February 26, 2026 • 50 mins
Steven Spielberg is Mr. Close Encounters—the filmmaker who arguably made UFOs “respectable” on screen, starting with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and its three distinct cuts: 1977, 1980, 1998). In Episode 2, hosts Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman revisit the granddaddy of UFO cinema and explain why that movie still feels like it was beamed in from the phenomenon itself: the five-note language, the lights, the “orbs,” the stigma of reporting, and the obsessive pull that turns an ordinary guy into a human compass pointing straight at the truth.
Then the episode pivots to the question that won’t go away: Did Spielberg ever get offered “the deal”—the same kind of covert approach Bryce and Brent say they received around Dark Skies? The guys lay out the folklore, the timing, and the circumstantial breadcrumbs, including Spielberg’s overt attempts to get cooperation (and the pushback he says he got), plus the larger “two factions” idea—some parts of government discouraging UFO talk while others may be using the cover of fiction to normalize it.
And because this is Sound, Light & Frequency, it gets personal. Bryce shares what it’s like to be in Spielberg’s orbit—developing a UFO pilot for him, working on Taken, and sitting with Spielberg and Hanks on an Emmy night—yet still finding him a “man of mystery” on the UFO question. Brent brings the episode’s most hair-raising anecdote: what Dark Skies director Tobe Hooper once told him during a crop-circle scout—an offhand, no-BS story suggesting Spielberg had been approached and briefed. Hooper isn’t here to confirm it, but Brent and Bryce explain why they take the memory seriously.
Finally, the guys drop the episode’s ultimate rabbit hole: Serpo—the rumored “exchange” story that sounds eerily adjacent to the film’s ending. Coincidence? Reverse-inspiration? Or something stranger, where the line between history and Hollywood gets fuzzy by design? Either way, “Mr. Close Encounters” is a smart, funny, deep dive into why Spielberg sits at the center of UFO pop culture—and why his “truth-to-fiction” ratio still haunts the conversation.
Hosted by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman.
Find us on iHeartPodcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Visit us at SoundLightFrequency.com
Sound, Light & Frequency is produced by Stellar Productions. Executive Producers are Bryce Zabel, Brent Friedman, Nick Johnson, and Jackie Zabel.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When Steven Spielberg started to make the movie, he sought
cooperation from two places, the Air Force and NASA. On
one level, it just contextualizes what we're talking about. Obviously,
if somebody did come to him, they came in a
more covert way. This is the overt part of this story.
First off, NASA. In nineteen seventy eight, he was talking
(00:22):
in an interview Spielberg himself, and he said that NASA
wrote him a twenty page letter asking him not to
make the film. He had wanted cooperation, but they, as
he put it, they read the script and got very
angry and felt it was a film that would be dangerous.
(01:00):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs. I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening
to Sound, Light and Frequency. Today we're going to have
a close encounter of the Spielberg kind. So grab your
gas mask. We are going to Devil's Tower. So on
(01:31):
our last episode, we told you about the deal we
were offered by JC from the Office of Naval Intelligence,
the deal to make Dark Skies part of their slow
Drip disclosure program. And we also told you about that
strange formula that JC gave us the one that he
wrote on the back of a bank envelope. Okay, so
that deal and the formula are two subplots in our story,
(01:54):
and we're going to be coming back to them many
times throughout the series. And these are super important to
the overall story we're telling, and we're certainly not trying
to be cute by not jumping into them immediately. It's
just that we want to do two things. We want
to provide context for them, and we also want to
take you inside the story and that way you can
experience this brush with the phenomenon and even the cover
(02:15):
up as close to the way we did as possible,
and hopefully together we might just find some answers. So
today we're going to shift focus away from our personal
story and pull back to Hollywood at large. We're starting
with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What we want
to do is sort of set the stage for what's
to come and to sort of let this flow. And
(02:37):
in order to do that, it sure seems like a
good move to start with the actual granddaddy, the best
UFO movie probably ever made and maybe forever, and that's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg. That's right,
and it's a movie that I think most people would
generally say is the seminal film that depicts UFOs aliens.
(03:01):
It got tons of critical acclaim made lots of money.
What do we think the log line is for this? Well,
it's pretty simple, actually, you know, and folks, you know
what a log line is. That's how we're supposed to
explain everything we do in Hollywood in a single sentence.
And that's kind of a great exercise sometimes because it
allows you to sort of say, what is my movie
or what is my TV series really about the log
(03:24):
line that we're positing. I don't know what they pitched.
This is just what we've got here to look at.
When ordinary people around the world experience strange visions and
encounters with UFOs, one man's obsession drives him to uncover
the truth culminating in humanity's first face to face meeting
with extraterrestrials, which you know, it almost takes the drama
(03:47):
out of it to put it into that, because, I mean,
let's face it, the reason people remember this is that
Richard Dreyfus, who plays the character Roy Neary, sees a
UFO has his life turned upside down. It's all about
his journey and it's all about mankind first having this
major encounter out in Wyoming at the end of the film.
(04:09):
I think if you ask what people remember most, they
remember dun, dunt, dunt. I'm so glad, by the way, Brent,
that you could actually do that, because I can't carry
a tune and I couldn't do that. I'm glad you
did it. It's the most incredible five notes in probably
the history of music. And as I understand it, when
they were trying to come up with something, because I
(04:30):
wanted to talk about the nature of communication and that
it's not always language or the language could be music,
and apparently Spielberg and Williams came to the conclusion that
six notes was too many. Seven notes was definitely too many,
and four notes wasn't enough, but five was just right,
which makes you sound like, Okay, great, there can't be
that many options. But I think when they ran it
(04:52):
through a mathematician, he came back and said, if you've
got five notes, you've got something like three hundred and
sixty thousand options or something. But you know what, Brent,
they came up with the right one, because it sticks
in my head to this day. Absolutely, it's haunting, And
just to connect back to our podcast, if you think
about it, the communication that the primary form of communication
(05:15):
is sound, light, and frequency. Right, You've got the sound,
you've got the tones, you've got the lights at the end, right,
and then you have the frequency, which is actually shattering
glass right in that final scene up on Devil's Tower.
So I think it's interesting that even though that was
not part of they don't say that in the movie,
that is actually something that comes right back to our
(05:36):
basic thesis that sound, light, and frequency may be the
secrets of the universe might just be. And one of
the things that I found interesting in getting ready to
do this was just how Spielberg thought Close Encounters of
the Third Kind was a great title for the thing,
and he got that from Jay Allen Heinik, who of
course is the first person who ever defined it and
was working on Close Encounters as a consultant, And just
(06:00):
for the sake of people who were, like, h what's
that all about? Just a reminder, you're not the only
people that might wonder that. The marketing people, when they
were getting ready to put out this film, they were concerned.
This made me laugh because I was listening to an
interview that I think Spielberg said, some of the people
in the marketing department thought it sounded like it had
something to do with porn. Close encounters of the third kind,
(06:23):
and so they went in their marketing very clearly. Over
and over they had everybody explaining what it was. Close
encounters of the first kind is a close range siding.
Close encounters of the second kind are physical effects, so
whether it's radiation burns or maybe landing depressions on the ground.
(06:45):
But a close encounter of the third kind is a
UFO siding where there is direct visual contact with an occupant,
whether you want to call them non human intelligence or
aliens or visitors or others, seeing somebody who ain't from
around the neighborhood. Well, now, interestingly, they could have avoided
(07:06):
all of these marketing headaches ipt they'd just gone with
the original title, which was Watch the Skies, which is
a great title. I say that often in emails. Watch
the Skies. It's a little bit of a painful thing
for me because about twenty years ago somebody passed away
and they had collected all of the great screenplays and
my wife and I inherited them all and that included
(07:28):
I believe a first draft of Watch the Skies, first
production draft.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Did it say that on the title? Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Okay, yes, it said watch the Skies on the title page,
and it was clearly real. I mean, this guy had
all the originals. And at the time, we were in
what you would call cleaning mode, and my wife was saying,
why do I have scripts all over the house here?
We've got to do something with them, and so we
donated them to the Writer's Guild of America. So that
(07:55):
means anyone listening to this, if you're a member or
you can go to their library, you could read that
same copy that we donated. And my only regret, of course,
is it would probably be worth millions on an eBay
account right now. But you know what, you got to
help the world.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Got to help the world. Well, So getting back to
the movie.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
From a personal standpoint, I had a very interesting experience
that a movie came out in seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It came out after Star.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Wars, but the same year as still the same year
as Star Wars, right, but I think later that year.
