April 16, 2026 • 45 mins
In “Majic Kingdom,” Bryce and Brent ask an uncomfortably fun question: why does Disney keep showing up in the UFO story? Bryce starts with the modern reality—Disney isn’t a historical footnote, it’s the current epicenter of alien storytelling, “industrializing” non-human intelligence across Disney+ through Marvel, Star Wars, and the Fox-era franchises in its orbit. From there, they rewind to 1953’s CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel and its blunt talk about “training” and “debunking,” including the suggestion to use television and motion pictures and explicitly naming Disney as a partner. The episode then dives into the “two 1995 whoppers”: the wildly pro-UFO Tomorrowland lobby film Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland (with lines that sound like a government briefing) and a two-week Disney UFO conference that flew in major speakers… yet apparently drew an audience of only about a dozen because Disney didn’t promote it at all, raising the question: what was it really for?
Then Bryce opens a personal Hollywood door: his mentor Bill Asher—TV comedy legend who unexpectedly directed the 1957 Cold War saucer morality play The 27th Day, built around abductees from rival nations handed world-ending capsules and forced into an “if they push first, do we?” dilemma. Asher’s Rat Pack proximity becomes more than name-dropping when Bryce recounts Bill’s firsthand JFK/Marilyn Monroe story: a July 1960 party at Peter Lawford’splace, JFK and Marilyn disappearing to the pool house for hours, returning with Marilyn wearing JFK’s shirt, and later JFK—drunk—stopping traffic on PCH shouting he’s going to be President, with Bill dispatched to haul him back inside before it hit the papers. Layered on top is the UFO whisper: Bill’s account of Sammy Davis Jr. describing “small silver discs” that hovered, darted, and then—Bill’s word—“poof!” vanished.
Finally, the episode lands on one of the strangest broadcast moments in UFO history: Major Donald Keyhoe on CBS’s Armstrong Circle Theatre in 1958, starting to “disclose” something never disclosed—only to have his mic cut while the camera stayed on him, leaving America watching his lips move in silence. Bryce reads what Keyhoe later said he’d been about to reveal—claims of working with a congressional committee on official secrecy and that open hearings would prove UFOs are “real… under intelligent control”—and then shares CBS’s chilling justification: the program had been “carefully cleared for security reasons,” and the network had to enforce “predetermined security standards.” It’s a perfect capstone for an episode about Disney, narrative power, and the eternal question: when it comes to UFOs, who gets to tell the story—and who gets to turn the sound off?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I read somewhere that I think it was Sammy Davis
Junior who had a UFO experience. He did Bill were
talking with Bill about that?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Or yeah he did, because we were talking about the
twenty seventh Day and he goes, yeah, well, you know,
Sammy saw one, and I was like, what tell me
about it? And that image of Sammy Davis Junior seeing
a UFO is really quite amusing. He told Bill about it,
but he told many other people. He said he had
seen a group of small silver discs, and this was
the early fifties, not a single light, but multiple lights,
(00:30):
multiple objects, and he described them as hovering and darting
and doing things that aircraft don't do. And then this
is the word that Bill used, and then poof, they
were gone. But that sounds pretty familiar to a lot
of the testimony we get these days. I'm Brice Sable.
(01:04):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
And I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
In this episode, we'll be taking a visit to the
Magic Kingdom and finding flying saucers.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
And we're going to tell you a story about the
American TV network that cut the mic on a live
broadcast about UFO investigations.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So anyway, last week, I'm taking a peloton class with
Cody Rigsby, and now the guy is usually entertaining enough
to get me through forty five minutes on a stationary bike,
but I kind of realize I'm not listening to a
word the man is saying because my mind's already locked
in on this episode we're doing. But I couldn't get
out of my head was this Disney and UFOs last
episode we got up to nineteen fifty three when the
(01:57):
CIA's Robertson panel actually recommended the UFO subject be made less,
i don't know, respectable, and they even floated the idea
of recruiting mass media, specifically including Disney, to help do it.
And that was seventy three years ago. But here's the
thing that hit me while I was peddling away. Disney
isn't just a historical footnote. Disney is the current epicenter
(02:20):
of this because today Disney doesn't merely touch alien life,
they industrialize it. Besides Disney branded content, they also own Marvel,
where the cosmos is packed with non human intelligences. They
own Star Wars with a canteena full of aliens in
every era, and with the Fox Library folded in, They've
got Avatar, they've got Alien Planet of the Apes and
(02:43):
X Files. That's a lot of franchises in the broader orbits.
So Brent, maybe it was just a case of surging
and dorphins. I don't know, but I've never really looked
at it this way. But if you go to your
Disney Plus app, you're going to find a lot of
options that deal with non human intelligence. What do you
think we should make of that?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Well, I think there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that
says that's not a coincidence, and there's even more actual,
hard evidence that says there was conversations and possibly some
type of deal made between the Robertson panel and Disney
way back when. And you could say, well, that was then,
(03:22):
this is now. The obviously Walt Disney is no longer around,
so whatever deal was made back in the fifties, but institutionally,
I think there's a reason to believe that maybe whatever
was agreed upon is still in force. It's fascinating because
as we've done the research for this episode, you keep
(03:43):
turning up things post Robertson panel, and just to rewind
to the Robertson panel, and remember the CIA sponsored it.
It's nineteen fifty three, and they start talking in their
four day I guess get together about an educational program
which is going to have two aims training and they
act actually use the word debunking. I think it's the
first time debunking has really shown up. And they say
(04:05):
we should use television and motion pictures and they list
potential partners and it specifically lists Disney Walt Disney Inc.
Animated Cartoons, O thing. It mentions his Jam Handy Company,
and I didn't even know what that was, but they
were famous for World War II training films. So the
(04:26):
Robertson panel, you know, it was kind of looking back
on World War Two, but also looking ahead to Disney.
Remember Disneyland doesn't open for two more years, so Disney
at this point is just a content provider. So what
happened is in the aftermath of the panel, there's a
guy at Disney top animator Ward Kimball, and he starts
(04:48):
talking or other. They try to put together a documentary
that'll be mentioning the whole UFO area. And we don't
hear about this till nineteen seventy nine. Stanton Friedman actually
heard and testified that Ward Kimbolt started talking about this
and at the time he was saying that Disney was
(05:08):
going to get real UFO footage from the government. And
what happened to that? Can you even imagine? I can't.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
And they didn't get it. That's all you need to imagine.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
No footage, Yeah, because I feel like if they had
gotten footage, we might be in a completely different place
at this point in time. But I think step back
for a second and consider what was the motivation of
the Robertson panel to talk to Disney if it was
not to either a start a disclosure program, right to
(05:40):
soften up the general public, or some type of disinformation meaning, Hey,
wait a minute, this whole UFO flying saucer story is
getting out of our control. Let's take back control by
changing the narrative. And let's do that with agreements from
the people who are making stories that are shaping people's minds.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, just for clarity on that whole thing, Kimball, Ward
Kimball said he was approached by people who were tied
into Douglas aircraft kind of interesting and you'll love this
one the Office of Naval Research. So there's then they
made again reaching out to say, hey, we need to
control this narrative, and they were going to have him
do a UFO picture. Now, admittedly that one didn't come
(06:29):
together in the way that they wanted to do it.
They wanted to end with actual footage. They didn't get it,
but they did have a Disney Tomorrowland series on I
think one of the mini documentaries they did that had
this great animation that Kimball had done. Also ended with
a bunch of flying saucers at the end, so they
were in the mode. But they were dismissive of that.
(06:52):
But I got to tell you it may be harder
for us to get into what they did or did
not do in the fifties. But man, in the nineties,
there are two whopper events that kind of blow your mind. Right.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
So we've got the Disney UFO conference in nineteen ninety five,
and then we've got the Alien Encounters experience in the
New Tomorrowland, also from nineteen ninety five. And interestingly, as
we said, by this point, Walt Disney rest his soul
had passed away and there was a completely new chairman
of Disney, Michael Eisner, who will come back to in
(07:26):
a moment in terms of how he may play a
part in all of this arrangement.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
We'll do the conference. Last, Let's do what was called
Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland. This is nineteen ninety five, folks,
and this was a documentary that was commissioned by Disney
on the idea that they were opening up a new
ride in Orlando. And it was called The Extra terror
Restrial Alien Encounter Terror spelled ter in all caps, okay,
(07:55):
And it's a forty minute runtime and as I understand it,
just so you know, this wasn't documentary that was going
to be put out over the airwaves or anything. It
was for the ride. And yet I got to tell
you I got a couple of quotes from Brent. This
is mind blowing because, Okay, Robert Urich, who maybe not
everybody knows today, but he was a big deal back then,
(08:16):
and he is the host of it, and he says
in this documentary that would again meet all the people
as they got in line to go see this new ride,
and beyond it, Robert Eurex says, I guess this is
what they would play, why they were holding.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
People before they went on exactly at it.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
So here's what Urik says. He says quote. For nearly
fifty years, officials have been documenting routine alien encounters here
on Earth. More than one alien craft crashed and was
recovered for secret US military research. The most famous case
took place in July of nineteen forty seven, just outside
the community of Roswell, New Mexico. Indications are the government,
(08:55):
military and scientific leaders will soon release nearly a half
century of official documentation of ongoing alien encounters on Earth. Okay,
admittedly it's the Gin people up for the ride, but
that's pretty dramatic stuff and it kind of fits in
with what we think today.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And who approved that text that feels like they're reading
a news briefing, Well, I think Eisner approved it.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
And the reason I say that is I got one
more great quote for you. Eisner insisted on doing the
intro to this thing. Okay, so before this quote that
I just read you from Robert Urich, this is what
Michael Eisner, who is running Disney, has to say. He
says this quote and.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Wait, let me just give you some context for everything. Okay,
in the nineties, Disney was arguably the most powerful and
successful movie studio. So this is the chairman or the
CEO president of Disney, the person running the show at Disney,
the most powerful person in Hollywood. Now go ahead, Okay, Well,
we'd also know Eisner had a bit of an ego.
