Director Darcy Weir has made a career out of chasing UFOs, alien encounters, and government cover-ups — but Dark Alliance: The Next Generation is something different. This time, he’s turned the camera on the people doing the chasing.
For years, legend has it, the Secret Space Program community operated as a kind of parallel universe—part whistleblower culture, part lecture circuit, part belief economy—all held together by claims of off-world military service, alien alliances, and a concept known as “20 and Back,” where you spend twenty years under alien observation and return to Earth the moment you left. In Dark Alliance: The Next Generation, Weir and narrator Kari Lindsay wade into this world and pick it apart little by little.
Historian and UFO researcher Richard Dolan sets the stage as a true believer — he’s convinced the Secret Space Program is real. But his experience on the conference circuit has soured him; the people demanding their place in that world are self-aggrandizing, unverifiable, and more interested in status than truth.
“…watched the whole ecosystem get deliberately muddied by ringers and planted disruptors sent by competing factions…”
The documentary profiles a cast of alien experts and skeptics who have built careers on these extraterrestrial claims. Tony Rodrigues says he endured twenty years of horrific abuse—physical, sexual, and emotional—as part of the program, with no documentation to back it up. Chris O’Connor sits next to Rodrigues with a similar story but a far more pleasant experience. Randy Cramer presents himself as a super soldier shaped by alien encounters. Michael Salla is an academic who lost his university position over his work in exopolitics — the study of the political implications of extraterrestrial life and humanity’s relationship with it. Jeremy McGowan, the military veteran in the group, initially aligns with Salla’s theory that the U.S. invaded Iraq to seize a Stargate — then turns around and debunks it from the inside. Walter Bosley, who first attended an SSP conference in 2014, watched the whole ecosystem get deliberately muddied by ringers and planted disruptors sent by competing factions — all angling for a seat at the table and their piece of the market. In the end, all roads lead to Corey Goode, the original “20 and Back” kingpin, who looms large without ever being on camera. Then there’s the reptilians!
Steven Cambian from the Truth Seekers podcast gives it a name: a circle jerk of fraud, where one unverifiable story props up the next, and the whole structure holds together on nothing more than “trust me, bro.” He emphasizes that there are many claims, accompanied by literally no proof.
"…there's the reptilians!"
