The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Bryce Zabel | Disclosure Day, Dark Skies, and Hollywood UFO Deals
Episode Date: June 13, 2026The Why Files releases video episodes on Spotify every Monday and Friday. And when you become a Spotify Premium subscriber, you get fewer ads – that means more story, less interruption. Discover ...how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. The Basement: Bryce Zabel | Disclosure Day, Dark Skies, and Hollywood UFO Deals Bryce Zabel created five primetime TV series, ran the Emmys, and spent his life writing UFO fiction — until the people behind the curtain came knocking. A postcard at his home. A stranger at his party who'd read scripts that never left the building. A vial of moon gold and an invitation to a cemetery at midnight. Was it disclosure, disinformation, or a game built around him? He's still trying to find out. Welcome to the basement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Today we're talking with Bryce Sable.
He created five primetime TV series, ran the Emmys, and was a CNN correspondent before his Hollywood career.
CNN correspondent to switch to writing fiction.
That's not a career change.
That's a lateral move.
In 1996, Bryce made an NBC show called Dark Skies.
It was about a secret government cover-up of UFOs.
I remember the show.
And it's amazing how many things it got right 30 years ago.
And while he was making it, the cover-up came to him.
Men who said they were Navy intelligence,
showed up at his house and his office.
They wanted to feed him real secrets to write into the show.
When the government shows up at my door, all they want is back taxes.
Yeah, join the club.
Today we're covering his career, his books, and his new podcast,
which asked whether the government has been hiding the truth about UFOs
inside our movies for 70 years.
There's one more thing those men asked him to do.
Meet a stranger at a cemetery at midnight.
Wild story.
After our talk,
I'll come back for a quick analysis of our conversation.
Let's go down to the basement.
Hey, you can watch the Wi-Files on Spotify.
New video episodes every Monday and Friday.
And premium subscribers get fewer ads,
which means fewer interruptions when things start getting weird.
Bryce, welcome to the basement.
Hey, it's great to get in the basement.
I mean, I want to thank you so much for letting me into this special place
to talk about all these things we're going to talk.
about. It's a great set, folks. I mean, this is really wonderful. I appreciate that.
It's great. And, you know, I know you're, you're just starting the basement. So I'm really happy
to be in the inaugural class of these people. Yes, you are. It's a very small fraternity.
Yes, but growing. But growing, unless this is our last one, we'll see. Yeah.
How are Patrick and Einstein doing? I was wondering. That's, whoa, there's a callback.
Well, the truth of the matter is, those are my endangered,
desert tortoises that we have.
And that's, I mean, this is amazing.
I'm reeling from the thing because
we don't have them anymore.
One of them ran away.
What?
And one of them died,
but they've been replaced by two other turtles,
Wendy and Lilith.
So the guys are gone and the women are in.
Okay.
And, you know, it's,
I don't think of myself as a responsible pet owner
per se. My son's excellent at it, for example, but not me. And my wife, Jackie, and I would say,
Endangered desert tortoises are good because half the year you don't have to do anything,
but put them in a box, right? That's all you do to them? Yeah. You just put them in the box and
hibernate them, and then the other half of the year, just, you know, give them some cut up zucchini
and some lettuce and let them party. How long do they live? Long time, right?
so long that it'll be my grandkids probably that end up having to deal with him.
Wow, I'm sorry one ran away.
Maybe he's happy.
I mean, that's what we like to tell ourselves.
You know, because they do, they can burrow.
They can get under our fence.
I think that's what our original fence.
That one got away.
And the other one, it's a sad story.
And I don't know why I would tell it here, but I will.
during the COVID pandemic, we had, I always used to put every year when they came out of
hibernation, I would get some kind of coconut core kind of thing that you'd spread around.
And it was all ground very nice.
It was a cushy landing for them, right?
I liked it.
But during the pandemic, they said, we can't get that anymore.
Here's our new supplier.
And so I put that stuff out and had larger pieces in it.
And frankly, it got stuck in his throat.
Oh, no.
It's terrible.
It's just the worst thing in the world.
And now that I've relived it,
I don't know if I can recover during this broadcast here.
That's a tough one.
Losing a pet is hard.
It is hard.
Sometimes harder than losing a person.
Yes.
Especially if you think I should have been smarter about that.
But you know what?
I've been there too.
Yeah.
Yeah, I had outdoor cats for a while until I had two fewer cats.
And then it was no more outdoor cats.
It was living in the Hollywood Hills at the time.
And my neighbors were saying, you can't let your cats out here.
It was like, ah, they've been outdoor cats for years.
They lasted three, four weeks.
Yeah.
And that was it.
No more outdoor cats.
Well, so we've clearly established, and we're less than five minutes in,
that both of us should not be trusted with pets.
Can't be trusted.
Okay.
I can't be trusted with children either.
Okay.
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So we've got broadcast journalism.
How do you end up on TV as a movie critic?
Well, okay, I didn't start as a movie.
I went to school at the University of Oregon.
Go Ducks, very good football team, all in favor of them.
And I went to journalism school.
And at some point during journalism school, you have to sort of pick what's your thing.
So I went with broadcasting.
And I ended up getting a job at the hippie radio station in Eugene, Oregon.
And that was a good gig.
I mean, that's the first time I ever talked about UFOs in public.
I sort of covered the Travis Walton story from afar, if you will.
So you were on air?
Yeah, yeah.
I was the morning guy in that thing.
But then I got hired at the TV station.
Okay, so I became an anchor reporter in Eugene.
And I ended up also doing the weather there and the movies.
Because the thing is, in a small market, it's like you say to yourself, well, who does movie reviews here?
And the answer is, well, no, buddy.
you go, I'll do them.
Right.
And, you know, then you get to do them.
I remember reviewing Alien was one of my first movies to review.
But mostly, you know, anchor reporter kind of thing.
And that was a great gig.
And then, you know, I came to, I did a short tour of duty in Arizona and Tucson.
And then came to L.A. as the first CNN correspondent there.
And I got to tell you, as you well know,
the news business is so interesting because if you're covering news, you are meeting thousands of people.
Just one person after another every day is just crowded with fast getting to no use.
And I found that a lot of times you were either meeting people on the best day of their life or the worst day of their life, sometimes in the middle, but often on those extremes.
That's true.
It really taught me a lot about drama, comedy.
all the things that I use now in a Hollywood script that I might write.
Right.
I hadn't considered that, but that's true.
So how do you get to sitting with Carl Sagan talking about Voyager?
That's a trippy, wonderful memory for me.
Well, how did you get picked for that?
Okay, here's the thing.
I was the CNN correspondent, and the way these things work, you know,
you jobs come and go because the person who hire you,
you comes and goes.
Right.
So the news bureau chief at CNN got fired.
And so I knew my days were numbered and they were.
And I ended up at PBS in Los Angeles working on an investigative news magazine called Newsbeat.
And again, it was sort of a nightly 30 minute, 60 minutes kind of.
It was 30 minutes instead of 60 minutes kind of thing.
And I would do one story a week.
And I noticed that nobody.
Nobody was really, a lot of the people there were not thinking about space.
And I always think about space.
So I was like, who's your space person here?
Well, nobody.
Well, I'll do it.
Like the movies.
Yeah.
I'll do it.
Just raise your hand and volunteer.
So I did.
And so I got to cover things like the early space shuttle stuff.
And also the Voyager.
And Voyager, of course, was the first unmanned thing.
that we sent that went out of the solar system.
But on its way out, it did a short tour of duty past Saturn.
And I believe this is the Voyager 2 that I'm talking about at this point.
I covered Voyager 1, I think, at CNN.
But anyway, 2 was on its way out.
And there was going to be a close encounter, if you will, with Saturn.
And this is, and again, I'm just going to have to date myself.
I mean, I used to be the youngest guy in the room and I went to Hollywood.
Now I'm probably the oldest guy in the room.
But that's life, right?
Anyway, so the year before I started working there, Carl Sagan had basically owned the station at KCT in Los Angeles because he was doing Cosmos.
Oh, he was doing it out of there?
Yeah.
That's where he recorded all of us.
Wow.
So when I came to work there, it was like, oh, yes.
They didn't have plaques for Carl Sagan or anything, but everybody knew that he had put them on the map.
It was a pretty big deal.
So when they were about to have.
the encounter, I pitched them that they should do something called Saturn and Beyond.
It would be sort of covering the live flyby and then talking about the future of space and that
kind of thing. And they said, well, that's good. And I said, and we'll ask Carl Sagan. And because I
thought, the guy's got to owe K-C-E-T something for putting, you know, for putting him on the map
like that. And so I just called him up and said, you want to do this thing.
And he said, sure, I'll do it.
So with that in mind, and he became part of that show,
but here's the sort of the, my favorite year part of it.
I was an on-air reporter and kind of a substitute anchor,
but the main anchor was a guy named Cleet Roberts.
And Cleet was sort of a mentor of mine, an early news mentor, right?
And Cleet was the most respected journalist in Los Angeles at the time.
I mean, he'd done it all.
And he was toward the end of his career.
And we would often sit on the set before we would go on and sort of, you know, just catch up and talk.
And I was out there covering things.
And he who stuck behind the anchor desk, in his opinion, right?
He remembered the good old day.
And he was such a great guy.
And he goes, you know, you remind me of myself when I was your age, which is the most lovely compliment any famous mentor could ever say to you.
You know, that was lovely.
So I was producing Saturn Beyond for CLEET to star in.
And to host, not to star in, but he was going to be the host.
And about three days before we were due to go on, I mean, I wanted to anchor it, but whatever, I was the producer.
Three days before I'm about to, you know, we're going to produce this thing,
Cleet ends up in a contract dispute with KCT.
And he says, I'm not going to host that thing.
forget it if we don't have a deal I'm not doing it let Bryce do it and he wasn't in a real
contract dispute he just threw that to you threw it to me oh it's the greatest lovely thing
so anyway this story is kind of intriguing because um we get through the the show and you know
you notice like you're a you're a host and by a host not only you're hosting the show but
you're sort of hosting the event right so right
Sagan comes on.
We talk live about the Saturn and the space program
and exploration of the solar system and all this stuff.
And then the show's over.
And it's like, well, thank you very much.
He's a lovely guy.
He shakes with the crew.
It's all that.
And I say, you know, I'll walk you to your car if you'd like
because I'm the host, right?
I'm hosting it.
And so he had to get to JPL to do some kind of interview,
I think, for Nightline with Ted Cople or something.
So we walk out there and we, as we're walking out there, I see his car.
I'm driving a Dotson B-2-10 at this point, right?
Which is not the sexiest car around.
This guy has some kind of foreign roadster convertible.
I thought, wow, that's so cool.
I would love that.
And I don't know why I said this, but I just said, you know, Dr. Sagan,
I have a question or two about the whole U.S.
UFO subject.
Uh-oh.
And he suddenly looks at me and he goes, yes, you know, with that kind of,
sure, please, go on.
And I just said, well, listen, I just know that you've said many times that the universe
is teeming with life.
And yet at the same time, you're not a believer so publicly in UFOs because you say
the distances are too great that they couldn't possibly be here.
But at the same time, you've talked about how an alien's
civilization could be so in advance of us that, you know, we'd look like primitives. So how is it that
you don't consider the fact that if the universe is teeming with life, some of them are a million
years in advance of us technologically, and they understand physics better than us,
or they have different lifespans? Why don't you consider that they might be here?
The stones on you. Wow. Wow. Well, I was young. What's he, you know, whatever.
Wow. I'm glad you. I'm glad you.
What did he say?
Well, he just, well, I mean, he looked at me like, and your point is?
I said, well, no, I mean, you know, I was trying to be nice and all that.
And we had that back and forth for about 15 minutes.
And the specific answer to your question, what do you have to say?
I wish I could remember the exact quotes.
But he stuck with this point of view, which was nobody's coming here.
That's not how it works, was in essence.
And I said, but that's an opinion.
right but but you you're saying that the UFO
world doesn't make sense because they deal in opinions
and not facts well isn't that an opinion too
you know I was a little I was probably crazy
but he took it well enough right I mean we had a nice back and forth
and about 15 minutes in he looks at his watch and he goes well I'm due at JPL
and he got in that lovely roaster of his and motored off and I waved at him and last
time I saw him. But listen, the guy was brilliant. I think he was wrong about UFOs. Well, this is the
80s. When you asked him that question at the time, were you aware that he had a bit of an arc?
Yes. That he had evolved. Yes. And I didn't know what you're referring to that in his early career,
he was well aware of UFOs. Very open. Thought aliens might possibly have come here to explore or something.
absolutely great point and while I was aware of that I wasn't aware of it enough to sort of call him on it
right that would have because he certainly knew more about his career in life than I did at that point
so I stuck with sort of the more esoteric part of it but I did kind of get my revenge on that you know I did
a TV series for NBC called Dark Skies and it took place in the 1960s during an alien invasion
And we can talk more about that
because that has something, other interesting things.
But here's the Sagan angle.
I want to save the good stuff.
Of course.
Here's the Sagan angle.
Yeah.
It had all these real characters in it.
So toward the end of the season,
when NBC had told us,
well, you know, you're probably not getting picked up again.
So just, you know, do whatever you want.
And Columbia TV, which was producing it, said,
you know, do whatever you want,
but don't spend a dime more than your budget.
it. Okay. So my partner, Brent Friedman, and I said, okay, well, what do we want to do with this? And so in our
final two episodes, we introduced Carl Sagan as a character. And we, our whole series took place at
Majestic 12, the guys that were in charge of the cover-up. And so we made Sagan, the chief scientist
of the Majestic 12 cover-up in kind of an homage to Donald Menzel, who was the earlier debunker, right?
who everybody thought he was just...
Put debunker in quotes.
Yes, because he ended up,
his names on the Majestic 12 documents.
Yes, it is.
Right?
So we made him a guy
that got picked up by Majestic 12.
And he's all pissed off
because they've kidnapped him, basically.
And they say to him,
you know, you're in no danger.
You're in no danger at all.
But if you'd really like to know
what's going on,
we can tell you,
in which case we'll keep driving
and we'll bring you in
and we'll show you what's going on.
But if you need to get out right now, that's fine.
We'll pull the car over.
The choice is entirely yours, Doctor.
And so he made the deal with the devil.
He said, if you'll tell me everything, I'll be your debunker.
And that's what we said about him.
And I think Sagan made that deal, too.
I don't think we were wrong.
No.
I think we were right.
I think if you really track him, it sounds to me like you have.
So if you track that career of his,
you do say there is some inconsistency between where he starts and where he ends.
Right. And that shift, the timing coordinates with his rise in fame as well, which is very interesting.
Yes.
Like his exposure increased.
Dark skies, your books, especially AD, is very prescient, almost like you have a crystal ball.
It's like we picked a racehorse that came in.
Yeah, it certainly is.
last thing on
journalism
yeah
you were award winning
investigated journalist
you have a favorite story
well the one I won the awards for
was
has nothing to do with UFOs
or paranormal or any of that
space was my beat but I covered a lot of other
things and we did a
story it was called the people
versus Dr. Mania I believe
is the one that we won the awards for
and that was just one where we found
a doctor, an eye doctor, who patients would come in and he would tell them they had a catarack
and charged them for it. And they'd already had cataracts. They've already had the surgery and
stuff. He would just tell people whatever he had to tell them to get them to have the surgery
and charge them for it, even if there was no need for surgery. And so that was a pretty good,
That was one where I got to play the Mike Wallace role, where I was chasing Dr. Manaya down the sidewalk going, Dr. Manaya, isn't it true?
You know, that kind of thing.
And so, yeah.
But I will say this, investigative reporting is such a valuable thing.
And I'm, my hat is off to everybody who's doing it about the UFO topic for sure, but all on everything.
I mean, investigative reporting speaks truth to power.
It holds people accountable.
It's a really good thing.
And certainly the ability that people have to be a good investigative reporter is so valued right now.
I mean, we could use more of them.
And frankly, it's expensive.
That's what was so brilliant about that year and a half where I got to work at Newsbeat.
We were doing, it felt like doing the Lord's work, right?
