Cover of Fiction

In “Cover of Fiction,” Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman explore how Hollywood sometimes tells the truth most effectively when it’s disguised as entertainment—and why that might be the only way certain ideas can travel without detonating careers, institutions, or sanity. The episode starts with a chilling secondhand message Bryce says an investigative reporter received from multiple intelligence-community sources: if you really want to understand the phenomenon, watch the German series Dark… and pay attention to its grim nuclear future. From there, Bryce and Brent connect the show’s time-loop paranoia, wormholes, and determinism to modern UAP theories about time, “other realities,” and why disclosure might be both too destabilizing and too complicated to drop in one clean press conference.

Then the episode turns personal—and uncanny. Bryce revisits how his 1993 Syfy thriller Official Denial became a kind of “greatest hits” of ufology (Majestic, crash retrievals, time-travel implications), and how the “cover of fiction” idea boomeranged back into real life through the infamous John Loengard letter and the Dark Skies mythology that followed. The rabbit hole deepens with Whitley Strieber’s Communion—including director Philippe Mora’s startling account of being questioned mid-flight by a man flashing a Defense Intelligence Agency badge. And just when the implications start to feel genuinely unsettling, Bryce lands the episode with a graceful reminder that even the hardest truths can be made survivable.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It literally told people that there was a John Longuard
who had contacted you and me and asked us to
take a deal to infuse some of the real ideas
he had into our TV series so that the.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Truth could come out.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
And I think what's strange about that, of course, is
boy did it work. It came back on us. As
you said, we call it, folks, the boomerang effect.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Well, and here's the thing is that we created this
as a marketing ploy and when jac approached us, what
he said to us was, we want to give you
some information so that you can use the Cover of
Fiction to disseminate it to the public in this slow
drip fashion. I'm Brice Able.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs?

Speaker 2 (01:09):
And I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to sound, light,
and frequency. Our entire podcast is usually about separating truth
from fiction, but this time it's going to get personal
and things may get a little dark, but rest assured
there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

(01:36):
So our show today is called Cover of Fiction. Now,
in case you don't know what that means, let me
just explain really quickly that in storytelling, cover of fiction
means basically using made up plots and characters to explore
or maybe even expose some sort of real world facts
or truth or even personal experiences. What that does for

(02:01):
creators is it functions as sort of a shield for
the ability to tell stories that might be too sensitive
or controversial or maybe even get them into legal hot water.
You've probably heard the saying the names have been changed
to protect the innocent. Well, in this case, the writers
are the innocent. Weirdness that sounds Rice, Why don't you

(02:23):
jump in and give us an example that I've got
a great example.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
I think we could all remember Succession, which of course
is a terrific show, one of my favorite shows on HBO.
And I know a lot about Succession only because as
the former chairman of the TV Academy, I go to
all the Emmy Awards and I watched Succession win Outstanding
Drama Series three times in twenty twenty, twenty two, and

(02:49):
twenty three. It got seventy five Emmy nominations nineteen Emmys,
and it is a perfect example of exactly the cover
of fiction you're talking about. Because people always point out
that the roy family, if you will in succession is
the equivalent of the Murdoch family. You got Logan Roy,
who would be Rupert Murdoch. You got Kendall Roy who

(03:10):
was Lachlan Murdoch. You got Roman Roy who was James Murdoch,
you got Shivroy who was Elizabeth Murdoch. I mean, it
really does lay over very well. The thing is, the
creator of the show, Jesse Armstrong, has repeatedly pushed back
on It's the Murdochs because he says it's not a
direct portrait and you know, this is just a commentary

(03:32):
on multiple real world dynasties and media power structures. But
I think probably Brent, that goes back to what you
were just saying. Some lawyer said you really should say
this isn't the Murdochs because you know what the Murdoch's
coming after you. So there is always that whenever you
use cover of fiction. And let's face it, half the
time you watch a movie and you know it's about somebody.

(03:52):
In fact, it might even be a biopic about somebody,
and at the end they have the legal disclaimer that
says there are no living people. Nobody forget what the
disclaimer is, but you read it, you go, that's not
even true. But anyway, so cover of fiction is the
title of the show, and boy do we have some
covers of some fiction's here to talk about.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Well, I think you make a great point, which is
that even if it is cover of fiction, sometimes the
writers or the creators won't cop to that. And that's
the case with the example we want to bring up,
which is the series Dark And I think you have
a great story that tees up a pretty interesting discussion.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
That's true, And just so everyone knows, we actually made
our own series called Dark Skies, all about the cover
of fiction. We're going to get there, but we're going
to get there in an unusual way. The first thing
I want to point out is I know a lot
of investigative reporters in the UFO UAP space, So I'm
not going to lay this at any one particular reporter's feet.

(04:48):
I'm going to say it's a composite thing or whatever.
But I'm not allowed to say their name. They asked
me not to use their name. But this person told
me about three years ago that multiple sources from the
intelligence community had communicated the same message to them at
the basic same time. Within a week, they had heard

(05:09):
this from three different sources in the intelligence community, and
the quote that stood out to me because I wrote
it down at the time. I was on the phone
with this person and they said it, and I thought,
I've had to write that down because I don't want
to forget that one. And they said, if you really
want to understand the phenomenon, then you should watch the
German TV series Dark and pay attention to its focus

(05:30):
on a grim nuclear future, which kind of shivered me
Timbers there.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Brent, Absolutely, that is pretty chilling.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
I'm only imagining that very few people who are listening
to us right now have actually fought their way through Dark.
I think it's three seasons long. It is in German.
It's called Dark for various reasons, but among them is
it's literally shot dark. So I was trying to I've
watched some of it with my wife and she's like,
I can't follow this thing. It's in German and it's

(05:58):
all in shadow.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
But here's the good news. When we started talking about this,
I thought, well, I'm going to watch at least the
first season and then, you know, maybe read some reviews.
I binged it like I got super into it, and
the humor here is that if you asked me to
try and explain to you what it was about off
the top of my head, there's no way I can.
So I'm going to read something to you here, but

(06:21):
just to follow up on what you said. It is
on Netflix. It aired in twenty seventeen. I think there's
three seasons up until two twenty. It received a lot
of critical acclaim it's got a very passionate fan base now.
But on the surface, interestingly, based on your quote, it
seems to have nothing to do with aliens or UAP
or does it. Let me catch up to speed on

(06:42):
what the show is. It follows four families in the
German town of Wynden, where the disappearance of local children
reveals a time travel conspiracy spanning multiple generations from nineteen
twenty one up through twenty fifty three. At the center
of this mystery is a wormhole in a cave system
directly beneath a nuclear power plant. The series explores fate,

(07:04):
free will, religion, quantum physics, and the cyclical nature of time. Well,
on the other hand, Brent, you had me at Wormhole.
It really did? Yeah, listen, Okay, I did.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
I didn't Binge the whole thing, but you'll laugh that
this is my way of experiencing the series. The first
thing I did is I watched the first episode. Then
I watched the last episode of season three. Then I
went back and finished number two and three of season one,
and then I watched all three episodes of the in sequence.

