Director of Groundbreaking UFO Doc Says What He Learned Left Him 'Rattled': 'Things Could Get Really Bad, Really Fast'

• Disclosure details what is being called an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligence and secret efforts to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin

• 34 high-ranking members of the U.S. government, military and intelligence community share never-before released information on UFOs and their potential impact on humanity

• Director Dan Farah tells PEOPLE he worked in secret on Disclosure for two and a half years because 'there's a lot of people who would try and stop this movie from getting made if they had the opportunity'

By his own calculation, Dan Farah watched Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial close to "a thousand times" before he turned 15. So it’s hardly surprising that the 45-year-old Hollywood producer yearned to one day create a film that picked up where Spielberg’s two fictional movies about alien visitations and government coverups left off.

“I wanted to make a movie,” says Farah, “that I always wished existed, a documentary that did an unprecedented job at seriously and credibly exploring what is actually known about UAPs [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, aka UFOs]  and non-human intelligence by people who have direct knowledge of it as a result of working with the U.S. government.”

Anyone who has gotten a chance to watch a screening of Farah's groundbreaking documentary The Age Of Disclosure (and, as of publication time, only a handful have) and pondered some of the film’s jaw-dropping revelations will tell you that the 45-year-old first-time director pretty much nailed it.

Over the course of his 1-hour-and-49-minute-long documentary, Farah speaks with 34 senior members of the U.S. government, military and intelligence community who all paint a disturbing portrait of what they claim is an 80-year-long cover-up regarding the existence of non-human intelligent life that has been visiting our planet for a decades.

Those interviewed detail what they claim has been a decades-long top-secret campaign to reverse engineer the technology from spacecraft of non-human origin that has been retrieved from crash sites by scientists from our government and those of other nations.

This has resulted, they say, in what has essentially become a top-secret arms race with China and Russia — where each nation is vying to be the first to find a way to harness this other-worldly advanced technology. The downside, warn many of the officials who appear in Disclosure, is that keeping this information secret and compartmentalized within the government and the military industrial complex could result in an intelligence failure exponentially worse than what happened with 9/11.

“We interviewed dozens of very high-level, credible officials who said these unknown threats [posed by UAPs] could basically destroy our way of life forever,” Farah tells PEOPLE. “Things could get really bad, really fast. Learning that left me rattled.”

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If true, the impact of these revelations — some of which were discussed in a series of bi-partisan congressional hearings over the past few years — has the potential to alter the future of humanity. That's why, explains Farrah, that he was able to get so many heavy hitters to speak on camera about this once-taboo topic.

“I ask people to think about why would any of these extremely high-level people like our Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] have to gain by participating in this film and shedding light on this?” he says. “They're doing it because they feel an obligation to bring out the truth as much as they legally can.”

Rubio — who confesses that this issue “keeps me up at night” in the doc — has a number of memorable scenes in the film where he discusses just how gravely important this topic is and the risks involved by our leaders’ continued reluctance to take it seriously.

“I think,” says Farah, “one of the best lines in the film is when Secretary Rubio says, ‘At the heart of every blunder in intelligence is a lack of imagination — the idea that an adversary can't do something or won't do something because it hadn't been done before. And that leads to strategic surprise and sometimes strategic surprise changes the course of human history.' ”

Related: Ex-Pentagon Official Discusses Government's Hunt for UFOs: 'I Have To Be Careful What I Say' (Exclusive)

Those interviewed in the film include retired Air Force Lieutenant General (and former Director of National Intelligence) James Clapper, Admiral (and former Navy Chief Oceanographer) Tim Gallaudet and former Department of Defense official (and one-time member of the Government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) Lue Elizondo.

Their first-hand accounts — such as those from Jay Stratton, the former director of the government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force — are both spellbinding and disturbing. “I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings,” Stratton says in the film.

Farah — who produced Spielberg’s 2018 sci-fi action feature Ready Player One — worked on the film in secret for two and a half years. “The truth is,” he says, “there’s a lot of people who would try to stop this movie from getting made if they had the opportunity.”

Lining up officials to speak on the record proved to be a long and difficult process. “A number of people, specifically intelligence officials, were actually concerned that their lives would be in danger if they participated and ultimately decided not to,” he says.

Disclosure — which is currently in search of a distributor — will premiere at South by Southwest Film Festival on March 9. Farah says he’s been buoyed by the “unprecedented” number of views — 18 million as of publication time — that the trailer has racked up on various platforms.

“The response has been really validating and rewarding,” adds Farah. “I think it speaks volumes to the universal appeal of this topic. I always knew that I couldn’t be the only person who wished that a movie like this existed.”

The Age of Disclosure premieres at SXSW on Sunday.

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