The Age of Disclosure: The Documentary That Broke Amazon Prime’s Record — and Divided the World

On November 21, 2025, a 109-minute documentary quietly appeared on Amazon Prime Video and in a handful of qualifying cinemas in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Within forty-eight hours it had broken the platform’s all-time record for highest-grossing documentary — surpassing Free Solo, the Oscar-winning climbing film, and outperforming major studio theatrical releases including Jurassic World Rebirth and Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. The film was The Age of Disclosure. It had been produced in near-total secrecy over three years by Dan Farah, the Hollywood producer behind Ready Player One, and it made a claim that no documentary had previously put on screen with this weight of named, credentialed testimony: that the United States government has been concealing evidence of non-human intelligence and recovered non-human technology since at least 1947.

The film is narrated by Luis Elizondo, the former U.S. Department of Defense intelligence official who ran the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) — the classified Pentagon UAP program whose existence was first reported by the New York Times in December 2017. Elizondo, along with AATIP’s engineering consultant Hal Puthoff and astrophysicist Eric Davis, alleges in the film that they uncovered evidence of a secret government “Legacy Program” that has investigated, recovered, and concealed evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence for more than eighty years. Davis goes further, claiming that former President George H.W. Bush personally confirmed to him the existence of alien encounters at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The Witnesses

What distinguishes The Age of Disclosure from previous UFO documentaries is the breadth and seniority of its sources. The film features thirty-four named participants drawn from the highest levels of the American military, intelligence community, and elected government. Current U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears and states plainly that people with “very high jobs in the U.S. government” have come forward with accounts that — if true — describe programmes that not even sitting presidents were briefed on. Rubio’s formulation became one of the most-quoted lines from the film: “We have people that are either A: liars, B: crazy, or C: telling the truth. And two of those three options are not good.”

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon all appear. So do the Navy pilots at the centre of the 2004 Nimitz encounter — David Fravor and Alex Dietrich — and Ryan Graves, whose testimony before Congress in July 2023 marked the first time an active-duty military aviator had described routine UAP encounters under oath. Jay Stratton, former director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, tells the film that governments are in a race to reverse-engineer non-human technology comparable in strategic significance to the Manhattan Project. Retired Army Colonel Karl Nell, who has gone on record with similar claims in academic settings, repeats them here.

The Reception

Critics and audiences responded in almost exactly opposite directions. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 27% critics’ score against a 93% audience approval rating — one of the largest critic-audience gaps in documentary history. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a basic cable exploitation doc done up with a fancy gloss” and noted that “nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.” The New York Times concluded that anyone who sat through its claims was “a chump.” Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer compared the eyewitness accounts to Bigfoot sightings. The Guardian, more measured, described the film as “serious and sourced” while acknowledging its claims were “provocative and controversial.”

Audiences, however, disagreed with the critical consensus in unusually emphatic terms. The film had screened at South by Southwest in March 2025 to what Deadline described as a stunned crowd. By the time of its November theatrical and streaming release, it had been screened for members of Congress — a private showing organised ahead of the public release that drew bipartisan attendance. For those who had been following the congressional UAP hearings since 2023, the Grusch testimony, and the long slow accumulation of official acknowledgements that began with the Pentagon’s 2017 admission of the AATIP programme’s existence, the film felt less like a revelation than a consolidation: everything that had been said in fragments, under oath, in committee rooms and press conferences, assembled in one place, on one screen, in one coherent argument.

Whether The Age of Disclosure is the document that finally breaks open the subject or merely the most polished instalment yet in a long series of credible-but-unverified claims depends entirely on where you start. The whistleblowers and their supporters argue that the absence of physical evidence in the public domain is itself evidence — that material is being held, that access is being denied, and that the pattern of official denials followed by admissions followed by further denials is precisely what a genuine cover-up looks like from the outside. Their critics argue that testimony, however senior and sincere, is not proof, and that the history of UFO belief is littered with credible-sounding claims that dissolved under scrutiny. Both positions are coherent. The film does not resolve that tension. What it does — with considerable production skill and an extraordinary cast of insiders — is make the tension impossible to ignore.