And I grew up in the Bay Area, I was
not old enough at that time to get in a
car and go see the movie. I don't even know
that I was aware of the movie, to be honest,
except a friend of mine's father had apparently had some
sort of UFO experience, was all fired up to see it,
(08:41):
put a bunch of kids in the car, me included,
and we went out on opening night. Now, apparently Close
Encounters opened only in two theaters, initially LA and New
York for a week or two, and then once everyone
you know was convinced it was a hit, it went wide.
So I think the second or week or what ever,
when it opened in San Francisco. I saw it on
(09:02):
opening night and it blew my mind. I had never
seen anything like that before, and some of those images
are still haunt me. I probably have seen the movie
thirty times. I've seen it a lot. I don't think
i've seen it thirty And by the way, I'm just curious,
what was the audience reaction. Were they reacting with you
at the same time, Yeah, I mean the audience reaction,
there were gasps. I think basically Spielberg wanted to He's
(09:26):
said in quotes that he wanted to capture that childlike
wonder of experiencing something that kids don't question.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Right, and he cast the movie that way.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
You know, a lot of the actors he felt had
that childlike quality, and I think that came out in
the screenings where the audience were just swept up in
this experience and they weren't questioning whether any of this
was possible. They were questioning when was it going to
happen to them? That was my takeaway, and that was
I remember on the ride home, everyone was talking about
(09:58):
how cool it would be to go inside the sho
although you didn't get to go inside the ship when
it was released in nineteen seventy seven. Just to be clear,
there were there have been three versions of Close Encounters
of the Third Kind released. The first was that feature
that you saw in nineteen seventy seven, and then there
was a special edition in nineteen eighty. When Spielberg made
(10:18):
what he called a deal with the Devil. He agreed
to take more money to shoot some scenes that were
more euphological in nature, and he wanted to put those
in the film, and in exchange, the studio said, yeah,
but you got to take him on board the ship.
So he shot the scene that took everybody on board
the ship with Roy Neary, and then in nineteen ninety
(10:39):
eight he finally got to put the director's cut out,
and it doesn't have that. He really felt like the
audience should make up their own mind about what was
inside the ship. So that's out of there now. I
just to go back to I don't have a great
I didn't sit in San Francisco with the big cool crowd.
I was a young TV newsman in Eugene, Ore and
(11:00):
I had a cameraman who was very into this, and
I was kind of into it too. We drive around
all day looking for stories, and we were very expectant
about this thing because a couple of years earlier, as
a young FM news guy, I had covered the Travis
Walton case. So I was like, Okay, I know a
little bit about UFOs. I wonder if this is going
(11:21):
to have since it was the third kind Occupants, if
it would be an abduction film in some respect. I
thought maybe it would be. And even though Roy Neary,
the main character, isn't abducted per se, the young little
boy who's in the film is abducted. So it's both
it's an abduction film and it's a wondrous film, and
(11:42):
the only thing I thought, when you're dying about wonder
Spielberg did go a little too far for some people
in that opening film. In the final credits, they played
the song when you Wish upon a Star, and it's
a little saccharin for a UFO film. But people seem
to forgive it. But I don't think it's in the
director's cut. No, I believe it was taken out. I
think it got some negative reactions. Well, you know, the
(12:04):
interesting thing is just to give some cultural context here.
If you think about it, what Jaws did for monster movies,
Close Encounters did for alien movies, which is it legitimized
those genres?
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Right?
Speaker 1 (12:15):
These were no longer B and C Hollywood movies. These
were huge commercial box office successes and critically acclaimed movies,
And so I think it changed a lot. But as
you said, even in the special edition, he depicted the
inside of a ship. And while most people at that
time probably felt this felt real, this felt like what
(12:37):
the UFO experience is all about. I think if you
compare what he showed as the inside of the ship
with what abductees over the years have described, he did
not get that right.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
No, he did not get that right.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Now, interestingly, I think people can say he did get
a lot right right. And by the way, that's what
JC said to us when he came to make a deal.
That was what him apparently and the Office of Naval
Intelligence Two dark skies. But let's go back and look
now at a list of some of the things that
we believe that he did get right, that Spielberg got
(13:11):
right and put on film, in some cases the first
that anyone ever seen.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
With regards to.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
The uphology, there certainly were a lot of first in it.
In one respect, it sort of begins with what you
might call a UFO flap, where everybody knows there's going
to be UFO's out tonight, so let's go out. And
you know, there's people in their trucks and their armchairs
(13:36):
and sitting outside watching them. And on the night that
that's happening, this main character, Roy Neary, who played by
Dreyfus again is electrician. The power's out, so again there's
a euphological thing and somehow they influence the power through
some kind of electromagnetic pulse event or whatever, and he's
(13:56):
out doing his repairs and that is a creepy but
very cool and incredibly iconic scene. There he is in
his truck, he sees a light sort of behind his truck,
and then suddenly all hell breaks loose, right, the truck
shaking and everything's going on. Now, technically, was that a
close encounter of the second kind that he has there? Yes, okay,
so we're escalating. In fact, you go from a first
(14:19):
kind where they've been seen, and then you go to, well, actually,
now I question that he has his encounter first, and
then we see the UFOs the next we start, and
we start with them finding lost planes from Oh yeah, right,
I'm talking about people who saw things. So I think
we can say that was the first kind, right, I
(14:40):
have to say, yeah, I got to go back to
the lost planes. For me, listen, this is just personal opinion.
I was a lot less impressed by the family stuff.
It always irritated me a little bit because this Roy
Neary character has a family that, you know, it's kind
of dysfunctional, and every time I was watching that, I
was like, come on, let's get to the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Come on.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And so you really get the good stuff at the
beginning of the film, where they are finding in the
middle of a sandstorm in the desert, all these planes
from the World War II era. Frankly, I think it's
from Flight nineteen that was lost over the Bermuda Triangle allegedly.
And there they are. They're in the desert, and not
(15:23):
only the planes untouched, but our guys are discovering it.
And it's very secret and it's a wonderful scene.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And the planes are intact.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Maybe they turn them on right, yeah, and they've got
the same fuel in them and everything. It's really great
and so but I just realized what the other first
kind experience is as we go inside the air traffic
controller tower.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yes, that is one of.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
The most authentic UFO scenes I have ever seen. It
feels like it's a transcript of something that actually must
have happened. It is brilliant. It's just it's people talking
to a jet pilot who is experiencing some kind of sighting.
He's trying to call it in to them, and they
all know something crazy is happening. And so you see
(16:05):
more of these air traffic controllers coming together and the
main guy is saying, do you want to report? Do
you want to make a report? Do you want to
make a report? And everybody knows, but they haven't said
the word yet. And then the next time, do you
want to report a UFO? And of course that really
touches on the major thing about UFOs, which is there's
(16:25):
been a stigma all these years. Absolutely, not only do
pilots not want to report these things, but the average
person that sees something is very concerned about talking about
it because their family will say to them, please, don't
talk about that anymore. My friends think you're weird, dad,
that kind of thing. So there's been a lot of stigma.
There's certainly been stigma for pilots, many of which were
(16:47):
grounded historically for daring to report. So ultimately that pilot
does not report it ties in with something that's very
big in the UFO world right now. Ryan Graves, who
is the lieutenant in the US and an FA eighteen
F fighter pilot who spent ten years doing this. He
was the guy on the twenty fifteen USS Roosevelt incident
(17:09):
who reported spears inside of huge Yeah, that's kind of
a weird thing to be out flying around, and he
and his fellow pilots reported those things. That's a far
cry from reporting a flying saucer. You know, something like that.
But he has started the Americans for Safe Aerospace. He's
testified before Congress about this. So in many respects, if
(17:30):
there's any progress being made at all in this topic,
one of them is at least among the first responders,
if you will, in the air, the pilots, there is
less stigma. They are more and more being encouraged to
tell people what they see well. And so but that's
a perfect example of what one of the things Spielberg
got right. He captured that era in terms of the stigma, right,
(17:53):
as you said, not just to pilots but to the
general public. But going back to the thing that Ryan
Graves saw, which was the sphere inside the square, the
sphere the energy being the orb if you will, that
was the first time I believe they had ever been
shown on film in close encounters, right. You see the
big crafts, the beautiful the ice cream cones, I think
(18:15):
as they're called in the coming around the mountain sequence,
but then trailing them as almost like they're the managers
or the scouts or something, are these little energy balls,
these little balls of light? And I don't think that
had ever been discussed before in public, don't it certainly
had never been seen on film. I think it all
goes back to the Foo fighters right in World War Two.
(18:37):
So where that came from don't know. But that's also
something that everyone is talking about today. Everybody's talking about
the orbs, and not just orbs flying around, I mean
louel Azondo, who of course is almost synonymous with UFO
disclosure efforts because he was part of that twenty seventeen
disclosure and helped get those three first videos from the
(18:57):
Navy out before everybody when the New York Times reported
on it. Loue Elizanda wrote a book that came out
last year called Imminent, Great Book, and it's a very
powerful book, and it's really his inside or account of
working in the Pentagon trying to get the truth out,
and when he couldn't get the truth out, he quit
so that he could talk from the outside. In this book,
(19:20):
there's a chapter where he talks about these orbs are
inside his house, and not only is he seeing them,
his wife is seeing them, his kids have seen them.
