The Age of Disclosure and the Shape-Shifter Hypothesis

Friday, November, 21, 2025

Let’s begin with the obvious: The Age of Disclosure is exactly the kind of film Washington thinks counts as intellectual engagement.

One hundred and nine minutes of retired admirals, intelligence officials, congressional hobbyists, and Marco Rubio (now with added gravitas) sitting in high-contrast lighting discussing “nonhuman craft” as though they’re reviewing zoning regulations for the Blue Army Procession of Fatima.

The film insists on its seriousness by sheer volume of talking heads—thirty-four of them—each framed with the same visual grammar: dimly lit rooms, brushed steel backdrops, and the kind of grave pauses that imply revelation is imminent if you’ll just keep watching.

It’s documentary as congressional catnip.
Dense enough to look important.
Vague enough to avoid accountability.

And, of course, screened in a committee room (available to rent or buy today!) where no one had dinner and everyone pretended they weren’t faintly thrilled.

Representatives shuffled in after a vote, still wearing the expression of people who’ve forgotten what daylight looks like.

Staffers brought notebooks, though no one has ever needed notes to process: “We don’t know what these things are, but trust us, they’re not ours.” The whole gathering radiated the particular smell of American officialdom: over-seriousness layered onto under-understanding.

Jay Stratton is one of those men the federal government produces in a certain mold—square shoulders, clipped sentences, and a résumé that sounds like it was written in a basement where sunlight is classified.

Former intelligence official, former director of something called the UAP Task Force, which is Washington’s genteel way of saying “the people we send when something appears in the sky we cannot explain, dismantle, or sue.”

He spent years moving through the Defense Intelligence Agency and its bureaucratic cousins, the way a career officer moves through airports—quietly, efficiently, leaving almost nothing behind except the sense that he knows more than you do and always will.

So when Stratton looks directly into a camera and says, “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings,” it’s not some guy in a parking lot next to a Wal-Mart.

It’s a man whose job was to look at the unexplainable, file it, and brief people who cannot afford to panic.

That line carries the weight of someone who has spent his adult life inside classified briefings where the lights never seem quite bright enough.

And then, of course, he refuses to elaborate. Declines. Waves it away like a man shooing a fly from his sandwich.

This is Washington at its most theatrical: drop the revelation, deny the details, and let the public argue while the classified documents remain tucked somewhere in a windowless floor the government pretends doesn’t exist.

This is the aura around Stratton. A man who has seen something, insists it was not human, and behaves as if further explanation would only complicate our already fragile grip on reality.

He is polite enough not to say out loud what his tone suggests: If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t sleep.

At the end of the day, I would still call that a public service. Bless your heart!

Now we leave the committee-room theater behind and walk into the colder territory where the real questions live.

But the film, for all its grandiosity, raises a simpler, more subversive question than it intends:

What if nonhuman shape-shifters are already living among us?
And more unsettling:
Would this world look any different than it does right now?

Humans Don’t Detect Anything—They Accept What Looks Familiar

Humans don’t perceive truth. They perceive patterns. They take whatever appears “close enough” and assign it a category.

That’s how we navigate the world: just close enough.

A shape-shifter wouldn’t need flawless disguise—just the right amount of affect, a conversational rhythm that doesn’t raise alarms, and the ability to simulate interest in whatever humans are currently panicking about.

In a species this easy to reassure, passing wouldn’t be all that difficult.
In fact, it would be fairly routine.

The Uncanny Already Lives Among Us in Broad Daylight

Go anywhere people gather without choice—DMVs, airports, surgical waiting rooms, food courts at 3 p.m.

You can see that folks already move through these spaces with behaviors that would look extraterrestrial if we hadn’t normalized them:

The too-still posture.
The smile that lands a beat late.
The precise, emotionless cadence.
The eyes that skim over human faces like scanning barcodes.

None of this triggers suspicion.

If something nonhuman adopted these patterns, we’d never know.
Why would we?
We barely question what the humans are doing.

Humans Shape-Shift Constantly, Just Badly

The workplace version of a person rarely resembles their domestic version.
The version presented to a spouse doesn’t match the version presented to colleagues.
The online self is its own species entirely.

Humans reinvent themselves situationally, often without awareness.
If a nonhuman intelligence could do this intentionally and coherently, it would look more stable—not less.

Perhaps the alien would appear more human than we do?

A Sharper, Cooler Look at the Species

If nonhuman beings watched us closely, they’d see that we’re not good at self-perception.
We don’t understand the forces that drive us.
We don’t notice our own contradictions.

But they see how we sacrifice scores upon scores of our young to power and debauchery.
While we don’t see the genocidal gap between how the human experiment actually behaves, and what we claim to hold sacred.

A species this profoundly self-absorbed and distracted, souls so utterly unmoored, would not be able to detect an outsider.
Because It struggles to detect its very self.

So, a better question becomes:
Would the aliens be concealed by their technology, or by our own inability to see clearly?
Occam would raise an eyebrow. Wouldn’t he?

What Happens When You Realize You Were Never Alone?

If nonhuman shape-shifters exist, and are exposed, civilization won’t collapse.
The lights won’t dim. Airports won’t empty. Keno will go on.
Some folks will still spend their evenings scrolling through problems they can’t fix.

What will change is quieter:
a shift in the story we tell about ourselves.

Because the measure of a species is not whether it is alone.
The measure is how it behaves once it learns it isn’t.

And when that moment comes—if it comes—it won’t feel like revelation.
It will feel like a long-overdue grudging recognition.

The kind that settles in the way a long, down-low truth does:
unhurried, unsensational, almost familiar.

We’re not so special. We were never the whole story.
We were only a small part of what we thought we understood.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.