(07:35):
And I still don't understand what it is. Maybe I
miss something by leaving out most of season one, two
and three.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
I don't know. I think it's possible. That was a
very interesting way to adjust that series. It makes no sense.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
But then I thought, this is going to be a
wild ride anyway, and it's going to be hard for
me to figure it out. And what if I don't
make it through all three seasons. If we're going to
talk about this thing, I kind of want to the end.
And the end did help me a little bit. I'm
not going to spoil it for anybody right now, but
it helped.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Look, I think for anyone who's even seen the show,
you're probably wondering, wait a minute, so what does this
have to do with UAP and the phenomenon? And let's
get into a little bit, because it's a very interesting series,
very well told in the show there's an inscription above
that cave with the wormhole. It's a Latin phrase that says,
sick Mundus create us st that was my best Latin accent.

(08:28):
That translates to thus the world was created. Now, interestingly,
that's taken from the ancient Emerald Tablets of Hermes, which
is a cornerstone of alchemy, known for that famous quote
as above, so below. Well, so this cave that has
the wormhole, sick Mundus is also not just the inscription

(08:50):
above that cave, but also the series secret society of
time travelers who are trying to alter timelines to solidify
their own reality. So basically it's a very complicated story,
not unlike the truth about UAP, which everyone finds to
be impenetrable at this point because there's so many theories. Now,
I know this isn't still an explanation, So let me

(09:13):
speculate a little bit on if Dark was in fact
working under the cover of fiction, its explanation of UAP
in my mind would be that aliens are interdimensional, not extraterrestrial. Additionally,
they would be infiltrating our timeline to alter it for
some unknown agenda, maybe to prevent that grim nuclear future

(09:37):
that you mentioned at the top of the show, and
then you start to wonder, well, if several people in
the intelligence agency are pointing to it, is that what
they are pointing to, that idea of time traveling aliens
and somehow our nuclear future. Well, guess what we've talked
about even before on the show, that a lot of

(10:00):
alien and UFO sightings have taken place around nuclear bases.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, so that's the first thing I thought when this
guy told me this. I thought, well, we do know
one thing. Nuclear weapons seem to have gotten the attention
of whoever the others are.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Whether these this.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
Non human intelligence seems to have historically been interested in
what we do with our nuclear power. It doesn't mean
they're extraterrestrials coming from far away to take a look
at as it could be, but as you said, it
could be interdimensional, might even be something will get to
in a minute as a theory. But I don't want
to interrupt the flow here, so keep flowing.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Well, let me throw out one more key point that
I think will take us where you want to go,
and that is that a very interesting aspect of dark
is the idea that free will is an illusion that
we live and in what you would call a deterministic universe,
which means that the past, the present, and the future
are already thick and only those in the case of

(11:02):
this story, with access to time travel technology can choose
in what reality we actually live in. Now, does that
connect to any interesting quotes that you might know about it? Well,
I'll tell you one thing.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
There's a government insider, a former CIA officer named Jim Simavan.
He was actually one of the people that Tom DeLong
hooked into his to the Stars Academy at the very beginning,
and at first he was very reticent to be interviewed.
Now he's been kind of a regular but on Coast
to Coast with George Napp, this is the quote. He says,

(11:35):
there's a whole other reality that surrounds us, we just
simply don't have the ability to see or interact with,
which is a crazy thing for a CIA officer to say.
And then he goes on he says, there is a
force out there that can control our environment, that can
put thoughts into our heads, that can lie to you,
deceive you, and that you are not in control of

(11:57):
your life. And listen, I thought the CIA had its
handful handsful putting down coups and things like that in
third world countries. But apparently they've got more on their minds.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yes, again, that sounds very much to me like the
illusion of free will. But here's the thing. If dark
is prophetic in the ways that those intelligence officers mentioned
to a person, you know, and Semivan is somehow right
in his proclamation, then think about it. It's no wonder
that the truth about the UAP phenomenon has not been

(12:31):
disclosed because it's way too disturbing, you know. You think
about that, and I don't think anyone wants to hear
that as the truth of disclosure. So there is one
more element of dark that I want to mention that
is not so dark, And this quite fascinating. It's that
the main characters find themselves stuck in kind of a
tragic time loop and they're trying to change it by

(12:54):
creating what's known as the bootstrap paradox. Now, that's a
time travel problem where or someone is sent back in time,
becoming the cause of itself and creating an infinite, self
sustaining loop. Basically, it implies that the item that was sent,
the person that was sent, has no actual point of

(13:14):
origin or creator, and that is by definition a paradox.
It's just mind bending, it is.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
And by the way, you said, maybe they can't tell
us anything because it's too disturbing. Another reason might be
that it's too confusing because people have not actually been
able to figure out how that works. And a great
example of that is a movie. Maybe not everyone has
seen Dark but most people have seen Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger,
which is, I believe, an example of this bootstrap paradox

(13:42):
you're talking about. And it was of course directed by
James Cameron, who we talked about a lot for his
work on The Abyss recently and Terminator of course he
directed it. And in a nutshell, the plot is that
Skynet sends a Terminator back in time Okay to kill
the leader of the human resistance, and the eminence of
that robot are eventually used to create Skynet. So I

(14:04):
remember trying to discuss with this with the people I
saw the movie with when I first saw it, and
we all kind of said.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, let's go get a drink. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
But what has always moved me about the Terminator movie
that just makes me smile even today is I think
the writers and the director got so wound up. Well,
I guess he was the writer as well, or at
least one of the writers. I don't remember right now.
But you get to the end and you go, this
is a little confusing. I'm not quite sure. Maybe we

(14:33):
need something to deal with this. And then there's the
voiceover in it. You know, and you and I both
know in putting together movies and TV series quite often
in post you'll go, this isn't quite working right. Maybe
a little voice over here would help. So here's the
voiceover from the end of Terminator, read by the Linda
Hamilton character, and she says, this is the voiceover. Should

(14:55):
I tell you about your father? That's a tough one.
Will it change your decision to send him here?

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Knowing?