They're outside the house, neighbors see them, which raises all
kinds of questions that won't be gotten into in this episode.
But sort of the hitchhiker effect. Do these orbs attach
(19:42):
themselves to people or things or places well, But going
back to Close Encounters, now ask the question these had
really never been discussed in public. They again, they were
referenced in World War II lore around about the Foo fighters,
but they were brought into the lexicon for the public
in Close Encounters as these light orbs. Now we know
(20:03):
either Steven Spielberg was prescient in terms of picking something
that would become such a defining element of modern upology today,
but he was also being advised by two very interesting
people on this movie, Jay Allen Heinik and Jacques Valet,
who you actually have a personal experience with, Well, I do.
This year, I got to have lunch at Jacques Frolat's
(20:24):
apartment of all things, and it's so envious. It was
such a cool thing, I mean to think, well, first
of all, his lovely wife made lunch for us. I mean,
that was pretty cool. But apropos of Close Encounters because
it's hard not to talk to him about it. What
everyone needs to understand is there is a character in
Close Encounters, the French scientist Lacombe, and Lacombe is played
(20:47):
by the great French director of Francois Truffau played very well,
but laid incredibly well. He grounds it. I think that's
Spielberg's crowning accomplishment in casting. He had to screw up
his courage to ask him, and he said yes, and
he came and said, I don't need to be a
director here, I'm an actor. And he acted the hell
out of it. Yeah, did a great job. But that
(21:07):
character was certainly inspired by Jacques Vallet. So people have
asked Jacques about this all the time, so you know,
I'm not going to go to his house and not
ask him. So I did say, what's your take on
being portrayed in film? And I bet that was kind
of cool, And of course he's got that smile, and
of course it was cool. He loved it. But the
thing that he said and has said consistently is the
(21:30):
ending is a little too positive for him, based on
the evidence that he has seen in his ongoing investigations.
He's not saying that it's completely wrong. He's just saying
there's a darker side to what he has seen in
the people and the witnesses he's talked to. And I
thought that was kind of interesting. It also mirrors something
that the great UFO researcher Stanton Friedman said. Stanton also
(21:53):
felt that it's hard not to see Close Encounters of
the third kind and say, what a great freaking movie
this is. It's not a documentary, it's a movie, right,
And so Stanton felt very much like Jock Delay, which
is it's great ending, it's fun. But there's another side
to all this. Well, speaking of another side to all
of this and going back to this concept of firsts,
(22:16):
I think this is the other aspect of Close Encounters.
We want to talk about outside the movie, everything surrounding
the movie. So in the topic of first I want
to bring up a friend and a colleague who you,
of course know because we both worked with him as
the director on our Dark Sky's Pilot, our Total Pilot.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
That's Toby Hooper. Just to give a.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Little context here, I was friends with Toby because we
were working on an independent movie developing it a couple
of years prior, and when we were looking for directors
for the Dark Sky's Pilot, we hit on Toby and
everyone got excited about Toby. Of course, Toby had done
you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, where he worked
with Steven Spielberg, and apparently he and Steven were very
(22:57):
good friends. So here's a very interesting story that goes
back to when we were scouting locations for The Dark
Sky's Pilot. We were up in the New Hall Ranch area,
which is north of Los Angeles, up in the hills,
and we were looking for an area where we could
shoot our crop circle sequence we had in the Dark
Sky's Pilot. There's a big crop circle right that is
(23:19):
the main character finds and has a whole interesting experience with.
And so at the end of the day, after we
had scouted this whole area, the small production group went
down to like kind of a roadhouse restaurant, and because
I had previously been friends with Toby, I sat aside
with him while everyone else was talking about logistics and whatnot.
And he had told me before that he and Steven
(23:42):
were really good friends, but they were very competitive, right,
especially when it came to film, And I had said
to him over dinner, you're going to finally beat Stephen
in something. You're going to be the first one to
put a crop circle on film, because despite everything Stephen
had done up until that point, he had not done
that and Toby kind of chalked and said, yeah, yeah,
I mean, but I'll never be ahead of Stephen in
(24:04):
this category. And I was like, why, what do you mean.
He goes, well, I mean he knows a lot. He
knows way more than me. And I said, oh really,
how so he said, well, yeah, I guess like sometime
after Jaws or something, you know, because Jaws was such
a big hit, he was approached by some people from
(24:25):
the military or the government or something and they offered
him some sort of deal. Now, to put this in
full context, this was before the pilot had been shot.
It was certainly before the pilot had aired, which means
this is way before the premiere party when people came
to you and I and said we want to make
(24:45):
you a deal. So I'm hearing about a deal before
it's even happened to us at any rate. This was
what Toby said. He didn't make a big sorry for
the punt, He didn't make a big deal out of it.
It was just a conversational thing. I questioned him about
it a little bit and he kind of moved on
and that was that. Now, unfortunately Toby has passed away,
so we have no way to prove this. And I'm
(25:07):
sure Steven Spielberg is not going to come on our
podcast and talk about this, but he's welcome to anytime. Yes,
so please come. We'd love to talk about your movies.
We're huge fans. But I think now what we have
to do is we have to ask the question if
this were true. And we're not saying it is, We're
just saying there's anecdotal evidence. Let's look at some other evidence,
(25:28):
some circumstantial evidence that might imply maybe Steven and the
people who made close Encounters knew something that may have
been given some information. And let's start with Bryce project Cirpo.
Oh boy, you want to start with Cirpo. Let's start
with you're going for the Okay, let's put the smoke
and gun on the table, all right, We're going to
follow up on all of that.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
We'll be back after a break.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Well, okay, And I don't think we have to worry
about spoilers. This movie's been out for almost fifty years now,
so if you get spoiled on this one, tough luck.
The film ends when Roy Neary, the Dreyfus character, goes
to what is the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, which by
(26:15):
the way, is a real place, and Louel Zondo even
lives in there there, which I find fascinating. But that's
another episode, of course. But Dreyfus goes there, and the
ending of the film is literally there are twelve people
who are ready to go onto this mothership and be
taken to the home planet of these aliens in kind
(26:36):
of a trade, and Dreyfus gets to go with him.
He's the thirteenth man, if you will. I think he's
singled out as the only one that goes if I
remember correctly. Everyone else is left behind. Oh they are. Yeah,
you're telling me something I didn't understand. I've watched this,
that's my reading. I've seen it thirty times. I got
I got the only one that walks on the ship
when we go inside the ship, it's him.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
But Kaish always saw there's a line of those the
conga line of thirteen people in the red suits, I thought,
in all the little gray surround him and they take
him individually up onto the ship.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Wow, I'm so back to projects.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I'm trying to process this right now because I've just
learned something totally new. Okay, well, okay, but there were
twelve of them, and they supposedly went off to another
planet or were supposed to, whether it was just Roy
that went or not. And then one of the alien
stays here, which is exactly what supposedly happened in real
(27:37):
life in nineteen sixty five, according to the rumors, And
again they're rumors. There's no hard evidence I've ever seen
that Project Circle was real. But supposedly in nineteen sixty five,
we did send a dozen people someplace. They came back
thirteen years later, and they told about their life and
adventures on this other planet. And what's interesting thing about
(28:00):
it is it's a chicken and egg kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
All right?
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Did this really happen? And then did people come to
Spielberg and say, by the way, here's something you might
want to consider for your ending. There's this real thing.
Or is it the other way around that Spielberg comes
up with this thing about twelve people being ready to
go off to another planet, and then later because of
this didn't really make the public until two thousand and five. Correct,
(28:27):
So it's chicken and egg. Where do you come down
on that chicken or egg? Well, hold on, I'm going
to withhold my chicken and egg vote for just a moment,
just looking at the evidence again, and I think this
actually brings up some of the what's so frustrating about
you afology, right, is because once you start looking at
it kind of analytically, at some point you find yourself
(28:49):
you've fallen into the you've stepped into the phenomenon, and
everything logic doesn't always hold up there. If you look
at the chicken idea, then you say, okay, well Spielberg
was the one that planted this idea, where did it
come from? Well, as you said, there's only rumors about
Project CERPO. They're pretty sophisticated and elaborate, to the point
(29:11):
where I believe hundreds, if not thousands of pages were
leaked right that were part of some sort of Defense
agency classified documents or something. Obviously, those, like almost everything
that comes out into the public sphere, have been highly contested,
and you know, people have tried to debunk them and whatnot.
