The truth is still out there

And so are the conspiracies to keep it from us

Happy holidays, everyone!

Those of you younger than 103 may not know about the greatest Thanksgiving episode in the history of TV sitcoms, where station manager Mr. Carlson, on WKRP in Cincinnati, dropped a bunch of unfortunate, live turkeys from a helicopter into a crowded city square as a promotional stunt, thinking they would land safely.

We didn’t actually see the visuals, but a regular character’s description and horrified reaction were hilarious.

In this era, unfortunately, that kind of humor, like the turkeys, doesn’t fly. So we have to be content with a different sort of flying-objects programming this Thanksgiving, and it comes in the form of a new documentary about UFOs that just dropped on Amazon Prime last Friday.

The Age of Disclosure is 109 minutes of serious but flawed journalism that does a good job of establishing that yes, of course, UFOs exist. Literally, hundreds of U.S. military personnel are on the record saying they’ve seen them. In the film, we hear directly from dozens of high-ranking government, military and intelligence insiders — people like Secretary of state Marco Rubio, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper — who either have studied secret reports or in some cases claim to have seen clear evidence themselves, including “non-human biologics,” which we non-government types would call “bodies.”

If you’re hoping to learn who these extraterrestrial visitors are, where they come from, or why they’re here, I recommend you save your $20 rental fee ($25 to buy), and maybe invest in some Arthur C. Clarke novels or Steven Spielberg movies and rely on your imagination instead. Age of Disclosure’s director Dan Farah doesn’t really address those questions which, to date, have no documented answers.

Nor do we see visual evidence of the film’s strongest claims. The best we get are already released military videos of what appear to be unrecognizable aircraft doing things that seem to defy the laws of physics.

Still, seeing all this first- and second-hand evidence of UFOs’ existence treated so straightforwardly, not only by high-ranking government officials but also in media reports from the New York Times, CNN and Fox News does mark a shift that’s taken place in our national thinking over the decades. And in my own thinking, too.

I never gave much thought to UFOs before I became friendly with Bryce Zabel, a talented and accomplished writer-producer and former chairman of the TV academy, who lives a mile or two from me across the Ventura-L.A. County line. Bryce ran a bunch of different TV shows over the years, most notably Dark Skies, a very cool, cult hit he created for NBC that mixed UFO lore and mythological conspiracies with real political history.

His interest in paranormal phenomena ramped up over the years, partly because of the research he’d done for his show and the things that happened to him as a result. I’ve heard a lot of those stories and could fill several Substack posts with them, but alas, those are his stories, and he’s been working semi-diligently on a book about them that I can’t wait to read. (Get moving, Bryce!)

On top of that, he’s become a prominent lecturer about UFOs when he has the time, and he created and co-hosts a podcast on the subject, Need To Know, that has 66,000+ YouTube subscribers, not that I’m jealous.

So naturally, as we walked literally hundreds of miles through our neighborhood together over the years, I have come to hear a lot about the various reported sightings of UFOs, which are now officially called UAPs – unidentified aerial (or sometimes, anomalous) phenomena. To me, this renaming seems part of an ongoing effort to make the whole subject more confusing for normal folks to understand, which is why I still say UFOs.

But call them what you will, the idea of some kind of alien visitation was regarded by most of us who grew up in the covered wagon era with extreme cynicism and doubt. All we knew was, some incident had happened, or maybe didn’t happen, near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and the U.S. Army Air Field media relations people reported we had recovered a “flying disc” that crash-landed nearby.

Within a day, the Air Force retracted that statement and said the disc was a weather balloon. So at the same time worldwide interest in the subject was exploding, people also began to suspect that if any super-intelligent race of non-human beings really did exist, the government was already working hard to cover it up. And this has been feeding on itself for decades.

That’s great material for conspiracy theories, books and movies, but the serious investigation being done was all behind closed doors. Until eventually, things began to leak out.

The biggest disclosure of inside information came from David Grusch, a former Air Force officer and senior intelligence analyst for various U.S. government agencies that study UFOs – yes, these actually exist. A few years ago, Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint that important government information on the subject was being illegally withheld from the American people. The Department of Defense said his complaint was “credible and urgent” and gave him protected status to speak to Congress.

In 2023, Grusch gave an extensive interview about what he knows to Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart that aired on NewsNation, and the rest of the media enthusiastically followed up. Coulthart, at the time, was also co-host of the Need To Know podcast with Bryce Zabel, and Bryce found himself in the middle of helping set up the NewsNation interview that opened a doorway to UFO public awareness.

As we burrow deeper and deeper into the rabbit-hole, the problem becomes that the story’s focus shifts from UFOs to the government’s longtime coverup of what they know. Some people love investigating these conspiracies, but to me they seem endless and repetitive. (See? That’s what they’re trying to do! Wear us out as we try to uncover what they’re hiding!)

That’s why the new documentary is called The Age of Disclosure and not The Age of UFOs. I’m not saying the movie’s a turkey, but for me, it’s just more of the same.