Speaker 1 (15:02):
But if you don't send Kyle, you could never be God.
You can go crazy thinking about all this. And I
thought that's kind of that's kind of a good move.
The way you get people to say, oh, I guess
I guess it all makes sense is to say you'll
go crazy thinking about it, so don't think.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
About it too much. Just enjoy the movie. And I
think that's probably solid advice. Brett.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
If you're talking about a movie. You've got a friend
that overthinks everything, and you go, you know what the
problem is, you're overthinking everything. You should just relax and
listen to the movie. But that doesn't apply when you're
talking about real life. You know, if it's your life,
it's your if it's the nature of your existence, if
it's about what reality really is. Yeah, I don't think
you can tell somebody I don't think about it just

(15:44):
it'll just confuse you.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
Reality is a reality, very true. I'm going to overthink
Dark one more time because as we talk about all
of this and lay all these ideas on the table,
there's one more thing. And this is basically my final
take on Dark. Based on everything we've heard, here's my theory.
What if humans from the distant future have been coming
back to steer our progress from the shadows, letting us

(16:09):
believe we still had free will, and they have an
agenda to intervene if necessary and prevent a catastrophe natural
or man made, in order to somehow fix or improve
their own future. But wait, there's more. Okay, what if
the future humans have become so mutated that they look

(16:29):
like grays, so what we call aliens are really us
from the future, and all this high stakes activity going
on Earth right now in the twentieth and twenty first
century is what brings real aliens, extraterrestrial and interdimensional to
our planet. That's my theory on maybe what Dark is
trying to tell us through the cover of fiction.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
Well, my friend, we agree about that because I have
that theory as well. The only difference between us right
now is I wrote a movie about it, which we're
going to talk about soon. But I thought the thing
that really made me feel very relevant idea to today
is we've just spent some time talking about Disclosure Day,
which is going to be Spielberg's big movie coming out

(17:11):
in June, and he was on The Colbert Show about
a year ago, or maybe even a couple of years ago,
and this is what Stephen Spielberg told Stephen Colbert. He said,
the most optimistic thing I feel about these things that
we are seeing in our skies the Army and Navy
and Air Force are recording on their gun cameras, is
that what if they're not from an advanced civilization three

(17:34):
hundred million light years from here, what if it's five
hundred thousand years in the future. That is coming back
to document the second half of the twentieth century and
endo the twentieth century because they are anthropologists and they
know something that we don't quite know yet that has occurred,
and they are trying to track the last one hundred.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Years of our history.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Well, that seemed pretty damn specific to me that he
would lay it out like that five hundred thousand years ago. Now,
I don't know if anybody's brief Steven Spielberg and said,
and by the way, it's not a million years, it's
only half a million years, So be sure to get
that right when you go on TV and talk about it.
And by the way, Colbert said, the most hopeful part
of that to me is that we survive. And Spielberg said, yes,

(18:18):
that we survive, or a certain percentage of us survived.
That allows these other generations to flourish. I always thought
Spielberger is supposed to be such an optimist. It's like, yeah,
most of us aren't going to make it, but some
of us might. So you know what, we got things
to talk about. Let's take a break here and come back.
And I want to tell everybody about a movie I
know they've never seen, but that has a lot to

(18:39):
say about time traveling aliens.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
So we'll be right back. So let's look at another
example of the bootstrap paradox.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, you know, listen, I knew nothing about the bootstrap
paradoix or anything when I wrote the movie Official Denial,
but it's certainly about it. This is kind of personal
to me. It's kind of a film that people can't
see right now because it's not available. You can't get
a DVD of it, and it's not streaming. But in
its day it was kind of a big thing. I

(19:17):
wrote a movie originally called Progenitor as a screenplay, and
it was a story about a guy who thinks he's
being abducted, and so what he ends up doing is,
you know, he's complaining and his wife wants to have kids,
and he doesn't want to have kids because it's the
kind of world we're building here and everything. The only
people that believe the guy his name is Paul Corliss,

(19:39):
he's the main character. The only people that believe the
guy is the government. They know he's being abducted and
they want to shoot down a UFO, so they wire
up his house so that the next time he is
abducted they can scramble Apache helicopters or you know, interceptor jets,
or even use SDI to shoot one down, and they do.

(20:00):
The thing about that particular story is that I tried
to cram every damn piece of ufology that I couldn't
that rent and I think I'm looking at it right
now about all the things that are in it, and
it's pretty successful at getting upology in there, and it
had a checkered history to get out there. I first

(20:21):
wrote this thing, and my agent was like, I don't know, man,
this is so strange.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
I don't know if we can send this out to anybody.
It's nuts.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
I mean, you got And then he started listing all
the things that I thought were great about and I said, okay,
well you know it's what I got, so send it out.
And I got called in to LA Law for a
potential assignment. And I go into the LA Law office
with David Kelly, who everybody knows David Kelly. I'm in
his office. He's got stacks of screenplays everywhere, I mean

(20:53):
hundreds of them, at least two hundred scripts. And on
one of the stacks is my progenitor script. And he says,
that's why he brought me in and I said, cool,
do you know anything about UFOs? Are you a UFO?
He goes, no, I don't know anything about that. I
don't really care about that, but I know good writing,
and that was good writing. So I ended up writing
a couple of episodes of La Law about that. But

(21:16):
the thing is, the entire this is not a spoiler now,
it was a spoiler back in the day. But the
whole movie goes through to the end, and there are
many machinations that we could talk about. In fact, I
could do a whole episode about.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
It, but we won't.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
But you get to the very end, and this Paul
Corliss character is now being allowed to go free. After
all the movie has transpired and they had a Majestic twelve.
And by the way, that's something that's so interesting to me.
Half of the things that are in official denial are
also in dark skies or TV series. I just recycled
a lot of good eufology. But the guy stops him

(21:52):
who's been running Majestic twelve, And he says, okay, just
tell me where are they from?

Speaker 2 (21:58):
What do they want?

Speaker 1 (21:59):
And the guy says, is it's not where they're from.
It's when they're us And that's basically the Rod Serling
Twilight Zone twist of the entire movie. And so the
thing about it, and then I'll turn it back over.
When I aimed for the there us from the future thing,
it wasn't because I thought they were us from the future,

(22:19):
like Spielberg is positing. I mean, I could posit it,
but I had nothing to base that on. I just thought, well,
that's a very cool twist. You know, why would you
be abducting people? Maybe you need to study the DNA,
maybe there's something wrong, maybe whatever. So yeah, Official Denial
was the first original film that the Sci Fi Channel

(22:41):
ever made, So that's my distinction.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Thank you, and I'm.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
Happy about that, and I you know, I just I
wish that somehow it could be on TV again and
maybe maybe somebody will hear this and make that happen.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
That would be a lovely thing. So one other thing
I want to talk about with regards to Official is
when we first started talking about that movie, you had
mentioned that you weren't exactly thrilled with the way it
turned out, the way it was produced. I think you
have a funny anecdote about that.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
I don't know if it's an anecdote, but I'll tell
you what happened. The darn thing just didn't get a
big budget. I wrote it to be a big feature
film that Steven Spielberg would direct someday as his follow
up to Close Encounters. That was kind of my imagination,
running a muck at the time, thinking that would be
a lovely thing. But at the end of the day,
the people that wanted to make it were at the