(29:32):
So we don't have any verifiable evidence that Project CERPO happened.
But if somebody was trying to reintroduce it into the public,
why did they wait almost thirty years to do so?
That seems odd. So no one knew about it in
seventy seven, seemingly. Is it a coincidence that Steven Spielberg
(29:52):
puts this out there and then almost thirty years later
it seeps out into the public. Now, the other side
of it, as you said, is well, what if someone
was just copying this? Okay, that's possible, But what a
strange coincidence that it came out in seventy seven as
this idea in a movie and then suddenly it becomes
(30:13):
this UFO touch point to the point where now there's
a documentary that's coming out on Apple. That's the thing
is where does the truth end and the fiction begin?
We don't know. It's a lot And if you think
about it, in two thousand and five, when they first
started talking about Circle, and by the way, this is
a quagmire that we could be caught in forever talking
(30:33):
Cirpo's talk. But when they first came out with it,
they said that they were taken to zeta reticuli, which,
if you're listening, you're saying zet a reticuli. That sounds somewhat,
That sounds familiar. The reason it sounds familiar is that's
where Betty and Barney Hill, who were abducted in nineteen
sixty one, said that they were that the people who
(30:55):
abducted them were from the Zemens. Yeah, they were Zeta reticular,
who took them and experimented on them and put them back.
Now what's interesting is, again Surpo was supposed to have
happened in nineteen sixty five. Okay, Betty and Barney's story
didn't actually become public until nineteen sixty six. As I
(31:15):
recall when the interrupted journey, Well it was sixty No,
it was late sixty five, So all this is going
on at the same time. Now I have to tell you,
I don't know what to make of this. There is
not a lick of hard evidence on the Project Circo front.
There's just a lot of people that talk about it,
and we're now two of them apparently. But I will
say it's worth talking about whether Spielberg was approached or not,
(31:39):
because what I will take to the bank over the
Surpos story is your story about Toby Hoopert. I remember
when you told me that, and I was I mean,
that took me back, because we all know Spielberg, and
for someone who worked with them to say, oh, yeah,
they came and talked to him. So let's just step
back for a minute and say, is it possible that
(32:03):
Spielberg was approached. Well, first of all, look at his
status in nineteen seventy four. I think Jaws comes out,
it's a huge hit, and the very next thing he
wants to do is Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
and he takes over two years making it before it
comes out in seventy seven, almost three years he's working
on it, So there's plenty of time for people to
(32:25):
realize he's working on it and to have approached him
if they wanted to. We should point out, though, in
the totality of this Stephen Spielberg has always denied ever
being officially briefed. He's denied the mere act of it,
let alone surpo or anything else. He has said repeatedly
that he was simply fascinated by UFO reports he had
(32:49):
read from Heinek and Valet, and he wanted to make
a film about Awe and contact. That's his official position now,
not to get into name dropping yearning, but we both
worked with the guy. Yeah, so I think we should
at least talk about our impressions about what he knew
and what he didn't know about UFOs. You want to
go first, Well, I think yes, we both work with
(33:10):
them ironically on UFO alien projects, right that were not
dark skuys. We're not close encounters. My experience was, you know,
somewhat less than yours, which is I was working at
Electronic Arts on a game when he had a deal
down the hall on a project code named Lmno, which
(33:30):
was about a female alien who is on Earth and
kind of like the man who fell to Earth, has
interesting powers and you're playing as this alien woman navigating
trying to escape the clutches of various government people who
are trying to catch her and whatnot. And so my
experiences sitting in the room with Steven, you know, bouncing
(33:51):
story ideas on occasion was he has that childlike wonder
right that he was looking to capture in close encore.
He asked a lot of questions. I didn't personally feel
that he was any expert on the topic, but he
certainly had a lot of interest and enthusiasm for it.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Absolutely. I met him three times, but only once in
a hard UFO context. First time I met him was
literally I got hired to write a video game called
Ghost in the machine for DreamWorks and had a meeting
with him. This is when Dark Skies was on, though
I will say this as I was introduced to him
at that time. He shook my hand and said, great
(34:33):
to see you again. And this is the first time
I ever met him, so I'm sure that's a line
that he must have to use. And he said, I'm
a big fan of Dark Skys and I was a
surprise to me for reasons that we will go into
in an episode further downstream, but anyway, that happened. Then
in nineteen ninety nine, I was hired to work on
(34:53):
the Taken mini series and was part of that original
writer's room and was one of the three time producers
on it. And we had I think three different There
was no zoom back then, right, so instead of a zoom,
he had somebody. He was in the Hamptons and he
had a photographer there and we had a photographer where
(35:14):
we were out here in Hollywood, and the three of
us had a meeting with Spielberg and I'll come back
to it. And second, the third time I met him
was I was chairman of the TV Academy and they said,
who do you want to sit with? At the Emmys,
and this was the year that he and Hanks were
nominated for Band of Brothers and won the Emmy, and
I said, I get to pick and they said sure,
and I went, what about them? So they sat me
(35:35):
with them and that was wonderful. Back to Taken though,
as people know, I think it's a ten part mini
series that was on Sci Fi and it actually is
very similar in some respects to Dark Skies, which preceded
it by three years, I believe. And we had worked
out a lot of things. The writer's room really knocked
out all kinds of things about UFOs and it was
(35:57):
a pretty darn good story and we were sort of
I think we had sent the paperwork to him and
then he was responding to it. All I'm going to
say is this, He didn't sound like a guy that
was briefed. He sounded like a guy. I wouldn't say
childlike wonder that's what the movie version of him was.
I would just say he sounded like a guy of
which I've talked to hundreds, who is really into the
(36:19):
UFO UAP topic, wants to know what you know, knows
enough about certain incidents that he wants to say what
do you think about this? What about that? And it
was a pretty lively interesting conversation all three times where
he would, yes, he had story points about the arc
of everything, but he would also want to stop and
(36:40):
talk about the UFO angle of something. It blew my mind.
I was so I felt really great that I got
to be a part of that and we could talk
about that.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
For a while.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
What I'd rather say, though, is people constantly do allege
that he was briefed and that somehow he was to
do things to help acclimate us to the alien contact issue,
to make it easier for us to understand what's going on.
Let's put that under a microscope for a second, because
(37:11):
I look, I'd love to believe it. It sounds interesting and
it happened to us, so why not. I mean, it
could easily have happened if they're coming to us. It's
why go to Friedman and Zabel when you got Spielberg
to go to I mean, so, yeah, I can definitely
believe that. But if there's a message that was imparted
to Spielberg in which he was supposed to impart to
(37:32):
the public, it's a very confused message. Think about this
close encounters they're the space Brothers.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
They're benevolent space.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Benevolent space brother aliens, et cuddly scientists running around. Okay,
war of the world's badass martians, marauding the countryside and
killing people, falling skies, a full on alien invasion.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
What's the message there?
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, so this is a very interesting topic. I think,
first of all, I have to personally ask myself, why
would Toby lie to me? I had been friends with
him for years. He had a southern charm to him.
He grew up in Texas, obviously, and he was honest
to a fault, and so the thought that he would
lie to me seems strange. Now, then you could say, well,
(38:19):
maybe Stephen lied to him. Maybe, But if he's gone
on record as saying I was never why would he
be telling a good friend a lie? Right, So that
part is I'm stuck in that the paradox of that.
But let's go back to the other question you asked,
which is what's the message. Well, I think we have
to look at time is not static. Time is constantly flowing.
(38:40):
And let's go back to the seventies. What we had
come out of in the fifties and sixties was a
lot of movies where aliens were scary and hostile. Right.
Certainly the fifties are Earth versus the Flying Saucers, Yes,
and even the day there stood still like big Intelligence
is coming down and telling humans how to live, and
they were imposed and scary, they were not benevolent space brothers.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
So you could make the point that in the seventies,
maybe the message from on high was let's try and
acclimate people to the idea that they don't have to
be scared to watch the skies, right, that they're benevolent
space brothers. Now, as we move into the eighties and
nineties and beyond, maybe the messaging has changed. Maybe there's
(39:24):
a bigger point here in well, let's put out many
different messages through Hollywood so that everything is out there
and it's all confusing and people don't know what to believe,
which is pretty much the state of the world we're in.
It pretty much explains where we are right this very second. Yeah,
so I think again, we don't have the hard evidence
(39:44):
to back any of this up. It's just we're looking
at pieces of history and saying, isn't this interesting?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Right?