(09:59):
I mean he liked to on camera and be interviewed
and things like that. That's not a knock on him
as a human being, but it might explain what he said, Hey,
I'd like to do the intro because he figured millions
of people every year were going to be getting on
this thing. It's what he said, though.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Because he participated in this, and clearly nobody asked to
say anything they don't want to say. I mean, if
you put dialogue in front of an actor, they don't
have to say it unless they want to. This is
what Eisener said. Quote at a military installation somewhere in
the United States. There are those who believe that the
government is hiding the remains of an alien spacecraft that
(10:32):
mysteriously crashed to Earth. With more and more scientific evidence
of alien encounters and UFO sidings, the idea of creatures
from another planet be as far fetched as we once thought.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Wow, yeah, that's pretty staggering. And I think so, now,
let's examine what this ride, this experience actually was. It was,
by all accounts, not Disney at all. It was, as
you mentioned, it was a terror, an extra terrestrial experience
that many parents felt was way too intense for kids.
(11:08):
It was all about trying to transport to the leader
of some alien race down to Earth. Something goes wrong
and a terrible monster comes. An alien monster comes in
to the theater and starts wreaking havoc, and people are
experiencing it behind them, They're feeling it breathing down their necks,
and kids were crying. So again, if we think about
(11:30):
the possibility that there was some direction to embrace alien
storytelling back in the fifties, this was the end result
of it, all those years later, something that felt very
real and very terrifying for the audience done at Disney,
which feels just complete counter programming to everything else that
(11:51):
they had there at the park.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And let's remember this is forty two years later after
the Robertson panel. So I don't know what that means,
because it could easily mean that they if they were
doing it then they'd been doing it all along, But
we don't have a lot of cases about that. Or
it could be nobody really did what that Robertson panel
wanted because they wanted it. They just did it because
they thought aliens were good box office or something. I suppose.
(12:16):
But it is kind of fishy about that because that
documentary only mentions the ride for five minutes at the end,
So it's thirty five minutes of UFO stuff and five
minutes about the ride. Kind of interesting, but maybe they
were hiding the monster anyway. It only aired in a
handful of US cities because they did air it at
random times on a few selected dates in February March
(12:39):
of ninety five, and it had no advanced notice. Okay,
so if you think about it, who does that? Right?
Who does that? And I believe it's the director of it?
He said quote an incredibly odd marketing strategy, considering its
purpose was to promote a major theme park ride for families.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, I mean their approach was let's bury the film
right essentially, But well, then why did they make it
in the first place?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right? Like?
Speaker 1 (13:04):
It raises a lot of questions.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
It sure does. But we've got another example though of
where Disney has done something absolutely insane or at least unexplainable.
And that's right after this or right around the time
of this. Also in nineteen ninety five, they decide to
have a UFO conference in Orlando. It's January of ninety five,
and this was a two week long conference. Now, you've
(13:30):
been to conferences for UFOs. I've been to them too.
They're usually three or four days at best, and there
are people that speak, but there's usually a whole lot
of people there to listen to them, right, That's how
it goes down. Not this time. They had a huge
lineup of people that they brought in there, and a
guy named I believe Don Ecker was the organizer. He
(13:50):
had been asked by Disney to do it. Ecker was
very involved in the UFO topic. They brought in guys
like Bud Hopkins, George Knapp, Don Schmidt, than Randall Sitchen.
They brought in, Okay, two weeks, all these folks there.
There's basically two conferences. Week one conference, week two conference.
They did not advertise it, right, there was no advertising. Now,
(14:12):
I don't know of any conference that I've ever been
to that didn't say and by the way, send me
your bio and send me your URLs because we got
a promo the hell out of this, because we won't
make any money, all right. So Disney spent a ton
of money because they had to provide airfare, room and
board and meals for all these people for two weeks,
all right, according to Ecker, And this just blows my mind.
(14:36):
But Disney never gave it an ounce of promotion, and
at best, the number of people in the audience was
never more than ten or twelve people. Wow, it's kind
of crazy. And the only thing I'm not even sure
I'm gonna let you take a crack at that. What
would explain that in your view?
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Either A, they had an intention that then somebody forced
their hand and said kill that thing, and it was
too late, so they kept it alive, but they did
not support it in any way, which is one viable explanation.
The other explanation is they were actually trying to make
these people that were very interested in the topic feel stupid, right.
(15:18):
They were trying to send a very subtle message that
you're going to come all the way here for this
big conference and nothing's going to happen because there is
nothing about the UFO phenomenon, I'm worth talking about.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
That's a fascinating and good guess. By the way, the
laid author Robbie Graham, who wrote the really terrific book
Silver Screen Saucers, when he was talking about this incident,
he also was kind of a guest that like, well,
I don't what would truly explain this. All he could
do was speculate, which is what we're doing here. But
he thought it might be an orchestrated chance for intelligence
(15:49):
agencies to assemble the leading UFO figures under one roof,
because this is pre internet right, yes, to take the
current pulse of the field. And there is a certain
validity in that guess, I think, because obviously, if you
want to take a pulse of the field right now,
just go on x go on Reddit. The field not
only can have its pulse taken, it's demanding to have
(16:12):
its pulse taken right So you didn't need to you
don't need to do that today. So I guess I
could understand that it would be one way to find
out what they're thinking or hear their best shot. But
several people went home early. They were just like, what
is going on here? And so we have two instances.
Then okay, Disney puts the documentary out but does nothing
(16:33):
to promote it at all. Then Disney right near the
same time holds a two week conference of UFO people
and doesn't tell anybody about it.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, it's mind boggling. And obviously there's many different ways
to interpret it, as we've just discussed, and I think
at this point it's probably a good moment to step
back open the aperture a little bit and say, it
wasn't just Disney that was doing interesting things in the
wake of the Robertson panel. The wider view of Hollywood
at that time was that they were making some pretty
(17:06):
crazy UFO alien movies, a lot of them. I mean
was that was a real kind of golden era for
alien and UFO movies. But you know, when I look
at them, when I look at all these titles and
I look at what they were about, because I haven't
seen a lot of them, there is no real commonalities
in the narrative messaging. So it wasn't like there was
(17:26):
a mandate given and everyone just adopted it. And the
stories are the storylines are really all over the place.
But what you really get is that UFOs and aliens
are being used more as a metaphor for other fears
at the times, So you've got movies that are really
representing nuclear fears, like Killers from Space in nineteen fifty four,
which is a low budget sci fi film about a
(17:48):
scientist who survives a mysterious plane crash only to discover
aliens have resurrected him to steal atomic secrets for an
Earth invasion using giant insects and reptiles grown with the
radiation absorbed from our own atomic bomb tests. Right, it's
just a huge cautionary tale. But then there was the
communism fear as we were feeling at that time with
(18:10):
the Red Scare invasion of the Body Snatchers in nineteen
fifty six about the extraterrestrial invasion where the alien spores
from space grow into large seed pods, each one capable
of producing a visually identical copy of a human. And
these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. A
local doctor uncovers this quiet invasion and attempts to stop it.
(18:34):
This is of course, where the term pod people comes
from in pop culture to refer to these emotionless humans.
But then you also Again, it gets even crazier when
you look at some of the other movies that were
coming out at that time. Nineteen fifty six, Planeted of
the Vampires, which is basically zombies in space. It conquered
the world. This is great. It concerns a bat winged
(18:58):
triangular alien named Ballulah or Beulah from the planet Venus
that uses a mind controlling device to turn people into
a motionless slaves so it can take control of the Earth.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
That sounds like a documentary. Now. You know what's interesting though, people,
First of all, the whole idea of Venus, which we
know basically next to Hell is one of the hottest
places around then probably doesn't support much life. And it
is interesting that even in the fifties into the sixties,
when the contact e movement was going on, that's where
people like Georgia Damski were claiming that they were taken
(19:38):
on board craft and flowing around the universe. Where did
he say they were from Venus? Yes, these were comely
Venusian women that were flying him around the universe. So yeah,
a lot of crazy was going on in some of
those films, and you're right, they did take a turn
for the weird in the middle of it. But at
the same time, I have to say, if you assume
(19:59):
the Robertson panel is fifty three, than anything that they
might have had any impact on would be fifty four
or fifty five, probably knowing how long movies generally take. Well,
there was some pretty stupid things before the Robertson panel.
They were Zombies of the Stratosphere. Okay, that's interesting they
had in fifty three when the Robinson panel was meeting
(20:20):
and having their grave meetings about the UFO issue. Catwomen
of the Moon was in the theaters, and so was
Abbott and Costello. Go to Mars, and of course you
got Commander Cody and the Rocket Rangers and Devil Girl
from Mars, Stranger from Venus, there's Venus again, Beast with
a Million Eyes. There's just the fifties were a golden
(20:42):
period for bad movies about flying saucers.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Well, and I think that's the whole point is we
know what the Robertson panel was doing, and we know
that Hollywood was, even before the Robertson panel, making its
own crazy movies. Switch over to the side of the audience.