(23:31):
Sci Fi Channel and they didn't have a lot of money.
They didn't have Spielberg signed up to direct films for them,
and they didn't have the money to make a big film.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
So we had I.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Think a two million plus budget, which is nothing, and
it wasn't much more than nothing back in nineteen ninety
three when they shot it. But they thought, well, we'll
make some more money advantage if we shoot it in Australia.
So the director, Brian Trenchard Smith, took my script and
ran off to Australia to shoot this thing. And he

(24:02):
was lovely. I mean, he would call me and we
would talk a lot about what was in the script.
But a decision was made, that's all I can say.
A decision was made that the alien, which is a
central character in the Official Denial film, that alien would
be played by a twelve year old ballerina in a

(24:22):
rubber suit. Interesting choice, Yeah, it was. And I got
to tell you, even though I wrote it, it's just
one of those things I can barely watch. And Yeah,
to this day I had people writing me who have
found a copy someplace or seen it on YouTube or whatever,
and they call me or write me and say, oh,
I just loved your film. It has all these great
ideas in it. And I want to write them back

(24:44):
and go, wait, did you actually see the alien in
this thing? But they didn't care because they sort of
looked at it like a I don't know, like a play.
So it didn't have to be as authentic as you
might imagine. So God bless those people who said that,
and you and I did learn one less and from it.
We took a look at Official Denial, which is on
the day you told me your Harrington story, I told

(25:05):
you about Official Denial. And one of the things that
we decided from my experience was let's not put young
girls in rubber suits and expect people to think that
they're an alien. You can't really move your face. You
can't move your mouth, you can't move your eyes. It's
not a good look. And so at least for Dark Skies,
we rejected that possibility and went for some other aliens

(25:27):
that were not still as good as you could do today,
but they were better. So yeah, that was that's my
one caveat to the whole thing. But just to tell
you the things that are actually in official denial, you
got Majestic twelve, you got my Labs, which are military abductions, right.
You've got Native Americans who know more about what's going

(25:48):
on because of the time travel aspect than anyone else
seems to know. You have a guy getting given a choice.
We'll tell you everything you need to know, but then
you work for us, which we did with Carl Sagan
and Dark Skies. That appears in official denial. First he
gets handed a Majestic badge, which of course is what

(26:09):
happened on the night of our Dark Skuy's party. We
gave everybody a Majestic badge. And there's an autopsy in it.
There's a conversation about disclosure and how it would lead
to mass panic and the collapse of institutions, which is
like the book I wrote with Richard Dolan.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
I mean, I was.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Reviewing this before we went on the air with this,
and I thought, my god, I've recycled everything I've ever
thought about the UFO topic. And I've been doing it
since nineteen ninety three. So I feel kind of bad
I'm recycling. But I think it may be that some
of the things that are in that movie are actually accurate,
and that's why we've gone back to that well from

(26:46):
time to time.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
But yeah, I mean absolutely fascinating. It's in a weird way.
Official Denial is like the greatest hits of ufology, kind
of story beats, and like you said there, they keep
getting reused, used because they're very durable, right, They're very interesting,
and so yeah, I think if you haven't had a
chance to see Official Denial, I recommend going to check

(27:09):
it out.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
And if you're going to find a copy anywhere, Yeah,
I'd like to say that it's a government conspiracy. They
are suppressing Official Denial print. They know that if the
public gets a chance to see this movie. I wrote
that all hell is going to break loose. So they're
doing the only thing they could do.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
That's exactly what they're doing well. So now, the other
thing that I thought was interesting about official denial is
that you actually said that you were inspired to write
the script because of Communion. The book absolutely true. Tell
me a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
You know, here's the thing, if you just go back
in history we all just so people know, Whitley Strieber,
of course, is the guy who wrote a book called Communion,
and then it became a movie called Communion a.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
Couple of years later.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
But he is like probably America's best known abductee because
he's written seven books about it or whatever. And I
will tell you how I got inspired by it, but
first I want to just tell everybody what exactly it is.
The book was published in nineteen eighty seven. It's called Communion,
a True Story, and it is whitt least Reeber, who
is a writer, a novelist. It's his intensely personal and

(28:17):
autobiographical account of what he says about these continuing nighttime
nightmares he's having at his isolated New York cabin and
followed by lost time and recurring flashbacks, and this sense
of his own reality is unraveling. But what people mostly
remember about it, Brent, And I'm sure this will be

(28:38):
true for many of the people hearing this is the
cover of the book is an image of what we
now believe are the Grays. And it's such a haunting,
evocative piece of art that is on the cover of
that that has stopped people in their tracks, which is
exactly what it did to me. I was in a
Barnes and Noble because right now we have the Internet

(28:59):
to do research, but back when this was coming out,
when I needed to do research on a movie I
was writing, I would go to Barnes and Noble. It
was like going to the library, but I got to
buy them and take them home. So I was in
a Barnes and Noble this is the last days of
the Reagan administration, and I see this table with a
hundred of these Communion books on it, and I pick

(29:21):
up this book. I had an armload of books I
was going to read, and I was ready.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
To go buy them.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
But I look at this thing, and I put all
of the books down that I was going to go buy,
and I marched straight up and bought it, took it
home and read it, and it freaked me out. It
just it was that iconic face come to life, and
also the sense that Streeber was authentically disturbed. But now
here's the thing that makes it such an interesting off

(29:51):
ramp in eufology. At the time the book came out,
Streeber was an established novelist, all right. He was the guy.
He was a man who was writing these wonderful books.
And some of them were made into movies. Wolf Hunger,
The Hunger. Yeah, what was the other one?

Speaker 2 (30:09):
You saw? You saw? Wolf and The Hunger were two
movies that I saw when they came out, and I
loved them. That was how that was my introduction to
Whitley Streeber was not through the book Communion, but actually
through those movies right on.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
So I had enjoyed those books, but the ones I
really got turned on by were two that he had written.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
One called war Day.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Which was the aftermath of a nuclear war, a limited
nuclear what that would be like, and it was riveting
and he and Whitley Strueber is a phenomenally talented writer.
I mean, he just knows the English language and how
to put it together. And then the other one was
Nature's End, which was sort of about the ecological collapse
of the world. But the point is they were novels,

(30:51):
so his book with that face on it says Communion
a true story, and it's supposed to be autobiographical. And
the first thing I thought was, well, maybe what he's
done is he's written the new novel, but in order
to make it feel very present and scary, he'll make

