Cemetery at Midnight

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I remember it being very surreal and asking myself several
times in the course of the meeting, is this really happening?

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Now?

Speaker 3 (00:09):
There are a couple of things that we should point
out here. Thirty years is a long time. Three decades
is a long time, and so I think we have
most of the details of what happened and what was said,
or at least the area it was said, maybe either
a little bit out of order because I didn't write
anything down that day I went back to work, but
I do know that we did ask for some identification,

(00:31):
and what was so weird about the meeting? We asked
for identification and we get told if the deal comes together,
then you'll get it. And I remember thinking that's just
so crazy. How can we make a deal with somebody
that won't tell us who they are? But it just
made no sense. And we went back and forth on
that enough that I think you and I probably had

(00:52):
one of those knowing glances exchanged where we thought, Okay,
let's just go with it. The guy's not going to
tell us right now. I said something else, by the way,
early on in the meeting that I thought was odd,
and maybe it was JC, but somebody said that they
had done some preliminary background checks on it, which was
so strange, but they implied that they were preliminary and

(01:13):
that the real thing would happen if we agreed to
make a deal. They were really going to look into us,
which also is deeply uncomfortable, saying a guy that won't
tell you his name is going to do a serious
background check on you. Listen at that point, but you're
probably thinking, what about the Harrington story. I'm thinking about
if you do a background checker, you got to call

(01:34):
everybody I went to college with. That's not going to
be a good look for me. And in fact, I
remember the guy that was called the Captain even act
of like, yeah, you probably won't pass that. He was
just so diffident, he was just so snarky. We were
told by this Captain character, don't ask us any more
about dates or places. That's not what this meeting is about.

(01:54):
And that happened. And we also brought up the idea
because again, if you're going to say you've got a
lot of things right, we're thinking about jfk Ann Roswell.
So we query them about that relationship between these two things.
And as I was thinking about this last week prepping
for this brand, I remembered very clearly that this guy
cut us off and he said two words, not today.

(02:17):
Let me give you some pro arguments for taking a
deal with these guys. At the time, we thought access
obviously could give us more authenticity for the show. We
were idealistic. Potentially we thought, wow, if this actually is
on the level, we might actually help facilitate real disclosure,
which was positive. And also given that, as we talked

(02:37):
about in a previous episode, we started the whole cover
of fiction thing. The idea that somebody would want to
come to us with a desire to use cover of
fiction wasn't as unreasonable as you might think. But I
think the main argument pro was we'll finally get to
know what's really going on, We'll get the truth. That
was seemed to be the promise.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
I think the negatives were primarily that it felt like
we would be losing control of the narrative. At what
I mean by that is we had a show, we
had a vision for the show. We had the network
on board, the studio on board, we had stories broken,
scripts written, and these guys being put in charge they

(03:19):
had certainly the captain made it quite clear that if
we were in business with him, he was going to
tell us what was going to happen. He was going
to be the showrunner in some sense of the word.
And I think that was terrifying, that sense that loss
of control. I think another thing that we talked about
and we had to take seriously was, Okay, these guys

(03:40):
are saying this is the truth. They're saying they're the heroes, right,
and we're going to be on their side and disclose
to the people. Again, they were giving us the pitch
of us being low and guard and dark skies, let's
get the truth out to the people. So that was enticing,
But we also did consider, but what if all of
this is a syop? What if all of this is lie?

(04:00):
What if all of this is disinformation? And so that
idea that we could be end up taking a deal,
lose control of the show, and only to be being
used as part of a disinformation campaign was pretty disgusting.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
I'm Bryce Sable. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs? And I'm Brent Friedman.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
You are listening to sound, light and frequency.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
All right. What we're going to be talking about today
is the second beat, if you will, of what happened
after JC crashed the Dark Sky's premiere party. And I
know that some people think, but you don't have to
refresh our memories on that. We got it. We've listened
to your previous episodes. But the thing is so many
new people are coming to this podcast that a little

(05:40):
bit of refreshment has to happen just to set the stage.
So here's the least I feel like you need to
know about this. We're talking about the events that happened
during the NBC series Dark Skies that we created. And
in our very first episode of this podcast, we told
you the story about a guy named JC who crashed
our premiere party, told us he'd seen the series, said

(06:02):
he was from the Office of Naval Intelligence and that
we did things pretty well and they wanted to make
a deal with us. That's your backstory. Do I need
any more?

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Is that?

Speaker 3 (06:12):
Okay, there's a little thing called the formula thrown in there,
but that's not relevant right now. Yeah, it is relevant
in that people would say, Okay, let's see the formula,
which we are getting to. We even have a date
for it. We're going to be putting it out there
on the literal thirtieth anniversary episode of this September seventeenth,
the twenty twenty six you will see the formula and

(06:32):
hear our panel talk about it. But the other thing
we're going to promise you is we are going to
tell you what the deal was, what we thought about it,
and what action we took about it. So all right,
I guess what you could say is what seemed like
a bizarre one night encounter suddenly became this organized, deliberate,
and harder to dismiss storyline. Brett, I don't know how

(06:55):
else to say it, because we basically saw JC go
off into the shadows at that dark Sky's party, and
we went to the office two days later, which was
our warehouse in North Hollywood. And I don't even remember
if we've told this before, Stop me if I had,
But this production facility was actually a warehouse in North

(07:17):
Hollywood that had been a place dedicated to making porn movies.
Did we ever say that.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
We haven't said that, but yes, and I remember that
we discovered that when there was a really interesting little
treasure trove of stuff in the office bathroom.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
You used, Okay, all right, this at least starts with
a little bit of humor and degradation. So I was
an executive producer of the show, and offices were given
and I got this nice, big office, and I was
pretty happy with it, and had worked there several weeks.
We did know that it had been used for making
porn movies, but there was really no reason to know

(07:55):
that other than somebody had told us when they rented
it to us. And on the way to the bath
through them there were a number of what would you
call it, just cabinets, cabinets, that's the word cabinet up above.
So in fact, nobody had ever looked in them because
they were so high up. And I didn't have a
ladder or anything, and I had other things to do,
as did you. And I remember one day one of

(08:16):
our assistants had a ladder and I said, bring that
in here, let's see whatever. And we opened it up
and Brent there were hundreds of the most graphic porn
magazines I've ever seen, not with titles like Playboy and
things like that. Now, those are nice. These were pretty
radical porn magazines. And I said to the assistant, oh man,

(08:38):
you got to get these out of here, right, So
make these disappear as I believed the mandate that he
was given. And later that afternoon, somebody came and said,
oh my god, have you seen what's out by the
garbage cans? And apparently our assistant had left them, just
left them out there, and when people said what are these,
he said, They're from Bryce's office office. Yeah, so that

(08:59):
was the office that a lot of this stuff went
down in, which gives it a little bit of a
humorous angle. But the point is we went to that office,
our production facility the monday after this Dark Sky's party
where this JC character had shown up, and I know
that we had received the formula that was written on
the back of a bank envelope, and that's the thing

(09:21):
we'll be talking about in future episodes, or at least
showing people. And we went in with it and we
showed it to certain people anyway, So this was strange. However,
we had to keep moving on with our lives, right,
there's a show to produce. We had obviously just debuted.
All eyes were honest, the network, the studio, everybody's looking
at ratings and discussing whether we were had the right thing,

(09:44):
and we were shooting in our next episode Up was
about Roswell and JFK in the aftermath of the assassination,
where literally our main character John Longard goes to Dallas,
Texas and talks to Jesse Marcel Roswell. Yeah wow, I know.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Crazy, so against all of that, basically business as usual
on a primetime TV series. I was getting messages from
my assistant Adam saying JC called.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Now.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
He had given us his card at the party and
if you remember, it said simply J dot C dot
with a three to one zero number.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
We did not call him.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
We had other things to do. I don't think we'd
made a decision one way or another what we wanted
to do, but we certainly weren't taking action upon it.
But he was quite aggressive after the party in following
up several times, and at some point, probably by the
third or fourth time, I got a message that JC
was calling from Adam. I went and took the call,

(10:43):
and he made some sort of quip about your hard
man to get on the phone or something along those lines,
but was still pretty friendly and said, Hey, we want
to follow up, and I hope you guys had some
time to think about it, and we'd love to have
another meeting, and I am being asked to bring a
superior to this next meet so we can get into
a little bit more details and see if we can
close this thing up. And I thought, okay, but we're busy,