What was the audience supposed to take away from this
prolifer of movies. The general sentiment was this is all
silly and fun and crazy, right, And so I think
(21:08):
one movie that we do want to kind of drill
down into is something that you actually have a very
personal experience with, which was a movie called The Twenty
Seventh Day in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I do actually have that the director of The Twenty
Seventh Day was Bill Lasher, and Bill Lasher, if I
can divert for just a second, was my mentor. The
very last television show Bill Lasher ever did was k Obrian,
a show I created and was my very first television series.
So he took me under his wing and said, hey, kid,
I'm going to teach you how TV works and that
(21:39):
kind of thing. Well, Bill would be the guy that
would know, because he directed most of the first two
seasons of I Love Lucy, He put the Nose Twitch
into Bewitched, and married Elizabeth Montgomery. He directed a Beach
Blanket Bingo and movies like that. But what was strange
is that Bill, a guy who was a comedy guy
in nineteen fifty ends up making this movie The twenty
(22:03):
seventh Day, which is clearly not the day the Earth
stood Still or anything, which is the one that people
tend to think, Oh, if you're gonna watch one fifties movie,
that probably is it. He didn't make that movie. Well,
let me tell you a little bit about The twenty
Seventh Day. It's a short film, seventy five minutes. It's
black and white. It's a Cold war science fiction kind
(22:25):
of thing. It's built to talk about the Russia US conflict,
but to do it using flying saucers. Here's the premise.
It's actually one of the first movies to do abductions.
Five people are abducted in the Twenty seventh Day. They're
ordinary people from five different nations. So let's get a
little of everything. They got an American reporter, an English actress,
(22:48):
a German scientist, a Soviet soldier, and a Chinese peasant
woman who could ask for anything more in a list
of abductees. And then comes this alien after he's abducted
these people kind of looks like an intergalactic airline attendant
or something. I mean, he's very calm, and he addresses
them about what he's about to do, and he gives
(23:08):
each a small box containing three capsules. Each capsule can
be activated to kill all human life in a huge radius,
and it doesn't damage buildings, So it's like a neutron bomb,
I guess in a little tiny capsule, and then the
boxes only respond to thought patterns of the person who
received them, and the capsules go dead after twenty seven days.
So what happens is it's this thing that is about
(23:32):
human nature, but also about if you think the other
side might push the button, do you push first? Right?
That's the essence of this movie. But it's also the
essence of the Cold War. It was very strange for
Bill who have done that. I did talk to Bill
a little bit about the UFO angle of the whole thing,
but you know, I was doing a television series and
(23:52):
trying to learn it is knee there and I don't
have a lot of time to talk to you. Thus,
but some.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Well, it is interesting why somebody has accomplished, as Bill
Asher right in what sounded like more like the drama
and comedy Vein would take on a project like this.
Do you have any special insight into that?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I don't know if I have insight. I have a theory. Okay,
let's hear the theory, okay, because what Bill said, Bill
always would sort of minimize. So I said, I said
to Bill, you were doing beach blanket bingo and stuff
like that, why would you do the twenty seventh today?
And he said, well, I have a large family and
I needed a paycheck, is what he said. And of
(24:31):
course Bill was one of those Hollywood guys that was
married many times and saw his fortune being halved over
and over, so maybe he did need the money. But
my theory is that that was part of it, but
not all of it. Because here's the thing. Bill was
also a guy that hung out with the rat Pack,
which I always found so fascinating about him. I mean,
(24:53):
he is a guy that hung out with Sinatra, Dean Martin,
Sammy Davis Junior, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and he was
sort of the guy off screen, right. He hung out
with them, he partied with them. He knew him very
very well, but he was not the public persona of
the rat Pack. But these guys, you know, they were
(25:14):
part of that time period where you would get together
at night and you'd get very drunk, so you could
say things that you could claim you didn't say the
next day or you didn't remember. And I'm sure there
are a lot of these parties that Bill was at
by nineteen fifty seven. He wanted to show his friends
that he wasn't just a comedy guy, that he also
(25:36):
had important things that he was doing well. The Twenty
Seventh Day is not a film that I recommend everyone
run out and watch. I mean, it was interesting for
me to see it because of my personal connection. It
is a movie that feels important because it is more
than even most of the other ones. It is clearly
about the Cold War. I mean, it's got a Russian,
it's got American. We can destroy them, they can destroy us,
(25:59):
and if they do, then the whole world's gone. Because
the aliens have said, we really need the earth, but
our culture prevents us from attacking you and taking it
from you. So we're going to give you these capsules
and then you'll when you destroy yourselves, then we'll move
in and take it over as if we're not worthy
or whatever. So yeah, so well, not the greatest movie,
(26:19):
but interesting.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So let's go back to the rat Pack for a second,
because that's fascinating. I read somewhere that I think it
was Sammy Davis Junior who had a UFO experience. He
did Bill, were talking with Bill about that, or yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
He did, because we were talking about the twenty seventh Day,
and he goes, yeah, well, you know, Sammy saw one,
and I was like, what tell me about it?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
And that image of Sammy Davis Junior seeing a UFO
is really quite amusing.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
He told Bill about it, but he told many other people.
He said he had seen a group of small silver discs,
and this was the early fifties, not a single light,
but multiple lights, multiple objects, and he described them as
hovering and darting and doing things that aircraft don't do.
And then this is the word that Bill used, and
then poof, they were gone. But that sounds pretty familiar
(27:05):
to a lot of the testimony we get these days.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Very much, which I think is much more a modern
depiction of UFOs than it was at that time.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yeah, and it's kind of incomprehensible to me that if
Bill was making this movie and hanging out with people
that they wouldn't have talked about UFOs a lot. Well.
And by the way, when I say ex officio member,
just a small sidebar. But in his later days Bill
has passed on. There's a picture I believe it was
in life magazine that shows Marilyn Monroe, who is sort
(27:37):
of she's been sewing into a tight dress on the
night that she sang Happy Birthday, mister President, so controversially,
and Bill directed that. He directed, oh really that night,
and Bill had a picture in his office where yes,
it had the Kennedy brothers and it had Marilyn, but
(27:57):
that had been cropped, and the full picture shows Bill
off to the side kind of looking down Maryland's cleavage
and all that, which I thought was pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So let's circle back to your theory about Bill's motivation
for taking on the twenty seventh day. I think I
agree that certainly the practical reason makes a lot of sense.
The idea that he has friends in the rat pack
that he wants to impress with doing something more serious
minded also makes sense. The fact that they're even talking
(28:26):
about UFOs casually in a friendly way that could give
him extra motivation. But I also know too that he
was in the military, so he might have had also
a unique point of view on the topic. Did he
ever mention anything like that to you.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
On that one time when we dived into the UFO topic,
He did. Bill had been in the US Army Signal
Corps in World War Two, and one of the things
he said, now, this is a triple negative, which it's
almost Yogi bearra ish in its triple negative. But he said,
I wrote this down because I thought I'd get it wrong.
Just because somebody in the military tells you something isn't
(29:00):
true doesn't mean that it's not wow. And I'm not
sure how to parse that exactly, Brent he was saying.
And how he explained that quote later was he put
nothing past the military because he figured if there was
something truly as important as the fact that flying saucers
or UFOs were real, the government would classify it and
lie about it. I never got the sense that Bill
(29:23):
himself saw a UFO. He made his movie that probably
there's not too much to be done with that. But
I will say this, in addition to the rat Pack,
he hung out with JFK, something that's kind of important
to our whole Dark Sky's chronology.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yet, and didn't he have a great kind of behind
the scenes story about JFK.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Listen, I tell this story at dinner parties. I don't
think I've told it on the air. I think this
is a first. It's tangential to the UFO topic. But
maybe you can find a UFO connection after I tell it.
Here's what happened, and Bill told me this, And the
thing is about Bill. First of all, he liked me,
so I appreciate that, and he wasn't about to bullshit me.
(30:05):
In fact, if anything, what I liked about him is
he didn't bullshit. He told you what he thought about
anything and everything. So anyway, this is what Bill told me.
He said that in the summer of nineteen sixty, when
JFK was nominated by the Democratic Party to run for president,
there was a party at Peter Lawford's house, either the
(30:25):
day before or the day after. I don't think this
was the night of the actual nomination, because I think
JFK had other things to do. And this party's going
on at Peter Lawford's house. Bill's there partying. We know
who the rat pack is, we've discussed him. But in
addition to the rat Pack, Marilyn is there and JFK
is there. This is July of nineteen sixty. And Bill
(30:45):
said that during the party, JFK and Marilyn went out
to the backpool house and they were gone a couple
hours and when they came back, Marilyn was wearing JFK's shirt.
He had a white dress shirt and she was wearing
it now And that's not the story though, That's just
he just told me that and said, yeah, of course, Maryland.