(31:11):
it his story. So that my first take was this
probably didn't really happen to him, but it's his latest novel,
so I have to read it. And I was reading
all this stuff. But after I read it, I thought,
I'm going to have to get off that position because
it sounded just too clearly lived. So I'm curious, at
what point did you read the book and what did you.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Think of it? So something you just said is, you know,
we're talking about the cover of fiction. It sounded like,
and I've heard this from other people too, that the
suspicion was that he was writing under the cover of nonfiction. Yes, right, exactly,
that he had made up another amazingly you know, interesting
story and put in a true story on the cover
to give you that kind of patina of reality. But

(31:57):
in answer to your question, I didn't read the the
book until probably ten or eleven years ago. I was
obviously well aware of it. I knew what the basic
story was, and however, I found it through Whitley Strieber's
Dreamland podcast. I started listening to that about ten years ago.
I've been an active subscriber to it since then. I

(32:19):
don't think I've missed more than maybe a handful of
episodes over the last decade. And he would often talk
about Communion, obviously, and I started to get interested in it.
I went back and read the book, and then I
watched the movie, and I will say, kind of like
you with some regrets about how Official Denial was produced,
I think Whitley has some of those same regrets about

(32:41):
how the movie of Communion turned out. Because here's the thing.
I read that book and I was blown away. It
felt very to me, very grounded emotionally, even though it's outrageous,
it felt very kind of serious, and I was along
for the ride. The movie takes a distinctly different tone,

(33:05):
largely due to Christopher Walkin's performance, but I think that
at at the end of the.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
Day, there Christopher Walkin. I mean, who doesn't love Christopher Walkin.
But the minute you put that guy on screen, say
he's your main character, and you're supposed to believe everything
he says and love him as a charming, charming person.
Not really, and he was in this improvisational mode at
which apparently you know.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
He was just he was trying to be unique and
all that. Yeah, well, look, this all takes us into
very interesting terrain. We've already come a great distance, but
we are here because the director of Communion had a
very interesting experience that all circles back to our first
episode when we had a party crasher.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
Right, well, absolutely well, First of all, the director is
a gentleman, I hope I pronounced it correctly, Philippe Mora,
and he and strieberhead met and decided that they would
make a movie out of this. Now what's interesting is
so they started collaborating and other people tried to get
the option on that book, including I think Spielberg but

(34:09):
other people as well, and they said, no, we're making
our movie. I'd bet Whitley Strieber today would say, yeah,
we should have gone with that Spielberg kid. That would
have been a good choice. But what is fascinating about
this Though we've told our story about how JC crashed
the Dark Sky's party, said he was from O and
I the office of Naval Intelligence, and they wanted to

(34:32):
talk to us about using our show to incorporate certain
ideas into it. Well, guess what happened with Felipe More.
This is from an interview from a site called Flashback Files.
He says he was followed by someone in an airport
who he kept seeing. He kept seeing this guy, but then,

(34:52):
you know, you see people several times in there where
didn't think too much about it, but he'd seen him
a couple of times. He takes his seat and the
guy sitting next to him, So I wrote down his
telling of the story. So rather than me tell his story,
I'm going to let Mara tell his story so that
we're accurate here. This is what he said in the
Flashback Files. After the film was made, I flew to

(35:14):
San Antonio to see Whitley, who was living there at
the time, and I was followed by a guy that
looked like Robert Redford in that Cia movie. He was
right behind me as I checked in. When we get
on the plane, the guy is seated right next to
me and he started chatting and he said, what are
you doing in San Antonio? I said that I was
seeing my friend Whitley. Strieber and that we had just

(35:35):
made this movie Communion, and he said that's the best
movie ever made about alien abduction. And he asked more questions.
So at one point I just asked him if he
was a journalist and he said, no, sir. He opened
his jacket and showed me a badge which said Defense
Intelligence Agency or DIA, which, by the way, i'd never
heard of, Morris says, but subsequently I've learned that it's

(35:59):
like the CIA of the Pentagon. Now and this is
Morris speaking, I have to abbreviate the conversation because this
guy and I talked during the whole flight from San
Antonio to Los Angeles. He asked me if I had
ever met any aliens. I said, no, Sarah, I haven't
met any aliens. He said, has mister Strieber met any aliens?
And I said, well, he thinks he has, but I

(36:20):
don't know. So the questioning was like that. It seemed
to me that they were really interested to know whether
it was a hoax or not. But it wasn't a hoax.
I mean, Whitley did believe it. Pretty interesting huh.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
Wow, Yeah, that's fascinating. It reminds me of our conversation
with JC right, you know that when he said you
got a lot right, he was so complimentary about what
we'd done, and it was a great entree. It was
a great way to kind of grease the wheels and
get us talking. So similar technique used by an intelligence

(36:54):
agent strikes me as possibly pre planned, not the coincidence
that it might have looked like. But be that as
it may. A couple other things that are interesting. Sticking
with Whitley for a moment and his point of view,
because he's had such a unique life. The sum total
of his experience is not in the Book of Communion.
He's written many books. He's had a lot of incredible

(37:17):
experiences since then. And when you talk about official denial
possibly being like a unified field theory of ufology, his
life is like a unified field theory of upology. And
there's just two quotes he's said that I want to
share because I think it gets to the essence of
not just Whitley, but also what we're dealing with or
what we're trying to make sense of. Here's one of them.

(37:40):
This is Whitley Streeber're talking. I wondered if I might
not be in the grip of demons. He's talking about
when he was abducted by the Grays, if they were
not making me suffer for their own purposes or simply
for their enjoyment. Now there's a degree of sadistic alien there.
But I think the more interesting thing is him deflecting

(38:01):
not to aliens but to demons. Right. This is an
ongoing idea of are they aliens or angels, right, and
or demons? So he was really early on. I think
he was on the vanguard of having that concept. Secondarily,
here's the other quote. Very quietly, he said, hidden away

(38:23):
from the scorn and disbelief of the people who cling
to the old, dying reality, a new one is being born. Now.
I personally believe that, and I think that that's another
reason that I tend to believe what happened to him
in that book, and that he reflected it as accurately
as he can remember. And that's the fact that he

(38:45):
was very vulnerable. That story produced a lot of what
he says, you know, scorn and disbelief. Right, he wasn't
applauded for coming out and talking about the rectal probe
and other things that happen and the kind of the
nervous breakdown, if you will, that he was having and
how that impacted his life. Those things are really hard

(39:05):
to talk about. And again, as an experiencer, I can
identify with that idea of you tell somebody or you
share with someone your most kind of intimate stories, and
instead of getting compassion or even belief, you're often ostracized,
and it's really hard to deal with that. So for
all of those reasons, and for the fact that I

(39:26):
have listened to him for ten years, I tend to
believe that he experienced something very close to what he
laid out. What he has chosen to interpret that as
later in his life, that's open to discussion, but I
think that I hear the details, I hear the emotion
in his voice when he talks about it, and that
all rings very true to me. So that's my take

(39:47):
on it. Bryce what's your take?