Because you got, instead of doing, at CNN, I would do things.
three stories in a single day.
Wow.
But at PBS, I did one story in a week.
And so that allowed me to do all the great stuff that you do as an investigative.
What does an investigative reporter do?
You pick up the phone, you call people, you talk to them.
And after you, and you write it down.
And then you look at it later and go, hmm, interesting.
And then you call somebody else up and you say, can I come over and talk to you about
something?
And then when you're finally getting it all done, you put them on camera and then you cut it
up and you give it to the people.
So yeah, I'll only say this about it.
The things I learned working at that PBS show Newsbeat
have been so valuable to me in terms of all the work that I've done since.
And there's nothing I have done since that I didn't learn something that that benefited me from,
which like even on creating a TV show, excuse me,
one of the things you want to be able to do is make sure it sounds authentic.
Well, how do you make something authentic?
Do you make something authentic because you write a movie, say, about lawyers because you've seen a lawyer show?
That's not authentic.
Authentic is to go talk to lawyers or doctors or whatever.
So what investigative reporting teaches you is, yeah, don't get your information off the Internet these days as a primary source.
Create your own primary sources first.
That's why I respect some of the people that have done some work in this.
My first need to know, partner Ross Colthard has certainly done some excellent work on this.
And George Knapp, you know, I think anyone who cares about this topic is just in awe of what George has done.
He's the best to ever do it.
He's phenomenal.
And so I think those guys have really helped take us.
Well, look, Ross gets his own accolades for whatever.
Let's focus on George for a second because George goes back and right here in Las Vegas,
we're recording.
George didn't take no for an answer.
He has an incredible memory,
but he also asked people questions.
He listens to the answers.
I've been on coast-to-coast with him a few times over the years.
And first of all, he's a great interviewer,
but he also listens to everything everybody says.
So it's not like you say something,
and then he goes, okay, now, our next,
he doesn't do that.
He's listening to what you're saying.
and he wants to know more about it because why a good reporter is insatiably curious and won't
take no for an answer and doesn't tolerate bullshit very well and that describes that man
that's why he's a he's a friend of mine and I'm also I couldn't hold a candle to him as a reporter
he's just the best yeah and it always has been and uh even when he's talking to I don't want to
use the word crazy, but the more out there stories, he's always respectful. He's asking good questions.
You know, his famous John Lear interview is fascinating. With some of the stuff John says is like,
wow, but George just kind of leans in and asks the right questions. It's fascinating.
Nothing wrong with letting people tell you their story. The only thing wrong is believing it if you don't
have 100%. Right? So, yeah, of course you've got to listen to this. But what I think,
another thing that makes, let's call it the nap style,
because he's not the only one practicing this day.
There are other great people who are doing journalism on this topic.
And the thing is, it doesn't matter how outrageous something is or isn't.
You still have to, you have to still say to yourself,
well, is there a way for me to validate this?
You don't take anything at face value.
You have to say,
there's more to the story than what this person just told me
because that's the other thing you learn doing journalism.
You go, there are a lot of different points of view about things.
And one of the things that I found so frustrating about, you know,
network journalism or just mainstream journalism in broadcasting
is that because the time is so short,
and this applies not just to long form,
but it certainly applies to regular reporting.
And this is my criticism,
and it's been particularly strong about UFOs,
which is the basic way to cover a controversial story in broadcasting
is to find somebody who says yes,
somebody who says no, interview them both,
and then do a stand-up where you say,
some say yes, some say no, I say maybe.
That's what qualifies as a journalistically balanced report.
But sometimes a story isn't balanced.
Sometimes there's actually some facts that support,
saying yes or no.
Sure.
And we don't see that that often.
No, we don't.
Certainly not in local markets.
You really don't.
No, you don't.
I guess one of my idols are heroes is Art Bell.
Oh.
Because not only would he be respectful of the person telling the story,
he just had such an instinct for spotting the story and knowing,
all right, I've got a beginning, middle, and end.
Here's how we're going to tease it out.
He just, he saw it miles away.
Here's an interesting thing about Art Bell.
By the way, I,
I know Art Bell or new Art Bell, and I was on his show, I think in 96, I was on Art Bell show,
and I put him on Dark Skies.
I made Art Bell a member of Majestic 12.
I forgot about that.
He was a member.
He played William S. Paley, the head of CBS.
He talked about it forever.
Now I remember that.
Wow.
And listen, I don't think art would take exception to what I'm about to say.
the difference between Art and, you know, George Knapp is art was an entertainer with a show.
George is a journalist who sometimes is on a show, right?
And art would let things stand just because, well, I mean, that's what they say, right?
So on the show that I was doing with Art, Bill, I was on to talk about, this is one of my first interviews ever on the UFO topic.
I wasn't interviewing him.
He was interviewing me because of dark skies.
But as the show started, somebody had called in saying, I'm seeing some lights up on in Monterey or something.
I don't even remember the location, but it's the California coast.
And Art just said, well, we're going to be following this story very carefully tonight.
And so every time we'd go to a commercial break, he'd say, and now the lights seem to be down.
I mean, we just, and it was, it was a show.
Did it, is it listed in any books as a great UFO sighting today?
I don't think so.
Probably not.
No.
But listen, he, classic radio guy.
Yes.
Really good at what he did.
Great voice.
Just everything.
And, you know, he stood his ground and he did, he was, look, good guy.
I mean, he wrote a book, I think the Quickening.
I mean, he was a great guy.
Quigening was a scary book.
And I mean, loved art.
And by the way, putting him on Majestic 12, I, I remember.
I remember when my partner, Brent, and I thought we would do that.
And I went, well, he's like, well, why, why would Art Bell do that?
I said, it's ironic.
It's subversive.
Let me call him.
And I called him up.
And there was this kind of long pause.
And then he, and then he says, I think the first thing he said is, do I get to keep the mustache?
Of course he did.
He didn't.
We made him shave it.
I think that was the thing.
Anyway, it was fun.
And he saw the joke.
I mean, which is a lovely thing.
For someone to not take themselves so seriously,
they can't do something like that.
I think it gave him fun.
He and his wife of the time came to the set,
and we hung out all day,
and he had a great time.
Yeah.
And to be honest with you,
did a very good performance.
Sure, because he was a performer.
He's a performer.
And what a great nod to the audience.
Absolutely.
A lot of them. They had to just go nuts for it.
Well, you know, that's the kind of thing where 90% of that audience had no knowledge of anything,
just another actor, you know, in a scene.
But for the 10% who were sort of UFO curious, they knew and they thought it was pretty wild.
I love it.
You know, I put those jokes in my shows all the time that nobody gets except for that one sliver,
but it's so special to them.
Because, you know, good stuff can just work on a couple of levels.
And as long as one of the levels hits most of the people, you're okay.
Yeah.
So how did you become the, what got you interested in space and that sort of thing?
Does this go back to Dad and the Apollo?
That's a good, yes, yes.
There's two stories here.
One is space, one is UFOs.
Let's hear it.
Let's talk space first.
Okay.
When I was, I grew up in Hillsborough, Oregon.
which is a suburb of Portland.
And when I was 15 years old, I was living large.
I had started working as a fry cook at the Arctic Circle drive-in.
And I started at $1.10 an hour, and I had worked my way up to $1.35.
Wow.
Right?
Pretty cool.
And I got to be a fry cook, eat all the burgers and fries you wanted.
It was sweet work, right?
But I was interested in space because during the 60s, it was our,
article of faith for my family.
I was just a little kid,
but we would get up at 4 in the morning
on Mercury flights and Gemini flights,
and everybody would watch the TV together.
So I sort of had this burned in.
My father was a history teacher.
So I had this idea burned in.
Well, okay.
So dad wanted to get up.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And get everybody up.
He got everybody up.
It's like he would come in at like 4.30 or something.
Okay, they're going to launch in half an hour
or whatever it was, right?
And so we would all watch.
All right. Flash forward to 1969 when, again, Bryce is living large, making big bucks,
clearing almost $10 a day.
Wow.
Think about that.
Yeah, not bad for a 15-year-old.
So I was working, the manager at the Arctic Circle was a Basque separatist named Mariano Bilbao.
Okay?
And Mariana was a tough, he's the best kind of hardworking immigrant you'd want.
What's a Basque separatist?
I wanted the Basque region of Spain to separate from Spain.
Oh, I thought they all want that.
Do they?
I don't know.
At the time, I, listen.
They're the descendants of Atlantis.
Okay.
They want to be their own thing, man.
All right.
Well, then I withdraw the character.
He was just a Spanish immigrant, we'll call it.
No, he was Basque.
He was Basque.
Hard working, though.
All right.
And so he put up the schedule.
And on July 20th, 1969,
Yours truly was on the schedule doing the main cooking at the Arctic Circle.
And I went to Mariano and said, hey, you know, the moon landing, can I get the night off?
And he said, no, the schedule, no, no, you can't have the night off.
Why?
Well, I want to see the moon.
You can't get out of this to watch TV.
And I said, okay, could we put a TV in the Arctic Circle?
Put a TV in a restaurant?
No.
And I said, well, what about a radio?
radio stop talking right he was done and i so i resigned myself i was not going to see it okay so i
report to work on july 20th 1969 and it's about 35 40 minutes before the before um armstrong and
aldron are going to be on the moon surface and um i just can't handle it man i just cannot handle it
and i call up my dad and the thing you have to understand is my dad was one of those tough guys
imagine the guy from Wonder Years.
That was my dad kind of guy.
So this was a Hail Mary of the highest order
that I was about to parlay here.
But I called him up and I said,
Dad, I just really want to see the moon landing.
Can you come and get me?
And then I take the phone and I'm holding it out here
because I know he's going to be screaming.
He's going to be saying,
you made a deal, you have to be responsible, et cetera, et cetera, right?
And then he says,
he says, oh, he says, you know, you'll be fired.
And I said, yeah, I know.
And long pause and he goes, I'll be right down.
So dad comes down, picks me up, takes me back home, we sit around the TV, we watch the moon landing,
about 35 minutes into the moon landing, he turns to me and he goes, I think it's time for you to go face the music.
puts me back in the car, drives me down to the Arctic Circle.
I get out.
By this point, Mariano Bilbao is there because he's been called in that Bryce has abandoned his pose.
Sure.
Right.
And he does as expected.
He fires me on the spot.
And my father, God bless him.
I mean, because he never, this was not his style.
He goes to Mariano and he goes, you know, you are making a very big mistake because this is going to go down as the defining moment of our times.
and you are always going to regret what you did tonight.
Then he turns to me and goes,
son get in the car.
And he drove me home.
And of course, I never worked at the Arctic Circle again.
Wow, and your dad was right.
He was right.
And he had an instinct for how important it was.
Yeah.
It's more important than being a fry cook.
Absolutely.
We need to see.
No, I have to say, I mean, that was a tough one, though, because, you know,
I kid about the salary and all that.
But, you know, there were lessons being learned.
Oh, yeah.
Having a job at a young age and all that.
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, but these things happen.
These things happen.
They do.
So let's take a quick break.
We'll come back.
We'll talk about how Hollywood enters the picture.
I love it.
Let's do that.
Before we get to Hollywood, we want to talk about your basement experience.
Well, listen, I was thrilled to go to the basement to talk to you because the way I came to
actually first really appreciate the UFO topic involves a basement.
Okay?
Okay.
I think when I was like 12 or 13, my family didn't have a lot of money or anything.
And there were no video games.
So there weren't a lot of things for me and my friends to do, but ride bikes and, you know, that kind of stuff.
But we came up with a way to have some fun.
We would go down to my parents' basement because, I don't know, nobody has basements in Southern California where I live now,
but they had basements back then.
So we went into the basement.
And my parents had kept every issue of look and life magazine.
magazines, okay, in the basement.
And they were just moldering away in the basement.
Nothing really happening to them.
When my friends and I came up with a reuse purpose,
we would take a, you know, these are extended format magazines.
And we would take them and we would roll them tight, right?
And they would become like lightsabers.
And we would have magazine fights in the basement where you would hit each other's magazines.
And then the guy who's, and they, paper would be,
flying and everything. And the guy won who disabled his opponent's magazine. Now, I admit, but at least
it was environmentally friendly. Right. You got to at least say that. Okay. So we're down there having
a basement battle. And I'm, you know, I pick a magazine up and I start to roll it up. And then I
realize there's this kind of cute French actress on the front cover. Okay. And her name was
Cecil Aubrey. And it was a Life magazine from June 26, 1950. I was not.
alive during that, of course. But these are old, old magazines. And so I stop because I'm 13,
you know, and I'm just starting to be interested in women. Of course you stop. Yeah. I'm like,
oh, this is interesting. So I find her, you know, I open it up and I'm looking to see this
Cecil Aubrey, who I think is like some kind of, she's being promoted as this French ingenue kind of thing,
right? And I find the article, and there's all these pictures.
of Cecile Aubrey.
Does it open this way?
No, it did not.
I wish it had.
That would come later, but that's a story we don't need to cover here in this.
And I wrote down this quote because it's so interesting.
They described here as frisky, pert, sugar and spice bundle of adolescents.
Love it.
Yeah.
How could you beat that?
Right.
I mean, so, you know, my friends, I were looking at that, and then I'm, you know, we're
going to get back onto the, you know, after the battlefield.
And as I'm closing up the magazine to roll it up,
something catches my eye.
And in that magazine is a picture of the McMinnville UFO photos.
Remember those?
Sure.
In 1950, there's two of them.
And the Trent's from McMinville, Oregon, actually took these pictures on a camera that the guy had.
His name was Trent.
And the article is called Farmer Trent's Flying Saucer.
Are these the one where you see the telephone poles in front of it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
And in fact, I'm sure probably on the video version of this, you'll probably show people what they look like.
Sure. They're pretty great photos.
Anyway, my friends and I stop and we're like, what is this?
Because the thing that's so great about those photos, and I'm kind of obsessed by them over the years,
is that they're either true or they're not.
They're either a hubcap suspended or they're actually a flying saucer that's better than anything the government's been releasing right now,
where you're actually looking at it.
And there aren't a lot of ways to fake those flying saucers in those photos.
And they have stood the test of time.
They have.
They have been reviewed by commissions.
Bruce McAbee did a whole study on them.
I mean, they stand the test of time.
But what's interesting and gathered the attention of me and my friends is that we lived just 20 miles from McMinnville, 20, 30 miles from McMinville.
This was local.
So we're looking at these two pictures of UFOs and going,
Damn. These are, this is almost more interesting than Aubrey.
Almost.
You know, almost. Not quite. We're 13.
Right. It's up there.
But it was.
It was right here.
Yeah. That's what we thought.
And every time my parents and I would drive to the Oregon coast to, you know, go to the beach or whatever, you drove through McMinnville.
They have a big UFO festival there right now.
And so that's where I started to first say.
Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets,
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What is this? You know, what's going on?
How did life cover that story?
Respectfully.
They did.
It was only a single page.
I think it has both as one big blowup of one of them and a smaller of another and has a picture of farmer Trent with his camera.
The thing is, I literally went to high school with people that in their later lives, you know, provided health care for the trends.
And everybody always said about the trends, these people, you know, are pretty well salt to the earth.
They ain't making stuff up.
But more than that, this blows my mind because today, of course, we all have phones.
We take a zillion photos, right?
But he comes out there.
He's got a camera with a fresh roll of film in it, right?
He may have taken a few pictures on it.
And he takes these two photos.
What does he do?
He doesn't run to the local pharmacy with the developing thing and get him developed.
No.
He holds on to him for a few months because he's a frugal man.
And he doesn't develop them until he's used up the entire role.
The whole role, right.
But those photos became the, you know, the biggest things.
And to this day, to this day, I think they stand the test of time.
I urge anyone to look at them and say, what's the deal with that?
Because here's the thing.
They're not orbs.
No.
They're nuts and bolts.
Yes.
Something is flying in McMinville, Oregon in May of 1950 that is anomalous.
So this is less than three years from Kenneth Arnold and Roswell.
So the propaganda machine is not in full effect yet.
Correct.
And, you know, again, I'm sure people had their own interpretations as they always would.
