and helped get funding. He’s in the film. He’s in the film, too. He got he got funding for OAP appropriated and OAP was the first government investigation of of UAP since the project blue book uh closure and um OAP had funding for a couple years and then um along the way the guys involved in OAP realized there was this bigger deeper program that was hidden the legacy program and that program did not want OAP to exist and it created a lot of bureaucratic issues for them behind the scenes a lot of hurdles for them and eventually long story short OAP lost its funding and so um Jay Stratton and and uh and some of his colleagues decided to keep it going in a bootstrapped unofficial effort and um they called that ATIP um and uh and and then Luzando got brought into ATIP um and uh was was involved in in in in in this effort to keep keep focus on this and um yeah they they uh they really pushed the ball forward collectively and then they came up with this plan to try to get Congress’s attention and get the public’s attention. Uh one of them would go public and the other would stay behind uh to move the ball forward whatever new interest got captured by the guy going public. And so uh they uh they strategize and they plan this out and and they talk about it in the documentary. Uh Luzando went public in a very big way and he got attacked. He he got he got a lot of attack and a lot of push back u when he went public. Uh the disinformation campaign we talked about earlier is real and very strong and ridicule. Lot of lot of uh you know disinformation headlines targeting him, trying to undermine him. But in the end he did a ton of mainstream press uh Fox, CNN, like all over the place. and it and it and it started to get on the radar of Congress in a real way like they they they see those news shows just like we do and their family and their wives and kids and and so um it it it the mission was accomplished basically it it it made this all public and then all of a sudden Congress was paying attention to it in a way they hadn’t before and they have a million questions and they directed their questions at Jay who stayed you know stayed inside government. So, this like it was like a two-handed plan. Um, that worked great. And and and then Jay was tasked with putting together the biggest whole of government investigation ever, which was the UAP task force. The Secretary of Defense and head of naval intelligence um instructed him to go build this. So for two years he quietly built this behind the scenes and got um every single one of the federal agencies and branches of the military to join the task force and and provide a couple representatives or one or two representatives and he built this whole of government investigation. Uh and then that was finally announced in
- Um and he was named the director announced as the director. Um, and then that program actually got the same push back behind the scenes from the legacy program and the gatekeepers of the truth and the UAP task force also lost its funding eventually. And in fact, um, it wasn’t lost it, it never actually got its appropriate funding.
There’s been many, um, programs uh, to investigate and many efforts to investigate. Um, and yeah, uh, you know, Jay and Lou are, uh, are are two of the main guys in the dock and, uh, played played key roles in this disclosure process. So to go as a springboard for that um you know as a journalist I’m I’m starting to do this and as I did my first one with Jeremy Corbals shout out to Jeremy I had half the community saying hey Shane great new and then push back and stuff and as it gets bigger and bigger you get more weird comments in your in your thing. But if we were going to do a multi-part series, what should we investigate? Like the phenomenon, government secrecy, defense contractors, China whistleblowers, like when you’re doing this, what do you really say, hey, somebody should investigate that or you know, we got to really look at this or if there is going to be disclosure, something has to happen here. The power that defense contractors hold over the situation needs to be put under a magnify. Great point. you know um you know in the film in the documentary when Rubio talks about how defense contractors have gotten a lot of um unchecked power in this situation uh we inter we we cut from that to Eisenhower’s famous uh speech about the power of the military-industrial complex we must car guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the militaryindustrial complex. He says that the ability exists and will persist for defense contractors to the military-industrial complex to get more power than the uh elected officials. And uh he’s basically warning the nation of we’re on a path to get to a a point where there’s a problem. And Rubio is in the documentary articulating we we got there. We’re here. We’re there. We’re we’re at the place Eisenhower warned us we would get to if something didn’t change. And so um that is something that needs to be put under a magnifying glass. Yeah. Um we were just in Africa at the largest war games there and was it Northup Gman or who was it? take Locky Locky Martin and they have a an AI laser system that can it looks like it’s from the future and it can detect it can detect uh up to a thousand or many thousands of drones and shoot them down with lasers and you’re like where are we getting these? I mean I mean it’s it’s it’s uh it’s the future and I you know when you brought that up I’m like defense contractors. Anyway, sorry to interrupt, but keep I would definitely focus in there and and then this technology race that we’re in with adversarial nations like China. Yeah, it’s very real. It’s very heightened and um there’s a lot at stake. Last Friday, uh we we had scheduled a podcast. You couldn’t come because there was a data dump. We have sort of a PDF space that we build to to get um documents in and then we could ask AI questions about you know we can sort of talk in the documents Adobe builds it sweet is a fantastic tool for journalists but um what has surprised you if anything about what there’s been two dumps so far and there’s I think four more this summer what what of the two dumps that have come out what has surprised you or not surprised you or what do you think so the first in the first one which came out on May 8th. Um there was a lot of UAP videos, there’s some im photos. The thing that was the most meaningful for me was there was a a still image from the 1972 Apollo mission to the moon. And you can see what looks like a structured triangle craft, three points hovering over the moon. And I had heard that this image existed uh from some of my interview subjects. Uh they had seen it. Um Jay Stratton was shown this image at NASA when he was when he was running the UAP task force. Um I you know I had heard from multiple people that this exists that there’s there’s evidence of a triangle craft over the moon in 1972. And um before that release of evidence on May 8th, the White House in their attempt to find where all the evidence sits, they went to people like Jay Stratton and asked, “Is there some stuff you can point me to?” And that’s actually one of the things that he pointed them to and they were able to get it out of NASA and uh they