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Well, listen, I'm not an experiencer, so I can't say, well,
that was exactly like my experience, So I have to
believe him. But I have thought a long time about this.
I was, as you know, friends with Stanton Freedman. I
asked Stanton Friedman once, Hey, Stam, what do you think
about Whitley Streeber. Do you think he's telling the truth? Stanton,
who had an opinion about everything, looked at me for

(40:10):
like thirty to forty seconds silently. You could just he
was thinking through his answer, and he said, well, I
think something happened to him, but I don't know if
the whole story is true. That was his analysis. So
I've been thinking about that for a while. That was
not an impression of Stanton Friedman, by the way. That
was just for drama anyway. So I've gotten to know

(40:33):
Whitley a little bit. I've worked on projects with him,
and I've met him at conferences, and I even had
Whitley and his wife Anne come to our house for
one of these projects and we had lunch, he and
Jackie and Anne and myself. And I will say this
on the experiencer aspect, let's remember the impact his late wife,

(40:55):
Ann Streeber had. After Communion was published. They started getting letters,
and not just a few, like a quarter of a
million letters, If I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
I think by now it's over half a million.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Okay, and read them all and they even published a
book about it. But she read all of them and
they were all, you know, I saw your book and
that image just made me. I had to buy it
because it's made me believe something. And then they read
the book and they go Your experience is so similar
to mine, So you kind of have to ask yourself
first of all, are all these people crazy? Are they

(41:31):
all hoaxers? Are they all whatever? And the answer is no,
they're not. So if you ask me what do I
think about Whitley Streeber and whether he's telling the truth?

Speaker 2 (41:40):
I do.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
I think Whitley Streeber is an honest man with some
pain in this experience.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
I know.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
It's also it cost him money and career too, because
instead of churning out a novel every year, he was
turning out alien books, and some of them did better
than others, as you might imagine. But I think his
passion and his attention to details speak very strongly to
the fact that one.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Of these happened to him. One of the most discussed
reasons for using cover of fiction regarding the UAP phenomenon
is what's called ontological shock. For those of you that
don't know what that means, it's basically a feeling of

(42:29):
profound disorientation when you come to realize that what you
believe to be reality is no longer true. Now there's
a feeling amongst some of the people at the very
highest level, those who know the truth about the UAP phenomenon,
that humanity is not ready for that truth. And if

(42:49):
you think about it, that's a very convenient way of
spinning the secret keepers as noble that they are somehow
trying to protect us from this awful truth. Put this
in full context. When we created Dark Skies, our main
character was someone named John Loengarde. He had the opposite
view of these secret keepers who are protecting us from

(43:12):
the truth. In fact, he had a fundamental belief that
people have a right to know the truth, regardless of
how shocking it is, which is why in our story
he joins the secret keeping agency Majestic twelve. His goal
was he wanted to learn the truth, and ultimately, when
he did find out the truth, he decided to get
it to his hero JFK, so that JFK could tell

(43:32):
the world. But unfortunately, in our world, JFK was assassinated,
so full disclosure. When we started Dark Skys, the idea
of using cover of fiction for a noble purpose was
not exactly what we had in mind. We actually had
a different agenda something we're going to walk you through now.
But the interesting thing about it is by doing this,

(43:54):
by using the cover of fiction, it created something called
the boomerang effect and came back to us in a
way that we could never have imagined.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
Boy, it sure did, and it's an interesting story. I
just want to pick up on a couple of things first.
Whenever we start to talk about Dark Skys, I feel like, look,
it was a long time ago. People need to know
what we're talking about. It is a NBC television series,
a one hour drama, an alien invasion story set in
the nineteen sixties, and Brent, you and I created that

(44:23):
for the network and it was a big deal when
it was on the air for NBC. So anyway, that's
what it was. And one of the things that was
so great about it. You mentioned that the people have
a right to know. That's what John Loannguard believed.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
But what was so.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
Great about the series is it became kind of a
conversation about disclosure, disclosure of UFO reality and whether we
should or should not get involved with that ontological shock
and the way I always explain it to people. Is
we had two major characters. John Loanguard said the people
have a right to know, which is sort of the
journalistic point of view and the pro public point of view.

(45:01):
And the head of Majestic twelve, who was Frank Back,
always had the point of view of Jack Nicholson. You
can't handle the truth right, And what we loved about
it is that they both were right. That's what made
it such a fair fight. Yeah, that Mark could make
a real argument that if we let this out right now,
people are going to freak out and the world as

(45:24):
we know it is going to fall apart, and we
got to keep ourselves together because there's aliens on Earth
and we can't let that continue. And Loan Guard is
right because if you're going to fight something that is
ontologically shocking, you better know what it is. So there
you go. Okay, so let's talk about John Loannguard.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
I feel like.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
That's the kind of wave that we can get into
what you were talking about and make it clear how
Cover of Fiction not only happened but came back and
bid us pretty strongly at that party that we've talked
about several times here. So okay, here's how John Loannguard,
the main character of Dark Skies, came to be. And

(46:04):
it's not a simple story. It starts in nineteen ninety
one when I was pitching a series called Sightings. And
this is not the Sightings that people remember, the one
that was a reality show that got on.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
I think Fox. This is before that.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
And I was pitching a UFO hour drama called Sightings
and I had a main character named John Lowengarde. That's
about the main comparison to our Dark Skies. And that's
a series got pitched at all four networks and all
four turned it down.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
So there you go. That didn't happen. That happens, Yeah
it does.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
And in fact, just a sidebar, I once pitched a
show with the Morgan Freeman. It was called Harley and
Davidson Attorneys at Law, and it was about two motorcycle
guys that were driving around the country. Freeman was in
love with this idea. They were driving around the country
and they were doing law and stuff like that, which
I don't even know if it's reasonable to do that,
because I think you have to have a law of

(46:57):
license and whatever state you're in.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
And they were driving around.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
But Morgan Freeman went, God bless him to every single network.
He sat in the office, he told the story with me.
We sat on the same couch, and it was a
thrill for me because you know who doesn't love Morgan Freeman.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
And yet, what do you think happened? Let me guess
no one bought it.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
No one bought it, Otherwise I'd be the guy that
created the Morgan Freeman show. Did not happen, because sometimes
networks go, well, that's just it was lovely meeting you, Morgan,
but whatever. So it does happen where you know, pretty
good ideas just are the right idea or the wrong
idea at the right time or whatever. Anyway, flash forward
a couple of years. I'm working at Lois and Clark

(47:41):
and I'm coming off Official Denial, my sci fi channel
film that you and I have talked about in this
episode and other episodes. And I get a phone call
in my office at Lewis and Clark and it's some
guy who says he's seen Official Denial and he has notes.
If that sounds familiar, yes, it is familiar. There was
a guy calling me saying he's got notes on my thing.

