Luis “Lue” Elizondo, a former Department of Defense official and member of the government’s classified Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, pictured at the Jefferson Memorial in “The Age of Disclosure.”

Six minutes into the screening of the UFO documentary, the audience reacted audibly.

“I have seen, with my own eyes, non-human crafts and non-human beings,” Jay Stratton, the former director of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, had just said on the screen.

A collective gasp — the kind that follows a shocking plot twist in a horror flick — rang through Austin’s Paramount Theater. Evidently, the attendees at this South by Southwest premiere of “The Age of Disclosure” were not UFO true believer wackos. True believers would not have been moved by this stunning revelation because, well, duh.

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But then, director Dan Farah didn’t make this documentary just for the true believers. He approached the subject with journalistic rigor, interviewing 34 senior members of the U.S. government — people in the military, intelligence and science.

All those people testified about their direct knowledge that intelligent life exists outside of our planet.

Many in the Austin audience, it seemed, were shocked, perhaps even persuaded that our federal government could harbor earth-shattering secrets about non-human intelligence.

I wasn’t one of the people who gasped. I’m not certain that there’s life on other planets, but I’ve had a healthy fascination with the possibility ever since Elliott and E.T. levitated through the sky on a bicycle. And I’ve been frustrated by the lack of serious attention that the question has received.

Could this be the film that changes the way that we talk and think about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the way we in the media cover it?

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In the theater, I wished some of my colleagues were watching with me. My mind wandered back to an editorial board meeting in the summer of 2023. I could practically........

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