But life at that time was not into debunking or anything.
I mean, I think they portrayed it like People magazine might have portrayed it later.
You know, it was like, here's an interesting story, right?
Sure.
And they put it in there because they thought that it was a really good photo.
But I just want to give you one example of how the problem we face in uphology for trying to get to the truth of certain things.
So years later, I have been not to that many UFO conferences.
I was selected as a speaker to one at the I UFOC, I think, in Phoenix.
And so I put together a PowerPoint.
And what I made for that PowerPoint,
I was trying to make the point that the media never covers these stories accurately or appropriately.
Right?
They always either make fun or whatever.
And I was trying to make a point of this is what should have happened.
So I made a Time and Newsweek magazine with the McMinnville photos in them.
Right.
And I put that up for the audience and said, remember these magazines?
And everybody is like, yeah, yeah.
And I said, no, you don't.
They're fake.
I made them.
right just to show people ask questions don't always believe things okay if you go to the
McMinville UFO conference website under their history section they have my magazine oh no and
they list they are showing it as the real thing and I have written them letters I have
social media posted about it I've told friends to talk to them about it and they won't take it
down. Oh, no.
He accidentally became part of the problem.
Yeah.
I absolutely believe it.
I mean, and so you, I say that only, you know, I'm not trying to be alarmist.
I'm just saying you got to ask questions.
And honestly, I wish the people there would just take it down.
They should take it down.
They should.
I mean, it's yours.
Yeah.
But I don't even care about that.
You know, I think to a certain amount, when I see people that take a picture of something and
then they put copyright in the corner.
Listen, if we're trying for transparency
and to prove that the UFO
UAP issue is honest and
needs to be taken seriously
as an anomaly, I'm not interested
in copywriting everybody's
little UFO photo.
I think you should give the,
they should have
the narrative of how that photo
or video came to be, but they should
release it to the world.
You're not trying to hold on to it
to, you know, to make money off it.
You're trying to help us reach a decision about what is going on.
Anyway, so that's how I became interested in UFOs.
Those fakes, though, they money the waters.
They make it so difficult.
They do.
And I feel it's so weird.
I mean, I never for a million years, I don't even know how they got it.
I never in a million years, though, thought that this was just meant to be kind of shock
value for an audience as an entertainer.
I was just saying, there they are.
But that's what happened.
Well, how did you make the shift into screenwriting?
Didn't you have the first sci-fi original?
I did.
And it was about UFOs.
Here's how it's interesting.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
If you're a TV news guy and you're an anchorman or a reporter, you're going to get fired.
Either your boss is going to get fired or your show is going to be canceled or you're going to be fired because somebody
different looking is coming.
You are going to be fired.
And so at a certain point,
when various jobs
were ending, I had started
dating my wife, Jackie,
and I sort of realized
I was going to have to, if I was going to
stay in the news business, the two
of us were going to have this terrible
pulling apart, you know, because we
both have to be looking. I met her
in the mayor's office. She was a
radio reporter. I was a CNN correspondent, right? But we were each, if you're going to pursue that
career, that broadcasting career, you're going to end up in a different city. Sure. You're going to have
these problems. And Jackie said, you know, have you ever considered writing a screenplay? That's your
fallback? I had never seen a screenplay. It isn't before the internet. And I said, no, I don't.
And you know what we did? AJ, this is so weird. We got in the car. We drove down to Hollywood.
Boulevard, found some guy on the street of Hollywood Boulevard who was selling screenplays of
movies that have been made.
We bought a couple of them.
And I read them and I thought, hmm, this looks pretty simple.
There's not a lot of adjectives.
It's pretty straightforward.
Right.
And so I wrote, they say write what you know, right?
So, well, the first thing I wrote was about something else that I gave it up halfway through
because I said, it's been good therapy.
It's not a great script.
Then I wrote a script called E&G, which stands for.
electronic news gathering, because that's what I knew. I knew the world of TV news. And that got me an
agent. It got sold. They made 102 episodes of it up in Canada. And so... Did you know how unlikely
that was? Not at the time. You were like, this is easy. Well, that's what I thought. And then the very,
the second script I wrote also became a TV series here in the U.S. And so I thought, I thought,
At that point, I was starting to realize this was pretty luck.
I mean, it's luck plus skill, but you have to be in the right place.
Sure.
Whatever.
And I just thought, well, you know what?
As long as people keep paying me to do this, I'm going to keep doing this.
And so I just stopped being a broadcast journalist, even though in a heart and by training,
I still feel that I am that person.
Certainly podcasting gives you the ability to do those things these days,
without having to work for NBC or somebody.
But I just turned my attention to drama.
And I found, as I said earlier,
one of the greatest pieces of training anybody can have
to be a screenwriter is to have been in news
because you experience so much real life
in such a condensed space of time, right?
And so being a journalist was the greatest thing
absolutely in the world.
And I do think
if I have a superpower as a writer,
it's simply that I've experienced
a lot of things,
not because I saw a lot of movies.
Now I've seen a lot of movies,
but at the time,
I had more experience than movies.
Do you remember where you were
when you saw your first thing on TV
that you wrote?
Who was with you?
What was that like?
Oh, wow.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a CBS drama series
called Kay O'Brien,
which was about a female surgeon in New York City.
It was like Gray's Anatomy without the sex.
It might still be on the air if we'd put the sex in it.
Could be a big mistake.
But anyway, CBS put it on at 10 o'clock at night.
And, of course, I'd already seen it by this point
a thousand times in the edit rooms or whatever.
But we had a little party for some friends.
I already wore surgical scrubs and everything.
And we had a few TVs.
And I just remember watching that and thinking,
oh my. I mean, oh my. What a moment. It was, it was a beautiful moment in a way that never, that exceeds. You know, I had seen myself on the air on taped reports as a reporter. So that's very personal, but you don't say, now that's art. You just go, well, that's today. I wonder what I'll do tomorrow. Right. But when you see something you wrote, oh, goodness, that gets to you. It's, and, and,
And you know what?
It is a thrill that never reduces.
Really?
If I had something on tomorrow night and you and I were watching it, I'd still be giddy.
I'd still be, there'd be tingling in my fingers.
You know, I'd just be, oh my gosh, here it, here it comes.
Because, and what's so interesting about that, I think, is that, again, you've seen it so many times.
You wrote it.
You shot it.
You were in the edit room.
You've seen it posted.
you've, you know, so many times, so many, many times.
And it's never the same when you watch it on the air.
No, that's special.
Just like you and I are having experience right now.
Okay.
Now, I don't know if you watch all your shows.
Never.
Okay.
But I will be watching this one.
And I guarantee you that when I watch it, I'll get that tingle because I'll say,
wow, that's how it looked.
I didn't, you know, because you have one experience from where you
are. And then you have another experience where you're interacting with the finished product.
That's right. And that's what I think, I mean, listen, there are a lot of knocks on Hollywood.
It is not a perfect world. Trust me. I mean, I've been kicked and abused and I was there, man.
Lied to. And you name it and you've had it too. You know. So it's not perfect, but it is exciting.
And you know what's interesting about Hollywood? If you're, like say you're a bank manager, okay, you're, you're going to
to have a good chance to still be a bank manager tomorrow, right? In Hollywood, you could be fired
tomorrow. On the other hand, in Hollywood, the phone could ring and somebody goes, hey, are you
represented by anybody? Well, yeah. Okay, who can I call? And then suddenly you're working on something.
Right. And it's cool. I, you know, like I worked on Taken with Steven Spielberg. That's a thrill.
I bet it is. How do you replicate that? I mean, that was beautiful.
I want to talk about take it a little bit later.
Yeah, yeah.
So take me through Dark Skies.
Yeah.
Was, did the network ask you to do that or did you pitch it?
We just came up with it.
Dark Skies is, I understand it's an old show, but it is an important show for sort of the whole idea of how is disclosure being managed.
Oh, people should still watch it because.
it's tracking with what's happening now.
But what's interesting about dark skies, in addition to the show itself, which I believe
one of the critics when it came out called it the most subversive show on television, which
I still bask in that one.
That's who...
It was.
I'm surprised it made it on the air.
As was I at the time.
But what's, you know, AJ, what's so interesting is that the thing that happened outside of the
show while making the show.
was potentially even stranger than the show.
And that, I think, is the takeaway from it for me,
because what happened in a, this is a short version of a big story,
but what happened is, and this goes back to what we were just talking about,
watching something live that you've done.
My partner, Brent Friedman and I had created dark skies,
and we'd come up with briefing books that didn't look at,
dissimilar to this thing, right?
We had these briefing books that were classified briefing books.
And they had all these fake documents and timelines and stuff in there.
And the premise of the notebooks was we put a little gold foil seal on them.
So it had to break it.
And they said they were top secret on the outside.
And they said that if you violated the terms of looking at them,
you'd be up for trees.
I mean, they were great.
And then they were wrapped in brown paper wrapper and with twine around them.
So when we took these to the networks.
Oh, so that was the pitch?
That was the pitch.
Brilliant.
So we took that to the network and we left them with these things.
And we just had to, we got two offers in the same day.
But when we left them, we just had to smile because they were so interactive for the time.
This is before the internet.
It meant that some executive was looking at this thing saying they could be up for treason if they didn't treat it
properly.
And so they had to cut the twine, they had to take off the paper, they had to break the gold
foil seal, and then what it said in there is you have been chosen, basically, to help get
out the truth about UFOs.
And it has to be done under the cover of fiction.
So now you are part of the conspiracy to tell this disclosure.
Wow.
Right?
Brilliant pitch.
It was, in fact, there's some group that called it.
one of the 12 best pilots pitches ever in Hollywood.
Bibles.
It was a Bible and a pitch.
Okay.
So suddenly, my friend, Brent Friedmaier, are on the fast track.
And a series of things started happening, which I could either tell you about them from the biggest to the littlest or in chronology.
I'm kind of at sea, but I'm going to go with chronology for a moment here.
Just to show you how...
So we're cruising along.
I've already created TV shows.
I know what this is like.
And I know how gifted we were.
You know, this was great.
And NBC buys it, and they order it to pilot.
So while we're shooting the pilot, the first weird thing happens.
I get a postcard.
We're shooting.
This is in production.
And while we're shooting, I get a postcard in the mail.
And on the one side of it, and I will give this postcard to you guys.
If you want to put it in the show.
On one side is the cover of a science fiction book, all right, called Flying Eyes.
But on the other side, it's been typed in a real typewriter with a dark black ribbon.
It's all caps, and it is not written as a sentence.
It's written one word, one word, one word, one word.
and it says, we are watching you.
No kidding.
Now, sure, that could have...
But since you were home?
It was sent to my home, my home address.
We are watching you.
Okay.
So that happened during the pilot, and the truth is,
I went to my partner the next day and said,
did you send this to me?
And he's like, what?
What do you talk?
And so obviously he didn't.
And we're like...
And break at one too?
No, just me.
Okay.
Just me.
And, oh, well, to backfill, it's not like I wouldn't have been on somebody's radar because you did mention it.
The first film I ever had made was called Official Denial, and it was the first film on the sci-fi channel.
Okay.
And it was about somebody who was being abducted, right?
And the government believed him.
My inspiration was Whitley Streber.
If the government thought Whitley Streber was actually being abducted, I thought.
What if they wire up his house when he's not there?
So the next time he's abducted, they can be told about it instantly and try to shoot down a UFO.
Right.
Operation Forced Encounter.
That's right.
So that's what that movie's about.
So anyway, now jumping head to Dark Skies and you get this card.
The pilot gets produced.
NBC likes it.
I think it gets a WGA award.
It does.
Well, it got nominated for a WGA award.
Yes, it did.
and the main titles of the series
won the Emmys.
Yep.
I won the Emmy.
So now we're fast forwarding.
Now we're picked up.
NBC says we're ordering
13 hours of this thing.
You know, get to work on the scripts.
We're going into production on the series
and all of that happens.
In the fall,
when the show is coming out,
we're having a party at my house.
All right?
it's a premier party.
200 people are in the backyard of this party
at the house I live in today.
These are people I know.
These are people that include studio executives
and network executives,
all the actors, all the crew, everybody.
And I know them all because I'm the producer of the show.
Is this your Majestic 12 party?
Yes.
Yeah.
And everybody has a little badge
that we made that we are actually using in the series.
So we thought, well, that's a party favor.
nobody will get rid of.
Sure.
So maybe they've already
had a majestic coal badge.
In the middle of this,
and we've got TVs outside,
we've got TVs inside.
In the middle of this,
some guy comes,
one of my producers says,
there's this guy that's looking to talk to you.
You better talk to him.
And this guy introduces himself,
and I don't know who he is.
He's the only guy in a party of 200 people.
I don't know who he is.
And he doesn't have a badge, right?
And he says,
he's about 30 years old,
nice enough looking guy jacket collared shirt not this similar to what i'm wearing right now and he says
listen the people i work for have sent me here to tell you that um you've done a really great job
you know uh we're we're just really impressed by what you have been able to do um what do what do you
what do you mean by that i'm i'm asking the guy and he says oh well you know um you got a
lot of things right.
In the pilot?
Yeah.
Which has aired yet?
No.
It has not aired.
It's airing that night.
And so, me being the wise ass I am at the time, I'm thinking the guy is full of nonsense.
So I go, oh, yeah, you've seen the pilot?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And he said, and we've read your other scripts.
We?
Yeah.
Okay.
And we've read the other scripts.
Yeah, the ones that we're working on.
They've had access.
So I'm like, okay, you've seen the pilot?
what happens after the crop circle?
You know, I'm full of swagger.
And he goes, oh, yeah, that's a great scene.
And then afterwards, they take the guy back to the majestic 12 headquarters,
and they do that operation to pull the ganglion out of his head and all that.
And I had to go, yeah, that's exactly what happens, right?
So he had seen the pilot.
Did he tell you who he worked for?
Yes.
Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.
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days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality
you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. But what's interesting is I threw
him out of the party. I said, you know, I don't know who you are. I've got 200 people here. I got a party
to run. You need to leave. So I told them to leave. About an hour later, I'm going into the
kitchen, probably to check on hors d'oeuvres. I don't know what. I'm just going to the kitchen.
And I see this guy talking to my partner, Brent Friedman. In the kitchen? No.
And by the barbecue right outside.
Okay.
So I go over there and the guy has started chatting up Brent and he says he's from the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Oh, and I.
He says his name is J.C. to call him J.C.
He didn't say his name was.
He says, call me J.C.
And they basically are saying, look, we'd like to, you know, we're all about trying to encourage slow drip disclosure.
And we would like to, you know, strike some kind of arrangement, some kind of deal with you guys.
Okay. What do you mean? Well, we would help give you some information that might be useful to you,
and you would try to accommodate that into some of your future scripts.
Now, at that point, to be honest with you, I don't know if I'm coming or going. I mean, I got a lot of my mind.
It's hard to produce a show, and it's hard to have a party in your backyard.
And this is a surreal conversation.
Totally surreal. Totally surreal.
But there's something about him that you believe him.
Well, he was a credible, nice enough guy.
I mean, to be honest.
He knew the scene.
He knew the scene.
He'd obviously had some accident.
Now, it's not like the dark skies pilot was locked up at Fort Knox and no one could ever have seen it.
Right.
But you're not sending screeners to D.C.
We're not sending them to O&I for sure.
I don't know.
But the actual paper scripts, though.
Yes.
He said, yes.
Yeah.
This is NBC?
Yes.
So here's the part that gets very strange.
Okay.
I threw him out a second time.
Right.
This time I mean it.
I said, look, this is all fascinating and everything, but I don't have time to deal with
this right now.
And I, you know, it's really time for you to go.
And he goes, got it, understand.
And then he looks at me.
I'm standing there with Brent and Brent's wife.
And he says, anybody have a piece of paper and a pen?
and I don't, Brent doesn't, but his wife says,
and she gets something out of her purse,
she's got a bank deposit envelope.
She rips off the back part of the envelope
and hands it to him with a pen.
And the guy turns away from us and goes,
now this happens in about 30 seconds, right?