(11:06):
and he said, okay, so we're going to be there
tomorrow at three o'clock and we'll see you.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Then I was like hold on.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
All of a sudden, it was like click, and next
thing I knew he was coming to the office. And
I remember with a little dread, having to come and
tell you, Oh, I just made a meeting with JC
and his superior to talk further about the deal, and.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
How are you here to tell you? And I think
we both felt the same way. The pressure of doing
a television series, especially in the days right after your premiere,
is ungodly. What people have to understand is not only
do you have a show on the air, you have
shows that are still being written. You have shows that
are going into pre production. You have a show in production,
you have a first cut of something that needs to

(11:47):
be looked at. You have a show that needs to
air in ten days or something. So you just have
so many things going on. I can't tell you that
I wasn't interested. I'm not going to say I didn't
want to meet with the guy. I was curious. First
of all, the most real thing about him coming to
our party is he had actually seen our pilot, So yeah,
you kind of wanted to know more, just as a

(12:09):
human being who's got curiosity, and me being a guy
that came out of journalism, I was like, yeah, I
want to take this guy's assessment. So listen, you and
I were and are both veteran writers who've gone to
our share of pitches, and we've been exposed to egos
like you can't believe in strange Hollywood personalities. All of

(12:30):
that is certainly true, but this was a meeting unlike
anything I've had.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
I know, we were trying to figure out how do
you prepare for this? And ultimately, I think all we
came up with was, look, let's make an agreement between
the two of us. We're not going to commit to
anything in the room. We're going to hear them out.
We're not going to say yes or no to the deal.
Whatever happens, We're just going to hear them out.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
And that was it.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
And I think that was, aside from a lot of
angst and probably not a good night's sleep for on
either of our parts. That was about all the preparation
we could really do for that meeting. So let's set
the stage physically for this thing. So aside from the
colorful detail of cabinets full of porn magazines, next to
that office was a conference room. And this conference room,
like a lot of them, it was down a hallway,

(13:13):
but it was adjacent to my office and frankly just
around the corner from yours. You and I were very
close together, and it had a big, clear window, and
so we knew two things. We knew that everyone would
be able to see that we were meeting with somebody,
so if something really untoward was happening, people would see
it totally.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yes, yeah. But we also knew that we had security
at the production offices, and so we were able to
tell our security guys, Hey, some people say they're coming
in this afternoon. We'd like you to pay extra special
attention and stand menacingly outside the conference room if at
all possible. So they did, and these guys showed up

(13:52):
promptly on time. JC and I guess we have to
discuss what the other guy looked like. I'll let you
take a crack at.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
That so as a refresher, or if you're new to sound,
light and frequency. JC himself was we are saying around thirty.
He looked slightly handsome. He looked like a cross between
a frat boy and a young military man, and very
pleasant in his demeanor. The same cannot be said for
the person that we will now refer to as the captain.
The captain came in all badass. He had the demeanor

(14:22):
of a drill sergeant, and we were the grunts and
he came in. He was much more physically imposing than JC.
He had on if I remember a Navy bomber jacket
with all sorts of insignias and patches and things, but
I think just casual pants. He wasn't in full uniform,
I guess is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
I had jeans on, because one detail I remember is
he wore boots, and I had forgotten this detail. But
they weren't boots that were scuffed up with cowdong or anything.
They seemed to be lightly dusted with sand or something.
I just remember. They weren't cleanly polished. They were sandy.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, had the real feel of an off duty He
came in and there wasn't any real chit chat. It
was we got right down to business. And the one
thing I want to frame this with is the whole meeting,
from my point of view, had a good cop bad
cop quality to it. Clearly, JC, who was the one
that first made contact with us, was the good cop,

(15:21):
and he was the one who was always trying to
lighten the situation throughout this meeting or get it back
on track, whereas the Captain clearly embraced the bad cop
role in many ways which will lay out.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
People have asked, who were these guys? What were their names?
Did you see their idea or whatever? We did ask
for their names this time. I think we were both
taken aback at the party and probably not thinking with
all our critical faculties, but we had a little time
and forewarning about this one. The one detail I wanted
to just add to that is I don't know that
we actually in the meeting called them the captain. I

(15:53):
think was introduced as the captain and we never called
them by anything. But I do remember thinking very strongly
that he reminded me of the Navy seal. He looked
like what you'd expect whereas JC was slight, not a
whimp or anything like that, but a normal guy.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
If I had to assess them, I'd say that JC
gave off intelligence officer vibes and the captain was clearly
a military man.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
Yeah, keep those two things in mind, folks, because what
we're about to tell you is what went on in
this meeting that in my remembrance about an hour and
a half. Does that sound about right to you? Yes,
And it went by rather quickly. I remember it being
very surreal and asking myself several times in the course
of the meeting, is this really happening? Now, there are

(16:40):
a couple of things that we should point out here.
Thirty years is a long time. Three decades is a
long time, and so I think we have most of
the details of what happened and what was said, or
at least the area it was said. Maybe either a
little bit out of order because I didn't write anything
down that day I went back to work, but I
do know that we'd did ask for some identification, and

(17:02):
this was what was so weird about the meeting. We
asked for identification, and we get told if the deal
comes together, then you'll get it. And I remember thinking
that's just so crazy. How can we make a deal
with somebody that won't tell us who they are. It
just made no sense. And we went back and forth
on that enough that I think you and I probably

(17:22):
had one of those knowing glances exchanged where we thought, Okay,
let's just go with it. The guy's not going to
tell us right now. He said something else, by the way,
early on in the meeting that I thought was odd,
and maybe it was JC, but somebody said that they
had done some preliminary background checks on it, which was
so strange. But they implied that they were preliminary and

(17:44):
that the real thing would happen if we agreed to
make a deal. They were really going to look into us,
which also is deeply uncomfortable, saying a guy that won't
tell you his name is going to do a serious
background check on you. Listen at that point, probably thinking
what about the Harrington story. I'm thinking about if you
do a background checker, you've got to call everybody I

(18:05):
went to college with. That's not going to be a
good look for me. And in fact, I remember the
guy that was called the Captain even acted like, yeah,
you probably won't pass that. He was just so diffident.
He was just so snarky.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
He did give off this energy of why do I
have to be here? I felt like JC and he
were told go back and have a meeting with these
guys and figure out if they're for if there were
going to do this or not. And the Captain probably
rolled his eyes and said you could just tell he
did not respect Hollywood. He didn't want to be there,

(18:37):
and he had very little confidence in us.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
It seemed to be whereas JAC seemed like he was there,
but he was clearly outranked. So as we get into this,
there were questions that were asked, etc. But they weren't
answered by j C first ever. It was either the
captain either said something or he dismissed it, and then
JAC said something, but let's throw something of subst's out there,

(19:00):
I believe. In the late eighties, there was a TV
documentary called UFO Cover Up Live, and that's the one
people famously remembered because there were some shadow interviews from
people supposedly on the cover up and they were talking
about having an extraterrestrial biological entity and custody that famously
liked strawberry ice cream okay, which a very specific thing. Okay,

(19:24):
And there's a whole background on UFO cover Up Live
that we don't have time to go into. Let's just
say that we knew that had happened because it was
about five six years prior to this meeting we're having
at Dark Skies. But one of the things that UFO
cover Up did is it introduced the concept of the Aviary,
which was a faction of the Air Force. Correct not

(19:45):
too subtle aviary birds flying around. But where it got
weird for us and why we invoked that is these
guys said that they were part of the aquarium.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yes, and the implication was obviously Aquarium, Navy, AVI Air Force.
The implication that they put forward to us was that
the Aquarium were the good guys. They were the people
trying to working for disclosure, coming out, making deals with
people in Hollywood to slow drip the truth through the

(20:16):
media and condition people give them a soft landing, all
of those euphemisms. Whereas the Air Force wanted the cover up,
was definitely actively working to keep things covered up, and
we didn't get into the specifics of why. I think
in the intervening years, there's talk that there's more of
a religious viewpoint of the phenomenon and aliens and everything