Speaker 1 (39:51):
So now, don't forget that when Steven Spielberg started to
make the movie. He sought Oh, he sought co op
from two places, the Air Force and NASA.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Right, let's take a look at do we have those
I do?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
I do.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
It is fascinating because on one level, it just contextualizes
what we're talking about. Obviously, if somebody did come to him,
they came in a more covert way. This is the
overt part of this story. First off, NASA. In nineteen
seventy eight, he was talking in an interview Spielberg himself,
and he said that NASA wrote him a twenty page
letter asking him not to make the film, which I
(40:31):
thought was pretty fascinating. He had wanted cooperation, but they,
as he put it, they read the script and got
very angry and felt it was a film that would
be dangerous. That's wild. But then this part actually humanizes it,
he said. I think they mainly wrote the letter because
Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there
(40:51):
were sharks and toilets and baptizs, not just in the
oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of
epidemic would happen with UFOs, which in some respects did
right because I mean close encounters. Let me put it
this way. I already knew about UFOs, and you did
two when we saw it, and it played on one
level for that, But a whole lot of people just
(41:13):
went to see what's this guy who just directed Jaws
got up his sleeve and they saw aliens and they went,
holy crap, what's this all about. Here's the one that
I find more interesting because it pertains to you and me.
He got a letter from It was actually the National
Guard Bureau in DC who wrote Columbia Pictures, but they
(41:35):
were writing on behalf of the Air Force. Okay, this
is a direct quote from the letter written to Columbia Pictures.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
We have reviewed the script and believe it would be
inappropriate for the Air Force to support the production. In
nineteen sixty nine, the US Air Force completed a study
which concluded there is no evidence concerning the evidence of
UFOs that would.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Be Project Bluebook.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
By the way, we have not been involved in UFOs
since that study, other than answering queries about the study.
Here's the good part. Now, the proposed film leaves the
distinct impression that UFOs in fact do exist. It also
involves the government and military in a big cover up
of the existence of UFOs. These two points are counter
(42:19):
to Air Force and Department of Defense policy and make
support to the production inappropriate. Well, they're simply reacting to
what Spielbury actually said he wanted to do. He himself says,
I was into UFOs, but then Watergate happened and I thought, oh,
that's my story, the government cover up. So they were saying,
(42:41):
we don't buy it. But that's where it gets interesting
to us, because this is the Air Force thing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
They don't want to help.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, so this is the last little piece of circumstantial
evidence that ties everything back to Dark Skies and our
friend JC. So going back to that deal we were offered,
it was coming from ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence,
and they claimed to us that the Air Force was
actually against disclosure and that they, as the Office of
(43:17):
Naval Intelligence, were the ones who were trying to get
the truth out there, kind of using the veil of
fiction to drip feed and condition the public over time. Well,
what they were basically telling us was that there were
two warring factions within the government, within the military industrial complex,
and they named them as the Aviary and the Aquarium.
(43:38):
And so going back to this idea that the Air
Force was telling Steven Spielberg, do not make this movie. Well,
that actually conforms quite nicely to what we were.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Told by JC.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Absolutely true. And I will tell you my Street Nielsen's
on telling the story about how the people who came
to us from the Office of Naval Intelligence and by
the way, Dark Skies, so you know, folks, the pilot
itself said that the head of Majestic twelve in our
pilot was a naval officer. And that's one of the
(44:10):
things that the people who approached us said is we
think you got a lot of things right, one of
which was you put the Navy in charge of the
cover up. So that's very interesting. When I've used the
word aquarium to even UFO insiders, they do that plight
ha ha. But I'm telling you that's what he said. Yeah,
you know, we didn't make this up. And it makes
(44:31):
a certain amount of sense if you believe the aviary designation,
which was most famously brought out. I believe in that
nineteen eighty eight documentary where they had the guy hidden
in the shadows and he talked about the aviary. So
I don't know, all we can ever say in things
like that is that's our experience. I will say, I
(44:52):
want a second what you said about Toby Hooper, though,
Toby Hooper, you had already known him, but I got
to know him as a human being and as a
director and as a decent man. You know, I had
met him as recently as I think I was in
can a few years ago before he passed away and
got to hang out with him for a night. This
is a decent guy.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Down to earth, totally down earth.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
He is not the kind of guy that says, let
me just float something. It's not true, but let me
just float something to somebody and see if they buy it.
There are people out there that do that. I mean,
you know, I'm a rehabilitated journalist. I know that I've
been lied to by professionals, is what I like to say.
But I think I'm a pretty good judge of human nature,
(45:35):
and I think you are too. Toby Hooper was a
decent guy. I never heard him say anything but the
truth to somebody as he understood it. And that applied
to the set. If somebody's performance was no good, he
wouldn't sugarcoat it. He just got we got it. We
gotta go again, you know, we gotta go again.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
That that won't work.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
I mean, and our lead Eric Close would confirm that
as well, that Toby never spared his feelings or anybody's feelings,
not in a bad way, just a supremely honest way.
So I'm just going to underline three times that if
Toby Hooper told you that he wasn't blowing smoke, he
believed that to be true. And since it's a personal
(46:19):
story about him talking to Steven Spielberg, who he did
know and worked for, I got to give it some credence.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Well, I think the last thing before we wrap this
up to think about which I find particularly interesting, and
it basically conforms with a lot of my experiences with
the phenomenon as an experiencer, and that is this idea
of the leap of faith. It's a key component of storytelling.
You see it all the time. But I think, look
(46:48):
at what Roy Neary had to do to get the truth.
He lost his job, he lost his family, he was
willing to lose his life, right, great scene in the
helicopter when he's pushed as far as he can, he's
been caught. He was so close to getting the truth.
He's got a gas mask on because they've put up
(47:09):
a whole fake quarantine to scare off the public, and
he alone takes the gas mask off because he believes
there's something else going on here, and he's willing to
die to find the truth.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
That's a very powerful thing, and I think that's when
the phenomenon recognizes you. When you're at that state and
you're willing to put everything on the line and take risks,
and there's something burning inside you, you inter something happens
to you at that time. I think we did it
with Lowngard Low and Guard wanted the truth about what
was going on. He sat and he talked with Betty
(47:44):
and Barney Hill. He believed them he was beaten up
and abducted by Majestic twelve. And when they said if
you want answers, you have to walk through the door
and join us, well, he had no idea that they
wouldn't just kill him, right, right, And so he put
everything on the line for the truth. And I think
that is a hallmark of not just great UFO storytelling
(48:04):
or great storytelling in general, but what it takes the
key that unlocks the phenomenon. I don't want to leave
the impression that whether Spielberg was approached or not approached
reflects on him in any way. Nor do I want
to leave an impression that whether he listened to them
or didn't listen to him reflects on him in any way.
We didn't select ourselves, probably wouldn't have selected himself. He
(48:26):
seems like a very decent guy in my interactions on
almost every level that I've interacted with them, you know, personally,
So it's not out of the question. It's a good question.
Not everything is equal. Project CIRPO is not as well
documented as other things. I would only leave us with
this thought. In nineteen eighty two, when he was debuting
(48:47):
Et at the White House, Ronald Reagan after the movie said,
you know, there's only two people in this room that
knows exactly how true this is. So that's an odd
thing to say. Maybe it says more about Reagan than Spielberg,
but there's no doubt that the number one person associated
with UFOs and aliens in the film and television community
(49:09):
bar nounn is Steven Spielberg. That's why we talk about him. Yeah,
so obviously very interesting that Ronald Reagan made this quote.
This brings us all the way back to how Dark
Skies was born with the story I was told by
someone in the Reagan administration right around this time period. Boy,
we're just so full of teases. We get we got
(49:31):
to get going on all this stuff. Anyway, we want
to thank everybody for listening to us, because it's a
conversation we're trying to have that we haven't heard too often.
And you know, sometimes you write a movie or a
book because you want to read it or see it
and nobody else has done it. I think that's why
we're doing this podcast, and so thanks all for paying attention.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yes, thanks for listening, and Watch the Skies.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Watch the Skies. Soundland and Frequency is an iHeart podcast
produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson
and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written
by Anna Stump and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and
executive producers are Brice Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the Skies.
When Steven Spielberg started to make the movie, he sought
cooperation from two places, the Air Force and NASA. On
one level, it just contextualizes what we're talking about. Obviously,
if somebody did come to him, they came in a
more covert way. This is the overt part of this story.
First off, NASA. In nineteen seventy eight, he was talking
(00:22):
in an interview Spielberg himself, and he said that NASA
wrote him a twenty page letter asking him not to
make the film. He had wanted cooperation, but they, as
he put it, they read the script and got very
angry and felt it was a film that would be dangerous.