Oh yeah. So from the point of view of was
(31:08):
Maryland and JFK involved, I think we pretty much all
think that they were now, but people will still argue
about it. We certainly said they were in dark skies
in one of our episodes. Anyway, So the party goes on,
a lot of drinking is going on, because that's what
happens at these parties, and at some point in this party, JFK,
who's as drunk as everybody else in the party, goes
(31:30):
out onto PCH, which is in Malibu where Peter Lawford's
house was, and he's stopping traffic on PCH. So JFK
is out there on PCH stopping traffic and screaming, I'm
going to be the fucking president of the United States,
and this seemed like it could undermine his candidacy. So
(31:52):
the group dispatched Bill, and I believe Lawford, but it
was Bill and somebody else to go get him. So
Bill literally wrestled the future President of the United States
off pch back into the house so he would not
be in the newspapers the next morning. And all I
can say, just like you know with the UFO story,
people go, God, it happened, but no one will believe me.
(32:13):
Imagine a couple of those people that were stopped in
traffic probably said JFK was out there and he was yelling,
and nobody would believe them. Yeah, they're still telling that
story to this day. Maybe that's our UFO connection. Although
and we don't have to get it into in this episode.
You and I have talked at length about JFK and UFOs,
and so he made a TV series about it.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Well, look, I think so fascinating. Bill sounds like a
very interesting man. I'm envious that you've got to spend
so much time with him, I think, again, bringing this
back to the big picture, the fifties were a time
of when you look at it and aggregate, The general
sentiment coming out of Hollywood about UFOs and aliens was
(32:59):
that that it was all largely ridiculous and that there
was no consistent narrative about UFOs except one real overriding message,
which was don't take any of this seriously. Now, whether
that was a mandated message in general from the Robertson panel,
we cannot say. But I think if you look at
all of the movies, it raises the question, okay, was
(33:23):
that what the audience was meant to take away from
all of these movies? Meanwhile, well, the audience is being
told not to take it seriously. The government is still
taking the subject very seriously, as the story of Donald
Keho will demonstrate.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
You know, I love this story. It's hard to beat
JFK stopping traffic on PCH, but this one may do
it because it's so right on about any potential government
involvement in media. Because this is a classic. It's nineteen
fifty eight. It is January twenty second of nineteen fifty eight.
(34:00):
There's a TV show on CBS called Armstrong Circle Theater
and they have a program that is called quote UFO
Enigma of the Skies, and Keiho is on it, and
so or a bunch of other people. It was Major
Donald Keho. He had been a marine. So again Brent Navy, Right,
there goes the Navy thing. Again. Kio had been a marine,
(34:23):
and he felt that the military was lying about this
flying saucer thing, and he wrote a number of books
and he became the face of UFO disclosure in the
fifties into the sixties, into the early sixties. Think about
Major Keiho as kind of a Louel Azondo type or
maybe even a David Grush type. It wasn't exactly a
(34:43):
whistleblower because he was on the outside looking in. He
was banging on the door saying, tell us what you know,
and nobody would tell him. Ended up on that show,
and it was heavily scripted, and a number of people,
for example, who were asked to be on the show,
said I'm not going to be on that show. I
think one of them was even Jacques Valat is that yes,
(35:04):
you know those nerves in front of you. Is that true?
Speaker 1 (35:06):
That is true?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
And who said I'm not going to be on it
because they wanted to script it so tight that you
could only talk about what had already been decided.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yes. Well, And the thing that strikes me about this
was again, this was all scripted. Like you said, it
was meant to be a performative demonstration by higher ups
within the government and the military again to promote a
certain message that there's nothing to see here, folks. But
you have this one man in Keiho who decides I'm
not going to read the teleprompter anymore, and in the
(35:38):
midst of this live televised broadcast, decided to say that
the Air Force was deliberately hiding the truth from the
public about UFOs. Now, obviously this completely contradicted the official statement,
and that set into motion a whole chain of events
during that lives where he was then censored by the
(35:59):
show producer.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
They killed his mic. He said on the program and
now I'm going to reveal something that's never been disclosed before,
and then bam, Mike cut. Imagine this, you're watching this TV.
There's only three networks back in nineteen fifty eight, and
so he's got a pretty large audience, and most people
are at home, and a lot of people saw it,
and they're watching this guy talk about UFOs and he says,
(36:24):
I'm going to reveal something that's never been disclosed before,
used the word disclosed, and then they cut his mic,
and yet they continued to show him on camera. So
you see this guy moving his mouth but not saying anything, right,
and apparently some people his mic was cut, but you
could almost hear him on Douglas Edwards Mic a little
(36:45):
bit for a few people. But after this happened, he
released what he was going to say. So the censorship,
such as it worked in nineteen fifty eight, is not
valid today because this is what he was going to say.
For the last six months, we have been working with
a congressional committee investigating official secrecy about UFOs. If all
(37:06):
the evidence we have given this committee is made public
and open hearings, it will absolutely prove that UFOs are
real and machines under intelligent control. That's what got censored.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Amazing and that was and so, as you said, some
people actually did hear this, And in the wake of
that broadcast, when that segment was done, the show was
inundated with people calling in and saying, what happened? What
did I miss? I heard something? What's going on? So
again we're back to some small scattering of people that
(37:39):
heard that live at the time are probably out there saying, no,
but I heard a government official come on air and
disclose the truth.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
But alsobody, most silly is it that it all has
to be scripted because in today's cable news world and
social media It's almost demanded that anybody covering this topic
would bring in someone who's a skeptic and someone who's
a believer and let them fight about it, but not
back then. And I find I have one more quote,
(38:08):
and I'll be done for the day on this. But
this one, I just found it to be so incredible
because this is what CBS said when people wrote them
about this and said why did you cut his mic?
They said, this program had been carefully cleared for security reasons. Therefore,
it was the responsibility of this network to ensure performance
(38:32):
in accordance with predetermined security standards. Any indication there would
be a deviation might lead the statements that neither this
network nor the individuals on the program were authorized to
release that about sums it up right there, cover your
ass as what as I call that quote? I mean, well,
and here's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
So of course Keiho tries to disclose, right, very brave man. Ultimately,
his assistant accusations over the years of a conspiracy against
the government led to his effective marginalization and the suppression
of his message. He was able to write some books,
but he was being debunked by the government and the
(39:14):
military that he served, So that's an early lesson, right
for anyone else in the military. Look what happened to
Donald Keo when you tried to tell the truth?
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think Donald Keijo in the same way Louel Azando
by many is considered kind of a hero of the movement.
Now I realize Elzando's very controversial. Keiho was never that controversial.
I own like five of Keyho's books, which maybe all
of them, I don't know, it's some amount of them,
and I've read three of them cover to cover, and
I have to say he has a style. It's a
(39:44):
very personal kind of style. It's kind of personal journalism
before that became a thing. Right. He's not Hunter Thompson
or anything, but he is talking about his investigation and
they're very good. In particular, he's going through case after case.
Any one of his books is full of cases where
if you read it, you'd say, good grief. I mean that,
(40:05):
what's the explanation for that? There's just no explanation other
than an omalus. So I think he did the world
a whole lot of good with his work. And I
think the other thing is, yes, he was getting debunked,
no problem, No question about it. But he had a
lot of fans. And why was that he had fans
(40:26):
because a lot of people knew something was not right.
The government wasn't coming completely clean on this. Now at
the time, he was really the receptacle of their suspicions
because most of the government stuff that they weren't being
honest about would come out later in memos that were
released almost decades later during the Freedom of Information Act.
(40:48):
But he was a great guy, just a great guy,
and we own a lot well.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
And I think this is a great segue now into
what does it all mean and where does this take
us on our journey of exploring kind of that unholy
alliance between Hollywood and the government. You know, as we've
seen the fifties was this really strange decade where the
narrative of the UFO phenomenon kind of shifted from Sirius
(41:16):
in the wake of Roswell and what's going on to
very silly in aggregate. One of the things that accomplished though,
was it started to open the door to mock and
stigmatize anyone who dared believe that aliens might be real.
And while some of the stench of that has worn off,
in the intervening years. I still meet people today who
(41:38):
confide in me their personal stories knowing what my mindset
is on this. So I hear these incredible UFO encounters
that they have never told anyone else out of fear
of being ostracized, not unlike our friend Donald Keiho, and
by the way, to me personally, not unlike my daughter.
I told you the story that my daughter saw UFOs
(41:59):
with a friend of her. They were scared that it
happened at three in the morning when they were supposed
to be asleep in this sleepover, and so they didn't
want to tell the parents then. But as they got older,
they decided they didn't want to say anything because they
thought people would consider them crazy. And it wasn't until
my daughter was in her late teens and she knew
that I was involved in dark skies and she started
(42:22):
to understand what my past and my belief system was.
That she confessed this to me, and she felt that
I was a safe harbor at that point. But again,
was that the intention of the Robertson panel was to
start just moving the conversation far enough that it would
open the door to start stigmatizing anyone who dared come forward,
(42:43):
whether it was Donald Keho or a teenage girl and
anyone in between, from telling their story without fearing the
stigmatization or the ostratization.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
That would come great Pointsaul. If you think back to
the Robertson panel, you really do have to ask yourself
what they're trying to tell us in their statements and
in their recommendations. Is UFOs aren't real? But just to
save the public from all this anxiety over it, we
need to debunk them and make people think they're silly. Okay.
Another explanation could be UFOs are very real, and they're saying,
(43:18):
we're not ready to talk about this yet. So what
arrows do we have in our quiver? And one of
them is the media and movies and television being the
biggest part of that. If I just hailed back to
the Disney thing that we started the show with, whatever
the Robertson panel envisioned and imagined back in nineteen fifty three,
(43:41):
Disney really didn't just touch this topic lightly. Across seventy
plus years, Disney's built a family facing pipeline for things
like space travel, aliens, artificial life, other intelligences, non human intelligences.