(20:39):
in the Air Force, and so they wanted to keep
it secret. Whatever the case may be, it was clear
that JC and the Captain were presenting themselves as the
good guys in this battle, and they wanted to recruit
us to be part of the good team.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
In fairness, I have to tell you, over the years,
where I've told partial tidbits of this story or at
least ask people, I do remember multiple people when I
said aquarium they kind of laughed like that was funny
to them. And I think that their attitude, and in
fact our attitude at the time was maybe this is
all just disinformation. Maybe these guys are here to find

(21:21):
out how gullible Freedman and Zabel really are. And we
didn't get hung up on that issue, but it did
come out there. So what happened is at this conference
room thing, the Captain was just yes, JC had said,
you got a lot of things right. The Captain was
there to tell us what we didn't get right, and
what we didn't get right was this ganglion, which was

(21:43):
a biological thing that embedded itself into somebody's brain and right,
And I remember him specifically saying, and you and I
have used this phrase over the years several times when
talking about this. He said, that's not the way it works.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah, and I remember when he said that, he said
it was such disdain. He actually made me think of
Frank Bach, our captain, our Navy captain character.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
In Dark Skies.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
It felt like we were getting chastised by one of
our own characters at that moment.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
Yeah. And Frank Buch was played by the late actor J. T. Walsh,
who was in a future episode. We'll talk about what
a seriously troubled dude this guy was. His character was
mean and nasty, and so was the actor, at least
at that time of his life. To say that he
reminded you of Frank Bach scary. The reason we hired J. T. Walsh, remember,

(22:38):
was was intimidating. He was intimidating. And when we first said,
when it was in casting, can we get J. T.
Walsh to play Frank Bach and people like, no, he's
a major guy. You make it a J. T. Walsh
type of actor. And we said, can't you just ask?
And we did and they gave it to him. Another thing,
by the way, that came up because it was so
much on our minds because remember the is about the

(23:01):
Roswell piece and given to JFK, and the first episode
now is literally merging the Roswell's story into the aftermath
of the assassination in Dallas. So Roswell was on our minds.
Maybe it's because I was a reformed journalist at that point,
but I had questions. So I thought, if these guys
are going to play this game, let's at least find

(23:23):
out they want to know what we know. I want
to know what they know. If they're telling us there's
a deal to be had, then maybe they should dangle
some of this information out here, because if they're not
even going to tell us their names yet, JC did,
or at least he gave us a name. Anyway, the
idea that Roswell was an anomalous event did get acknowledged
in this meeting, but we were told by this Captain character,

(23:47):
don't ask us any more about dates or places. That's
not what this meeting is about. And that happened, And
we also brought up the idea because again, if you're
going to say you've got a lot of things right,
we're thinking about Ken Roswell. So we query them about
that relationship between these two things. And as I was
thinking about this last week prepping for this brand, I

(24:08):
remembered very clearly that this guy cut us off and
he said two words, not today. Yes, no.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
But I remember thinking at the time he didn't poo
poo it like he did the Gangli, and he didn't
confirm nor deny that there was a relationship between JFK
and Roswell. He just said not today, because, as it
turned out, they had pressing business they wanted to talk
with us.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
Sure, And by the way, just to show you that
I don't take no for an answer, sometimes to my
own detriment. After having said not today, what was on
my mind was we were actually in the middle of
breaking a story about Scoro, New Mexico. Oh right, that
would become an episode. I believe Jim Perriot wrote it,
and it was called Hostile Convergence, And so we were

(24:52):
in the middle of a lot of those writers' room
discussions about how to make this happen. So I asked
him something about it again just shut down with the
I don't remember the specifics, but it would have been
something like not on the agenda. The guy was terse
and negative, not on the agenda, and one other thing
that came up. I'm just giving the content stuff here.

(25:14):
I believe another thing that came up was clearly the
abduction phenomenon, because in the pilot we had Betty and
Barney Hill as characters in it, right, And then also
in the pilot, John Loanguard's girlfriend, Kim Sayers was abducted herself, right, right,
So abductions were a pretty major thing, and he seemed

(25:34):
to acknowledge that. He seemed to acknowledge that not only
was happening, but they were clearly tinkering with our DNA.
And I might be wrong about this one, so I'm
kind of curious if your recollection matches it. One of
us might have been you even But somebody said, how
long has this been going on? Is this a long
term thing? Or is this something that just started with

(25:57):
Betty and Barney? And again he dismissed it and moved
on by saying something like.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Next, yeah, yeah, no, I that actually topic. I'm pretty
sure it was me that tried to probe on that
because it interested me greatly. But he just wasn't, Like
I said, he was not interested in answering our questions.
This was one of those things where you're being interrogated
by a cop and you're trying to ask questions to
the cop and they say, no, I asked the questions right.
In this case, he was trying to run the meeting,

(26:24):
and we were flailing for answers, right because we've got
two people suddenly on the inside. We're trying to get
anything we can out of this meeting, and he is
just intent on taking it exactly where he wants me
to get.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
And we are going to get to that in one second.
But I wrote one other thing down that I recall
really pissed him off, right, because remember, these guys had
acknowledged we're from the Office of Naval Intelligence, which, by
the way, is historically a thing Bob Lazar his story
was tied to Office of Naval Intelligence people, and later,

(26:56):
if we have time, we'll talk about John Lear and
how he acknowledged that. So I think our question was,
if you're from the Office of Naval Intelligence, why are
you guys in charge of things that are flying around
in the skies. What about the things in the oceans,
which now is a hot topic USO's unidentified submerged objects.

(27:16):
So that was not a question this gentleman wanted to hear.
He did, though, by my recollection, want to know what
we are going to do about that. We're rewriting some
episodes because he hadn't seen any yet, which was so
disturbing that somebody, this guy knew more about what was
coming up in the show, potentially than some network executives

(27:37):
that we had right, so he's not seeing it in
the show. And I know my fault at that time
in that meeting, as I was a little too practical.
So I went into this dissertation about how it's very
difficult to shoot on water and you got to get
water tanks. I'm talking about the production part of all
of that, and he was not satisfied at all about that.

(28:00):
And then I think he did get to the thing
he wanted to talk about.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yes, So I guess let's get into the meat of
the meeting here. So here's what happened. As Bryce pointed out,
these guys had seen our pilot, they had seemingly looked
at our briefing book, and there was an understanding that
we were going to be taking the show into space.
Our season two was largely focused on all of the moonflights,

(28:24):
the Moon missions, and we had a whole alternate history
storyline around that.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
Let me just add one point to that and then
run with it. Our first season ended in nineteen sixty
seven in the Summer of Love, and that was a
little different than what our Bible said. We thought we
were going to go decade by decade, but we found
out there were so many things happening that we only
got by our twentieth hour of production to the Summer
of Love. And what we were going to start the

(28:50):
next season with was nineteen sixty eight, which is still
considered one of the toughest years in American history, and
we were going to move through at least to Watergate,
which was night teen seventy four, which means the whole
Apollo program right part of it.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, So they had some awareness based on our Bible
that we were going to go there out into space
as it were, and I remember there's some declaration of
we're going to have to move that up. You're going
to have to get to that sooner because.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
What's going on.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
And this is where he went from not answering any
questions to basically getting up on his high horse and
telling us what the whole point from his or from
the Office of Naval Intelligence purview, the whole point of
the UAP phenomenon was, which is it's all about the moon.
And I remember thinking, what we had some ideas and

(29:42):
there were certainly conspiracy theories about the moon landings being
faked and whatnot, but I had never contemplated that. As
he said, it was all about the moon. So this
really came out of left field. But he then went
on to explain that the reason that it was all
about the Moon is that there are others. I think

(30:03):
that was his word for aliens. I know specifically, he didn't.
He never used the word aliens. He used others. And
he said there are others who are using the Moon
as a staging ground for various activities that included manufacturing, mining,
all sorts of stuff for some sort of meta material

(30:23):
that was being.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Used to produce craft.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
I think that was what he said, that was coming
and going from Earth to the Moon. And he said
this with such kind of matter of fact confidence that
when I heard this, I thought, WHOA, Okay, so that's
what's going on. He sold it really well in the room.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
He did. Yeah. By the way, just as a sidebar,
when Richard Dolan, and I wrote ad after Disclosure, we
were wondering what to call these aliens or nhi or whatever.
And remember Whitley Street where he called them the visitors,
and so we can't call them the visitors, and we
don't want to call them aliens because what if they're
not aliens? What if they're time travelers, or what if
they're interdimensionals whatever. So I harkened back to that and