(01:00):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs. I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening
to Sound, Light and Frequency. Today we're going to have
a close encounter of the Spielberg kind. So grab your
gas mask. We are going to Devil's Tower. So on
(01:31):
our last episode, we told you about the deal we
were offered by JC from the Office of Naval Intelligence,
the deal to make Dark Skies part of their slow
Drip disclosure program. And we also told you about that
strange formula that JC gave us the one that he
wrote on the back of a bank envelope. Okay, so
that deal and the formula are two subplots in our story,
(01:54):
and we're going to be coming back to them many
times throughout the series. And these are super important to
the overall story we're telling, and we're certainly not trying
to be cute by not jumping into them immediately. It's
just that we want to do two things. We want
to provide context for them, and we also want to
take you inside the story and that way you can
experience this brush with the phenomenon and even the cover
(02:15):
up as close to the way we did as possible,
and hopefully together we might just find some answers. So
today we're going to shift focus away from our personal
story and pull back to Hollywood at large. We're starting
with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What we want
to do is sort of set the stage for what's
to come and to sort of let this flow. And
(02:37):
in order to do that, it sure seems like a
good move to start with the actual granddaddy, the best
UFO movie probably ever made and maybe forever, and that's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg. That's right,
and it's a movie that I think most people would
generally say is the seminal film that depicts UFOs aliens.
(03:01):
It got tons of critical acclaim made lots of money.
What do we think the log line is for this? Well,
it's pretty simple, actually, you know, and folks, you know
what a log line is. That's how we're supposed to
explain everything we do in Hollywood in a single sentence.
And that's kind of a great exercise sometimes because it
allows you to sort of say, what is my movie
or what is my TV series really about the log
(03:24):
line that we're positing. I don't know what they pitched.
This is just what we've got here to look at.
When ordinary people around the world experience strange visions and
encounters with UFOs, one man's obsession drives him to uncover
the truth culminating in humanity's first face to face meeting
with extraterrestrials, which you know, it almost takes the drama
(03:47):
out of it to put it into that, because, I mean,
let's face it, the reason people remember this is that
Richard Dreyfus, who plays the character Roy Neary, sees a
UFO has his life turned upside down. It's all about
his journey and it's all about mankind first having this
major encounter out in Wyoming at the end of the film.
(04:09):
I think if you ask what people remember most, they
remember dun, dunt, dunt. I'm so glad, by the way, Brent,
that you could actually do that, because I can't carry
a tune and I couldn't do that. I'm glad you
did it. It's the most incredible five notes in probably
the history of music. And as I understand it, when
they were trying to come up with something, because I
(04:30):
wanted to talk about the nature of communication and that
it's not always language or the language could be music,
and apparently Spielberg and Williams came to the conclusion that
six notes was too many. Seven notes was definitely too many,
and four notes wasn't enough, but five was just right,
which makes you sound like, Okay, great, there can't be
that many options. But I think when they ran it
(04:52):
through a mathematician, he came back and said, if you've
got five notes, you've got something like three hundred and
sixty thousand options or something. But you know what, Brent,
they came up with the right one, because it sticks
in my head to this day. Absolutely, it's haunting, And
just to connect back to our podcast, if you think
about it, the communication that the primary form of communication
(05:15):
is sound, light, and frequency. Right, You've got the sound,
you've got the tones, you've got the lights at the end, right,
and then you have the frequency, which is actually shattering
glass right in that final scene up on Devil's Tower.
So I think it's interesting that even though that was
not part of they don't say that in the movie,
that is actually something that comes right back to our
(05:36):
basic thesis that sound, light, and frequency may be the
secrets of the universe might just be. And one of
the things that I found interesting in getting ready to
do this was just how Spielberg thought Close Encounters of
the Third Kind was a great title for the thing,
and he got that from Jay Allen Heinik, who of
course is the first person who ever defined it and
was working on Close Encounters as a consultant, And just
(06:00):
for the sake of people who were, like, h what's
that all about? Just a reminder, you're not the only
people that might wonder that. The marketing people, when they
were getting ready to put out this film, they were concerned.
This made me laugh because I was listening to an
interview that I think Spielberg said, some of the people
in the marketing department thought it sounded like it had
something to do with porn. Close encounters of the third kind,
(06:23):
and so they went in their marketing very clearly. Over
and over they had everybody explaining what it was. Close
encounters of the first kind is a close range siding.
Close encounters of the second kind are physical effects, so
whether it's radiation burns or maybe landing depressions on the ground.
(06:45):
But a close encounter of the third kind is a
UFO siding where there is direct visual contact with an occupant,
whether you want to call them non human intelligence or
aliens or visitors or others, seeing somebody who ain't from
around the neighborhood. Well, now, interestingly, they could have avoided
(07:06):
all of these marketing headaches ipt they'd just gone with
the original title, which was Watch the Skies, which is
a great title. I say that often in emails. Watch
the Skies. It's a little bit of a painful thing
for me because about twenty years ago somebody passed away
and they had collected all of the great screenplays and
my wife and I inherited them all and that included
(07:28):
I believe a first draft of Watch the Skies, first
production draft.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Did it say that on the title? Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Okay, yes, it said watch the Skies on the title page,
and it was clearly real. I mean, this guy had
all the originals. And at the time, we were in
what you would call cleaning mode, and my wife was saying,
why do I have scripts all over the house here?
We've got to do something with them, and so we
donated them to the Writer's Guild of America. So that
(07:55):
means anyone listening to this, if you're a member or
you can go to their library, you could read that
same copy that we donated. And my only regret, of course,
is it would probably be worth millions on an eBay
account right now. But you know what, you got to
help the world.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Got to help the world. Well, So getting back to
the movie.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
From a personal standpoint, I had a very interesting experience
that a movie came out in seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It came out after Star.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Wars, but the same year as still the same year
as Star Wars, right, but I think later that year.
And I grew up in the Bay Area, I was
not old enough at that time to get in a
car and go see the movie. I don't even know
that I was aware of the movie, to be honest,
except a friend of mine's father had apparently had some
sort of UFO experience, was all fired up to see it,
(08:41):
put a bunch of kids in the car, me included,
and we went out on opening night. Now, apparently Close
Encounters opened only in two theaters, initially LA and New
York for a week or two, and then once everyone
you know was convinced it was a hit, it went wide.
So I think the second or week or what ever,
when it opened in San Francisco. I saw it on
(09:02):
opening night and it blew my mind. I had never
seen anything like that before, and some of those images
are still haunt me. I probably have seen the movie
thirty times. I've seen it a lot. I don't think
i've seen it thirty And by the way, I'm just curious,
what was the audience reaction. Were they reacting with you
at the same time, Yeah, I mean the audience reaction,
there were gasps. I think basically Spielberg wanted to He's
(09:26):
said in quotes that he wanted to capture that childlike
wonder of experiencing something that kids don't question.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Right, and he cast the movie that way.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
You know, a lot of the actors he felt had
that childlike quality, and I think that came out in
the screenings where the audience were just swept up in
this experience and they weren't questioning whether any of this
was possible. They were questioning when was it going to
happen to them? That was my takeaway, and that was
I remember on the ride home, everyone was talking about
(09:58):
how cool it would be to go inside the sho
although you didn't get to go inside the ship when
it was released in nineteen seventy seven. Just to be clear,
there were there have been three versions of Close Encounters
of the Third Kind released. The first was that feature
that you saw in nineteen seventy seven, and then there
was a special edition in nineteen eighty. When Spielberg made
(10:18):
what he called a deal with the Devil. He agreed
to take more money to shoot some scenes that were
more euphological in nature, and he wanted to put those
in the film, and in exchange, the studio said, yeah,
but you got to take him on board the ship.
So he shot the scene that took everybody on board
the ship with Roy Neary, and then in nineteen ninety
(10:39):
eight he finally got to put the director's cut out,
and it doesn't have that. He really felt like the
audience should make up their own mind about what was
inside the ship. So that's out of there now. I
just to go back to I don't have a great
I didn't sit in San Francisco with the big cool crowd.
I was a young TV newsman in Eugene, Ore and
(11:00):
I had a cameraman who was very into this, and
I was kind of into it too. We drive around
all day looking for stories, and we were very expectant
about this thing because a couple of years earlier, as
a young FM news guy, I had covered the Travis
Walton case. So I was like, Okay, I know a
little bit about UFOs. I wonder if this is going
(11:21):
to have since it was the third kind Occupants, if
it would be an abduction film in some respect. I
thought maybe it would be. And even though Roy Neary,
the main character, isn't abducted per se, the young little
boy who's in the film is abducted. So it's both
it's an abduction film and it's a wondrous film, and
(11:42):
the only thing I thought, when you're dying about wonder
Spielberg did go a little too far for some people
in that opening film. In the final credits, they played
the song when you Wish upon a Star, and it's
a little saccharin for a UFO film. But people seem
to forgive it. But I don't think it's in the
director's cut. No, I believe it was taken out. I
think it got some negative reactions. Well, you know, the
(12:04):
interesting thing is just to give some cultural context here.