30 seconds.
And he's very purposeful, and he's writing something.
And then he folds it in half, and he hands it to us,
and he goes, you know, you may want to put this
in a safety deposit box or something.
Maybe if we don't make a deal 10 or 15 years from now,
maybe you'll look it up and you'll see we were on the level.
And Brent says, can we look at it?
And he goes, oh, sure.
So we look at it.
And the only way I can describe it right this second is it kind of looked like an equation
with symbols in it.
And I didn't immediately understand everything about it.
But it was clearly his intention.
to write it. I mean, he didn't make this up.
Will you share this picture with us?
I can't share it with you right now because we're doing it on our soundlight and frequency
podcast later. I will come back on and talk to you about it sometime or whatever.
I feel bad even saying that. No, no, no. That's okay.
But you'll understand why. So we say to him, what is it? And the guy goes,
Secrets of the Universe,
sound, light, and frequency,
which is where the title of the current podcast comes from.
Now, the reason I'm not sharing it right now
is but what Brent and I,
it had been lost for a number of years for,
and we got our hands back on it
just recently in advance of this.
And so we've decided to try to investigate it a little bit
so that we can sort of,
we're going to present our findings,
and release it to the public on the same day.
That's all.
That's the only reason we're sitting on the actual thing right now.
And it had been lost because Brent had been living in Hollywood,
and then he moved to the San Juan Islands,
and they got a different safety deposit box.
And his wife, it was smaller,
and his wife moved the stuff into his office.
And about two years ago, this is so funny how things happen.
Because people say, well, why didn't you hold on to that?
Well, I was busy with raising three kids and making TV and movies and stuff.
I had other things to do.
So I started to write a book about this, which I never have finished.
And I wrote, I called Brent up and I go, you know, you've had this thing for a quarter of a century, man.
It's my turn.
Right.
And he said, okay, fine.
And he looks for it.
He couldn't find it.
And I said, that's just not.
I mean, you know, Brent and I are fast friends, but this was a problem.
I mean, so I said, hey, it's not okay.
You know, I mean, I trusted you with this thing, and it's a key part of this story, and I need to see it.
And he goes, I can't find it.
And I said, when's your daughter coming home from college?
And he goes, she's going to be here this weekend.
I said, tell her, I'll give her $500 if she can find it, and she found it.
And what had happened is the glue from the envelope or whatever had stuck inside a couple of pages.
and as she went through every book and every folder,
she found this thing again.
So we've only recently sort of refound it.
But it's clearly the one.
I mean, it's clearly the thing.
So we're looking into it.
So it's just symbols.
It's like, it's more like an equation.
It's not really an equation.
It's a drawing, it's a, it's a drawing with stuff in it that you'll see.
I wish I could be more specific.
I mean, I want you to speculate on it, but you need to save that reveal.
I think so.
I mean, I think with the, as the more I've looked into it and the more I talk to people about it,
people are like, well, that's not bullshit.
That's something.
And is it the secrets of the universe?
I don't know.
But if you think about sound light and frequency, many people do say those three.
things are pretty primal in terms of understanding our reality.
And in fact, Tesla is widely reputed to have said, if you want to understand the secrets
of the universe, think about energy, vibration, and frequency or something along those lines,
right?
So maybe this guy was an acolyte of Tesla.
But the story doesn't end there.
No?
No.
No.
Okay.
Because he leaves.
and you know the next week at the office you know Brent and I look at this thing and I go you know what
I don't have time to think about this maybe you put it in your safe deposit we'll worry about it later
this guy calls and says Bryce seems to be a bit of a problem he's talking to Brett I'm not sure
he really understands what we're talking about this is JC yeah and he says maybe he needs
to meet my superior and so JC and his
so-called superior, arranged to come to our office at dark skies to talk to us about a deal.
Okay?
So, you know, I was very busy, but that's pretty tantalizing.
One does kind of want to hear what they have to say, right?
Yes.
So we said, okay, but I told the security guys, we're going to talk in the conference room that
has a glass partition so everyone can see you in the conference room in case anything untoward
is happening.
and I said, I want you guys to stand outside the conference room and look tough.
Looked like you're not to be messed with.
Right.
So they did.
And J.C. showed up.
He was kind of the good cop.
He brings a guy, maybe 10, 15 years older than him who I believe, Brent and I've always called him the captain.
We didn't call him anything in the meeting, but we believe he was introduced as a captain.
No credentials shown.
We asked for them.
I didn't ask him at the party because, to be honest,
people say, well, why didn't you? It's because
I'm sorry, I'm in the middle
of... No, I get it. Yeah. And who
knows? He could be a wacky guy. You don't know.
Yeah. And so I thought, I don't have time
to vet the guy at a party.
I'm not going to worry about it. So yeah, we did
when they came. And
the guy, the so-called
captain guy, he came dressed
in a bomber jacket with a lot of
insignias and patches and stuff.
Jeans, boots. He looked
like a Navy seal. This is how I always
looked at him. If you, if the
If the JC character looked like he had an intelligence background,
the guy he brought looked more military.
Really felt tough, Navy SEAL.
And he didn't look like he was happy to be there.
He was very condescending to me and Brett.
He sort of felt like, seriously, I got to go talk to these Hollywood guys, right?
He was very tough.
He was not there to win over us for friends or anything.
thing. And, you know, again, I've talked about these things for an hour. Well, I'm sorry, an hour
in a podcast or whatever. I don't want to waste your hour here. No, you're not wasting it.
But we had a... I want to know what the deal, what the offer was. Yeah, we had an out. Well,
the offer was made a little more specific. Oh, but to go back to the identification. Yeah, I did say,
well, who are you? You know, you say you're from O and I, prove it or whatever. He goes,
not the way it works. That was a favorite line of his because he said, you know, if we're going to make a deal,
then that information will be available to you. And he said, and by the way, you know, we've already
done a preliminary investigation on you guys. If we make a deal, we'll do a more detailed one.
I mean, how weird is that? So a guy is going to investigate. They've already done a preliminary
investigation on me, but I don't get to know who they are. It sounds like a threat a little bit.
very threatening like that postcard.
Was there a dollar figure?
No, no.
Because, well, I mean, okay, here's what went down.
His whole thing was, there's so much complexity in all this.
There's no way I'll say it perfect or anything.
Take your time.
You recall in the 1980s, there was that special UFO live or something.
And it was on, I don't know where it was, but they purported, they had a bunch of
of people in shadowy interviews, and they were talking about an alien and strawberry ice cream
and things like that. And remember, that was Richard Doty and they called themselves the
aviary. That's right. And it was the Air Force. That's right. These guys...
Falkin. Exactly. And of course, the Air Force has been a lot less forthcoming over the years than the Navy.
That's right. Even recently. Less worthcoming and much more destructive. Yes. And that, you know,
the Navy, well, not perfect, seems to be...
be on the front lines of a lot of this stuff right now.
These guys said, and this will just probably make you laugh.
And again, I'm not vouching for everybody.
I'm just trying to be a good pragmatic relayer of what happened, right, as opposed to saying
this is what I believe.
I just can tell you what was said.
What he said was, he either said, we are the aquarium or think of us as the aquarium.
Aviary or Aquarium?
Aquarium.
Because they were the Navy.
Right?
I got to write this down.
There's an episode.
There's an episode to be made there.
Hecklefish will have things to say about that.
Yes, you will.
The aquarium.
All right.
Now, over the years, I've told that to people who are in the UFO, UAE.
Well, hold on. Keep us in the room.
You say no.
You say, I'm not interested.
To the, oh, no, we did not say we're not in.
interested.
He didn't say no.
No.
Well, in the room, this goes on about an hour and a half.
And it got kind of contentious.
Whereas the good cop, JC, was always trying to say, well, I think we can agree.
But this guy, I felt like, okay, you want to ask us for this deal.
And the deal was simply going to be some version of we will brief you on certain key things
that you should know, and you will find ways to incorporate them into your series.
You know, nothing beyond that at this point, which is, you know, kind of a weird thing
for somebody to be in your office telling you about.
Why does it take over an hour?
Because I said to the guy, so, well, because I thought maybe this is real.
And even if it's not real, if it's disinformation, I know about Richard Doty and that
shit. But you did know? Yeah. I'm thinking, I'd like to hear what they have to say. So I said things like,
well, okay, you know, that's all well. Oh, I know the first thing I should tell you, though, is
what they did say, you got a lot of things right, but the captain was there to say what we got
wrong. And what he said we got wrong is we had these biological ganglions that infested a human's
brain and if you could get it out of them, you know, you could bring him back from the brink and all that.
And he was disgusted by the ganglions, this guy. And he said, and this is, this, I've never
forgotten this phrase, he said, that's not the way it works. That's not the way it's done.
That's not the way it's done. To which I said, well, how is it done? Right. Now, we only did
the ganglion, not because we believe ganglions are the real thing. This was a TV series. We're looking
for a little horror effect.
Sure.
Right?
And he said,
it's,
I don't know if you use
the word implant,
but that's what he was talking about.
It's implants.
They're technological,
their biological,
fusion,
whatever,
but it's an implant.
You don't need all that stuff.
Did Jaycee tell you
what you got right?
Yeah.
Specifically?
I think that they were saying
certain things like,
you know,
the fact that we had Betty and Barney Hill
in the pilot,
that was right,
the fact that we,
said JFK was killed over Roswell.
Possibly, the implied might be right.
They definitely said Roswell was right.
I mean, connecting JFK to UFO, that's canon now.
Yes, but it wasn't when we did it.
No, no.
We just made it up.
Our idea then was what is the, let's take the unified field theory of conspiracies
is what was our grand idea.
We said, let's take the two biggest conspiracies of all time, UFOs and Kennedy,
Let's put him in an atom collider and see what happens, and that became our series.
Okay.
I mean, we've traced the Kennedy assassination all the way through the Mori Island Info incident
and Fred Christman.
Yes.
Guy Bannister.
It all goes back to JFK.
Yes.
And then the Leicester memo comes out a few years ago and confirms a lot of that.
It always feels like I'm involved in the Mandela effect or something.
Because when Brent and I wrote all this, there was no internet for us to get this from.
We'd never read any book that said anything.
anything like this. We just made it up. Only now, like you said, it's almost canon. So...
Well, Jacques Valet would say that this is, you're creating the myth and the myth is creating
inspiration. I think that's possible. Because, I mean, you cover Majestic 12 on the series?
Yeah, they said that was, we got that right. And you got that right. I mean, here's the thing.
I started saying to this guy, I started asking him questions, right, to see what they were going to tell us.
Did you know about the Majestic 12, Jamie Chanderay,
more issue, all that?
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's what we based the show on.
We just said, if Roswell was real, then Majestic was real.
And if JFK was in office 14 years after Roswell,
then whether he knew about it or was trying to know about it or didn't know about it,
Roswell and Majestic infected the undercurrent of Washington, D.C.
in the 60s.
So that was our point of view on the whole thing.
I think that's what Stanton Friedman fell to him, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Well, Stanton was a friend of mine,
and I once optioned his book,
Top Secret Magic, about his quest to validate
the Majestic 12 documents.
Now, we could do a whole show
arguing Majestic 12 documents.
I think they're real.
I don't think all of them are real,
but I think I subscribe to the Eisenhower briefing document
being authentic.
You do?
Now, not everybody does,
by any means.
Stanton did.
He did.
He got a couple of things wrong.
He did.
But he got some things right.
But nobody was more willing to go to a research facility.
And, you know, it was like iron pants, man.
He would just sit himself down and go through boxes after boxes and find stuff.
I don't know about the Majestic 12 documents.
There's some things about them that I just don't like.
Well, you're right to be skeptical.
You know, I mean.
But I still believe there's a group.
There has to be a group.
I guess that's really, I think we agree.
Yeah.
My take was there has to be somebody in charge after Roswell.
You wouldn't have Roswell and, excuse me, and leave nobody in charge.
So for our purposes of the show, we said for our, because remember, we're making these briefing books,
we said, well, at least we can Xerox the Majestic 12 documents and put them in, and we don't have to write them.
Right.
So we just, and also, every television series of you,
think about it, needs a base. If it's a hospital show, it's the ER. Now, if it's a legal
show, it's the law office. If it's a police station, I mean, the police show, it's the police
station. So what was ours? It was Majestic 12. Right. Okay. So that's really why we got
between it. And I, again, I respect your thought about Majestic 12. It's going to be debated until it's
not debated. At some point in this disclosure process, either we're going to see the documentation that
proves how they were all done, or we're going to see the documentation that proves that
some of them were real.
Because Doty's in that mess again.
Yes, he is.
And that's what I think Brent and I thought was going on when these guys came to the office,
right?
And the only thing, and again, this story gets so strange, and I'm not vouching for the
credibility of what the other person said.
I'm only vouching for the fact that I was there and saw it happen.
That's fair.
So at a certain point, I was asking the guy questions, and you probably know this, but just a few years ago,
David Grush told his story for the first time in my house to Ross Colthard.
I didn't know that.
In your house.
Yeah, the same place where this party happened.
And many of the things that Dave, and that's the story we can talk about later possibly,
but many of the things Grush has said, crash retrievals and revives.
reverse engineering and biologics and that kind of stuff.
These guys were implying, if not stating outright.
So that felt very familiar to me that they were saying things.
But as I got more detailed, the guy just put up a, because that's not why we're here.
Right.
He just, he wasn't going to talk about it.
And finally, he got so upset with me.
I mean, I really was not rubbing the guy the right way.
He goes, fine.
And he reaches in his pocket, and he pulls out this little vial.
Okay, it's a little glass vial with a black screw top.
And he puts it on the table and he goes, there, that's what this is all about.
And we're like, what?
And I think Brent picked it up first.
And it had little flakes in it, little gold flakes in it, which I presume might have been gold or whatever.
I don't really know.
Shot of gold flogging.
Yeah, exactly.
But there was no liquid in it.
But Brent said it kind of looked like a snow globe to him
that they were kind of floating around in there.
I didn't see that.
When I picked it up, it was just half full
with these little gold flakes.
But what the guy was saying is there's mining going on on the moon
and that this is a big part of it.
Now, I can't tell you that I found evidence of mining on the moon or whatever,
but that's what he said.
Okay?
How do we know what's misinformation?
How do we know David's not part of a program?
Well, he seems way, way, way more authentic as a witness because you can know a lot about him,
which is not to say that the story I'm telling might not be 100% true, but it could also be 100% false.
I'm not being false.
Neither is brand.
We're just sort of telling it.
But here's how it ended because it takes it to a,
a far stranger finale.
I started, I said, I don't, I was running a TV show.
And guys are telling me they want their world reflected in my scripts.
That ain't the way I roll at this time.
And so I'm saying, I don't really understand this.
What are you proposing?
Are you saying you want us to hire writers that you recommend?
Are you saying you want to rewrite our scripts?
what are you going to do there?
And he goes,
and I said,
no, I want to know.
I want to know.
Because it doesn't work that way.
I said,
I got writers out here
who depend on residuals
to feed their families.
And, you know,
I want to know.
Are you planning at some kind of impact
with this writing thing?
Are you trying?
And he's like, we're not half,
you know,
and he got very upset,
and they left in a huff.
Did they give you any examples
of what they would want in the show?
No.
Well, I mean, I think...
Because that...
Yeah, yeah, they did.
Actually, actually...
No, no, actually they did have one...
Here's a specific example.
Which is what got me into the confrontation with him in the first place.
He said, well, are you doing any shows?
We haven't seen anything where you're doing shows that take place in the water.
Because I think I had asked him the question that started that.
I said, if you're the Navy...
why are you investigating UFOs which you know are generally in the air what do you have to do with
it and you know obviously well a lot of them are seen in the water and that's when he brought up
so are you doing stories about that because you're going to need to now we didn't really know
about that back then I mean not a lot not like we do today right and so but you know again
Brent and I had set dark skies.
The leader of Majestic 12 in Dark Skies
was from O&I.
I mean, he was a Navy guy.
He was a Navy captain, our guy.
And so that's one of the things they said we got right
that we had it in the Navy.