(31:07):
suggested to rich we call them the others, and that's
what's in a d book. But this thing takes a
radical turn, though, because confident as he was, and overwhelming
as that may have seemed, and you make a good point,
it felt I guess I have to believe that, but
I totally did not at that point, right. I don't
remember what questions I was asking, but it just was like,

(31:29):
wait a minute, what are you talking about. I don't
think I was as verbal about that, but you can
sort of read a guy in a room. We were
trying to read them, they were reading us, and I
probably had that look on my face of what are
you talking about? And I recall at that point he
pulled out a little vial, a little glass vial and

(31:50):
you've seen these. They're little sample vials. They're tiny, had
a black screwtop on the top, and it had something
in it. And I'm going to let you go with that. Yes.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
When we questioned him about the moon being the center
of everything, he again got annoyed, reached into his coat
pocket and took out this little vial and like almost
slammed it down on the table and said, this is
what it's all about. And both you and I were
looking at it like that, this what's in this little vial.
That's the explanation for roswell and the cover up and

(32:21):
everything else, like oh okay, And I know we each
took a turn picking it up and looking at it.
What I remember is picking it up and seeing that
it had what looked.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
Like to me fool's gold.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
A fool's gold is something that actually looks more like
gold than actual gold. It was more like this brightish yellow,
but it was like it was flaky. It looked was
like gold flakes almost, And I remember looking at it
and shaking it to see, okay, how light is this stuff?
And everything like a snow globe just fluttered throughout the

(32:55):
little vial, except there was no liquid in it. I'm
kind of shaking it and it's all just fluttering, right.
So either this vial was some sort of a vacuum
or there was some strange quality to this stuff, but
there was nothing really spectacular about it other than it
was just this kind of gold meta material apparently that
had a slightly lighter than air quality to it, if

(33:18):
you can believe that.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
And that was it.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
That was the entire piece of evidence that he was
willing to share with us.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
Pretty light evidence, if you will. Now, Okay, I don't
remember the snow globe aspect. This is where again it's
rasham on time. Although maybe it's not even that you
looked at it you shook it. I remember looking at it.
I don't think I shook it. So what I saw
was if the thing was this big, the little flakes
were about that much of it, maybe a little less

(33:46):
than half of it. And I grew up in a
pretty poor family. We did not have gold lying around,
no gold coins, no gold bouoyon, no gold flakes, no nothing,
so I had no experience with what gold actually would
look like to be on with you. I knew it
as a color, but not as a substance, and I
honestly can't say that it impressed me in any real

(34:07):
way other than the fact that he thought it was
so impressive. As you said, he sold it. It was
challenging the way he put it out there. Of course,
it was almost like I wasn't going to show it
to you guys, but you're so difficult that yeah, kind
of like that.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
That was like, you want evidence, Fine, here's your evidence.
And that was it, and that was as far as
he was going to go with the explanation. I think
the interesting thing too at that point was it brought
up a lot of questions for me. What was going
through my head and why I was maybe both intrigued
by the story but also probably resistant in some way.

(34:44):
Was I was already fast forwarding to, Oh, no, we're
going to have to rewrite so much. We're gonna our
whole second season where you have to pull up and
what are we going to do? This is gonna be
so much work, Because in my mind I was already thinking, Okay,
I guess we're probably going to take this deal, and
it's going to be a ton of work, And so
I was already thinking that's a great reason not to

(35:05):
take the deal.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
Yeah, and by the way, that's a good transition though,
because that's where we kind of went back to the deal.
But I just want to make one kind of overall statement.
Over the years, I have heard various people tell me
what they think is going on. I've heard David Grush
tell me, and Colthart and Dolan and people. We've had
these conversations, and a lot of the things that I
didn't hear until David Grush was holding up his hand

(35:29):
in Congress were sort of implied in that meeting, the
idea that there have been crashes, like going back to Roswell.
I think he was agreeing with Roswell, but again he
did it so dismissively. He did it like that, if
you kids think that's the only time these things have crashed,
then I don't know what to do about you guys. Right,
So there was an implication there were more than one.

(35:50):
There was a sort of implication that there was some
kind of reverse engineering. I don't remember how it came up,
but how do you think these things are? You know,
not all of them are theirs or something like that.
So certain key elements that have become part of the
lore were feathered in there. So I do feel like
there's a consistency between what the captain said to us

(36:12):
and what David grushed old Congress that there's other stuff. Anyway.
At a certain point, remember JC is talking a little bit,
but mostly he's letting us talk and he's letting the
guy talk, right, And at a certain point on this
moon thing, it got a little I wouldn't say heated,
but it was like that moment where there's ten seconds
of silence and everyone's looking at each other and you're thinking, Okay,

(36:35):
this isn't going real. Well, what's going to go on?
And we're already over an hour into this thing. So
at that point, my recollection is he jumps in, trying
to be the good cop again and trying to get
this conversation moving in the right direction. He kind of
blurts out, let's talk about how to move forward with
this deal.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, the logistics. That was what he wanted to talk
about right now.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
It's so weird because with all this other stuff going on,
the thing that we get hung up on in this
meeting is actually funny in retrospect. But they basically were
still arguing, look, we will provide you with access to
certain key facts and you will provide us with this
forum for this slow drip disclosure. And so I started

(37:21):
when he said that, I was like, what, how would
this work? And we would give you things and then
they'd be typed up and you'd put them into your
It was sort of dismissive to the writing process it were. Now,
what you have to understand is at that point you
and I had gone through a really rough thing on
that we had been forced into a writer's guild arbitration

(37:45):
over dark Skies because the network a week before production
had said to the studio, hey, let's get some guys
in here. Let's get another writing team in here to
punch up a couple of the scenes. And so what
ended up happening is people we didn't know and we
weren't told about, provided some dialogue for a couple of scenes,

(38:06):
and only one line ever made it into the film,
and it had something to do with the drapes in
the apartment that Languard was going to be in. They said,
these drapes look older than the Coolidge administration. That was
their line. Suddenly we were defending our lives with a
writer's guild arbitration just to.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Jump into quick an arbitration, for anyone who doesn't know,
is when the credit either story credit or write written
by credit on a teleplay, a screenplay, whatever it may be,
is contested. A multiple peeable feel they deserve the credit
or more credit or first position or whatever it is.
And our union, which is the Writer's Guild of America,

(38:45):
basically acts as the arbitrator of that kind of contested
credits case. And they bring in various writers and they say, okay,
everybody read all the material and evaluate who made the
big contribution and who made the smaller contribution, and then
we'll figure out what the official crample.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
We're going to everybody's stuff.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
And that's part of what you agree to when you
join the Writers Guild, that when these things go to arbitration,
you will accept the arbitration it is, therefore buying it.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
And it's done anonymously. The arbiters are anonymous, so were
the writers. So you and I were writer A. We
had to write a statement of writer A. We don't
even know if these other guys or actually it was
I think a husband wife team. I found out later
would be writer B. And listen, I found the It's
seven pages long. I'm not going to read it, but
the run the finale to it, I think is just

(39:35):
worth reading because it's fun. Because this was our conclusion
we wrote. The teleplay for Dark Skies is based on
a concept with a Bible timeline which runs from seventy
five million BC to the year two thousand and eight.
It reinterprets all of human history through the prism of
UFO contact with an alien parasite civilization named the Hive,

(39:55):
been on world domination by the millennium. In the teleplay
you have read, Dark Skies begins the creation of an
entire alternative history where the most important date ever occurred
in our lifetimes February seventeenth, nineteen sixty two, the discovery
of Patients zero. The pilot script speculates on alien involvement
in the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers, the Cuban

(40:17):
Missile crisis, and ultimately the assassination of John Kennedy. It
takes the reader viewer into a covert military organization whose
activities are unknown to our leaders, much less our citizens,
and then it concludes, we don't mean to be flipped,
but clearly this outweighs a line of dialogue about some
old curtains, which I thought this one of our best
better written things you and I have ever written. And

(40:38):
we also pointed out that we had done thirteen drafts
and all of.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
This leafs these Yeah, okay, so needless to say, by
the way, we got sole credit.