If you think about it, what Jaws did for monster movies,
Close Encounters did for alien movies, which is it legitimized
those genres?
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Right?
Speaker 1 (12:15):
These were no longer B and C Hollywood movies. These
were huge commercial box office successes and critically acclaimed movies,
And so I think it changed a lot. But as
you said, even in the special edition, he depicted the
inside of a ship. And while most people at that
time probably felt this felt real, this felt like what
(12:37):
the UFO experience is all about. I think if you
compare what he showed as the inside of the ship
with what abductees over the years have described, he did
not get that right.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
No, he did not get that right.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Now, interestingly, I think people can say he did get
a lot right right. And by the way, that's what
JC said to us when he came to make a deal.
That was what him apparently and the Office of Naval
Intelligence Two dark skies. But let's go back and look
now at a list of some of the things that
we believe that he did get right, that Spielberg got
(13:11):
right and put on film, in some cases the first
that anyone ever seen.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
With regards to.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
The uphology, there certainly were a lot of first in it.
In one respect, it sort of begins with what you
might call a UFO flap, where everybody knows there's going
to be UFO's out tonight, so let's go out. And
you know, there's people in their trucks and their armchairs
(13:36):
and sitting outside watching them. And on the night that
that's happening, this main character, Roy Neary, who played by
Dreyfus again is electrician. The power's out, so again there's
a euphological thing and somehow they influence the power through
some kind of electromagnetic pulse event or whatever, and he's
(13:56):
out doing his repairs and that is a creepy but
very cool and incredibly iconic scene. There he is in
his truck, he sees a light sort of behind his truck,
and then suddenly all hell breaks loose, right, the truck
shaking and everything's going on. Now, technically, was that a
close encounter of the second kind that he has there? Yes, okay,
so we're escalating. In fact, you go from a first
(14:19):
kind where they've been seen, and then you go to, well, actually,
now I question that he has his encounter first, and
then we see the UFOs the next we start, and
we start with them finding lost planes from Oh yeah, right,
I'm talking about people who saw things. So I think
we can say that was the first kind, right, I
(14:40):
have to say, yeah, I got to go back to
the lost planes. For me, listen, this is just personal opinion.
I was a lot less impressed by the family stuff.
It always irritated me a little bit because this Roy
Neary character has a family that, you know, it's kind
of dysfunctional, and every time I was watching that, I
was like, come on, let's get to the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Come on.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And so you really get the good stuff at the
beginning of the film, where they are finding in the
middle of a sandstorm in the desert, all these planes
from the World War II era. Frankly, I think it's
from Flight nineteen that was lost over the Bermuda Triangle allegedly.
And there they are. They're in the desert, and not
(15:23):
only the planes untouched, but our guys are discovering it.
And it's very secret and it's a wonderful scene.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And the planes are intact.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Maybe they turn them on right, yeah, and they've got
the same fuel in them and everything. It's really great
and so but I just realized what the other first
kind experience is as we go inside the air traffic
controller tower.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yes, that is one of.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
The most authentic UFO scenes I have ever seen. It
feels like it's a transcript of something that actually must
have happened. It is brilliant. It's just it's people talking
to a jet pilot who is experiencing some kind of sighting.
He's trying to call it in to them, and they
all know something crazy is happening. And so you see
(16:05):
more of these air traffic controllers coming together and the
main guy is saying, do you want to report? Do
you want to make a report? Do you want to
make a report? And everybody knows, but they haven't said
the word yet. And then the next time, do you
want to report a UFO? And of course that really
touches on the major thing about UFOs, which is there's
(16:25):
been a stigma all these years. Absolutely, not only do
pilots not want to report these things, but the average
person that sees something is very concerned about talking about
it because their family will say to them, please, don't
talk about that anymore. My friends think you're weird, dad,
that kind of thing. So there's been a lot of stigma.
There's certainly been stigma for pilots, many of which were
(16:47):
grounded historically for daring to report. So ultimately that pilot
does not report it ties in with something that's very
big in the UFO world right now. Ryan Graves, who
is the lieutenant in the US and an FA eighteen
F fighter pilot who spent ten years doing this. He
was the guy on the twenty fifteen USS Roosevelt incident
(17:09):
who reported spears inside of huge Yeah, that's kind of
a weird thing to be out flying around, and he
and his fellow pilots reported those things. That's a far
cry from reporting a flying saucer. You know, something like that.
But he has started the Americans for Safe Aerospace. He's
testified before Congress about this. So in many respects, if
(17:30):
there's any progress being made at all in this topic,
one of them is at least among the first responders,
if you will, in the air, the pilots, there is
less stigma. They are more and more being encouraged to
tell people what they see well. And so but that's
a perfect example of what one of the things Spielberg
got right. He captured that era in terms of the stigma, right,
(17:53):
as you said, not just to pilots but to the
general public. But going back to the thing that Ryan
Graves saw, which was the sphere inside the square, the
sphere the energy being the orb if you will, that
was the first time I believe they had ever been
shown on film in close encounters, right. You see the
big crafts, the beautiful the ice cream cones, I think
(18:15):
as they're called in the coming around the mountain sequence,
but then trailing them as almost like they're the managers
or the scouts or something, are these little energy balls,
these little balls of light? And I don't think that
had ever been discussed before in public, don't it certainly
had never been seen on film. I think it all
goes back to the Foo fighters right in World War Two.
(18:37):
So where that came from don't know. But that's also
something that everyone is talking about today. Everybody's talking about
the orbs, and not just orbs flying around, I mean
louel Azondo, who of course is almost synonymous with UFO
disclosure efforts because he was part of that twenty seventeen
disclosure and helped get those three first videos from the
(18:57):
Navy out before everybody when the New York Times reported
on it. Loue Elizanda wrote a book that came out
last year called Imminent, Great Book, and it's a very
powerful book, and it's really his inside or account of
working in the Pentagon trying to get the truth out,
and when he couldn't get the truth out, he quit
so that he could talk from the outside. In this book,
(19:20):
there's a chapter where he talks about these orbs are
inside his house, and not only is he seeing them,
his wife is seeing them, his kids have seen them.
They're outside the house, neighbors see them, which raises all
kinds of questions that won't be gotten into in this episode.
But sort of the hitchhiker effect. Do these orbs attach
(19:42):
themselves to people or things or places well, But going
back to Close Encounters, now ask the question these had
really never been discussed in public. They again, they were
referenced in World War II lore around about the Foo fighters,
but they were brought into the lexicon for the public
in Close Encounters as these light orbs. Now we know
(20:03):
either Steven Spielberg was prescient in terms of picking something
that would become such a defining element of modern upology today,
but he was also being advised by two very interesting
people on this movie, Jay Allen Heinik and Jacques Valet,
who you actually have a personal experience with, Well, I do.
This year, I got to have lunch at Jacques Frolat's
(20:24):
apartment of all things, and it's so envious. It was
such a cool thing, I mean to think, well, first
of all, his lovely wife made lunch for us. I mean,
that was pretty cool. But apropos of Close Encounters because
it's hard not to talk to him about it. What
everyone needs to understand is there is a character in
Close Encounters, the French scientist Lacombe, and Lacombe is played
(20:47):
by the great French director of Francois Truffau played very well,
but laid incredibly well. He grounds it. I think that's
Spielberg's crowning accomplishment in casting. He had to screw up
his courage to ask him, and he said yes, and
he came and said, I don't need to be a
director here, I'm an actor. And he acted the hell
out of it. Yeah, did a great job. But that
(21:07):
character was certainly inspired by Jacques Vallet. So people have
asked Jacques about this all the time, so you know,
I'm not going to go to his house and not
ask him. So I did say, what's your take on
being portrayed in film? And I bet that was kind
of cool, And of course he's got that smile, and
of course it was cool. He loved it. But the
thing that he said and has said consistently is the
(21:30):
ending is a little too positive for him, based on
the evidence that he has seen in his ongoing investigations.
He's not saying that it's completely wrong. He's just saying
there's a darker side to what he has seen in
the people and the witnesses he's talked to. And I
thought that was kind of interesting. It also mirrors something
that the great UFO researcher Stanton Friedman said. Stanton also
(21:53):
felt that it's hard not to see Close Encounters of
the third kind and say, what a great freaking movie
this is. It's not a documentary, it's a movie, right,
And so Stanton felt very much like Jock Delay, which
is it's great ending, it's fun. But there's another side
to all this. Well, speaking of another side to all
of this and going back to this concept of firsts,
(22:16):
I think this is the other aspect of Close Encounters.