(48:03):
But you know that happens from time to time. They're
not all like our JC saying I'm from the Office
of Naval Intelligence and I have notes. This guy was
just a guy calling in from the road. Yes, he
said that he had worked for Majestic twelve, but that's
pretty easy to say on a phone call. And I
said to the guy, Brent, I go, so what's your name?

(48:24):
I thought that would be an easy question, a good
way to start, and this guy goes, well, it doesn't
work that way. Oh really, give me a name, And
I was like, well, that's interesting. So my brain just
goes to that failed sightings pitch and I go, well, okay,
you're John Loanguard. So that guy became John Loanguard and
a couple of phone calls I had with him, So

(48:46):
that's where you come in. Now, about a year or
so after that, you and I are having our now
infamous lunch at the Caudasoul Italian restaurant in Universal City,
and you tell me about Harrington.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
John Harrington. Right, So now we've got two John's, two Johns.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
So when you and I decide that we're going to
create a show, John seems like a good name, but
we can't call him John Harrington.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Right, because you have had that story. We want to
work under the cover of fiction. So John Harrington has
disclosed certain things that we are going to work into
our series, and you had a phone call with somebody
who had some thoughts that might have worked from Justic twelve.
We create John Lowngard as our composite character to carry
the torch into our series and be the truth.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
You and I liked that name very much because even
though its spelled l oe n g A r D
loan Guard, we liked it because it was subliminal for
loan guard, basically the guy standing at the gates.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yes, right, what's funny is on a side note mention
that to several people, and there really like I didn't
get that. So it was so subliminal that it went
right over everyone's head. And of course we thought this
was a completely made up original name. And as another.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Sidebar to the John Loengard story, while Darkskuys is in
production and is deep into production and it's like halfway
through the season, we get a phone call from a
Life magazine photographer named John Lohngard John Longard, and he's saying,
why are you using my name? And we're like, wait,

(50:26):
who are you? I'm John Lowngard and it's spelled Loe
n Gard, something that I thought I made up in
nineteen ninety one. So okay, So that's the backdrop for this.
This brings us to the letter the real cover of fiction,
the real cover of fiction. So you and I are
creating this show and we get this idea that we

(50:47):
should tell the story under the cover of fiction. That's
a lovely little embrace of our idea because we want
to use it in this briefing book that we're coming
up with, where it's basically going to be telling whoever
we're pitching the show, Hey, we need you to put
this television series on the airwaves. It's the true story

(51:12):
of what's really going on with UFOs. It's a true
story about the nineteen sixties and Majestic twelve. But we're
all going to wink pretend it's a TV series.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Do I have that right? You do? And the other
nuance to this was also there was a degree of
self preservation on my part in embracing this idea of
cover of fiction and going with the name John lowengardis
because I did not want to use the name of
John Harrington. I wanted to take some of the things
that he told us and defintely integrate them into the show,

(51:45):
but at the same time distance ourselves and say, no,
this is a fictional series. And yet we also wanted
to have it both ways. We wanted to be able
to tell the NBC and Sony executives that, well, wait
a minute, there's some actual truth here, and we're telling
this under the cover of fiction because our composite character,
John Lownguard disclosed some things to us, so that I

(52:08):
think the net effect of that was it made it
more enticing.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Here's where things get twisted and weird. Yes, and yes
we know it's odd, and yes we know it's confusing,
but so be it.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
It happened.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
So while we're planning these notebooks and we're building them,
I mean, we're going to as you pointed out a
few episodes back, we're going to the Kinkos and making
all these color copies of things and making this super
secret notebook. But we thought, you know, it just misses something.
What is it that it could have that would give

(52:42):
it that marketing twist? And ladies and gentlemen, for those
of you who are watching this is a copy of
the Loan Guard letter. For those of you not watching,
I'm holding up a short little letter that is signed
by a guy named John Lowngard, and I'm going to.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Read it to you now.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
And of course, Brent, it's a little over the top,
but that was kind of the point at the time.
It's dated January two, nineteen ninety five, so this is
almost a year before we actually shot the pilot, the
two hour Pilot, And it says, Bryce and Brent, the
truth must be told. You have been chosen as instruments

(53:19):
to achieve this objective. The truth, however, must not be
represented as truth. Too many people who are needed in
the struggle will die. The cover of fiction must be
used to present this truth. Those who fear the light
will not want to bring attention to you by allowing
your death. This is the only way. Do not be
afraid the fight for humanity. Demand your courage. John Wohnguard,

(53:43):
We were so brave, Bryce, We were so brave anyway.
So that was the conceit, and we stuck with it
and people enjoyed it. And just so everyone understands, that letter,
a copy of that letter was the very first thing
in the briefing book that we took it ABC, NBC,
and CBS on that faithful day, and it literally told

(54:05):
people that there was a John Longuard who had contacted
you and me and asked us to take a deal,
if you will, to infuse some of the real ideas
he had into our TV series so that the truth
could come out. And I think what's strange about that,
of course, is boy did it work. It came back

(54:28):
on us. As you said, we call it, folks, the
boomerang effect.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
Yeah. Well, and here's the thing is that we created
this as a marketing ploy, and when jac approached us,
what he said to us was, we want to give
you some information so that you can use the cover
of fiction to disseminate it to the public in this
slow drip fashion. So it is spinning, keep going. If

(54:54):
you think about that, it's mind boggling because we put
out this idea of a person coming to us telling
us to use the cover of fiction, and then lo
and behold at the premiere party, he walked out of
your bushes and came and said just that. Now, if
you think about it, either A it's just a coincidence,

(55:15):
or B. He did say he had read not just
our pilot script, but our entire bible, so he could
have been kind of ironically referencing the cover of Fiction
letter that we used, although there was no indication of that.
He didn't put up air quotes around cover of Fiction
or he wasn't winking at us at the time. And
the last possibility is that again this whole concept of

(55:40):
putting something out into the consciousness and somehow the boomerang
effect brings it back to you in the real world.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
It's just crazy. Now I have a couple of things
I want to sort of throw on that fire, couple
of logs to throw on the late Robbie Graham wrote
a terrific book about Hollywood and UFOs. It was called
Silver Screen Sauce and it's still available now, and he
wrote extensively about what happened to us at Dark Skies
in his book, and one of the things he said

(56:08):
that feels so relevant right now is he said, no
Hollywood product has so actively sought to blur the boundaries
between UFO fact and fantasy as the NBCTV show Dark Skies.
So when that happened, we weren't thinking that JC was
going to come out of the bushes at a Hollywood
premiere party. We were just trying to blur fact and

(56:28):
fiction into the sales and marketing of the TV series.
He goes on to write The Dark Sky's Bible and
the loan Guard letter in particular, exemplified the now complete
inseparability and symbiosis of the euphological fact and Hollywood fantasy,
which is a nice way to say what we were doing.
Loan guards statement to his creators that they had been