Speaker 3 (40:47):
Yeah, we did, and the arbitration came back very quickly.
I don't even know if writer be Ever even wrote something,
but we felt like we had to hit him with
overpowering force. So hence seven pages anyway, normally not important,
but it was important in our mind state at this
point that sometimes you have to defend your life and
you have to defend your creative input and if we

(41:09):
don't defend it strongly, So in the middle of preparing
for production, you and I had to drop everything and
write this statement to try to get credit for the pilot,
which we did and then also we got the creative
buy for the TV series because of them. Anyway, so
this is in my mind as this guy's telling us,
we're going to give you stuff, and I started asking
questions about, Okay, you're going to give us storylines, do

(41:32):
you want credit on this? What writers? Are you going
to try to suggest writers? Because the network has their
writers that they're suggesting, and the studio as writers they're suggesting,
and Brent and I have writers that were suggesting, and
you want us to tell the network in the studio that, hey,
we got some writers we don't want to tell you about,
but they've got some good ideas. And then I think

(41:54):
the other thing is we are feeling protective of our staff.
That writers make a living and have family is based
on having residual fees that come based on the credit
risk that they get on the scripts. Yeah, and so
we started asking him about these things. I think it
was mostly me. I think you were probably in shock
that I was going down this road. But this guy

(42:15):
was getting increasingly frustrated because I was taking this thing
that he was just tossing off and I was like, no, wait,
so you would then do this, and then you would
do that, but wait, no, we couldn't do that. We
could and write. So it got very, uh, I don't
know what contentious.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
He was not in a good move when he arrived,
and I think we worked him into a state of
complete discombobulation. He was so confused and frustrated why we
were now talking about writerskilled residuals and he made it
very clear that either he nor anyone that he worked
with cared about credits or money. That's not what this

(43:00):
was about. We've had enough, This isn't gonna work. And
next thing we knew, the meeting was falling apart and
they were heading for the door, and that was unceremoniously
that was the end of the meeting.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Yeah, and I remember feeling almost relieved because the minute
they hit the door, I got up, grabbed a cup
of coffee, and went back to my office and started
doing whatever is I had to do, because that's just it.
If this would happen under a normal situation, if happened
to you and me today, we'd have had them walk
out and then said, holy shit, can you imagine what

(43:33):
are they saying here? And we probably did that for
a couple of minutes, but then we had scripts and
production all this stuff going on, and so we just
went back to work. And so if we do an
interlude here at all, it would simply be to ask
ourselves what we thought of this whole moon thing, because
the moon is a seriously important thing in science fiction.
It's a place where secrets are kept, right, people are

(43:56):
either mining or there's military on the moon or the
moonlight is fake?

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Well, the moon is moon is not real. It's an artificial.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yeah, which is Roland Emerick, who we were talking about
for Independence Dy he wrote it. He did a movie
Moonfall where it's falling into the earth. So there's always
all these secrets about the moon, and the moon is
an important thing to a lot of people, and you
take a crack at it. But I do have a
personal story that is not relevant to dark skies. But
if I don't tell it right now, I'm going to

(44:26):
hate myself. So you can run with whatever you got first.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
No, if you want to, I don't want you to
hate yourself, So please share your story.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
Okay, here's the thing. This is going to date me
and people that know math are going to know how
old I am, and I hate that. But on the
other end, when you google somebody these days, it tells
you how old they are, So okay, screw it now
you know. But when I was fifteen years old, I
was a fry cook at the Arctic Circle restaurant in Hillsboro, Oregon,
and Brent I'd worked my way up. I started at

(44:54):
a dollar ten an hour and I was up to
a dollar thirty five an hour, and I was feeling good.
But I was also interested in space. And July twentieth,
nineteen sixty nine was coming up and my boss, who
was a Basque separatist immigrant who had come to the US,
I asked him, Hey, his name is Mariano Bilboo, and

(45:15):
I said, Mariano, can i'd like to have the night
They put the schedule up and I was scheduled to
work on that night and I said, I really feel
like i'd like to see the moon landing? Right, so
can I have that night off? And he goes, this
is not this is a business. No, you can't have
the night off. And I said can we put a
TV in here? And he goes, TV, No, you can't
put a TV. And what about a radio? No, no radio.

(45:38):
You come to work. And so because it was such
a good and high paying job, I said, okay, I'll
do it. So that night comes and it's the moon
landing's happening in about thirty five minutes or so, and
I just can't handle it. And so I called my
father at home. And my father was one of these
you had a tough dad. I had a tough dad,
not a lot of praise, a lot of critics, kind

(46:00):
of thing, tight emotional state on the guy, and I said, Dad,
I really want to see the moon landing. Can you
come pick me up? And then I pulled the phone
out because I know the lecture's coming. He's going to say, no,
you you made a commitment to that job, and by God,
you've got to serve that commitment. And so I'm thinking
this is hail Mary, but it's not going to go anywhere.

(46:21):
And to his credit, in kind of a Wonder Year's
kind of moment, my father says, I'll be right down. Wow.
So I say great, I take off my apron I
go wait outside. My father comes, I get in the
car and he goes, you know you'll be fired, and
I'm fifteen years old, and I said, yeah, I know,
and he said, okay, let's go. We went home. We

(46:42):
watched the moon landing. It was everything I hoped it
would be. We all anyone who was alive knows what
it felt like. And at the end of the moon landing,
at about half an hour in of watching, my father
turns to me and he says, I think it's time
for you to go face the music. So I get
in the car. We drive back to the Arctic Circle
and there's Mariano who's been called in that Bryce has

(47:04):
abandoned his post. And Mariano sees me get out of
the car and he fires me instantly, and my father,
God bless him, because this is the only time I
really have this great feeling about him. He looks at
Mariano Bilbao and he goes, you know, sir, you do
not understand how important this is and how it's going
to change the course of human history, and you're going

(47:24):
to feel bad about what you've done for the rest
of your life. Son, get in the car and we
went home. Okay, And I never worked there again, obviously.
But so I guess the reason I feel like I
have to tell this story because when I think about
the moon and the moon landing, it's not about where
I was when I saw the moon landing. It's about
where I was. And that's my story.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
That's a great story, and it's a very interesting segue
into my story about the first movie I ever saw,
which was two thousand and one A Space Honesty. Yeah,
I will date myself as well. When the movie came
out in nineteen sixty eight, I was five years old. Now,
if you've seen two thousand and one, a space Odyssey
by the renowned director Stanley Kubrick, you'll know it is

(48:08):
not appropriate material for a five year old. But my
dad took me to the Oaks Theater in Berkeley, California.
I had never been in a movie theater before, right,
and walking up to the balcony, I remember he wanted
to sit in the ballow.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
Wait a minute, are you telling me two thousand and
one is the first theater, first theater movie that I
ever saw. That's age five years old? Yep.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
So we're sitting in the balcony of this old theater
in Berkeley, California, and just the sound track of that
movie alone was so bombastic. We're not going to get
into all of the scenes in the movie, but suffice
to say that it opens up with something probably a
lot of people have seen or they've seen parodies of,
which is you're back in prehistory with a bunch of

(48:51):
apes when humans were apes, running around picking up bones,
beating each other up, killing each other. And then they
find the monolith, the famous black rectangle, right, which is
this iconic mythic symbol of man's consciousness or higher consciousness
or something. Anyway, these monkeys in ancient times are finding
this monolith which starts humming, and one of them throws

(49:13):
a bone at it, and next thing, the bone spins
up into the air and becomes a spaceship, and we're
in space. And that's how the whole movie opened. And
that I say all of this because from about that
point on, as a five year old, I think I
just went numb. I really didn't remember anything about the
rest of the movie other than that. But here's the
funny thing. My dad was so taken with the movie

(49:36):
that he bought the soundtrack. And I grew up in
Berkeley in the sixties and my parents were artists and
fairly young. There was a lot of partying that went
on at our house, and I remember, not on one occasion,
but many occasions waking up in the middle of the
night two three in the morning. My parents were out
partying with their friends, and my dad was playing the

(49:56):
soundtrack to two thousand and one at high vault. So
what I was hearing were the sound of monkeys hooting
and hollering in Bay. And I remember so many times
waking up to the sound of these monkeys screaming, right,
which explains a lot of my childhood. And so that
was my two thousand and one experience until much later
when I went back, and I've seen it many times.