But here's where things just take such a bizarre...
I mean, all I can tell you is life is weird.
So Bryce hears this, and I'm a producer, and I go,
Oh, well, wait a second. You can't be shooting in water all the time. You've got to get tanks and you've got people in scuba gear. I'm dissecting this thing as a production problem. And he's, I can just see the guy getting red. You know, he's just, and then, and then when I started talking about it, and what are you going to do about these scripts? Because I'm a journalist, right? So I'm grilling the guy. And he didn't like that. And they left in a huff. Okay. So.
You don't grill him. That's not the way it's done.
That's not the way.
So here's the craziest part that will just, your audience will hear this and go, I don't know
what to make of this because I still don't.
But, oh, right.
So a few more days go by.
And again, they're not calling me because I'm off doing show stuff, but they call Brent.
And he doesn't take the calls.
You know, three or four calls go by.
I don't think he's taking them.
Finally, he picks up and it's the show on the air this time?
Yeah.
How's it doing?
Before you were banished?
to Saturday nights.
Well, this is all happening
right after the premiere.
Because the premiere did well, didn't it?
It did well enough.
I mean, the numbers on the premiere
in 1996 would be a hit show today.
Right.
But we're just modest in those days,
but well enough.
It was selected by NBC
to be the lead show
in their Saturday night trilogy.
They had hundreds of buses
around L.A. with dark skies
posters on them.
They had skyriding planes
with dark sky.
I mean, they were putting a lot of money
and promos and marketing into this thing.
Was X-Files around?
Yeah, it was.
It was.
People always sort of felt like they had to choose
between our show and their show,
but I felt like X-Files is all about
sort of the suspense of, is it or isn't it?
First of all, we wrote this pilot,
you know, before really even knowing
much of all about X-Files.
And we also wrote it to be not
a tease. In the very first scene of dark skies, you see a UFO and it ain't manmade. Right. So we're not
teasing anybody. We're saying there's an alien problem here on Earth. Okay. So a few days go by
after the captain and J.C. come out and it's gone badly. Right. I always have to, you could either
laugh about it or get concerned about it because, you know, it is kind of scary that anybody would come out
and be mad at you, who looks as scary and tough as this guy.
But, you know, now that it's decades later, I'm probably safe.
I'm probably out of the woods on that one.
But anyway, they call, J.C. is apparently called Brent and got his assistant three or four
times, and Brent's not taking the calls.
And finally, Brent takes the call.
And J.C. says, well, that could have gone better, right?
And he basically, the conversation was,
Bryce really seems to not be hitting it off with my superior.
Maybe we need to do something else.
Okay?
And they said, we think maybe there's one more thing we can try
before we have to just give up on this thing.
And Brent said, well, what would that be?
And they said,
there's a ship that's going to be in Long Beach coming up.
And there's a guy on the ship.
I think he said was an admiral, but I could have that wrong.
But there was a guy on the ship that we needed to meet.
And we could not come on the ship because you can't be logged onto a ship.
You can't log on a couple of Hollywood screenwriters to talk about UFOs on a ship.
No.
That's a bad idea.
Now, on the other hand, if you're a complete con job, it's also a good idea for you to say they can't come on the ship.
because you don't have to show the ship.
But what they said is that this guy, the admiral, I call him,
was going to take shore leave of some kind to visit and pay respects to a friend who had passed.
And this is the part where I'm going to tell you,
you're just going to probably laugh out loud or hit your head on the table.
I don't know which.
But they wanted us to meet this guy at a cemetery.
at midnight.
Come on.
See?
That's what they said.
What?
That's what I said.
Now...
We can't do a we work or something?
Cemetery at midnight?
What's that about?
It's crazy and it's insane.
Okay?
I'm not arguing that it makes any sense.
But then if the phenomenon is playing with you,
sometimes it doesn't make sense.
So I don't know.
Again, I'm relaying what they said.
Now, Brent and I thought, my first thing was it's an initiation, right?
They're testing us to see if we're either dumb enough or gullible enough or brave enough to go do it.
Brent thought there might be something there that they were going to show us.
But then as we talked about it, we said, yeah, we'll get there.
There'll be two six-foot graves there.
And we'll each get popped in the back of the head.
And that'll be that to this little thing.
And my first reaction, of course, was,
Hey, I have three children and I'm married
And I'm not meeting anybody at a cemetery at midnight,
whether it's real or it's not real.
Nope.
Okay.
Brent, who didn't have kids at the time,
was almost willing to do it,
but we had taken a vow that all for one, one for all.
You know, we weren't going to do it unless we both did it.
And ultimately, we decided not to do it.
And we ended the relationship.
They did call a few more times.
never took their calls again.
And I completely agree.
There are things that sound light and frequency,
secrets of the universe, this formula,
the postcards, we are watching you,
the guys coming.
I mean, here's what I would say.
I don't know whether to vouch for
or against the authenticity of this.
I have, as a reporter, been lied to by experts.
they did not strike me as lying to me.
I'm just saying that.
I'm just saying my impression was that these were serious people.
But I would say this.
You know, you've heard of the phrase in MMRP,
a multi-media role-playing game.
Yep.
Right?
It felt like Brent and I were in that,
that somebody had constructed a game around us
and that we were unwitting players in the game.
So even...
That's kind of how you use.
started the show. Yeah. It's with
like an ARG. They wanted
us, if you think about it,
our entire pitch for selling
dark skies was, we must
use the cover of fiction to tell the truth.
What happened to us?
Just like you were talking about, maybe
you create the thing
with the JFK thing? Well, what happens?
These guys show up
into our lives
and say, we need you to use
the cover of fiction to slow
drip disclosure.
So our heads were reeling.
You know, I mean, what's real, what's not real in this thing?
And it felt like, well, let me put it this way.
Somebody spent either a lot of time or a lot of money or probably both to do this to us.
Because if these guys were actors, they're pretty freaking authentic actors.
If it was a scripted thing, then somebody spent some time scripting it.
Yeah, but it's not easy to get your unaired pilot.
It's not easy.
As an actor.
It's definitely not easy.
Did the network get involved in this?
We never told the network.
Yeah, that was not.
See, my biggest concern, by the way, about even considering it as a deal was Sony, which was producing this, or Columbia TV at the time, and NBC, did not really care.
to hear that Bryce was getting his ideas from the government.
That would not be something they would want to hear,
and I didn't want to tell him that.
And frankly, Brent and I felt that if we even really entertained the thing,
aside from the cemetery at midnight bullshit,
we felt if we actually entertained it and did it,
we would be giving up agency over our own project.
That we would, you know, I mean, how would that have even worked?
and how would we have been compromised?
And what would people have thought about it
if they found out about it?
So we just said, we're out.
I mean, we took it far enough.
But things started to feel like they were coming in us.
Because think about it, you get the postcards.
We are watching you.
And then you get a guy that crashes your party.
Then he brings somebody to your office.
And then they persist.
And they're talking about a cemetery at midnight.
And if you want to go there,
I'll tell you another story that happened, and it involves Stephen Spielberg.
Let's hold that until after the break, but the last question, because we have a lot of Spielberg to cover.
Oh, yeah.
There's your transition, I guess, yeah.
It is.
But before we go, are there any shows where you've spotted what you'd consider implanted information?
I think that's impossible to know.
I mean, one of the reasons Brent and I started to do soundly.
light and frequency as a podcast.
We were less trying to create another podcast,
but we wanted a format that would become an active investigation.
Because we know what happened to us,
and it doesn't make any sense to think that,
hey, if Friedman and Zabel turn it down,
that's it, let's walk away.
Let's never approach anybody in Hollywood ever again about this.
That wouldn't make any sense, right?
So our feeling was by telling these stories,
because, you know, listen, like a,
I said, I used to be the youngest guy, now I'm probably the oldest guy. What do I gain by taking
these stories and never telling them? So I feel like it's time to, I feel all of us who have been
impacted in the phenomenon have an obligation to bear witness to our piece of it. And if enough of
us bear witness to our pieces, we assemble a mosaic of contact and disclosure. So I'm only offering
my piece of it to find, so that my part of the mosaic is in there. And I'm encouraging other people
to come forward if they can and tell us their story in the same way that there are whistleblowers
like David Grush and, you know, even what Lou Alizondo has done and all that. If there are other
people coming forward in Hollywood, that tells us something. So by virtue of telling this story to you
and for Brent and I to be telling it in our own words, what we're really saying to people is,
hey, if you got a story like that, here's a safe place to tell it. And we've already had one
person come forward, the director of lawnmower man, a man named Brett Leonard, has contacted us
and we've done a show with him. And he basically said that at roughly the same time,
he was contacted by someone who said he was with the Defense Intelligence Agency. And so
we're hearing, and we're developing another case where somebody else said that they had been
approached. So maybe it wasn't just us. It definitely was.
Yeah.
All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about how Spielberg is an asset.
I've heard you, I think, use a film metaphor about disclosure being hard cut versus a dissolve.
Yes.
And the hard cut sounds like it would be difficult on society,
talking about like the Robertson panel or the Burkings report.
are we in the middle of a dissolve now?
I mean, if we're talking about it that way, it's a great metaphor.
In a movie, you can either do a slow dissolve from one scene to the other,
or you can just cut to it, right?
And so in the disclosure world, the way that would be, a hard cut would be,
you're not thinking anything is happening.
The president or the pope or somebody walks out and says,
we're not alone, we have bodies, here's one of them right now, right?
And everybody goes, oh my God, I mean, that's the hard cut.
The slow dissolve is you slowly dip your toe in the water.
You slowly leak this out, right?
And when Richard Dolan and I wrote AD after disclosure, this was before the New York Times article of 2017.
And so we were like, you know, a hard cut seems more likely.
Because that would mean something happened, like a Phoenix Lights incident would happen today.
And we'd all have our cell phones and we'd instantly talk about it on social media.
So that's the president at the podium.
Yeah, that's the hard cut.
I think we are living in a slow dissolve right now.
I mean, the evidence to me seems pretty strong.
You've got that New York Times article that kicks things off.
But what have we had sense?
We've had the Lou Elizondos, the David Grushes,
We've had, you know, every day seems to bring a new whistleblower or a new book from somebody.
And these are, you know, if you look at the Age of Disclosure documentary that was just out,
there's like 30 people who have actual credentials who are talking about it.
And yet, you can go talk to somebody on the street and go, what do you think about this?
They're not completely aware yet.
No.
But they're closer to aware than they were.
I think we're in slow drip disclosure right now.
I think it's a slow dissolve.
And do you believe they're telling us the complete truth?
No.
No.
No.
Do you think some of the information dripping is false?
That's a different question.
I can't judge it.
I don't see anything that I think that is dripping that is completely false.
Instead, what I see are people like Hal Putoff who say, you know, I've told you this much stuff,
but in realities, there's that much stuff that I know.
and there's a whole bunch of guys like him,
almost all the guys in the age of disclosure thing.
That doesn't mean anybody's lying.
It just means they haven't been given the Ali Ali
income for you to talk.
I saw one show that you did with James Fox,
and he said exactly what I believe,
and you guys were talking about it,
which is, hey, if you want to resolve this thing,
just absolve everybody of their NDAs.
Just let anybody come forward and testify.
We'll get to the bottom of it.
Just give that license.
They kind of need to because if your statement is cleared through the Pentagon,
you still have your clearance, you're still on the payroll, you still have your pension,
I'm skeptical of what you're telling me.
Yeah.
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definition of luxury. And because it's, you know, I've been at this a while and it all goes back to
Doty in the 80s and Bill Moore and it's just been a mess ever since. I don't know who to believe.
It is. You are not wrong. I mean, the frustration that you must feel and
and your listeners must feel is what I feel,
which is you don't have to tell me everything to tell me something.
And so we may even not need to use the word disclosure with the capital D
because I don't believe anybody's walking out to a podium and saying to the media,
there's a five-terabyte hard drive for each of you with all the world secrets on it.
That's not going to happen.
No.
I don't expect that to happen.
But another word that would be good for me would be confirmation.
I'd like to at least have somebody in authority confirm we're not alone.
You know that Roswell thing?
Yeah, that happened.
We're looking into it.
A lot of this is classified.
We're not going to tell you everything.
But there you go.
That would be better than nothing.
It would.
I mean, if you look at Obama and Trump couldn't be more different people.
Correct.
And yet they're both kind of said aliens are real.
They got in a fight about it.
They got a fight about a lot of stuff.
But those are two very different men and say the same thing.
Yeah.
And Edgar Mitchell is a very, an astronaut says Roswell happened.
Yep.
So it's very frustrating.
You were talking earlier before we came on.
It was a nice story about how Elizondo said,
if you knew what I know, you'd be very somber.
Yeah.
Why would we be somber?
Well, you'd almost have to, he's not amplified on that, but you'd be somber.
I suppose he is saying, if you knew the things I knew, they're a little disturbing,
and that would cause you to be somber about the whole thing.
And by the way, I want to answer more of that, but there's a little quick sidebar here.
My partner, Brent Friedman on Dark Skies, when he was a young man,
grew up next to the Secretary of Energy in the Reagan administration, a fellow named John Harrington.
And Brent was hired in 1981 to drive Harrington's cars across the country
because he had just taken a job with the Reagan administration in the Navy Department, right?
And then he was later promoted.
And John was one of Reagan's, John Harrington was one of Reagan's great friends.
And like I said, Brent, Brent didn't, like me, didn't have the world's friendliest dad,
but John Harrington taught him how to throw a ball and all that.
They were neighbors and friends.
And Brent got to D.C., and I'm really condensing.
But Harrington, later that night after dinner,
after the cars were delivered and everything,
on the back porch with just Brent, told him
that he had been briefed at an underground facility in West Virginia
for several months,
and that he cried himself to sleep every night.
Wow.
And Brent said, many things, like why are you telling me and whatever,
but Brent said, why would you cry yourself to sleep?
And Harrington said, because I have two daughters,
and this is the world they're going to grow up in.
What did he mean by that?
Well, he didn't give the specifics like none of these guys do.
He just said that the reality that he was encountering
was disturbing and and and and he was shaken by it and according to brent harrington was a strict
Calvinist a very religious man he said something else that was quite strange he said aliens was done
on day three but he was there for a couple of months so what else was it i mean i'd like to know that
also though in the in in times to come harrington has not common
on this, of course. But the idea that he told Brent that he had been briefed at a West Virginia
underground facility, there were no known West Virginia underground facilities in 1981 when he told it
to him. No, I'd be racking my brain trying to think. But a decade later, they broke the story of
Greenbrier. That's right. Hotel. The Greenbrier Hotel. Which was a large underground facility
in West Virginia where they were going to evacuate Congress in a nuclear war. That's true. And you guys,
there's an episode on that. And when David Grubbush,
was at my house practicing his interview that he would do for News Nation with Ross Colthard.
I asked him, do you know John Harrington?
And Grush said, oh, I know John Harrington.
And most recently, Grush has called Brent Friedman and said,
do you think we can get, can I get an audience with John Harrington?
Can you help me?
So obviously they're taking the Harrington story that Brent has told for years.
This is the story, by the way, that when I first met Brent, he told me that story, and that's why we became fast friends and decided to do dark skies together.
Wow.
And it turns out it's, in my view, a true story.
You don't try to subpoena or otherwise get John Harrington to tell his story to the Congress.
I mean, Rush works for the House Oversight Committee, and he's asking Brent about John Harrington.
That's pretty credible stuff.
Yeah, it is.
Right? So anyway, to your question about somber, I tell you that only because, yeah, if you're crying yourself to sleep at night, that's something has made you somber at best, right? Now, I like to be an optimist about life, right? I have come down, look, I understand there are two points of view on disclosure. One is the people have a right to know. And the other is what Jack Nicholson says in a few good men in words
written by Aaron Sorkin, which is, you can't handle the truth.
Okay?
Now, I happen to think both are true.
I agree.
Okay?
And that's what Dark Skies was about.
We made it a soliloquy between these two guys.
Yep.
You can't handle the truth.
People have a right to know.
So I do believe that, although I have come down strongly today, I feel like the clock has run out.