If there is a message. It eludes me because the
message seems to be let's throw a whole bunch of
stuff against the wall and see what sticks. I don't know,
(44:04):
is that how you see it, or what's your take?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
You know what that is? Exactly? My take is when
there is a lack of coherence to the message, then
you stop looking for meaning and you just treat it
as entertainment. If I were to theorize what the whole
point of potentially the Robertson panel is, let's turn down
the volume on this and if it's out there in
the public consciousness as just entertainment, then maybe no one
(44:29):
will bother thinking about it and wasting any time on
it as a serious topic. It was funny the other
day I started thinking, what I feel like is I
feel like I'm a district attorney trying to prove a
case and looking at all the evidence and saying, what
was really going on here? Was their motive? Right? Was
their criminal activity? Was their coercion? All of these things?
(44:50):
We can't answer that yet definitively, but I feel like
that's what we're starting to bring to the surface.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Well, another fun time with you talking about this stuff,
and for those of you over at Disney, please don't
hate us. 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
(45:17):
by Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthauser and Your hosts and
executive producers are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the GUIs
I read somewhere that I think it was Sammy Davis
Junior who had a UFO experience. He did Bill were
talking with Bill about that?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Or yeah he did, because we were talking about the
twenty seventh Day and he goes, yeah, well, you know,
Sammy saw one, and I was like, what tell me
about it? And that image of Sammy Davis Junior seeing
a UFO is really quite amusing. He told Bill about it,
but he told many other people. He said he had
seen a group of small silver discs, and this was
the early fifties, not a single light, but multiple lights,
(00:30):
multiple objects, and he described them as hovering and darting
and doing things that aircraft don't do. And then this
is the word that Bill used, and then poof, they
were gone. But that sounds pretty familiar to a lot
of the testimony we get these days. I'm Brice Sable.
(01:04):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
And I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
In this episode, we'll be taking a visit to the
Magic Kingdom and finding flying saucers.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
And we're going to tell you a story about the
American TV network that cut the mic on a live
broadcast about UFO investigations.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So anyway, last week, I'm taking a peloton class with
Cody Rigsby, and now the guy is usually entertaining enough
to get me through forty five minutes on a stationary bike,
but I kind of realize I'm not listening to a
word the man is saying because my mind's already locked
in on this episode we're doing. But I couldn't get
out of my head was this Disney and UFOs last
episode we got up to nineteen fifty three when the
(01:57):
CIA's Robertson panel actually recommended the UFO subject be made less,
i don't know, respectable, and they even floated the idea
of recruiting mass media, specifically including Disney, to help do it.
And that was seventy three years ago. But here's the
thing that hit me while I was peddling away. Disney
isn't just a historical footnote. Disney is the current epicenter
(02:20):
of this because today Disney doesn't merely touch alien life,
they industrialize it. Besides Disney branded content, they also own Marvel,
where the cosmos is packed with non human intelligences. They
own Star Wars with a canteena full of aliens in
every era, and with the Fox Library folded in, They've
got Avatar, they've got Alien Planet of the Apes and
(02:43):
X Files. That's a lot of franchises in the broader orbits.
So Brent, maybe it was just a case of surging
and dorphins. I don't know, but I've never really looked
at it this way. But if you go to your
Disney Plus app, you're going to find a lot of
options that deal with non human intelligence. What do you
think we should make of that?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Well, I think there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that
says that's not a coincidence, and there's even more actual,
hard evidence that says there was conversations and possibly some
type of deal made between the Robertson panel and Disney
way back when. And you could say, well, that was then,
(03:22):
this is now. The obviously Walt Disney is no longer around,
so whatever deal was made back in the fifties, but institutionally,
I think there's a reason to believe that maybe whatever
was agreed upon is still in force. It's fascinating because
as we've done the research for this episode, you keep
(03:43):
turning up things post Robertson panel, and just to rewind
to the Robertson panel, and remember the CIA sponsored it.
It's nineteen fifty three, and they start talking in their
four day I guess get together about an educational program
which is going to have two aims training and they
act actually use the word debunking. I think it's the
first time debunking has really shown up. And they say
(04:05):
we should use television and motion pictures and they list
potential partners and it specifically lists Disney Walt Disney Inc.
Animated Cartoons, O thing. It mentions his Jam Handy Company,
and I didn't even know what that was, but they
were famous for World War II training films. So the
(04:26):
Robertson panel, you know, it was kind of looking back
on World War Two, but also looking ahead to Disney.
Remember Disneyland doesn't open for two more years, so Disney
at this point is just a content provider. So what
happened is in the aftermath of the panel, there's a
guy at Disney top animator Ward Kimball, and he starts
(04:48):
talking or other. They try to put together a documentary
that'll be mentioning the whole UFO area. And we don't
hear about this till nineteen seventy nine. Stanton Friedman actually
heard and testified that Ward Kimbolt started talking about this
and at the time he was saying that Disney was
(05:08):
going to get real UFO footage from the government. And
what happened to that? Can you even imagine? I can't.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
And they didn't get it. That's all you need to imagine.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
No footage, Yeah, because I feel like if they had
gotten footage, we might be in a completely different place
at this point in time. But I think step back
for a second and consider what was the motivation of
the Robertson panel to talk to Disney if it was
not to either a start a disclosure program, right to
(05:40):
soften up the general public, or some type of disinformation meaning, Hey,
wait a minute, this whole UFO flying saucer story is
getting out of our control. Let's take back control by
changing the narrative. And let's do that with agreements from
the people who are making stories that are shaping people's minds.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, just for clarity on that whole thing, Kimball, Ward
Kimball said he was approached by people who were tied
into Douglas aircraft kind of interesting and you'll love this
one the Office of Naval Research. So there's then they
made again reaching out to say, hey, we need to
control this narrative, and they were going to have him
do a UFO picture. Now, admittedly that one didn't come
(06:29):
together in the way that they wanted to do it.
They wanted to end with actual footage. They didn't get it,
but they did have a Disney Tomorrowland series on I
think one of the mini documentaries they did that had
this great animation that Kimball had done. Also ended with
a bunch of flying saucers at the end, so they
were in the mode. But they were dismissive of that.
(06:52):
But I got to tell you it may be harder
for us to get into what they did or did
not do in the fifties. But man, in the nineties,
there are two whopper events that kind of blow your mind. Right.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
So we've got the Disney UFO conference in nineteen ninety five,
and then we've got the Alien Encounters experience in the
New Tomorrowland, also from nineteen ninety five. And interestingly, as
we said, by this point, Walt Disney rest his soul
had passed away and there was a completely new chairman
of Disney, Michael Eisner, who will come back to in
(07:26):
a moment in terms of how he may play a
part in all of this arrangement.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
We'll do the conference. Last, Let's do what was called
Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland. This is nineteen ninety five, folks,
and this was a documentary that was commissioned by Disney
on the idea that they were opening up a new
ride in Orlando. And it was called The Extra terror
Restrial Alien Encounter Terror spelled ter in all caps, okay,
(07:55):
And it's a forty minute runtime and as I understand it,
just so you know, this wasn't documentary that was going
to be put out over the airwaves or anything. It
was for the ride. And yet I got to tell
you I got a couple of quotes from Brent. This
is mind blowing because, Okay, Robert Urich, who maybe not
everybody knows today, but he was a big deal back then,
(08:16):
and he is the host of it, and he says
in this documentary that would again meet all the people
as they got in line to go see this new ride,
and beyond it, Robert Eurex says, I guess this is
what they would play, why they were holding.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
People before they went on exactly at it.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
So here's what Urik says. He says quote. For nearly
fifty years, officials have been documenting routine alien encounters here
on Earth. More than one alien craft crashed and was
recovered for secret US military research. The most famous case
took place in July of nineteen forty seven, just outside
the community of Roswell, New Mexico. Indications are the government,
(08:55):
military and scientific leaders will soon release nearly a half
century of official documentation of ongoing alien encounters on Earth. Okay,
admittedly it's the Gin people up for the ride, but
that's pretty dramatic stuff and it kind of fits in
with what we think today.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And who approved that text that feels like they're reading
a news briefing, Well, I think Eisner approved it.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
And the reason I say that is I got one
more great quote for you. Eisner insisted on doing the
intro to this thing. Okay, so before this quote that
I just read you from Robert Urich, this is what
Michael Eisner, who is running Disney, has to say. He
says this quote and.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Wait, let me just give you some context for everything. Okay,
in the nineties, Disney was arguably the most powerful and
successful movie studio. So this is the chairman or the
CEO president of Disney, the person running the show at Disney,
the most powerful person in Hollywood. Now go ahead, Okay, Well,
we'd also know Eisner had a bit of an ego.
(09:59):
I mean he liked to on camera and be interviewed
and things like that. That's not a knock on him
as a human being, but it might explain what he said, Hey,
I'd like to do the intro because he figured millions
of people every year were going to be getting on
this thing. It's what he said, though.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Because he participated in this, and clearly nobody asked to
say anything they don't want to say. I mean, if
you put dialogue in front of an actor, they don't
have to say it unless they want to. This is
what Eisener said. Quote at a military installation somewhere in
the United States. There are those who believe that the
government is hiding the remains of an alien spacecraft that
(10:32):
mysteriously crashed to Earth. With more and more scientific evidence
of alien encounters and UFO sidings, the idea of creatures
from another planet be as far fetched as we once thought.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Wow, yeah, that's pretty staggering. And I think so, now,
let's examine what this ride, this experience actually was. It was,
by all accounts, not Disney at all. It was, as
you mentioned, it was a terror, an extra terrestrial experience
that many parents felt was way too intense for kids.