(50:17):
It's not up there with close encounters or contact where
I've seen it twenty or thirty, but I have seen
it probably ten times. It's a fantastic movie. We can
talk a little bit about some of the things in it.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
I had to talk about that soundtrack one moment, though, yes, please,
I owned the soundtrack as an LP, of course, an album,
and I'm just telling everybody right now, if you google
two thousand and one soundtrack album and look for images,
the back cover of the two thousand and one soundtrack
shows a couple of astronauts looking at a tablet, and

(50:47):
if you look at that tablet, you will see two
letters on it, BZ and as Bryce's Abel. You know BZ.
Just well. When I first realized that I was in
college and we we're going to see two thousand and
one on Saturday nights, everybody would go to the midnight
show of two thousand and one stoned out of their
minds because they wanted to see the final sequence. But

(51:09):
I was very proud, it said, BZ. Listen. The film
is so interesting because it suggests that humanity is part
of a larger evolutionary experiment that's been guided by this
unseen non human intelligence. And the key to it, though, Brent,
is that the Moon is serving as the trigger point
in that process. So, yes, these guys in the movie

(51:32):
go all the way to Jupiter and that's where the
starchild and all this great ending stuff. But there's the
sequence on the Moon where they are excavating this thing,
and so what begins is a story about space exploration.
Ultimately it becomes a meditation on existence itself, and the
Moon is positioned not as a destination but as a

(51:55):
silent signal that something or somebody has been watching and waiting,
And that, to me is why two thousand and one.
I'm with you. I've seen it at least a dozen times,
possibly more.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
Yeah, we've before, we've kind of read loglines. You just
did a great job of encapsulating not the plot so much,
but what it's about. What's the meaning of two thousand
and one, because I think the plot would be difficult
to summarize because it's a movie that's told in segments
that are related, but go see the movie. It's amazing.
It still holds up today. It looks as good as
any movie that is out right now.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
I actually look forward to us doing an entire episode
about moon movies and a long form dissertation on two
thousand and one, but I know we have other business
to take care of. I will say there is a
collection of Moon movies just waiting for us to weigh
in on them. But the one that's about if you
will Mining on the Moon, which is what the captain

(52:47):
was saying, Yes, this is what it's about. The most
recent one that I've seen that's all about that is Moon. Yes.
Heelium three, wasn't it? Yes? And I saw it last night.
It holds together, folks. If you want to see a
great film. Sam Rockwell is the star of it. He
plays all the roles in it. And it is Helium
three that they're going after, so a fascinating thing. Now,

(53:10):
most recently there's been my gosh, there's Moonfall. That's the
one we just talked about. Fly Me to the Moon
came out a couple of years ago where they're saying
it was faked. And I couldn't even watch that one
because I know it wasn't faked, so I don't like
to talk about that.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
But on that topic, and I think this is interesting
is that when people do talk about the moon landings
being faked, who do they say directed them right on?
Stanley Kubrick.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
You bet. And the reason was is because.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
The moon landings happened a year after two thousand and
one came out, and I think a lot of people
watch two thousand and one and it felt like watching
a documentary. It felt like what everyone imagined space would
look like. And so I think that no surprise when
people said, how could they have pulled off these fake moonlandings?

Speaker 3 (53:55):
Have Kubrick do it? Right?

Speaker 1 (53:57):
He just pulled off a miracle with two thousand and one.
So obviously there's no evidence that ever happened. There's a
lot of conspiracy theories about it being faked, about Kubrick,
about it being an artificial structure, there being mining going
on the moon. This is where we get into kind
of the rabbit hole of what is really going on

(54:17):
with the Moon and asking ourselves all these years later,
was there anything to what the captain told us.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
Point of fact, I'm not one hundred percent sure of
this part but when he did raise the moon as
an issue, I do remember saying somebody saying something like
like in two thousand and one, just some sidebar reference,
and again this guy being such a put down artist,
saying something, if you think that the moon is all
about classical music and blah blah blah, then you are

(54:47):
not as smart as you think you are. Just something
like that. So yeah, I also think, by the way,
in context of your story, I believe Kubrick was asked
about that and of course strenuously denied that it happened
that he would fake the moon landing. On the other hand,
people who think the moon landing was fake would say,
of course he'd deny it, so you can't ever get around.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
He had a sense of humor though, because in The
Shining Danny has a sweater that says Apollo eleven on it,
so clearly he was well aware of what the rumors were.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
Listen, there's so much to that, and all I know
is that I did a lot of research on it,
as did you, and we haven't even touched this surface.
So let's just resolve. We're going to come back to that,
but right now we've got to resolve the Captain and JC.
And as we left our story, we had a situation
where these guys have left and not in a happy way.

(55:38):
It was not a happy place where they left, and
you and I had gone back to work, and time elapsed.
I'm unclear how much time elapsed, because time kind of
compresses when you're producing a TV series. It's like it's
twenty four to seven. Now. You even dream about your
series because you have to. Your brain has to keep
working because you've got to show up at seven in

(55:59):
the morning and right keep going and stay till nine
at night and then drive home. So yeah, so that
was going on, and then something happened.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
So what happened was JC resurfaced and started calling I
started getting more messages from my assistant. And why he
was calling me, I can't say. I think he felt
I was the easier mark.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
I'm sure of that. I'm sure that's what happened.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
And so I finally once again got on the phone
with him, and this time he had a little bit
more kind of edge to his voice. He wasn't quite
as friendly because obviously everyone knew that last meeting hadn't
gone well. And he proceeded to say that we were
being given one more chance to make this deal work,

(56:41):
and they were pulling out the big guns. I think
there was some kind of strange quote like that, And
what it came down to was they were going to
get us a meeting with an admiral, so someone even
higher up than the captain. And what I was told
was that there was I think an aircraft carrier or
some navy vessel coming into San Pedro, which is south

(57:05):
of Los Angeles in one of the big port areas,
and was going to be coming in there in a
couple days, and the admiral of that ship was going
to take a personal leave from the ship and go
on to shore to have a meeting with us that
would not be an official meeting.

Speaker 3 (57:21):
And before you lay that part out, though, let's just
recall before that call came in, you and I did
have time to have a couple of conversations, right. It
still weighed on us, not so much that we thought
the deal was on the table much we were like,
I guess that didn't work out, But we still were
talking about what's the point of view should we take

(57:41):
this deal, what would that mean? Should we not take
the deal, what would that mean? So that was an
active conversation that we're having, and then it got real
serious because they got back in touch with us correct.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
And so I'm listening to this proposal that we're going
to be meeting with an admiral, and I was thinking, Wow,
the captain was so intimidating.

Speaker 3 (58:01):
I can't think of.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Someone meeting with someone more intimidating. But then the situation
took a very dark turn because I said, Okay, where
would we be meeting with this admiral and he said,
that's the thing. This will not be an official meeting.
So after hours he is going to request a personal
leave from the ship to come visit.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
And the reason though, just to be clear, they said,
you can't meet him on the ship because you have
to log you guys in exactly and you cannot be
logged in. Now that's a very convenient thing if you're
not who you say you are, say I can't bing
you on the ship. But that that seemed plausible. They're
not about to log in Friedman and is able to
meet an admiral if you're trying to keep a big
secret for a Dark Sky's creative meeting. But where he

(58:45):
wanted to meet us was Apparently the cover story that
the admiral was using was he was going to go
visit a friend of his, a deceased friend, and pay
his respects at a nearby cemetery in Long Beach. The
plan was, as JC state, you are going to meet
the admiral at a specific gravesite, which we.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
Will give you the name of, at midnight. And all
I heard was cemetery at midnight. And immediately what went
into my mind was, we're going to go to this
grave site and it's not going to be the gravesite
of some friend of the admirals. I'm going to see
Brent Friedman's tombstone and bruck Sables tombstone, and there's going
to be two holes dug six feet deep. And as

(59:27):
we're taking all of this in, we're going to get
popped in the back of the head and that's where
we will be.

