I just finished the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure and it left me with mixed reactions. The production quality is solid and the interviews are engaging, but the framing leans heavily toward the idea that aliens should be viewed as a national security threat.
I can't tell whether the filmmakers thought this approach would get the world more interested in the topic or whether they genuinely believe aliens are dangerous, which would make the whole thing look like projection (what the US did with Iraq). They even point out that defense contractors are becoming too powerful, which feels inconsistent, because a threat-based alien narrative would only make those companies richer and more influential.
There's something deeply unsettling about this framing. When we cast extraterrestrial intelligence as a "threat," we're projecting our own violent, competitive nature onto beings we know absolutely nothing about. It's the same colonial mindset that has driven centuries of human conflict – the assumption that anything different or unknown must be controlled, contained, or destroyed.
The documentary seems to miss a crucial point: if advanced civilizations have been visiting or observing us for decades (as the evidence suggests), and they haven't already conquered us, then the "threat" narrative makes no logical sense. A civilization capable of interstellar travel would already possess technology so far beyond ours that any hostile intent would have been acted upon long ago.
Instead, what if we approached this phenomenon with curiosity rather than fear? What if the real threat isn't from "aliens" but from our own inability to transcend our tribal, warlike thinking? The defense contractors and military-industrial complex stand to gain enormously from a threat-based narrative, while the rest of us get caught in a cycle of fear and paranoia.
I worry that this framing will set back genuine understanding by decades. Instead of asking "How can we defend against them?" we should be asking "What can we learn from this phenomenon?" and "How might this change our understanding of consciousness, technology, and our place in the universe?"
The national security lens doesn't just distort the conversation, it actively prevents us from having the deeper, more meaningful discussions we need. It's time to move beyond Cold War thinking and approach disclosure with the open-mindedness and intellectual courage it deserves.