(11:08):
It was all about trying to transport to the leader
of some alien race down to Earth. Something goes wrong
and a terrible monster comes. An alien monster comes in
to the theater and starts wreaking havoc, and people are
experiencing it behind them, They're feeling it breathing down their necks,
and kids were crying. So again, if we think about
(11:30):
the possibility that there was some direction to embrace alien
storytelling back in the fifties, this was the end result
of it, all those years later, something that felt very
real and very terrifying for the audience done at Disney,
which feels just complete counter programming to everything else that
(11:51):
they had there at the park.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And let's remember this is forty two years later after
the Robertson panel. So I don't know what that means,
because it could easily mean that they if they were
doing it then they'd been doing it all along, But
we don't have a lot of cases about that. Or
it could be nobody really did what that Robertson panel
wanted because they wanted it. They just did it because
they thought aliens were good box office or something. I suppose.
(12:16):
But it is kind of fishy about that because that
documentary only mentions the ride for five minutes at the end,
So it's thirty five minutes of UFO stuff and five
minutes about the ride. Kind of interesting, but maybe they
were hiding the monster anyway. It only aired in a
handful of US cities because they did air it at
random times on a few selected dates in February March
(12:39):
of ninety five, and it had no advanced notice. Okay,
so if you think about it, who does that? Right?
Who does that? And I believe it's the director of it?
He said quote an incredibly odd marketing strategy, considering its
purpose was to promote a major theme park ride for families.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, I mean their approach was let's bury the film
right essentially, But well, then why did they make it
in the first place?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right? Like?
Speaker 1 (13:04):
It raises a lot of questions.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
It sure does. But we've got another example though of
where Disney has done something absolutely insane or at least unexplainable.
And that's right after this or right around the time
of this. Also in nineteen ninety five, they decide to
have a UFO conference in Orlando. It's January of ninety five,
and this was a two week long conference. Now, you've
(13:30):
been to conferences for UFOs. I've been to them too.
They're usually three or four days at best, and there
are people that speak, but there's usually a whole lot
of people there to listen to them, right, That's how
it goes down. Not this time. They had a huge
lineup of people that they brought in there, and a
guy named I believe Don Ecker was the organizer. He
(13:50):
had been asked by Disney to do it. Ecker was
very involved in the UFO topic. They brought in guys
like Bud Hopkins, George Knapp, Don Schmidt, than Randall Sitchen.
They brought in, Okay, two weeks, all these folks there.
There's basically two conferences. Week one conference, week two conference.
They did not advertise it, right, there was no advertising. Now,
(14:12):
I don't know of any conference that I've ever been
to that didn't say and by the way, send me
your bio and send me your URLs because we got
a promo the hell out of this, because we won't
make any money, all right. So Disney spent a ton
of money because they had to provide airfare, room and
board and meals for all these people for two weeks,
all right, according to Ecker, And this just blows my mind.
(14:36):
But Disney never gave it an ounce of promotion, and
at best, the number of people in the audience was
never more than ten or twelve people. Wow, it's kind
of crazy. And the only thing I'm not even sure
I'm gonna let you take a crack at that. What
would explain that in your view?
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Either A, they had an intention that then somebody forced
their hand and said kill that thing, and it was
too late, so they kept it alive, but they did
not support it in any way, which is one viable explanation.
The other explanation is they were actually trying to make
these people that were very interested in the topic feel stupid, right.
(15:18):
They were trying to send a very subtle message that
you're going to come all the way here for this
big conference and nothing's going to happen because there is
nothing about the UFO phenomenon, I'm worth talking about.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
That's a fascinating and good guess. By the way, the
laid author Robbie Graham, who wrote the really terrific book
Silver Screen Saucers, when he was talking about this incident,
he also was kind of a guest that like, well,
I don't what would truly explain this. All he could
do was speculate, which is what we're doing here. But
he thought it might be an orchestrated chance for intelligence
(15:49):
agencies to assemble the leading UFO figures under one roof,
because this is pre internet right, yes, to take the
current pulse of the field. And there is a certain
validity in that guess, I think, because obviously, if you
want to take a pulse of the field right now,
just go on x go on Reddit. The field not
only can have its pulse taken, it's demanding to have
(16:12):
its pulse taken right So you didn't need to you
don't need to do that today. So I guess I
could understand that it would be one way to find
out what they're thinking or hear their best shot. But
several people went home early. They were just like, what
is going on here? And so we have two instances.
Then okay, Disney puts the documentary out but does nothing
(16:33):
to promote it at all. Then Disney right near the
same time holds a two week conference of UFO people
and doesn't tell anybody about it.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, it's mind boggling. And obviously there's many different ways
to interpret it, as we've just discussed, and I think
at this point it's probably a good moment to step
back open the aperture a little bit and say, it
wasn't just Disney that was doing interesting things in the
wake of the Robertson panel. The wider view of Hollywood
at that time was that they were making some pretty
(17:06):
crazy UFO alien movies, a lot of them. I mean
was that was a real kind of golden era for
alien and UFO movies. But you know, when I look
at them, when I look at all these titles and
I look at what they were about, because I haven't
seen a lot of them, there is no real commonalities
in the narrative messaging. So it wasn't like there was
(17:26):
a mandate given and everyone just adopted it. And the
stories are the storylines are really all over the place.
But what you really get is that UFOs and aliens
are being used more as a metaphor for other fears
at the times, So you've got movies that are really
representing nuclear fears, like Killers from Space in nineteen fifty four,
which is a low budget sci fi film about a
(17:48):
scientist who survives a mysterious plane crash only to discover
aliens have resurrected him to steal atomic secrets for an
Earth invasion using giant insects and reptiles grown with the
radiation absorbed from our own atomic bomb tests. Right, it's
just a huge cautionary tale. But then there was the
communism fear as we were feeling at that time with
(18:10):
the Red Scare invasion of the Body Snatchers in nineteen
fifty six about the extraterrestrial invasion where the alien spores
from space grow into large seed pods, each one capable
of producing a visually identical copy of a human. And
these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. A
local doctor uncovers this quiet invasion and attempts to stop it.
(18:34):
This is of course, where the term pod people comes
from in pop culture to refer to these emotionless humans.
But then you also Again, it gets even crazier when
you look at some of the other movies that were
coming out at that time. Nineteen fifty six, Planeted of
the Vampires, which is basically zombies in space. It conquered
the world. This is great. It concerns a bat winged
(18:58):
triangular alien named Ballulah or Beulah from the planet Venus
that uses a mind controlling device to turn people into
a motionless slaves so it can take control of the Earth.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
That sounds like a documentary. Now. You know what's interesting though, people,
First of all, the whole idea of Venus, which we
know basically next to Hell is one of the hottest
places around then probably doesn't support much life. And it
is interesting that even in the fifties into the sixties,
when the contact e movement was going on, that's where
people like Georgia Damski were claiming that they were taken
(19:38):
on board craft and flowing around the universe. Where did
he say they were from Venus? Yes, these were comely
Venusian women that were flying him around the universe. So yeah,
a lot of crazy was going on in some of
those films, and you're right, they did take a turn
for the weird in the middle of it. But at
the same time, I have to say, if you assume
(19:59):
the Robertson panel is fifty three, than anything that they
might have had any impact on would be fifty four
or fifty five, probably knowing how long movies generally take. Well,
there was some pretty stupid things before the Robertson panel.
They were Zombies of the Stratosphere. Okay, that's interesting they
had in fifty three when the Robinson panel was meeting
(20:20):
and having their grave meetings about the UFO issue. Catwomen
of the Moon was in the theaters, and so was
Abbott and Costello. Go to Mars, and of course you
got Commander Cody and the Rocket Rangers and Devil Girl
from Mars, Stranger from Venus, there's Venus again, Beast with
a Million Eyes. There's just the fifties were a golden
(20:42):
period for bad movies about flying saucers.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Well, and I think that's the whole point is we
know what the Robertson panel was doing, and we know
that Hollywood was, even before the Robertson panel, making its
own crazy movies. Switch over to the side of the audience.
What was the audience supposed to take away from this
prolifer of movies. The general sentiment was this is all
silly and fun and crazy, right, And so I think
(21:08):
one movie that we do want to kind of drill
down into is something that you actually have a very
personal experience with, which was a movie called The Twenty
Seventh Day in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I do actually have that the director of The Twenty
Seventh Day was Bill Lasher, and Bill Lasher, if I
can divert for just a second, was my mentor. The
very last television show Bill Lasher ever did was k Obrian,
a show I created and was my very first television series.
So he took me under his wing and said, hey, kid,
I'm going to teach you how TV works and that
(21:39):
kind of thing. Well, Bill would be the guy that
would know, because he directed most of the first two
seasons of I Love Lucy, He put the Nose Twitch
into Bewitched, and married Elizabeth Montgomery. He directed a Beach
Blanket Bingo and movies like that. But what was strange
is that Bill, a guy who was a comedy guy
in nineteen fifty ends up making this movie The twenty
(22:03):
seventh Day, which is clearly not the day the Earth
stood Still or anything, which is the one that people
tend to think, Oh, if you're gonna watch one fifties movie,
that probably is it. He didn't make that movie. Well,
let me tell you a little bit about The twenty
Seventh Day. It's a short film, seventy five minutes. It's
black and white. It's a Cold war science fiction kind
(22:25):
of thing. It's built to talk about the Russia US conflict,
but to do it using flying saucers. Here's the premise.
