Copyright realclearscience
UFOs are set to once again return to the forefront of public consciousness. Later this month, the documentary The Age of Disclosure will debut on Amazon Prime. The film makes the case that the U.S. government has for decades been covering up information regarding the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Director and producer Dan Farah spoke to a venerable list of politicians, pilots, former defense officials, and others to make his case, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Lt. General James Clapper, a former Director of National Intelligence. In advance of the film's streaming release, Farah stopped by Bill Maher's HBO talk show Real Time last Friday for an interview. The twelve minute conversation turned out to be a skepticism-free fest of science fiction, taking for granted the veracity of the documentary's claims and assuming as fact that our planet has been and is still being visited by intelligent aliens. If you dont think this is happening now, Im not sure who the kook is," Maher stated early on. Farah noted how American military personnel have seen UFOs now commonly called UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) instantaneously accelerating, employing anti-gravity technology, and seamlessly passing from air to water without resistance, in apparent defiance of known physics. Here, he was referring to the four "UFO" videos released by the U.S. government over the past six years. All of these objects were spotted in darkness, and seen through night vision or radar, mediums notoriously prone to artifacts, errors, and misinterpretation. In the videos, the "UFOs" simply look like blobs. As investigator Mick West has pointed out, they are infinitely more likely to be balloons or drones rather than alien craft. It must always be said: despite the ubiquity of cameras in modern societies, nobody has managed to film a convincing alien ship in broad daylight. In the "promising" videos we get, UFOs are always ill-defined blobs. Bill Maher didn't raise this simple counterpoint, however. Instead, he advanced the interview with armchair alien theorizing. I dont think its a coincidence that we started finding stuff in 1947, right after the dawn of the nuclear age, he offered. Maher thinks that aliens come to check out humanity when our species achieves a seismic technological advance. AI could provide another key moment, he mused. "Is it possible that we do get to this level where we're getting threatening to them?" Maher also lended credence to the documentary's claim that aliens could have bases on the deep seafloor. "We don't know much about the bottom of the ocean," he riffed. More odd hypothesizing followed. "They seem to have the technology, I learned from your movie, to turn off or on our nuclear weapons," Maher said. "It's obviously a display of power of some sort," Farah replied. The interviewed wrapped up with Maher tossing out the theory that aliens may be intentionally crash-landing their craft to provide us with new technologies that we can reverse engineer, an act of cosmic benevolence. Farah said that key government officials interviewed for his documentary avow the existence of secret programs in place at governments worldwide to reverse engineer alien technology found on Earth, a claim that went unchallenged by Maher. When it comes out later this month, Farah's documentary will no doubt serve as an intuitively convincing advertisement for UFO conspiracy theories. But as you watch it, keep this in mind: it doesn't really offer any new or concrete evidence that hasn't already been in the public record. There's no indisputable alien technology, no photographic or video evidence beyond the grainy videos we've already seen, no smoking gun documentation. Instead, watchers will just get hearsay, outlandish opinions, calls for transparency, and extraordinary claims from seemingly serious people. But being serious doesn't make one scientifically-minded or skeptical. As Bill Maher showcased in his interview, you can assert devotion to facts but still spout a lot of fact-free, wacky ideas.