Speaker 3 (59:32):
Laid to rest.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
That was all of this went through my mind when
he said cemetery at midnight.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
Mine too, because remember you had to come into my
office and say there's been a development, and then you
had to lay that on me. Now, as I've considered
this over the years, to be told we're going to
have a meeting in a cemetery at midnight. It's crazy.
It's insane. Yeah, and there aren't a lot of great
reasons why that would be worthwhile or why it would

(59:58):
even be done. I thought when I I first heard this,
my first take Brent was it's some kind of weird initiation.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Yeah, it felt like a test. If these guys are
willing to do this, then they're either complete idiots and
we own them, or they're committed and they're in and
we can trust them.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
One was a two. I remember saying you though, like,
what is this some kind of weird initiation? You had
a different take at the time. You were like, I
don't know, maybe there's something buried there that they're going
to show us. Yes, at the time, I will be
perfectly honest. I was completely terrified, but I was equally intrigued.
And here was the good news. You had kids. I

(01:00:36):
didn't have kids yet, so.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
There was a part of me that was like, maybe
i'll go, Bryce, you don't have to go, I'll go.
And I think what it came down to was, no,
we're in this together. You're not going. I'm not going.
We have a show to run. No one's going to
a cemetery at midnight.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
Let's drop it. I just I did feel like I
have a wife and three kids, and yes, the last
the least responsible thing I could do in that position
was to go to a cemetery at midnight. But before
we actually lay out the ending of this, let's just
summarize the conversations that we had before that phone call
and even a little bit after it, before we weighed this.

(01:01:13):
Let me give you some pro arguments for taking a
deal with these guys. At the time, we thought access
obviously could give us more authenticity for the show. We
were idealistic. Potentially we thought, wow, if this actually is
on the level, we might actually help facilitate real disclosure,
which was positive. And also given that, as we talked

(01:01:33):
about in a previous episode, we started the whole cover
of fiction thing, the idea that somebody would want to
come to us with a desire to use cover of
fiction wasn't as unreasonable as you might think. But I
think the main argument pro was we'll finally get to
know what's really going on, We'll get the truth, and
that was seemed to be the promise in and I

(01:01:54):
remember I do remember talking about that sitting and I
think we're sitting in my office because it had a
on the other side. I was behind my chair, and
we would talk to each other across that big old
desk that they had, and we thought we might get
to see a craft and a body.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
Yes, that was the inducement. That was seemed to be
the promise. They never used those words, but in our minds,
if we were going to go to a cemetery at midnight,
it was because there was a craft and a body
somewhere that we were going to be shown.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Now you were more open to taking it. So I'm
going to let you take some negative. What are the
negatives to taking such a deal?

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
Look, I think that other than it sounds insane, I
think the negatives were primarily that it felt like we
would be losing control of the narrative. At what I
mean by that is we had a show, We had
a vision for the show. We had the network on board,
the studio on board, we had stories broken, scripts written,

(01:02:57):
and these guys being put in charge they had certainly
the captain made it quite clear that if we were
in business with him, he was going to tell us
what was going to happen. He was going to be
the showrunner in some sense of the word, and I
think that was terrifying, that sense, that loss of control.
I think another thing that we talked about and we

(01:03:18):
had to take seriously was, Okay, these guys are saying
this is the truth. They're saying they're the heroes, right,
and we're going to be on their side and.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
Disclose to the people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
Again, they were giving us the pitch of us being
low and guard and dark skies.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Let's get the.

Speaker 1 (01:03:33):
Truth out to the people. So that was enticing, But
we also did consider but what if all of this
is a syop? What if all of this is a lie?
What if all of this is disinformation? And so that
idea that we could be end up taking a deal,
lose control of the show, and only to be being
used as part of a disinformation campaign was pretty disgusting. Additionally,

(01:03:55):
there was the thing of if we do take the
deal and they give us information, are we going to
be blackmail at some point? Are people going to say
years later, these guys didn't write the show. This was
all given to them. So I think there was plenty
of reasons not to do it. Again beyond just self preservation,
I also think there was a personal reason for both
of us. Even though you didn't have kids, you had

(01:04:15):
a skeptical spouse, as did I, and I think that
it would have created a legitimate personal rift between us
and our lovels, and that would have been a difficult thing.
So I agree with that we didn't want to be
conduits for disinformation. The other thing, by the way, what
if it had become public that we had done this.
If we had done it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
It just seemed like that is so unknowable, and it
clearly weighed on both of us, and I just want
to make one thing clear. Having some fun talking about
it right now, but in the moment, I was disturbed.
It was disturbed that somebody, let me put it this way,
I didn't know if these guys were on the level
or not, but I did feel like somebody had spent

(01:04:55):
a lot of time or and or money trying to
build this situation around us, and it wasn't clear why.
If it was on the level, that would also mean
that we'd be in a real troubling situation. I guess
it's time. I don't think it's a mystery to anybody.
But what it finally really came down to was the

(01:05:17):
approach that these guys made from invading this party for
the Dark Skuy's premiere and then coming to our offices
and behaving the way they behaved, and then offering a
cemetery at midnight, all of that seemed very alarming. It
seemed dangerous, It was coercive, and what's the word you use,
It's insane. At least it felt insane. So at the

(01:05:40):
end of the day, I know my position was, I've
got a wife and three kids. I'm not meeting anybody,
any human being or any non human being at a
cemetery at midnight.

Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
We came to the same conclusion. One of the interesting
things though, is that once we came to that conclusion,
the story that we told ourselves was those guys, who
knows they were probably lying right. It was comforting to
think that it was all we did, the right thing.
There was no truth there. But I think a couple
things to just look at in the intervening years is that,
obviously there's much more talk now than there was in

(01:06:13):
nineteen ninety six about all sorts of stuff going out
on in space in the up on the Moon. There's
obviously been in this New Moon mission with Artemis but
all of the speculation about what might be going on
in space or even up on the Moon has reached
a crescendo of late And something that happened a couple
weeks ago was Gary McKinnon, who was the famous kind

(01:06:36):
of British hacker from I believe the nineties, was arrested
when he was just a teenager for hacking into a
bunch of US intelligence agencies and seeing things that he
was not supposed to see.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
And there's a whole.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
Rabbit hole we can go down that we're not going
to if you're interested, check it out. He gave an
interview recently with Jesse Michaels on American Alchemy. Shout out
to Jesse Michaels, love his podcast anyway. In that interview,
he says a couple things that actually align with what
the captain told us, oh so many years ago, and
so again, maybe coincidence, but I think it's interesting to

(01:07:14):
start comparing some notes. Some of the things he said
he saw were that he got into Fort Meade, he
got into the Defense Information System Agency, the DoD networks,
the Basic Army Networks, the Navy networks, the UASF, the
US Air Force, networks, and also the Johnson Space Center.
This teenager hacked into all of these places was but

(01:07:36):
was obviously working with very low speed internet, so he
was like trying to download all of this information was
going very slowly. But one of the things that he
saw was he saw from the Johnson Space Center a
spreadsheet that was titled non Terrestrial Officers, and it went
on to delineate something about that had ship names, and

(01:07:57):
there was a material that was being transferred. There was
chemicals like molly b D, denim, strontium, barium, There was
all rex sorts of records of ship to ship transfers
of materials, and for a moment apparently he thought, oh,
they're talking about US Navy ships. But when he researched it,
none of these names matched up with actual Navy ships,

(01:08:19):
which then implies that there was a whole kind of
network of work being done up in space, none of
which we are aware of or that has been officially
revealed in any capacity. And so then you're going to
go down the rabbit hole a little bit and you say, Okay,
the captain told us there was mining going on the
Moon for some sort of material. When you start looking

(01:08:41):
at these things that he laid out. All of them
are these rare minerals and elements that are found in
various quantities up on the moon. So again, is this
all a coincidence or are these dots starting to be
connected thirty years later?

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):
I'll connect one other dot for you. Yeah, after McKinnon
got arrested, I'm not sure he was a teenager when
he did that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:03):
I think no, no, I'm sorry he hacked and then he
was arrested a couple of years later.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
So when he got arrested, and he's a U cases
and so when he got first arrested, the British were
looking into it, and they were treating it as it's
not as big a deal. But then the British sent
some people over to talk to the guess what, the
Office of Naval Intelligence, and they came back quite chastened,

(01:09:27):
and the Office of Naval Intelligence was invoked strenuously in
this thing. So there's O and I again. Now I'm
not I don't think either of us are saying that
these are clear connections. But I think what interests us,
both of us, is that for every this O and
I keeps appearing as the Naval Intelligence name attached to

(01:09:49):
secrecy and access and compartmentalization. And it fits right in
with us being told you got a lot of things right, oh,
and I and the Navy and yeah, So what is
the status of Gary McKinnon right now? Based on what
he told the.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
British government stood their ground and would not allow him
to be extradited. So he got in trouble, clearly, But
he did. I think they were going to put him
away for fifty years or something, for seventy f for
breaching these networks and seeing and getting access to classified information.

Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
So Jarry McKinnon's not going to Disneyland anytime soon. He'll
be picked up and arrested anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:10:26):
Yeah, it's so there's and there's one last piece of
the puzzle that we want to throw out, and it's
it's possibly the strangest, the most unsettling, and also the
most speculative. After we had turned down the deal, and
by the way we turned it down by simply not
taking any more phone calls from JC. We just never
allowed there to be any further communications. But about probably

(01:10:48):
a week or two after the offer to go to
the cemetery at midnight, I remember one day coming into
the dark Sky's office, and my assistant Adam, looked ashen faced,
and he waited until we were in the office. He
colt closed the door and he wanted to show me
something that seemed very important, and it was a newspaper,
one of those little newspapers from the West side. I
don't remember a west side of Los Angeles. I don't

(01:11:09):
remember which one it was. But he quickly opened it
up and he showed me an article about a body
that had washed ashore down by the Santa Monica Pier
that had no id on it, but that fit the
description of jc OH. And my first thought was, Oh, no,
he couldn't close the deal, and so they took him out.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
We're alledging that, by the way, this one wasn't. This
is more speculative than cemeteries at midnight, absolutely, But I think.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
The point of that is that once you get immersed
in the paranoia of a situation, And by the way,
in the aftermath of all this, we did start telling
more people about cemetery at midnight and all that kind
of stuff. So now people were making a show about
a cover up, but they were all still feeling part
of the cover up. So now you have people seeing

(01:11:58):
all sorts of strange things all over the place, and
your assistant bringing you in stories about somebody showing up
dead at the Santa Monica Peer. Obviously we have no
idea if that was JC or what happened to him,
but it was one of those kind of punctuation marks
on the whole thing that just left this sense of
unsettling mystery, which really explains a whole feeling of JC

(01:12:21):
and the captain and the offer and the deal and
the formula. It all felt like we were in the
twilight Zone.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
I really feel like Rod Sterling should have been narrating
our dark Sky's experience. I thought you were going to
tell a slightly different story. And I know we've gone along,
but I'm I think we'd be remiss not to throw
this out there. One day after that cemetery, at midnight
moment and all that, we come to the office and

(01:12:48):
John Lear is silling John Bobby. He has come unannounced.
Now for people who don't know, John Lear was the
son of Bill Lear, who was the famed inventor who
created the Lear Jet business aircraft and also the eight
track system. John Lear was a significant player in UFO history,
but he was also a significant pilot was he had

(01:13:11):
thousands of flight hours as a pilot. He flew more
than one hundred aircraft types. He worked as a test pilot,
He held speed records. He knew everything about aviation. But
he's also the guy that got famous with his Lear
hypothesis or the Lear statement where and I'm just going
to read you a list of things that he said

(01:13:32):
there and see if they make any if they ring
any bells. In his statement, John Lear is the guy
that said alien craft had crashed and been recovered. This
is in the late eighties, in the early nineties, so
a few years before US, but a few years after
say Bob Lazar. He Lear said bodies had been retrieved.
Secret treaties existed between the US and extraterrestrials, human abductions

(01:13:56):
were occurring, and underground bases were involved in joint pride
with non humans. Okay, so back when he was saying
this is crazy shit, right, and then he you know,
he was talking about reverse engineering, black budgets, all that stuff,
and Barry is sitting in our lobby. We weren't expecting him.
We let him sit in the lobby for a couple
of hours because we were like, maybe he'll go away.

(01:14:18):
I don't but whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
But Arry, this is the son of the guy who
invented the lear jet, right, as he said, he's got
like serious credentials, and he's sitting in our lobby for
several hours because we're too busy to meet with him.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
The reason I bring it up in this episode, and
maybe we'll go into more depth later, but he had
a few things when we did meet with him that
did happen, and he had some things to say about
the moon himself.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
Yes, and his whole stance was the moon is artificial.
It's not at all what we've been told. It's in fact,
it's a massive artificial structure, and there are hidden civilizations
operating beyond Earth utilizing the Moon, and NASA is concealing everything,
all of the alien architecture and the mining that is
going up on the moon. Again, we have a meeting

(01:15:01):
with JC and the captain where the captain tells us
it's all about the moon. And then unexpectedly days later,
a week later, whatever it was, John Lear shows up
at our office to tell us about what he knows
about the moon.

Speaker 3 (01:15:15):
And it's possible that maybe you didn't do this, but
maybe I didn't treat him with the proper respect because
I think I was a little done with people coming
into my office to tell me Moon stories and stuff
when we had such real responsibilities to get the show out.
Because and I couldn't find it for this show, but
maybe I will find it. He wrote me a letter afterwards,

(01:15:35):
and it's a pretty critical letter, basically saying, well, I
guess you guys don't want to know what's really going on.
You're just too busy making your TV show or whatever.
But he came out, we talked to him, and interestingly enough,
he was Bob Lazar, who was the guy that said
he worked at Area fifty one and S four. He
was Bob Lazar's biggest supporter when Lazarre first told his

(01:15:59):
story to Jordeap back in nineteen eighty nine. And in
the latest Bob Lazar documentary which just came out, it's
called S four. One of the recreations based on Bob
Lazar's testimony is a document they made him read when
he first went there, and it's got Office of Naval
Intelligence on it. My mind just signed yes, and I

(01:16:19):
think let's wrap this up. I know this has gone long,
this has been a crazy trip down memory lane. Going
back to JC. Right, let's hope he's alive.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
In fact, our secret wish is that he is and
that he's listening to this podcast. And towards that end,
because we're Hollywood writers, we thought it would be fun
to imagine what JC is up to right now, our
old friend JC. And so we have been writing and
producing a little micro series called The Deal.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
When we launched a podcast, we don't Know, I Know.

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
And when we launched our podcast, we put out the
first Deal kind of under the radar. We just put
it out there. It's on YouTube, it's on the Stellar
channel and by the.

Speaker 3 (01:16:59):
Way, people can access at Hollywood UFOs dot com. There
you go.

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
And so the first episode is very short, less than
a minute, contemplates what would JC do if he heard
that we were had a podcast and we were telling
stories about him. And so we have a six episode
micro series in mind, the second episode of which we're
going to leave you with, and we encourage you now
to go back watch the first episode second and they'll

(01:17:25):
be running in parallel with the rest of the season,
and we promise you that by the time you get
to the sixth episode, it'll all fold back on itself
and you'll have a fun little ride.

Speaker 3 (01:17:34):
Why don't we just let's play that right now and
then come back for a goodbye. We have a problem.
Dark Skies is back on radar.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
Have a real life man in black, and he tells
us that he's been sent by the Office of Naval Intelligence.
That deal was to be part of the government's slow
drip disclosure program around UFOs.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Never told me you were ow and I back then,
is it theired yet? Not un till February nineteenth. It's
called sound, light and frequency, of course it is.

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
It's from iHeart, so it'll be everywhere.

Speaker 3 (01:18:14):
But we have resources use them. Okay, that was fun. Okay,
here's what I've enjoyed about doing those things. Brent, And
I don't know if everyone will get our sense of
humor or our sense of drama or whatever. But I
have always wondered, and I'm sure you have from time
to time, what would have happened if we took the

(01:18:35):
deal back in nineteen ninety six. Would we have been killed,
would we have been brought inside? Would we have had
a tom DeLong done on us? I don't know what
would have happened. So It's a nice little thing to
see these things being made. We've had several friends say
to me, why are you poking the bear? You want
this guy to come back into your life, And I

(01:18:55):
will say, right here and now, at this point in
my life, I'm ready to talk about the deal. I'm
not ready to sign anything yet, but I'm ready to
have some more deeper conversations about the deal.

Speaker 1 (01:19:04):
So I hope that Jac is out there listening, and Jac,
if you're listening to this podcast right now, get in
touch with us.

Speaker 3 (01:19:11):
Yeah. And I would just say, my kids are all
growing up, so I have an open mind about it. Now,
there you go. Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart
podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick
Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was
written by Anna Stump and Hamilton Lighthouser, and Your hosts

(01:19:34):
and executive producers are Brice Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the Skies

Speaker 2 (01:20:14):
P

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