released it. So hold on, hold on. That’s like Buzz Aldridge or somebody takes a picture of a No, it was it was it was from the camera on the lunar module. Oh wow. And um people at NASA and people at the UAP task force involved in the UP task force, they asked all the obvious questions like let’s can we rule out lens flare? Can we rule out a camera effect? All they they did tons of work ruling all that stuff out. And they concluded that no, that’s a real thing that was there and caught in the frame. Wow. Of course, we live in a time where, you know, people are so ADD and they’re seeing a million things on their social media scrolls. like that that doesn’t register as significant as it is, you know. So, I’ I’ve made a point of bringing attention to it interviews and actually there’s this wasn’t released, but I I I learned from the people who analyzed the photo that when you change um the contrast on the image, you can find there’s actually another triangle in the same frame. Wow. Interestingly, triangle crafts have been seen all over the place. As I told you in that story, that was the first the first video Jay Stratton saw that led to the creation of OAP. Um was a triangle craft over a restricted missile silo on a military base. Um so these triangle crafts have been around a long time. Um, another thing that was really notice uh significant for me in the in this last drop uh 4 days ago, there was information uh released revealing that there’s an active FBI investigation at a specific site in the US that’s having reoccurring UAP activity and FBI agents are seeing it with their own eyes and and recording it on a daily basis. And I know from my own relationships within the FBI that that’s super real and that it’s um there are boots there are boots on the ground like actual FBI agents at this site every day. They have a command post set up and they’re seeing this stuff with their own eyes and they’re filming it. So it’s pretty extraordinary that they uh release some information making it clear that this this is happening. Uh that was 4 days ago. And then um that memo I mentioned earlier from 1948 um from the head of naval operations about an increase in UAP activity and instructing the entire NA naval force to be on the lookout that was released in this last drop. Um there also four days ago there was another there was a an image a photo not a photo sorry a drawing uh um portraying what these witnesses saw of like a tic-tac-shaped UFO where kind of looks like a potato or a tic tac um over Cheyenne Mountain um military base in Colorado Springs. Super secretive military base. It’s like it’s the alternative command post for NORAD. Um, Nor is now at uh Pearson, I think. Um, it’s the alternative command post for Northern Command. It’s it’s a, you know, a significant bunker if there’s ever, you know, giant war. Um, you know, it’s a very significant secretive base and five very credible military witnesses all saw this with their own eyes. They didn’t have um their phones on them, so they couldn’t record it. So, they described it to an artist who drew that image that was released. But the but the report of this and the credibility of the witnesses was released in this last evidence drop. To go back to they didn’t have their phones on them. The there’s all kinds of footage in in your film. There’s all kinds of footage in the world of military footage, old footage, photos, you know, sensors, radar, all these things. But like now where everyone has a, you know, iPhone 17 that does three cameras or whatever, there’s no there’s no great footage. Yeah. But one of the things explained in the film, the the scientists in my film explain when they explain how this technology works, how they figured it out, that warp bubble that they described as being created around the craft that separates it from our environment, it it creates um a barrier that also makes it hard to take a photo. So, like the analogy that people used with me was, you know, you could take an underwater camera and go underwater and take pictures of fish and get it clear, but if you try taking that a photo of them from above the water through a different medium, it’s not going to work out. It’s going to be all distorted and and and exactly like the UAP videos we we get, right? Because you’re literally taking a photo through a space-time barrier, basically. Um, so it’s like trying to take pictures of koiish uh uh in the water from above above the water. Yes. all distorted and weird and wacky looking. So, you know, now some some of the uh video evidence that exists that I’ve been told about that is still classified is uh very clear. And so what what the uh what they what what the people in intelligence community presume is that that that bubble around the craft was turned off in that moment, right? And so they got clear clear images. Crashing another controversial thing. If they’re so far advanced and the technology is so good, how do we find the crashes and why do they crash and Yeah. So that’s that’s a common that’s a common question and and and the answer is any advanced technology has room for error first of all. Um second um there’s there’s a belief that the in the intelligence community and most people I I interviewed that there might be circumstances that humanity has created that have led to those crashes. So um atomic testing for example um maybe it’s as simple as that that bubble that surrounds the craft. Maybe you can knock a craft out of that bubble with the right circumstances. And isn’t there a part of the film where they say that there’s a there’s some theories that they could be gifts like Yeah. There’s also there’s also, you know, help Dr. Halpudof talks about the fact that some of the craft that have been recovered weren’t crashes. They were just found outside military bases. Like they were placed there like they were given to us as a gift. And when when thinking about what the intention could be, um Dr. Pudof suggests that maybe um maybe they’re trying to help move our technological progress along. Um if if we assume that gifts are also being given to adversarial nations, maybe it’s a giant IQ test and a to you know a race to the finish line. Who knows? Um but it it’s a wild fact that some of these have not actually been crashes. Some of these recoveries, they’ve just been left there. We got to answer these questions, which means more disclosure. Yeah. The film is The Age of Disclosure. Number one on Prime. The producer, the director, the man, the machine, Danfire. Thank you for spending time. I want to keep it open cuz I want This is going to keep going on. This is the age of disclosure. It’s pretty good. Pretty good. We got you. You You do it. No, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Uh, I’m too tonedeaf. Plus, I can’t. And John Williams is like the the greatest the greatest the greatest the great but I grew up in the same era. I grew up with that uh you know ET and and and Close Encounters and now we have to go see Disclosure Day. We’ll see what happens there. It’s a great great great pleasure. Thank you buddy and uh congratulations on the film. Everybody go see it. Thank you. Bango. Appreciate it. All right. Awesome. Perfect. You were perfect. Good talk. We could spend five hours.