(56:50):
chosen as instruments to tell the truth about UFOs under
the cover of fiction would later ring disturbingly true for
Zabel and Freedman. So yeah, yeah, that happened.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
And.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
To this day, honestly, Brent, I'm glad we're doing this
thing because at least we have the time to explain it.
When I've been at like a dinner party or whatever,
and I even attempted to try to explain this, it
made no sense and I just dropped it. So with
the extra time we have, you can lay it out.
I think we really did intend to put a lot
of true things into the TV series. That's true. Our

(57:27):
whole concept was, let's tell a story in the sixties
where all the things in the sixties, and all the
people in the sixties are part of our story. So
we have all these wonderful characters in it. You know,
everyone from well, you know, John Lennon is in it,
Carl Sagan, Betty and Barney Hill are in it, Jay Allen, Heinek,

(57:47):
Jim Morrison, you name it. I mean, they're all in
this thing. So what we were trying to do was
blend fact and fiction under the guise of a drama.
But our bigger point was, folks, these UFO events actually
did happen, and we were just sort of filling in
the blanks around them. Yeah, little did we know that
we would be sucked into it.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
Well, and you referenced Robbie Graham. He also had another
interesting quote about dark skies that'll take us to the
home stretch of our episode.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Well, okay, so I hope that listen. I'm sure people
will be leaving quote comments with question marks across them,
saying what but that's what happened and we can revisit
that again. But here's how Robbie Graham ended his discussion
of our show. He says the show was dark in name,
dark in themes, and dark in visual content, with violent

(58:41):
and intense scenes in most episodes, So Brent, not only
was it called Dark Skies, according to Robbie, we were
dark and that reminds me of something.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Yes, well, now we're back right where we started from
with the show dark and the whole concept of this
truth that everyone keeps saying at the highest levels needs
to only be dispensed under the cover of fiction, must
be incredibly dark. Well, let's step out of the fictional
world and go to some actual kind of whistleblowers, if

(59:13):
you will, talking about what they feel the truth. Is
the first one I'm going to cite is Luel Azando,
who was a recent whistleblower, wrote the book Imminent was
part of the if I believe we're correctly military defense
analyst or what was this exact ty.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
He ran and again he ran a TIP, which is
the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program right right, although people
argue to this day about whether he really ran AWSAP,
and I get so confused. I'm not even going to
wade into those waters.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Yes, I know, it's tomatoes, tomatoes, So anyway, luel Azondo
did an interview with Ji Mungle on his Theories of
Everything show where Kurt asked if the general public knew
or saw what you saw, what would the next week
look like? How would the public react. Elisondo's response was somber.

(01:00:08):
I think there would be this big exhale for about
a day and then this turning inward and trying to
reflect on what this means to us and our species
and ourselves. That's pretty dark, just dark. You know, he's
choosing his words carefully.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
That's a great quote. And he goes on and says
in other interviews, multiple times he asked questions about, well,
maybe the truth is we're not the apex species, the
apex predator. We think we are here on planet Earth. Well,
that's disturbing. I would call it dark, but it certainly
throws into question how we might feel about our tendency

(01:00:47):
here on this planet.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Well exactly. And so then you, you know, you have
to ask the question, are people at the top in
the know correct in saying that this truth cannot just
come out on var furnished, that it needs to come
out slowly under the cover of fiction. And as much
as everyone in the UFO community gets frustrated by that

(01:01:09):
that inability to have full disclosure, maybe there is something
to be said for protecting us from ontological shock.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Well, so I mean, clearly, Brent, just if our own
show is any example of this has been going on
since the fifties. There have been alien movies well, and
long before that there were alien serials and alien books
and alien this and that. Aliens have been around for
a while. So if the idea was to avoid ontological
shock by showing people alien movies and stuff, well, then

(01:01:42):
mission is accomplished in my view at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
I mean we've been doing that. Yeah. Anyway, I know
this episode has gotten dark as well, and I feel
like now we owe it to the viewers and the
listeners to try and bring things back up a little bit.
I have a way to lighten them bright and the
show for an ending. Maybe it's a personal story, and
I think it's relevant and maybe nice. I've made it

(01:02:07):
clear that I got elected to be the CEO of
the Television Academy right before nine to eleven. So my
first job was to cancel the Emmys, and we set
them up for October seventh, and then we invaded Afghanistan
that day, so we canceled the Emmys a second time.
And if you want to have a dark time, in
America that was a dark time, and in Hollywood in particular,

(01:02:29):
there were a lot of people who were questioning, as
was I, you know, what is the relevance of an
award show in a time of national tragedy. Maybe we
should just forget about them and move on. So that
was hanging over us, and there were a lot of
celebrities and producers and all that that question whether we
should even keep rescheduling the Emmys. In the midst of that,

(01:02:49):
while that discussion is ongoing, we had an event that
had been previously scheduled, which was an event to honor
Gregory Peck, and it was in the Academy Theater and
Gregory Peck was getting up in years, he didn't live
much longer than this, and he was waiting for the
event to happen, and I was there getting ready. I
was going to introduce him from the stage, so I thought, well,

(01:03:12):
I'd better go up and say hello. So I go
up to Gregory Peck and say, mister Peck, I'm Bryce Able,
I'm going to introduce you tonight. How you doing, Can
I get you anything? You know that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
And he was very pleasant, very nice, and we had
a nice conversation, including the fact that he actually the
head of the Motion Picture Academy when Martin Luther King
was assassinated, and wow, I believe they postponed, but they
still did them and he gave a memorable tribute to

(01:03:41):
Martin Luther King. So with that kind of in my mind,
I thought, I'll ask him about it, and we talked
about it, and I said, you know, mister Pack, a
lot of people, a lot of celebrities who have to
be on the red carpet are trying to figure out, well,
how should I handle this? What is the right way
to be on a red carpet during this time? And

(01:04:04):
I got to tell you, it's such a great moment.
It's seared in my memory. The guy did not miss
a beat, you know, he's up in years, didn't take
a second to think about it. He looks at me
and he goes, well, I would be sober, but not somber,
with a twinkle in my eye to assure the people
that everything is going to be okay. And wow, there's

(01:04:27):
your word, somber. He said, I would be sober, but
not somber. And there is a difference.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
There is a difference, and those are words of wisdom,
and I would expect nothing less from someone like Gregory Peck.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
So maybe as we walk our way through this over
these next episodes and talk about the debate about disclosure
and what's going on right now and how it should
all be handled, I'll just say it again, I would
be sober, but not somber, with a twinkle in my
eye to assure the people that everything is going to
be okay. Sound, Light, and Frequency is an iHeart podcast

(01:05:09):
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 Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthauser and Your hosts and
executive producers are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the Skies