You know, 80 years is plenty.
The people do have a right to know, good, bad, or indifferent.
So I'm in favor of tell me, you know, let me decide.
if I can handle it or not.
I just feel like we have to know.
Well, tell us about after disclosure
because you don't argue about UFOs or aliens in the book.
No.
This is what happens after.
Yes.
I think Richard Dolan,
and I became friends because I called them up
after I read one of his earlier
National Security State books.
And we decided to write this book
because we said,
you know, there's been like 5,000 books
trying to prove UFO.
was a real. Let's not write that. Let's not write that book right now. Let's assume other people
have done that. Let's write the one book nobody has written. Let's write the book about what happens
after we all agree they're real. Yes. Me, that's pretty interesting. What's the world going to
look like? And so we, and you know Richard Dolan by by reputation and all that. He's, he's a
brilliant historian and thinker, and he knows more about what's happened historically in this topic than
than most people or anybody.
And I feel very privileged that for an entire year,
Rich and I sort of had this ongoing discussion with each other,
where we would call each other up and go,
you know, I was just thinking, what about this and what about that?
Trying to ask ourselves, what is really going to happen after disclosure?
Now, I say that, and I always have to buy it back a little bit,
because it does depend on what's disclosed.
True.
If you get a little disclosure like a confirmation, yeah, maybe people rock on.
If you get full disclosure and somebody goes, and by the way, there are 17 different species here.
Some of them are interdimensional.
Some of them are time travel or whatever.
Some crazy-ass disclosure.
We can't handle that.
That's going to freak some people out.
So it depends.
I just, I really don't know.
But Rich and I were able to talk about that a lot.
And the one thing that we sort of came to a conclusion about that we tried to implement,
which is if you're trying to look for clues about the future, try to look a little bit in the past as well.
So, for example, 9-11 happens. What happens?
We closed the stock market for a few days, right?
That'll probably happen.
The Great Depression happens.
What happens then?
We close the banks down so that people don't withdraw all of their money.
That will probably happen.
there will probably be a time of great disturbance.
How great can't say yet.
But we'll probably get through it.
We'll probably muddle through it.
And that's, I think, where we come down on it.
But I just think that the thing that we both discovered together,
and it was such a, I would call it joyous.
Maybe it wasn't joyous to him, but it was to me.
Because I thought, I'm really involved in thinking about something
that people just, the only people I could think of that were thinking about the things I was
thinking of at the time were probably the gatekeepers, you know, the secret keepers, you know,
who have to think about those things.
But I wasn't saying any evidence anybody else was thinking about it.
Let's face it, if there's a disclosure that just starts with we are not alone and escalates
to and some of them are here now, who, that's a big piece of disclosure by itself, right?
It's going to affect the economy, stock market, banks, etc.
But it's going to affect law.
What about aviation law?
What about all the pilots that got fired because they said they saw a UFO?
What about the military?
What are we going to prepare for with the military?
What about education?
What are we going to tell our kids?
And what about all these history books of the last 80 years?
Are we going to rewrite all those?
What about energy?
These things are not flying around on gasoline.
Right? So just pick anything in the world. What about culture? What you and I are doing right now? How will that change? Well, it'll change a lot. We'll have, we won't be speculating as much. We'll be saying, geez, that's pretty outstanding. We'll be looking at some image over there and going, damn, I can't deny that's real. So I do think it's a big deal. Anyone who minimizes it is probably wrong. On the other
hand, there seems to be evidence with so much happening all the time. It is so disturbing.
The world seems more complex and strange than ever. So probably it might not be as bad,
but it depends. You know, you always got to go. It depends. Didn't David Grush kind of get us
part of the way there? He did. And nothing happened. No. And we've had a few hearings since then.
and David Fravor and all these says, nothing's happened.
I'm frustrated by that as well.
I'm curious.
Why do you think nothing happened?
You've talked to so many interesting people
and spent so much time thinking about it.
I think, I mean, we can only speculate,
but I think there's a lot of water being muddied
and Lockheed and Raytheon are very important.
Right.
I think that's really who's driving the narrative.
My old podcast partner, Ross Colthard, said on our last show together,
he said, I can now state categorically that the Tic Tac is made by Lockheed Martin.
It's Lockheed Martin technology, he said.
Yep.
I don't believe that, but I don't know.
Do you?
I do.
You do.
I do.
All right.
Well, see, that's interesting.
If you notice on those videos,
So you think the Tick-Tac that's zipping around and that, that we do that now, we have that.
I think so.
Yeah, interesting.
But notice the videos that are being released now from the Navy are cropped in so we can no longer see the angles and speed.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So you can't use trigonometry anymore.
Yeah.
Where we've seen one video that definitely looks like a UFO, but when you do the trigonometry, it's a balloon going 40 miles an hour.
But on the screen, it looks like it's.
crazy, but it's just parallax.
So I think 99% of it could be explained.
It's the 1% that concerns me.
And I just don't think full disclosure is ever going to be there.
I mean, I think that the government probably has
some type of anti-gravity research, at least,
if not technology, cheap energy, free energy,
but you can't let your adversaries know you have it.
Let's extend that argument, though, on full disclosure.
It also depends on what full disclosure is, of course.
The assumption when Rich and I started writing our book was, you know, we were in a top-down world.
And we still are to a certain extent that people who know things don't like to share and whatever.
But a lot of the tools of observing the reality around us have devolved into the public sphere.
Yes, the government and private enterprise probably have better versions of a lot of things.
We have a lot of stuff now that allow us to see what the reality of the world we live in is.
And I think one thing that's changed about disclosure is we may be living in a world that can also go bottom up.
That more and more people can be involved in helping to solve this problem.
And I have thought for years, don't sit around.
and wait for the government to tell you what they know.
They will tell us probably kicking and screaming.
Totally agree.
Bottom up is the way I'd like to see it happen.
I don't want to hear from any more senior military intelligence people.
I'm done with that.
I feel that.
I feel you.
I want the guy who sweeps the floor,
who smuggles out a piece of something.
Yeah.
And risks his life and job and blows the whistle.
That's the guy I want.
The Bob Lazarus.
Yeah.
you know, who I find the most credible.
There's plenty of holes in his story.
And it's been semi-consistent, but that type of story.
Well, AJ, the frustration, I think, is that we, a lot of people,
if you read the internet and Reddit and X, there's a lot of people going,
yeah, just, you know, you people are all just drifting liars and show us the,
and I agree with that.
I'm part of the show me the saucer crowd.
Sure.
I want to see it.
But part of the problem with the.
current situation we have where people are fessing up from within government is nobody's allowing
nobody allowed lou elizando to take a piece of the roswell wreckage out of the pentagon i mean that's
not how it works no right i mean if if you do get to talk about this that's all you get to do you
don't have the evidence the people who have the evidence have it and they're not sharing it and
they're not sharing their work. So it, there is a preponderance of evidence, if you will,
that is given to us by people who claim to have seen and know things. And it's pretty extreme,
but nothing is going to change the world and turn it upside down like authentic real evidence.
Right. Or another mass siding potentially, where everybody stops what they're doing and says,
What is going on here?
And by the way, just to tell you what I'm kind of working on,
one of my latest projects, I'm doing it with Lionsgate.
It's called Undeniable.
And it's exactly that premise.
The premise is it's seen from the world of a television newscast, all right?
Write what you know, right?
And they actually hired me to write it as a, it's a seven-part scripted podcast.
We start production next month.
There's cast already.
that's been brought in
because they want to create the IP to sell the TV series
because nobody wants to spend any money anymore.
So that's fine.
But the premise of it is exactly what we were just talking about,
which is in the opening episode, there's a plane crash.
It's a mid-air collision,
and the news people are covering the mid-air collision,
but the thing is it's a mid-air collision
with an anomalous object.
And some kid on the plane has taken a video
of the mid-air collision
and has texted it out
as they're crashing
on the Indianapolis freeway system.
So suddenly the news people
start to cover a plane crash,
but now they're covering an anomalous
object. And so what
I'm trying to do in that story
is tell the story that takes you from day
one, nobody knows
anything, to day seven, we're all
agreed, we're not alone.
You know, the week that could change the world.
And I bring that up only because
I want to say the thing that is going to change your world, it's probably something you and I
aren't thinking of right now. Of course. Yeah. That's just the way things are. There's something lurking,
like I didn't see the New York Times writing that article in 2017. Nobody saw that coming. Right? I mean,
who saw that, right? I mean, the Air Force probably did. Yeah. I mean, we knew, you know,
it was great. Tom DeLong the year before it announced to the Stars Academy. But, you know,
things weren't happening in an intense way. And the pace has, uh, you know, it was a, uh, you know, it was
picked up, obviously.
So, and I don't think everyone saw David Grush coming.
No.
But again, you're so right.
I mean, David Grush, I believe, is telling the truth.
He seems to have the proper credentials and all that.
But I wish he had been able to get out with a piece of the craft or, you know,
with a biological sample or something, because I want to see it.
Well, since his statements have to be cleared through the Pentagon,
why don't just the Pentagon give the statement?
Because the president needs to tell them to do it.
And so far, President Trump has not told them to do it.
Now, we could have a long conversation that we get both attacked on the media for being both pro and anti.
You can't even speak about Trump anymore in an Internet world.
But, I mean, he has the power to do that.
Now, what he's doing instead...
And he promised to do it.
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
Maybe he will.
Maybe he won't.
But it would take something of that magnitude.
It would.
He promised to release lots of files and a lot of subjects that seemed to hit some bumps.
Yeah, they did.
How long do you think Steven Spielberg has been an asset for the IC?
That's an interesting question.
First of all, of course, his movie Disclosure Day is...
certainly interestingly timed.
I doubt that the people at Universal that are putting it out are doing anything that
other than a victory dance in the office complex because how great to have people talking about
UFO and UAP when files and videos are being released.
The reviews are amazing.
Yeah.
I haven't seen yet.
Yeah.
I would say this about Spielberg.
A couple of things.
First, he has always denied being an asset of anybody.
So I'm just...
Of course.
Of course.
I'm just saying, let's...
And I was half joking.
Right.
But it feels like he knows something.
Well, okay.
So let's just state for the record, he says no.
You know, in his interviews that he's doing for his movie, he says, you know, I've just
been studying this a long time.
And these are the conclusions I've reached.
And I think it's very clear that if you're Stephen Spielberg, people do.
seek you out and tell you things if they know your interest. So he's had some great
conversations, as have you and as have I. We've, not everyone who said anything to you
as have you put on the air and vice versa. He knows some things. Now, I will give you a specific
story though. When we were shooting the dark skies, two specific stories. When we were
shooting the dark skies pilot, we were creating a crop circle north of LA. And
And it was hard to create a crop circle.
So these people that go, these guys with a board and two guys have created all the crop circles,
I'm skeptical because we had like 14 people on it for two days and it still looked like crap,
you know, compared to, you know, some of the real ones.
But there were a couple I could not debunk and I tried to.
Yeah.
So who knows?
Anyway, what I do know is that our crew that was out scouting locations for the crop circle scene
ended up taking a break that night.
I was not on that location scout, but Brent was.
And Brent was talking to our director, Toby Hooper.
And you probably know Toby Hooper because he directed Texas chainsaw massacre and poltergeist.
And he knows Steven Spielberg very well.
And Toby Hooper, who is a man, he's passed on, but I did shoot the pilot with him.
And I know him to be a very, very direct and honest guy.
I mean, he never pulled a punch about anything ever.
But he told Brent when Brent said to him, you know, you're finally going to get to do something Spielberg, you know, hasn't done.
You're going to do something first.
You're going to make a crop circle, which, by the way, Spielberg is making a crop circle or did make one for Disclosure Day.
But this is a while ago.
And Toby said, yeah, well, you know, yeah, but I'm never going to be ahead of Stephen because, you know,
Stephen knows a lot of things.
And Brent's like, well, like what?
By the way, that was a very bad Toby Hooper impersonation.
I won't do that anymore.
But what Toby told Brent is that Stephen Spielberg had told him
that he had been given direct information in a, in a, what I want to say,
in a unofficial capacity that people,
had given him information for close encounters.
He said that.
Toby said that to Brent.
Which, of course, he hired Jay Allen Heineck as a consultant.
He used Heinex.
Close Encounters, He coined that phrase.
Right.
And had a cameo in the film.
True.
But I think what Toby was saying to Brent is, yeah, of course he brought Heinek in, right?
But Heinek's last words, or one of his last words, according to Don Schmidt, the Roswell
researcher who worked with him on kufos, one of Heinzak's last words were, why won't they tell me
even now?
Really?
Yeah.
So I think we know that Heinek knew a lot because he investigated a lot.
Yeah.
But he didn't know a lot because the, you know, the guys, you know, came around, you know,
and told him things.
Like Heinek pressed the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who famously had a standing desk
and he was in his office and challenged him.
why, you know, I've worked loyally for you guys.
I've done what you've asked me to do.
And according to Heinek, who told this to Don Schmidt, Rumsfeld comes around.
See, that's the problem, though, because it's three sources.
Sure.
Whatever.
It's still a good story.
Heinek watches as Rumsfeld comes around his standing desk and gets in his face and says,
don't you ever ask me about that again.
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That was easy.
So Heinek didn't know every.
everything. What Toby was implying to Brent, or said to Brent, not implied, Spielberg's heard from
real people, the people that know shit. They've talked to him. So, you know, I don't know what that
means, but that was the allegation. Now, I, as we talked about, I did work with him on the Taken series.
So we had some meetings talking about UFOs. And my take on hearing him talk about UFOs is he's
like you and me. Super interested guy who's read a bunch of books and talked to a lot of
important people and has a lot of ideas and theories and everything. I didn't get from him that
he knew things. I didn't know. Well, close encounters, that's what, 1977? Yeah. He basically
covered the planet, the planet Serpo legend. He sure did, or started it, one or the other, yeah.
Before anyone heard of that, which I thought was a Doty story. Yeah. But what's, I think, interesting about
Spielberg, who is the UFO alien director for sure, is now I don't know what Disclosure Day,
what the theme is going to be, but it feels like his point of view has gotten a little darker
over the years where you go from close encounters.
Sure.
It's a friendly exchange, and then you get to War of the Worlds.
I think you make a great point, AJ.
My take on Disclosure Day, what it means is Stephen Spielberg is 79 years old, as we were
record this. He's going to be 80 near Christmas this year. Okay. Over the time from close
encounters actually scratched that from when he was a kid in Phoenix where his first movie
as a kid was about UFOs. Was it? Yes. Two hours and 30 minutes of UFO Spielberg kid movie. Wow.
And then he made close encounters in 7677. Anyway, from that moment until Disclosure Day,
he's had his name on as a writer, a director, or a producer on 30 alien projects.
Wow.
Okay.
I believe that people should look at Disclosure Day.
And I'm not going to comment on the film one way or the other at this point.
Let's let people have a pleasurable experience having it envelop them.
But as you watch it, I would ask people to consider this is likely to be Spielberg's closing argument about UFOs.
Okay. This is the one where he's put all the things that he thinks he knows into one basket, wrote up the story on his own, 55 pages single spaced, gave it to his writer and expanded into this film, and now he's directed it with loving care.
When you see Disclosure Day, that's what he thinks is true, because he's been interviewed multiple times, and he keeps saying,
this is the true story.
Well, why would you say it's the true story
if it's only what you think you know
because you've talked to a few people
and read some books?
You know, he's saying it's a true story
because he believes what he's saying
and, you know, without spoiling anything,
it's very clear that what he's saying
is there's a private cutout organization,
whether it's not Majestic 12,
it's called something else in the movie.
But there's something out there
that's in charge of all this stuff.
Sure.
That there are abductions that have happened.
They start in childhood.
And that there are human alien hybrids out there.
That's what the movie is saying from the trailer
and from the interviews everybody's been doing.
So there's no spoiler for me saying that.
No.
But he must believe it.
What would lead him to believe that?
Because he knows things.
Well, that's the question, isn't it?
What would lead him to believe that?
Well, he's either heard it from a trusted source.