It's actually one of the first movies to do abductions.
Five people are abducted in the Twenty seventh Day. They're
ordinary people from five different nations. So let's get a
little of everything. They got an American reporter, an English actress,
(22:48):
a German scientist, a Soviet soldier, and a Chinese peasant
woman who could ask for anything more in a list
of abductees. And then comes this alien after he's abducted
these people kind of looks like an intergalactic airline attendant
or something. I mean, he's very calm, and he addresses
them about what he's about to do, and he gives
(23:08):
each a small box containing three capsules. Each capsule can
be activated to kill all human life in a huge radius,
and it doesn't damage buildings, So it's like a neutron bomb,
I guess in a little tiny capsule, and then the
boxes only respond to thought patterns of the person who
received them, and the capsules go dead after twenty seven days.
So what happens is it's this thing that is about
(23:32):
human nature, but also about if you think the other
side might push the button, do you push first? Right?
That's the essence of this movie. But it's also the
essence of the Cold War. It was very strange for
Bill who have done that. I did talk to Bill
a little bit about the UFO angle of the whole thing,
but you know, I was doing a television series and
(23:52):
trying to learn it is knee there and I don't
have a lot of time to talk to you. Thus,
but some.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Well, it is interesting why somebody has accomplished, as Bill
Asher right in what sounded like more like the drama
and comedy Vein would take on a project like this.
Do you have any special insight into that?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I don't know if I have insight. I have a theory. Okay,
let's hear the theory, okay, because what Bill said, Bill
always would sort of minimize. So I said, I said
to Bill, you were doing beach blanket bingo and stuff
like that, why would you do the twenty seventh today?
And he said, well, I have a large family and
I needed a paycheck, is what he said. And of
(24:31):
course Bill was one of those Hollywood guys that was
married many times and saw his fortune being halved over
and over, so maybe he did need the money. But
my theory is that that was part of it, but
not all of it. Because here's the thing. Bill was
also a guy that hung out with the rat Pack,
which I always found so fascinating about him. I mean,
(24:53):
he is a guy that hung out with Sinatra, Dean Martin,
Sammy Davis Junior, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and he was
sort of the guy off screen, right. He hung out
with them, he partied with them. He knew him very
very well, but he was not the public persona of
the rat Pack. But these guys, you know, they were
(25:14):
part of that time period where you would get together
at night and you'd get very drunk, so you could
say things that you could claim you didn't say the
next day or you didn't remember. And I'm sure there
are a lot of these parties that Bill was at
by nineteen fifty seven. He wanted to show his friends
that he wasn't just a comedy guy, that he also
(25:36):
had important things that he was doing well. The Twenty
Seventh Day is not a film that I recommend everyone
run out and watch. I mean, it was interesting for
me to see it because of my personal connection. It
is a movie that feels important because it is more
than even most of the other ones. It is clearly
about the Cold War. I mean, it's got a Russian,
it's got American. We can destroy them, they can destroy us,
(25:59):
and if they do, then the whole world's gone. Because
the aliens have said, we really need the earth, but
our culture prevents us from attacking you and taking it
from you. So we're going to give you these capsules
and then you'll when you destroy yourselves, then we'll move
in and take it over as if we're not worthy
or whatever. So yeah, so well, not the greatest movie,
(26:19):
but interesting.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So let's go back to the rat Pack for a second,
because that's fascinating. I read somewhere that I think it
was Sammy Davis Junior who had a UFO experience. He
did Bill, were talking with Bill about that, or yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
He did, because we were talking about the twenty seventh Day,
and he goes, yeah, well, you know, Sammy saw one,
and I was like, what tell me about it?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
And that image of Sammy Davis Junior seeing a UFO
is really quite amusing.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
He told Bill about it, but he told many other people.
He said he had seen a group of small silver discs,
and this was the early fifties, not a single light,
but multiple lights, multiple objects, and he described them as
hovering and darting and doing things that aircraft don't do.
And then this is the word that Bill used, and
then poof, they were gone. But that sounds pretty familiar
(27:05):
to a lot of the testimony we get these days.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Very much, which I think is much more a modern
depiction of UFOs than it was at that time.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yeah, and it's kind of incomprehensible to me that if
Bill was making this movie and hanging out with people
that they wouldn't have talked about UFOs a lot. Well.
And by the way, when I say ex officio member,
just a small sidebar. But in his later days Bill
has passed on. There's a picture I believe it was
in life magazine that shows Marilyn Monroe, who is sort
(27:37):
of she's been sewing into a tight dress on the
night that she sang Happy Birthday, mister President, so controversially,
and Bill directed that. He directed, oh really that night,
and Bill had a picture in his office where yes,
it had the Kennedy brothers and it had Marilyn, but
(27:57):
that had been cropped, and the full picture shows Bill
off to the side kind of looking down Maryland's cleavage
and all that, which I thought was pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So let's circle back to your theory about Bill's motivation
for taking on the twenty seventh day. I think I
agree that certainly the practical reason makes a lot of sense.
The idea that he has friends in the rat pack
that he wants to impress with doing something more serious
minded also makes sense. The fact that they're even talking
(28:26):
about UFOs casually in a friendly way that could give
him extra motivation. But I also know too that he
was in the military, so he might have had also
a unique point of view on the topic. Did he
ever mention anything like that to you.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
On that one time when we dived into the UFO topic,
He did. Bill had been in the US Army Signal
Corps in World War Two, and one of the things
he said, now, this is a triple negative, which it's
almost Yogi bearra ish in its triple negative. But he said,
I wrote this down because I thought I'd get it wrong.
Just because somebody in the military tells you something isn't
(29:00):
true doesn't mean that it's not wow. And I'm not
sure how to parse that exactly, Brent he was saying.
And how he explained that quote later was he put
nothing past the military because he figured if there was
something truly as important as the fact that flying saucers
or UFOs were real, the government would classify it and
lie about it. I never got the sense that Bill
(29:23):
himself saw a UFO. He made his movie that probably
there's not too much to be done with that. But
I will say this, in addition to the rat Pack,
he hung out with JFK, something that's kind of important
to our whole Dark Sky's chronology.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yet, and didn't he have a great kind of behind
the scenes story about JFK.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Listen, I tell this story at dinner parties. I don't
think I've told it on the air. I think this
is a first. It's tangential to the UFO topic. But
maybe you can find a UFO connection after I tell it.
Here's what happened, and Bill told me this, And the
thing is about Bill. First of all, he liked me,
so I appreciate that, and he wasn't about to bullshit me.
(30:05):
In fact, if anything, what I liked about him is
he didn't bullshit. He told you what he thought about
anything and everything. So anyway, this is what Bill told me.
He said that in the summer of nineteen sixty, when
JFK was nominated by the Democratic Party to run for president,
there was a party at Peter Lawford's house, either the
(30:25):
day before or the day after. I don't think this
was the night of the actual nomination, because I think
JFK had other things to do. And this party's going
on at Peter Lawford's house. Bill's there partying. We know
who the rat pack is, we've discussed him. But in
addition to the rat Pack, Marilyn is there and JFK
is there. This is July of nineteen sixty. And Bill
(30:45):
said that during the party, JFK and Marilyn went out
to the backpool house and they were gone a couple
hours and when they came back, Marilyn was wearing JFK's shirt.
He had a white dress shirt and she was wearing
it now And that's not the story though, That's just
he just told me that and said, yeah, of course, Maryland.
Oh yeah. So from the point of view of was
(31:08):
Maryland and JFK involved, I think we pretty much all
think that they were now, but people will still argue
about it. We certainly said they were in dark skies
in one of our episodes. Anyway, So the party goes on,
a lot of drinking is going on, because that's what
happens at these parties, and at some point in this party, JFK,
who's as drunk as everybody else in the party, goes
(31:30):
out onto PCH, which is in Malibu where Peter Lawford's
house was, and he's stopping traffic on PCH. So JFK
is out there on PCH stopping traffic and screaming, I'm
going to be the fucking president of the United States,
and this seemed like it could undermine his candidacy. So
(31:52):
the group dispatched Bill, and I believe Lawford, but it
was Bill and somebody else to go get him. So
Bill literally wrestled the future President of the United States
off pch back into the house so he would not
be in the newspapers the next morning. And all I
can say, just like you know with the UFO story,
people go, God, it happened, but no one will believe me.
(32:13):
Imagine a couple of those people that were stopped in
traffic probably said JFK was out there and he was yelling,
and nobody would believe them. Yeah, they're still telling that
story to this day. Maybe that's our UFO connection. Although
and we don't have to get it into in this episode.