Listen, I'm not going to be the guy that's on a crusade to say he was read into any program or not.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
But I would be the person to say he's thought about it probably as much as you and I have thought about it and maybe more, right?
And he's had a, I've been blessed and that I've been able to talk about UFFF.
to all kinds of great people.
I've talked to UFOs to Buzz Aldrin,
to Stan Lee, to Carl Sagan, as we said.
It's a blessing, and I'm happy and grateful
that it happened to me.
And for Spielberg, it's probably two or three times that.
He's probably talked to everybody about it.
So it's not impossible that Stephen Spielberg
has come up with some pretty interesting thoughts on his own
that he didn't need to be briefed in about.
However, he is saying things that,
sure make him sound like he's confident of what he's saying.
I mean, I picture that meeting with JC and a 28-year-old Spielberg, and they say,
Stephen, you want to be the biggest director in the world?
Here's what we need you to do.
Well, you've hit my soft spot because I know that what happened to me felt very authentic.
And at the same time, it's quite obvious that nobody only went to Friedman and Zabel on dark skies.
If what happened to me was an authentic experience,
I'm not the only guy that that's ever happened to.
There were people that happened to before
and people that happened to after.
I don't know who all they are, of course.
So you'd have to at least put that on the table
and say that's certainly a possibility.
And you hear those rumors all the time,
whether it's close encounters or E.T.
of these other movies,
there's always the rumor of there's some government man
that says it got a lot of that right.
Yeah.
Well, that's what they told me.
But again, and you're very well versed on this, as is your audience,
you've also got the entire historical precedent of Richard Doty and his disinformation.
And the fact that people have been disinforming.
So, for example, my own story doesn't mean it's true, but it doesn't mean it's not official.
It may very well have been an official approach to us for another reason.
either to feed us disinformation that we would put in the show or to find out what we would do if fed
disinformation. During the middle of it, Brent and I felt like we didn't call it a multi-media
role-playing game when we were in the middle of it. In the middle of it, we said, I feel like
we're in a movie. And I don't know how this movie ends. And I don't know if it's a thriller or a
comedy. I mean, that's how we kind of looked at it. Yeah. You know, and, and yeah, that kind of stuff.
Well, the cemetery twist is great. That's the craziest part of that story. It's crazy.
It's crazy. Oh, I'm going to give you the short version of this. There's one other weird thing that
happened in dark skies. In the summer, before, well, no, while shooting the pilot, all right,
I did get those postcards. That to me, let's put a pin in that.
Postcards, we are watching you.
There were two of them.
Put a pin in that.
Well, it was on the set one day.
I get a call from the Columbia TV executive.
And he says, hey, listen, there's another project shooting here on the lot.
And you've got to get your guys out of the black suits right now.
And I said, what are you talking about?
Because we had men in black in their black suits.
They were the agents of Majestic 12 in our script.
And he said, well, there's a.
movie, it's a comedy, it's
men in black, and
they don't want you in black
suits. You're guys
in black suits. I proceeded
to say, well, you know,
this goes back to the 50s, you know,
and I started talking about Gray Barker
and Moorey Island
and all the stuff you were talking about.
And I'm, you know, I was pretty well
versed on this at the time, and I'm citing
chapter and verse, and he cuts me off
and he goes, Bryce,
let me put this in words,
that you can understand, which, by the way, is one of the most condescending things anybody
could ever say to you, but, you know, I'm from Hollywood.
It's not the most condescending thing that's ever been said to me.
But he says, let me put this in words that you can understand.
And I'm, this is an exact quote.
I am not mincing one word.
This is the exact quote.
He said, get your actors out of the black suits today, or we will shut down your production
and burn the negative.
Wow.
So there was no room for debate.
Nope.
They were the bigger, you know, this was being produced by Amblin, and Barry Sonnenfeld was the director.
And again, I'm not pointing a finger at Spielberg or Barry Sonnenfeld.
I'm talking about what executives told me and what lawyers told them and whatever and whatever.
So we had to accommodate them.
Because that wasn't an empty threat.
They would have shut you.
Yes.
They would. Yeah. And so we felt very powerless. And remember, at the time they're doing this, we've just been picked up. I mean, we're shooting a pilot. I mean, we're going to shut down. We're going to burn your negative. But we're molders in a black suit every week. I know it. It's crazy, but it gets crazier. So we said, okay. So we shut down production briefly and started putting everybody in blue and green and brown suits.
It's not the same.
And we started looking into, and we couldn't call them men in black.
We were told under no circumstances, can you call them men in black?
So we had to change the name, do a find replaced in all of our script to call them cloakers, is what we called them.
Cloakers.
Cloakers.
So when you see Cloakers in a dark skies episode, that's why.
So we did that.
And we thought, well, this is over.
Okay, we did what we needed to do.
Flash forward one year.
now it's the summer of 96 we are on the schedule we are the lead show on NBC Saturday night it's a home run okay
couldn't be better and we're going to produce 13 hours it's already been purchased for that okay by NBC to
Sony slash Columbia TV and we receive a call from the same
executive he says I have to come over and talk to you and he comes over and he says listen I've
just come from a room full of lawyers and we have a problem and the problem was they things had escalated
well Brent and I thought we were home free things had escalated lawyers were talking to lawyers
and again I don't know I don't know how this drives back to the creative team of men in black
but lawyers were talking to lawyers who were talking to executives who were talking to us finally
And we were presented a list of 19 non-negotiable demands for what had to happen in our pilot.
We had to, they wanted us to reshoot our pilot.
19?
Yeah.
Like what?
No elevators is an example.
Men in Black had an elevator.
No elevators.
I couldn't have an elevator.
Because you had one going to a secret?
Yes.
No secret organizations in Washington, D.C.
Couldn't have that.
And here's a good one.
No autopsy.
No alien autopsy.
Now, I'd already put an alien autopsy in official denial on my sci-fi film.
We had an autopsy in dark skies, but what was the X-Files but an autopsy every few weeks?
Sure.
With Mulder and Scully doing them, right?
I mean, nobody owns autopsies, but we were told you cannot have an autopsy.
You can't have a farmer.
I was told there can be no farmer in dark sky.
because we have a farmer in men in black.
And it was pretty frightening.
And what happened is they told us we had to do these things.
And so Dark Skies was scheduled to have 11 days of reshooting,
11 days on a pilot that NBC had already bought and produced and had delivered to them.
Now we're having 11 days of reshoots.
So the aired pilot was that?
It hadn't aired yet.
It was going to air in a couple of months.
But I mean, the one that we saw was the reshot, yeah.
Oh, no.
If you want an ultimate irony, by the way, though, when they finally put the DVD out for dark skies,
the people who put it out, Shout Factory, called me up and said,
so we're putting your DVD here.
There's two versions of the pilot here.
What are they?
Interestingly enough, Sony, without knowing that they did it, had sent the original version
of our pilot out internationally.
And then there's the NBC version
that finally got aired.
And if you get the Dark Sky's DVD set,
it's like going to film school.
You see these two different things.
They're both on there?
They're both on it. Oh, that's brilliant.
Which you prefer?
Well, it's funny.
Okay, it was bad to have this done.
And before I answer, which I prefer,
you need to understand something.
In the middle of this, well, Brent and I were sort of pushing back going, what's going on here?
We were called into the Columbia TV office and said, you guys better lawyer up because this is getting serious.
Because, you know, there are accusations that you've stolen your script.
Wow.
And of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
And there was a moment.
You know how you and I are sitting across the table from each other?
there was a moment when Brent and I are in the dark sky's office is at two in the morning sitting across from each other.
And I remember the conversation.
It was like, so what are you going to do when we can't work in Hollywood anymore?
And I said, well, maybe I'll go back into journalism.
And he said, who's going to hire you to be a journalist if you've just been fired from your show?
and the thing that they were going to do,
they wanted Sony to give the money back to NBC
and not produce the show at all.
And there's a nice twist in it
in that, remember we had 19 non-negotiable demands,
Don O'Meyer bought the show for NBC.
He used to run it, he's passed on.
And Don O'Meyer, when he heard about this,
Well, it's very interesting.
I got sent to NBC
where I was supposed to sell
the 11 days of reshooting.
And I was like, why would I do that?
Right.
But they made me go there
and say, it's going to be better,
which I'll get to in a minute.
But Olmeyer, during all this,
basically said,
so,
I bought this thing.
I've got it in the office here.
We're going to air it.
Screw him.
I didn't make any deal
to get rid of it.
it. We're going to air this thing. I love this guy. I know. I didn't know this until just very
recently. It's a new discovery. I didn't understand why the non-negotiable demands became,
all right, you can still do your show. And Brent and I, by the way, came up with another
notebook about this big explaining, you know, the creation of dark skies and all that, because
our lawyer told us to. And so between that notebook sort of explaining things and Olmeyer saying,
I'm going to air it anyway, screw you guys. It now became, all right,
Well, we're still going to do a reshoot.
You know, we're going to try to accommodate all parties, all right?
And so what Brent and I decided to do in the aftermath of that is we said to ourselves,
okay, we could pout, we could hold our breath till we turn blue because we have every right to.
We are being abused big time right now.
But if we're going to reshoot for 11 days, let's go resh.
And some of those scenes they're going to reshoot are just to replace black suits with green and blue.
and brown suits, let's go read those scenes over and ask ourselves, could we make them any better?
So we sucked it up and did some judicious rewriting. And so this is a long way to answer your
question, but which version do I prefer? It's hard for me to tell because we said, but you got to love
your firstborn, right? So that one's great. But we did fix a few things. And the second one,
we mourned the idea
like Majestic 12
originally you got on an elevator
in the state in the Capitol building and went
down below and that's where Majestic
was and so I
loved that most in the original
but in the revision
that they made a shoot
Majestic you had to drive out of town
into Virginia and clear a gate
and drive your car in
which wasn't nearly as good
but on the other hand certain things didn't
get touched like the Betty and Barney Hill scene
we had in it's the same in both versions the uh the autopsy got some rewriting uh because they made us
make a few changes this feels overly aggressive very another production company very the only reason
that happened if if dark sky dark skies had been at one company and men and black had been
in a completely different company both companies would have said to the other f you we're not we're not
doing anything about it right but they were at the same company
And so because they were at the same company, suddenly there was somebody besides,
there was somebody to appeal it to.
And, you know, let's face it, dark skies, I love it.
Thank God they gave us 40 million to make these episodes.
And I, not me, they gave 40 million to produce it.
And I'm proud of it.
I'm extremely proud of it.
But I understand that Men and Black at the time was a huge film.
you know, you had Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
I don't buy it.
You're an unaired pilot, and that's a guaranteed blockbuster.
What do you care what they're doing over here?
The only reason I tell you the story is, you know, as I said,
we all have to sort of just tell our story, right?
And so I don't think you can analyze the dark skies story with the JC and the captain
and the cemetery at midnight, and that we are watching you,
postcard without also saying that in the middle two months before the show actually aired on NBC,
this happened. You know, you can draw your own conclusions. Are they related? I don't know.
They could be. They might not be. I just know living it. Brent and I felt like we are,
we're done. Our careers are ruined. We're out of here. As we're recording this,
two of the hottest movies in theaters right now are created by YouTubers.
Oh, there you go.
So this is, this is that our time has come, which means dark skies could come back?
It could.
I'd be, again, I don't own it, even though I created it.
Sony owns it.
I would love a phone call.
You know, I said, one of the great things about Hollywood is the phone can ring.
I'd love the phone to ring and somebody go, hey, you guys want to reboot dark skies?
I'd love it.
But they could do whatever they want.
Sony's actually listening right now.
You're listening. They're fans. They're fans.
Yeah, please. Bring it on.
But you know, you never know.
And I went in on that project, Sony.
Yes, you should be. You need to be a consultant.
Did they move you to Saturday night?
No, we started on Saturday night.
Was that a good slot then?
No, no, because there were no DVRs. It was a death slot.
First of all, they made us be at 8 o'clock.
We were very violent.
So we shouldn't have been on at 8 o'clock. That's family hour.
should have been the 10 o'clock show.
And before DVRs, let me just ask you, on most Saturday nights when you're a young person,
are you trying to stay home on Saturday night?
No.
And so what happened is you immediately, you know, we appealed to a lot of people.
I mean, people were like really intrigued by it.
But then they'd miss an episode or whatever because they had a life.
Well, they didn't get to rewatch that episode.
They couldn't watch it on YouTube.
They couldn't DVR it.
They couldn't, there's nothing.
So they just, so it's not a good way to make a habit.
So it was bad.
But it wasn't for lack of trying.
I give, I mean, NBC is the hero in this thing.
Not only did Olmeyer save us, but NBC put, you know, believed in the show enough to, you know, do everything possible to make it succeed.
And I loved that.
I thought that was great.
You know, it is interesting that you say, maybe they'll call you about a remake.
you know what I keep hearing is I tell this story to people and you'll probably hear it yourself.
People will go, you know, I don't know about this dark skies thing, but you should make a movie
about what happened to those guys because that's kind of what it feels like sometimes.
That's a good movie too.
Right. And the only thing I always say when people ask me, say something like that to me, I go,
yeah, well, we'd have to do a slight rewrite. The movie would be Bryce and Brent, take the deal.
I'm curious about the deal because...
You know, if they want you to put certain storylines in, that's different to me than force you
to take things out.
Right.
Like those 19 items, that bothers me.
Yeah.
But if you have a connection in intelligence that says, here's a storyline that might work for you.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Yeah, let's roll with it.
But, you know, part of the problem, I'm not part of the problem, but a reality is I didn't
need those guys.
No.
I was well read on this topic.
I had many conversations with people.
at the time. And you mentioned John Lear earlier, just to continue and finish the dark skies thing.
After we sent the guys packing over the cemetery at midnight thing, the next week, I'm in my office
working and somebody comes in and says, there's a guy named John Lear in the lobby.
What? And Brent and I are like, what? John Lear's in the lobby? And, you know, I don't know if your audience is aware of who
John Lear is. They are. Okay. So, and I, you know, Brent and I were aware of John Lear because he had sort of,
I think he issued his Lear statement or whatever about reverse engineering and all this stuff.
And he also had a lot to say about the moon. Yes, you did. Remember. So we were very busy. And,
and again, I sort of paint myself as the difficult person in this thing, but I wasn't trying to be
difficult. I was trying to put a show on. And so when somebody said, John Lear has showed up
in your lobby without
any foreknowledge.
He didn't call and say I'm coming by.
I just said, well, you know, I'm in the
middle of a meeting here and I can't
talk to him right now. So Brent and I made
John Lear sit in the lobby for two hours.
Oh, no.
But we finally sit down with him
and he comes in. He was nice
enough. You know, he told us
to things. He came to tell us
things. I don't know that he's related
to the J.C. Captain thing.
I don't know. But it
happened right on the heels of it, right? And I think he felt dissed by, you know, me making him
wait in the lobby. He sent me a letter, which I'm still looking for, I'm trying to find it,
that it was a pretty nasty letter afterwards. I bet. Where he just basically said, well, I can see
your little TV series is so much more important than finding out what the truth really is.
It sounds like him. But he's a strange guy because a lot of it sounds crazy, but he got a few things
He sure did. He sure did. And he, you know, it was just a weird time for me because I thought to myself,
I've just put up with these two guys who say they're from O&I. And now I got John Lear sitting in my lobby,
and I got a show to run. Because, you know, the thing about doing a television show, and I'm not sure
everyone understands this, but you're not focused on one thing at a time. At any given moment,
you have a script that's being broken in a writer's room.
You have a script that just came out that's waiting for notes.
You have a production draft that's going into pre-production.
You have a show that's shooting.
You have dailies that are coming in.
You have the first assembly of a future episode
that needs to be looked at and notes done.
You have another episode that you're trying to lock for the network.
Then you have another show that's going in to be scored.
And you've got to meet with the musician or something like that.
There's so much going on.
Right.
You would just, you'd become hysterical at times.
And at the same time, like I said, I had three kids that were little kids.
So that was a tough.
You know, I'm not sure John felt my pain, but, but yeah.
Shift gears for a quick second.
Yeah.
I love alternative history.
And you wrote two books award winning.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
So just the one that fascinates me.
In your book, what happens with JFK?
Okay.
If you think about it, dark skies, in one respect, is alternative history.
Yes, it is.
And like I said, my father was a history teacher who wasn't alive when I wrote these two books.
He probably was rolling over in his grave over these two.
But I wrote two books.
The first one was called Surrounded by Enemies.
What if Kennedy survived Dallas?
And the second one was called Once There Was Away, What if the Beatles Stayed,
together these two great mythological things.
So what happened in the Kennedy one is I just thought, okay, I don't think it's a great
way to look at it to say, oh, if Kennedy didn't die in Dallas, he'd have stopped the Vietnam
war and everything would have been wonderful and blah, blah, blah.
I just thought that's not practical, particularly if, particularly if Kennedy survived but had been
shot at, two things would have happened. The public would have known somebody tried to kill the
president in broad daylight. And Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy would have become the first
conspiracy theorist because they would have known it wasn't a matter of who tried to kill Kennedy,
but like who didn't want Kennedy killed. That's right. There were a lot of suspects at that time.
Sure. And Bobby Kennedy being fiercely protective of his brother would have said, well,
John, it's not going to look pretty, but we are going to protect you. We are not going to let these
mofos take you down. Did they bring Dulles out of retirement in that story? Probably not. No,
no, you want to stay afar. In fact, he's one of the suspects. Of course he is. And in fact,
if you think about it, JFK and Bobby would have been the conspiracy theorist. What would they have done?
They just sat down as they do in the book. That very night, JFK comes back from Dallas and
They sit down in a darkened oval office and go over all the suspects and who they think was behind it and what they're going to do about it.
And I don't think it's a terrible spoiler, but to say, once you start investigating an attempted murder of the president, it doesn't stop neatly.
You don't get to control the investigation, right?
And so what happens in the book is that they start looking into JFK to find out who killed them, and that that,
means you're turning over a lot of rocks. And some of those rocks have women under them.
Yes, they do. And that would have been a painful thing because remember, people love JFK. I love
JFK. I mean, what a great leader and what a charismatic person. At the same time, though, people
loved his wife. Oh, yeah. They thought Jackie was pretty cool. And if they found out that JFK
was cheating on Jackie with more than a few women, I don't know that that would be.
have been a good look for him.
That would have been a pretty bad optic and could have changed the public view.
But even as the public view was changing, you'd have also had people looking into,
okay, well, if you think they did it, what did JFK do to them and what?
You know, there's just a lot of things that could come out.
And so in my book, JFK doesn't get killed by a bullet, but he gets killed by an investigation.
and not killed his reputation in his career.
Yeah, he gets destroyed.
Does he finish out his term?
No.
He does not.
He resigns.
Yeah.
I need to check out this book.
It's sort of, it's one of those where Bobby has to go to him and say, you know, Jack, the votes aren't there for you.
Well, some would say they weren't there in the first place.
Yeah.
Well, that's true.
But I mean, if he survives and gets reelected 68.
You know what's so great about it, though?
What?
I had the greatest time.
writing both of these books because instead of writing them as a novel, I wrote them as an anniversary
edition of like Rolling Stone. So it was Rolling Stone writing the story of JFK's survival in Dallas.
And it was Rolling Stone writing the story of the Beatles figuring out how to stay together instead
of breaking up. And I just had the greatest time. And, you know, one of the things that's so wonderful
when you're writing and things are working, things just start clicking, right? So particularly with the
Beatles, I found myself saying, well, okay, I got to write John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
Well, we all know who they are, right? So that's the number one thing of writer needs.
You sort of need to know, you can describe the same event, right? But if you have four distinct
people looking at it differently, they're all going to talk about it differently. And you know
who turned into the character I loved to?
write the most. I mean, Lenin was great. He's easy to write. And, you know, George, he's got
that spiritual thing, but he's also got an ironic sense of humor, I guess. And Paul, of course,
is the commercial guy, but I loved writing Ringo, because what was so great about Ringo,
it's true in life, but it's also in my book, where everybody else is talking, and Ringo is
always just kind of sitting there, as he did, many times, he'd listen, and then he'd be the guy
that pitches in the thing that ties it all together in this self-deprecating wonderful way.
that he had. And I'm not sure people even remember it, but, you know, he should have got credit
on certain songs. I mean, he's the guy that said, you know, mate, it's like, it's like I'm working
eight days a week. What? Yep. And it's like, how you feel in Ringo? Well, it's been a hard day's night.
I mean, he came up with those. So, yeah. Yeah, the Peter Jackson documentary is, which is amazing.
So great. You know what's the greatest thing of Peter Jackson documentary is? We think John and Paul
really just hated each other at the end, right?
And there were moments, but there is a moment where George Harrison is the one that storms off.
Sure.
And what happens?
John and Paul go into another room to talk about it, and there was a microphone there.
What?
That's like the greatest find in Beatle history.
And you've got John and Paul talking on a microphone about George, and they're not talking like guys that don't get along.
They're talking like two guys that want to save the band, and I believe it's John and
that's saying, yeah, well, we can get clapped in here.
Don't worry about it, right?
But they're not mad at each other.
No.
They're on the same team, even at this time where the original Let It Be documentary is written,
and if you watched it back then, you went, oh, boy, these guys, who, you know, this is,
this is a train wreck.
No.
But the Peter Jackson thing goes to show you a little more information changes perspective.
It does.
It also applies to our UFO thing.
The more information you have, the bigger the lens, the more you see the accuracy of what's going on.
That's right.
Fascinating.
So what are you working on now?
Are you still doing your podcast with Dolan?
Yes.
It's called Need to Know.
Did it with Colthart for the years doing it with Dolan.
But mostly I'm concentrating right now on telling the soundlight and frequency story because I really feel it's one where, you know, there are a lot of people doing,
I guess solo UFO podcasts.
And, you know, I know how to do that,
but I feel like the one contribution I can make right now
is to try to burrow in on the Hollywood thing.
Well, I love your approach,
how you kind of take one piece of media per episode.
Yeah.
Before we take off,
maybe just can tell us how that podcast works.
The format is very unique.
Yeah.
We like the, we're not reviewing movies,
but we are sort of telling the story of dark skies,
not as the primary story, it's just woven in.
And at the same time, what we're trying to do is to take alien and UFO movies that people have seen.
And instead of reviewing them like, well, the camera work could be better here and that kind of thing,
we're actually asking ourselves, what does this movie say about alien life?
What does this movie say about UFOs?
you know what what what can what can we learn and then ask ourselves is did hollywood add something to
euphology because that's it's the chicken and egg argument right did did hollywood say something first
and down we think it's true and we refer it in euphology or did something go on in uphology that
hollywood got wind of and say and i think if you want to know the truth it's both i mean
carly young said this yes yes he did
He didn't believe in UFOs, but he said if the myth survives, it'll find a way one way or the other.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I've just been really, you know, listen, it's good to like your work, right?
And I'm really enjoying sort of rolling up my sleeves and trying to learn more.
And I hope I've done justice to some of it in talking today about sort of what happened at Dark Skies.
not that I think a 30-year-old show
you know opens up the
the world in any way
but it is reflective
just like some of these older movies
you think about it the day of the earth stood still
what does that tell us what ideas did it put out there
what was the first movie ever made about flying saucers
it was called the flying saucer in 1950
and you know
who were the writers of some of these films
some of them came from the you know
the U.S. Army Signal Corps and intelligence and things like that.
Did that impact what they wrote about?
And coming across things which I know you and your audience is aware of the Robertson
panel, which the CIA convened in 1953, okay, and that could be a need to know.
That could be a WIFiles, okay?
But what makes it a soundlight and frequency is that one of the things that Robertson panel
in 1953 recommends is that they should try to.
marginalize this whole UFO thing and get people's minds off it and maybe they should reach out
to Hollywood and in specific they say what about Walt Disney and then and so brand and I then go well
if you're going to reach out to Walt Disney what do we know about Disney today the Disney company is
the number one purveyor of alien content on the planet they have they own the X-Files they own
the alien franchise that's right they have the Marvel franchise they have they have
They have so much alien content.
Is it related?
I don't know.
That would be speculation.
Who knows?
But the whole thing's been fascinating.
Thank you for bringing it up because it's been fun.
And we're sort of halfway through it.
And I'm hopeful that as we get to the end, A, we're going to show off that formula.
And by the way, the day that we're doing that, I'm mailing it to you, all right?
And you can put it up wherever you want.
But the other thing is it's just given us a chance.
to sort of, at the end, to try to say to people, okay, we don't know exactly what's happening
maybe, but here's what we've learned.
You've been on the ride with this.
This is what we learned.
You could do this on your own show, of course, because you're taking everyone who listens
to the Y files on a large investigation, and they're learning with you, and conclusions
are being made and debated, and that's healthy.
So I think that's really terrific.
And so, yeah, I'm enjoying that.
And the other thing, by the way, though, and I'm sure you feel the same way,
UFOs can marginalize people.
We've seen it happen, right?
And for years, I sort of fought against being just the UFO.
I don't want to be the UFO guy.
I want to be a writer-producer, right?
Not just a UFO guy, even though it's taken on a big part of my life.
but one of the things is that my wife and I are producing a film called The Last Battle in the Fall, quite likely, in Europe.
And it's about the last battle of World War II in Europe, and it's a true story.
And it is a, and it's cast, it's got cast now, which I can't talk about the cast because they haven't put the press release out.
But it's a hell of a story.
I can't wait to see that.
It's so good.
Can I give you the 32nd version of it?
Sure.
Okay.
Last week of World War II in Europe, what do we know?
We know that Hitler kills himself on April 30th.
Well.
Or, yeah, okay, you really are a conspiracy show.
Good for you.
Okay.
Let me rephrase.
Okay.
The world believes Hitler killed himself on April 30th.
And on May 8th, Germany surrenders.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, what we know, and it's a true story, and it's from a book by Stephen Harding,
the author, that I've adapted into the screenplay.
What happens is,
there are some Americans in the middle of that week who, you know, they just really want to end the war.
They don't want to be the last guy to die in Europe.
They want to go home and marry their girls and have babies, right?
They just want to be done.
They want to get normalcy.
But these guys get set up to a castle in Austria.
Oh, right.
Okay?
And they're told, listen, take your tank and go up to this castle litter in Austria because the Nazis are,
holding a bunch of high-value French prisoners of war there.
I know this story is a great one.
It's fantastic.
The generals, the premiers, all the people who actually hate each other, because they all blame
each other for losing the war, right?
But they're all cooped up together as POWs, high-value POWs.
So the Americans do what they're supposed to do.
They go up there.
They fight their way in.
They manage to prevail.
They take the French out of the cells, and they put the German guards in the cells.
And the French do what French do.
They get out the best wine.
And everybody starts celebrating, right?
And it's like fantastic.
And in the middle of the night, they start getting shelled.
Yep.
Why?
Because Himmler has sent 200 angry, liquored up, pissed off Waffen-S-S officers to surround this castle
and kill everybody involved so they don't testify at war crimes trials.
Kill everybody, including the Nazis.
Yes.
And so then.
Yes.
That's the twist.
Go ahead.
So the Americans have to go to the Germans.
They just locked up and say, you know, let me ask you a hypothetical.
If we give you your guns back, who are you going to shoot?
Us or them?
And the German guards led by a German gongle who, there's no good Germans in this thing,
but he's not a bad, bad German in that he's the guy that says the war is over.
You know, it's over.
We're going to fight for peace.
so yeah we'll fight with you
and so what happens is
you have this mythic battle in a castle
where you've got Americans
Germans and French
the French are these old
French guys you know
and the Germans are these
older young German guards
and the Americans
were outnumbered 20 to 1
there were like 10 of them and 200
off in SS so these guys are in a castle
holding them off
and it's just so full of
interesting things. For example, they run out of ammo, both sides. Yeah, you can't write this.
You can't. I mean, I did write it. Right. But I, I, and so literally, it comes into the castle
keep where people are fighting with knives and, and maces and all this stuff. Yeah. And it really happened.
It's a great story. It's like a Lord of the Rings scene. It's so wonderful. It's amazing. I'm looking
forward to that. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for letting me even tell that because I can't wait to see it.
You know, what's funny, though. It's a Hollywood story, though, because yes, he wrote the book, but the way
It happened is I was standing in my sister-in-law's kitchen years ago and I ended up standing
next to this guy.
I don't know him.
He doesn't know me.
I tell him I work in Hollywood.
He says he's the editor of World War II magazine.
And we're talking and he goes, you know, I've heard about a story.
I don't know if it's any good.
He tells me the story and I go, if that's not a movie, I don't know what is, can I option
it from me?
He says, fine.
So I write a treatment about this thing and I show it to him.
this is Stephen Harding, and Harding reads the treatment. You know, I'm going to take it out and sell a
movie. He reads the treatment. It goes, this is great. Do you mind if I write the article first? And I said,
yeah, sure, because I want to option it. So he writes a major article for World War II magazine. I optioned it.
And I'm so excited about the article that I say, I'm going to inspect the script out. So now I write the
screenplay. So I take six months and I write the screenplay. And I show it to Harding because now I'm going to
take the script out and he goes, oh, wow, this is really good. Do you mind if I write the book?
So he takes a year and a half to write the book. I put the script in a drawer. He writes the book.
The book becomes a big hit. It's on the New York Times bestseller list. We take the script and the book
out and now we're making a movie. Oh, God bless. I can't wait for it. It's a great story.
Yeah, it is. It's fun. The podcast, Soundlight and Frequency. Highly recommend. You haven't heard anything
like it if you're into UFOs, this is the podcast.
This should be a huge show.
It's amazing.
Bryce Abel, thank you so much. It's been fun.
It's been great. Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Me too. Bye, everybody.
That was Bryce Abel, one of the best storytellers I've had down here.
We covered his years in news, the Dark Sky's saga, Stephen Spielberg, and his book about
what happens after we admit we're not alone.
So let's untangle some of this.
Dark Skies is real. NBC put it out on the air in 1996, and it's
opening title sequence one in any.
McMinnville photos Bryce talks about are real too, shot on the Trent Farm in Oregon in
1950 and printed in Life magazine that June.
Optical physicist Bruce McAbee studied the negatives and found a real solid object in the sky.
Skeptics still call it a hoax, but the photos are good.
Now the bigger idea, that the government has quietly steered UFO stories through Hollywood.
That part isn't fantasy.
In 1953, a CIA group called the Roberts
panel recommended using mass media to take the mystery out of UFOs.
The records show Walt Disney's name came up.
Government touching Hollywood on this subject is on the books.
The men who came to Bryce's house and called themselves Navy Intelligence?
That I can't prove, and neither can he.
But he told it straight.
It could be real.
It could be disinformation.
Whichever it is, I believe him.
I think someone's shown up, and I kind of tend to believe it was Navy intelligence.
The thing that got me is the way.
West Virginia story. In 1981, a man named John Harrington told Bryce's partner he'd been briefed
inside an underground facility of West Virginia. At the time, no such place was public.
Eleven years later, the Washington Post exposed the Greenbrier, a secret bunker built to
hide Congress in a nuclear war in West Virginia. Harrington named it a decade early, and I've
covered the Greenbrier Hotel. It's a fascinating place, and it has been expanded. Now, what I respect
about Bryce is he never asked you to believe him. He lays it out on the table and lets you decide.
His new podcast is called Sound, Light, and Frequency. And it's not really a UFO show.
It's an investigation into whether our movies have been doing the government's work for 70 years.
And spoiler alert, they have.
His book with Richard Dolan is AD after disclosure. It's on Amazon and check out his podcast
where he analyzes movies and TV shows looking for hints of disclosure.
We pulled on the Men in Black, JFK, and Morrie Island thread.
in this episode and Majestic 12 in another.
They're both linked down below.
Until next time, be safe.
Be kind.
And know that you are appreciated.
A secret code inside the Bible said I would.
Frozen paranormal fun as well as music.
So I'm singing like I should.
And it never ends.
No, it never ends.
All with M.K.
I'm a DER.