You and I have talked at length about JFK and UFOs,
and so he made a TV series about it.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Well, look, I think so fascinating. Bill sounds like a
very interesting man. I'm envious that you've got to spend
so much time with him, I think, again, bringing this
back to the big picture, the fifties were a time
of when you look at it and aggregate, The general
sentiment coming out of Hollywood about UFOs and aliens was
(32:59):
that that it was all largely ridiculous and that there
was no consistent narrative about UFOs except one real overriding message,
which was don't take any of this seriously. Now, whether
that was a mandated message in general from the Robertson panel,
we cannot say. But I think if you look at
all of the movies, it raises the question, okay, was
(33:23):
that what the audience was meant to take away from
all of these movies? Meanwhile, well, the audience is being
told not to take it seriously. The government is still
taking the subject very seriously, as the story of Donald
Keho will demonstrate.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
You know, I love this story. It's hard to beat
JFK stopping traffic on PCH, but this one may do
it because it's so right on about any potential government
involvement in media. Because this is a classic. It's nineteen
fifty eight. It is January twenty second of nineteen fifty eight.
(34:00):
There's a TV show on CBS called Armstrong Circle Theater
and they have a program that is called quote UFO
Enigma of the Skies, and Keiho is on it, and
so or a bunch of other people. It was Major
Donald Keho. He had been a marine. So again Brent Navy, Right,
there goes the Navy thing. Again. Kio had been a marine,
(34:23):
and he felt that the military was lying about this
flying saucer thing, and he wrote a number of books
and he became the face of UFO disclosure in the
fifties into the sixties, into the early sixties. Think about
Major Keiho as kind of a Louel Azondo type or
maybe even a David Grush type. It wasn't exactly a
(34:43):
whistleblower because he was on the outside looking in. He
was banging on the door saying, tell us what you know,
and nobody would tell him. Ended up on that show,
and it was heavily scripted, and a number of people,
for example, who were asked to be on the show,
said I'm not going to be on that show. I
think one of them was even Jacques Valat is that yes,
(35:04):
you know those nerves in front of you. Is that true?
Speaker 1 (35:06):
That is true?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
And who said I'm not going to be on it
because they wanted to script it so tight that you
could only talk about what had already been decided.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yes. Well, And the thing that strikes me about this
was again, this was all scripted. Like you said, it
was meant to be a performative demonstration by higher ups
within the government and the military again to promote a
certain message that there's nothing to see here, folks. But
you have this one man in Keiho who decides I'm
not going to read the teleprompter anymore, and in the
(35:38):
midst of this live televised broadcast, decided to say that
the Air Force was deliberately hiding the truth from the
public about UFOs. Now, obviously this completely contradicted the official statement,
and that set into motion a whole chain of events
during that lives where he was then censored by the
(35:59):
show producer.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
They killed his mic. He said on the program and
now I'm going to reveal something that's never been disclosed before,
and then bam, Mike cut. Imagine this, you're watching this TV.
There's only three networks back in nineteen fifty eight, and
so he's got a pretty large audience, and most people
are at home, and a lot of people saw it,
and they're watching this guy talk about UFOs and he says,
(36:24):
I'm going to reveal something that's never been disclosed before,
used the word disclosed, and then they cut his mic,
and yet they continued to show him on camera. So
you see this guy moving his mouth but not saying anything, right,
and apparently some people his mic was cut, but you
could almost hear him on Douglas Edwards Mic a little
(36:45):
bit for a few people. But after this happened, he
released what he was going to say. So the censorship,
such as it worked in nineteen fifty eight, is not
valid today because this is what he was going to say.
For the last six months, we have been working with
a congressional committee investigating official secrecy about UFOs. If all
(37:06):
the evidence we have given this committee is made public
and open hearings, it will absolutely prove that UFOs are
real and machines under intelligent control. That's what got censored.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Amazing and that was and so, as you said, some
people actually did hear this, And in the wake of
that broadcast, when that segment was done, the show was
inundated with people calling in and saying, what happened? What
did I miss? I heard something? What's going on? So
again we're back to some small scattering of people that
(37:39):
heard that live at the time are probably out there saying, no,
but I heard a government official come on air and
disclose the truth.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
But alsobody, most silly is it that it all has
to be scripted because in today's cable news world and
social media It's almost demanded that anybody covering this topic
would bring in someone who's a skeptic and someone who's
a believer and let them fight about it, but not
back then. And I find I have one more quote,
(38:08):
and I'll be done for the day on this. But
this one, I just found it to be so incredible
because this is what CBS said when people wrote them
about this and said why did you cut his mic?
They said, this program had been carefully cleared for security reasons. Therefore,
it was the responsibility of this network to ensure performance
(38:32):
in accordance with predetermined security standards. Any indication there would
be a deviation might lead the statements that neither this
network nor the individuals on the program were authorized to
release that about sums it up right there, cover your
ass as what as I call that quote? I mean, well,
and here's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
So of course Keiho tries to disclose, right, very brave man. Ultimately,
his assistant accusations over the years of a conspiracy against
the government led to his effective marginalization and the suppression
of his message. He was able to write some books,
but he was being debunked by the government and the
(39:14):
military that he served, So that's an early lesson, right
for anyone else in the military. Look what happened to
Donald Keo when you tried to tell the truth?
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think Donald Keijo in the same way Louel Azando
by many is considered kind of a hero of the movement.
Now I realize Elzando's very controversial. Keiho was never that controversial.
I own like five of Keyho's books, which maybe all
of them, I don't know, it's some amount of them,
and I've read three of them cover to cover, and
I have to say he has a style. It's a
(39:44):
very personal kind of style. It's kind of personal journalism
before that became a thing. Right. He's not Hunter Thompson
or anything, but he is talking about his investigation and
they're very good. In particular, he's going through case after case.
Any one of his books is full of cases where
if you read it, you'd say, good grief. I mean that,
(40:05):
what's the explanation for that? There's just no explanation other
than an omalus. So I think he did the world
a whole lot of good with his work. And I
think the other thing is, yes, he was getting debunked,
no problem, No question about it. But he had a
lot of fans. And why was that he had fans
(40:26):
because a lot of people knew something was not right.
The government wasn't coming completely clean on this. Now at
the time, he was really the receptacle of their suspicions
because most of the government stuff that they weren't being
honest about would come out later in memos that were
released almost decades later during the Freedom of Information Act.
(40:48):
But he was a great guy, just a great guy,
and we own a lot well.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
And I think this is a great segue now into
what does it all mean and where does this take
us on our journey of exploring kind of that unholy
alliance between Hollywood and the government. You know, as we've
seen the fifties was this really strange decade where the
narrative of the UFO phenomenon kind of shifted from Sirius
(41:16):
in the wake of Roswell and what's going on to
very silly in aggregate. One of the things that accomplished though,
was it started to open the door to mock and
stigmatize anyone who dared believe that aliens might be real.
And while some of the stench of that has worn off,
in the intervening years. I still meet people today who
(41:38):
confide in me their personal stories knowing what my mindset
is on this. So I hear these incredible UFO encounters
that they have never told anyone else out of fear
of being ostracized, not unlike our friend Donald Keiho, and
by the way, to me personally, not unlike my daughter.
I told you the story that my daughter saw UFOs
(41:59):
with a friend of her. They were scared that it
happened at three in the morning when they were supposed
to be asleep in this sleepover, and so they didn't
want to tell the parents then. But as they got older,
they decided they didn't want to say anything because they
thought people would consider them crazy. And it wasn't until
my daughter was in her late teens and she knew
that I was involved in dark skies and she started
(42:22):
to understand what my past and my belief system was.
That she confessed this to me, and she felt that
I was a safe harbor at that point. But again,
was that the intention of the Robertson panel was to
start just moving the conversation far enough that it would
open the door to start stigmatizing anyone who dared come forward,
(42:43):
whether it was Donald Keho or a teenage girl and
anyone in between, from telling their story without fearing the
stigmatization or the ostratization.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
That would come great Pointsaul. If you think back to
the Robertson panel, you really do have to ask yourself
what they're trying to tell us in their statements and
in their recommendations. Is UFOs aren't real? But just to
save the public from all this anxiety over it, we
need to debunk them and make people think they're silly. Okay.
Another explanation could be UFOs are very real, and they're saying,
(43:18):
we're not ready to talk about this yet. So what
arrows do we have in our quiver? And one of
them is the media and movies and television being the
biggest part of that. If I just hailed back to
the Disney thing that we started the show with, whatever
the Robertson panel envisioned and imagined back in nineteen fifty three,
(43:41):
Disney really didn't just touch this topic lightly. Across seventy
plus years, Disney's built a family facing pipeline for things
like space travel, aliens, artificial life, other intelligences, non human intelligences.
If there is a message. It eludes me because the
message seems to be let's throw a whole bunch of
stuff against the wall and see what sticks. I don't know,
(44:04):
is that how you see it, or what's your take?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
You know what that is? Exactly? My take is when
there is a lack of coherence to the message, then
you stop looking for meaning and you just treat it
as entertainment. If I were to theorize what the whole
point of potentially the Robertson panel is, let's turn down
the volume on this and if it's out there in
the public consciousness as just entertainment, then maybe no one
(44:29):
will bother thinking about it and wasting any time on
it as a serious topic. It was funny the other
day I started thinking, what I feel like is I
feel like I'm a district attorney trying to prove a
case and looking at all the evidence and saying, what
was really going on here? Was their motive? Right? Was
their criminal activity? Was their coercion? All of these things?
(44:50):
We can't answer that yet definitively, but I feel like
that's what we're starting to bring to the surface.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Well, another fun time with you talking about this stuff,
and for those of you over at Disney, please don't
hate us. 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
(45:17):
by Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthauser and Your hosts and
executive producers are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman.
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