We want to talk about outside the movie, everything surrounding
the movie. So in the topic of first I want
to bring up a friend and a colleague who you,
of course know because we both worked with him as
the director on our Dark Sky's Pilot, our Total Pilot.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
That's Toby Hooper. Just to give a.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Little context here, I was friends with Toby because we
were working on an independent movie developing it a couple
of years prior, and when we were looking for directors
for the Dark Sky's Pilot, we hit on Toby and
everyone got excited about Toby. Of course, Toby had done
you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, where he worked
with Steven Spielberg, and apparently he and Steven were very
(22:57):
good friends. So here's a very interesting story that goes
back to when we were scouting locations for The Dark
Sky's Pilot. We were up in the New Hall Ranch area,
which is north of Los Angeles, up in the hills,
and we were looking for an area where we could
shoot our crop circle sequence we had in the Dark
Sky's Pilot. There's a big crop circle right that is
(23:19):
the main character finds and has a whole interesting experience with.
And so at the end of the day, after we
had scouted this whole area, the small production group went
down to like kind of a roadhouse restaurant, and because
I had previously been friends with Toby, I sat aside
with him while everyone else was talking about logistics and whatnot.
And he had told me before that he and Steven
(23:42):
were really good friends, but they were very competitive, right,
especially when it came to film, And I had said
to him over dinner, you're going to finally beat Stephen
in something. You're going to be the first one to
put a crop circle on film, because despite everything Stephen
had done up until that point, he had not done
that and Toby kind of chalked and said, yeah, yeah,
I mean, but I'll never be ahead of Stephen in
(24:04):
this category. And I was like, why, what do you mean.
He goes, well, I mean he knows a lot. He
knows way more than me. And I said, oh really,
how so he said, well, yeah, I guess like sometime
after Jaws or something, you know, because Jaws was such
a big hit, he was approached by some people from
(24:25):
the military or the government or something and they offered
him some sort of deal. Now, to put this in
full context, this was before the pilot had been shot.
It was certainly before the pilot had aired, which means
this is way before the premiere party when people came
to you and I and said we want to make
(24:45):
you a deal. So I'm hearing about a deal before
it's even happened to us at any rate. This was
what Toby said. He didn't make a big sorry for
the punt, He didn't make a big deal out of it.
It was just a conversational thing. I questioned him about
it a little bit and he kind of moved on
and that was that. Now, unfortunately Toby has passed away,
so we have no way to prove this. And I'm
(25:07):
sure Steven Spielberg is not going to come on our
podcast and talk about this, but he's welcome to anytime. Yes,
so please come. We'd love to talk about your movies.
We're huge fans. But I think now what we have
to do is we have to ask the question if
this were true. And we're not saying it is, We're
just saying there's anecdotal evidence. Let's look at some other evidence,
(25:28):
some circumstantial evidence that might imply maybe Steven and the
people who made close Encounters knew something that may have
been given some information. And let's start with Bryce project Cirpo.
Oh boy, you want to start with Cirpo. Let's start
with you're going for the Okay, let's put the smoke
and gun on the table, all right, We're going to
follow up on all of that.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
We'll be back after a break.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Well, okay, And I don't think we have to worry
about spoilers. This movie's been out for almost fifty years now,
so if you get spoiled on this one, tough luck.
The film ends when Roy Neary, the Dreyfus character, goes
to what is the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, which by
(26:15):
the way, is a real place, and Louel Zondo even
lives in there there, which I find fascinating. But that's
another episode, of course. But Dreyfus goes there, and the
ending of the film is literally there are twelve people
who are ready to go onto this mothership and be
taken to the home planet of these aliens in kind
(26:36):
of a trade, and Dreyfus gets to go with him.
He's the thirteenth man, if you will. I think he's
singled out as the only one that goes if I
remember correctly. Everyone else is left behind. Oh they are. Yeah,
you're telling me something I didn't understand. I've watched this,
that's my reading. I've seen it thirty times. I got
I got the only one that walks on the ship
when we go inside the ship, it's him.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
But Kaish always saw there's a line of those the
conga line of thirteen people in the red suits, I thought,
in all the little gray surround him and they take
him individually up onto the ship.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Wow, I'm so back to projects.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I'm trying to process this right now because I've just
learned something totally new. Okay, well, okay, but there were
twelve of them, and they supposedly went off to another
planet or were supposed to, whether it was just Roy
that went or not. And then one of the alien
stays here, which is exactly what supposedly happened in real
(27:37):
life in nineteen sixty five, according to the rumors, And
again they're rumors. There's no hard evidence I've ever seen
that Project Circle was real. But supposedly in nineteen sixty five,
we did send a dozen people someplace. They came back
thirteen years later, and they told about their life and
adventures on this other planet. And what's interesting thing about
(28:00):
it is it's a chicken and egg kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
All right?
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Did this really happen? And then did people come to
Spielberg and say, by the way, here's something you might
want to consider for your ending. There's this real thing.
Or is it the other way around that Spielberg comes
up with this thing about twelve people being ready to
go off to another planet, and then later because of
this didn't really make the public until two thousand and five. Correct,
(28:27):
So it's chicken and egg. Where do you come down
on that chicken or egg? Well, hold on, I'm going
to withhold my chicken and egg vote for just a moment,
just looking at the evidence again, and I think this
actually brings up some of the what's so frustrating about
you afology, right, is because once you start looking at
it kind of analytically, at some point you find yourself
(28:49):
you've fallen into the you've stepped into the phenomenon, and
everything logic doesn't always hold up there. If you look
at the chicken idea, then you say, okay, well Spielberg
was the one that planted this idea, where did it
come from? Well, as you said, there's only rumors about
Project CERPO. They're pretty sophisticated and elaborate, to the point
(29:11):
where I believe hundreds, if not thousands of pages were
leaked right that were part of some sort of Defense
agency classified documents or something. Obviously, those, like almost everything
that comes out into the public sphere, have been highly contested,
and you know, people have tried to debunk them and whatnot.
(29:32):
So we don't have any verifiable evidence that Project CERPO happened.
But if somebody was trying to reintroduce it into the public,
why did they wait almost thirty years to do so?
That seems odd. So no one knew about it in
seventy seven, seemingly. Is it a coincidence that Steven Spielberg
(29:52):
puts this out there and then almost thirty years later
it seeps out into the public. Now, the other side
of it, as you said, is well, what if someone
was just copying this? Okay, that's possible, But what a
strange coincidence that it came out in seventy seven as
this idea in a movie and then suddenly it becomes
(30:13):
this UFO touch point to the point where now there's
a documentary that's coming out on Apple. That's the thing
is where does the truth end and the fiction begin?
We don't know. It's a lot And if you think
about it, in two thousand and five, when they first
started talking about Circle, and by the way, this is
a quagmire that we could be caught in forever talking
(30:33):
Cirpo's talk. But when they first came out with it,
they said that they were taken to zeta reticuli, which,
if you're listening, you're saying zet a reticuli. That sounds somewhat,
That sounds familiar. The reason it sounds familiar is that's
where Betty and Barney Hill, who were abducted in nineteen
sixty one, said that they were that the people who
(30:55):
abducted them were from the Zemens. Yeah, they were Zeta reticular,
who took them and experimented on them and put them back.
Now what's interesting is, again Surpo was supposed to have
happened in nineteen sixty five. Okay, Betty and Barney's story
didn't actually become public until nineteen sixty six. As I
(31:15):
recall when the interrupted journey, Well it was sixty No,
it was late sixty five, So all this is going
on at the same time. Now I have to tell you,
I don't know what to make of this. There is
not a lick of hard evidence on the Project Circo front.
There's just a lot of people that talk about it,
and we're now two of them apparently. But I will
say it's worth talking about whether Spielberg was approached or not,
(31:39):
because what I will take to the bank over the
Surpos story is your story about Toby Hoopert. I remember
when you told me that, and I was I mean,
that took me back, because we all know Spielberg, and
for someone who worked with them to say, oh, yeah,
they came and talked to him. So let's just step
back for a minute and say, is it possible that
(32:03):
Spielberg was approached. Well, first of all, look at his
status in nineteen seventy four. I think Jaws comes out,
it's a huge hit, and the very next thing he
wants to do is Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
and he takes over two years making it before it
comes out in seventy seven, almost three years he's working
on it, So there's plenty of time for people to
(32:25):
realize he's working on it and to have approached him
if they wanted to. We should point out, though, in
the totality of this Stephen Spielberg has always denied ever
being officially briefed. He's denied the mere act of it,
let alone surpo or anything else. He has said repeatedly
that he was simply fascinated by UFO reports he had
(32:49):
read from Heinek and Valet, and he wanted to make
a film about Awe and contact. That's his official position now,
not to get into name dropping yearning, but we both
worked with the guy. Yeah, so I think we should
at least talk about our impressions about what he knew
and what he didn't know about UFOs. You want to
go first, Well, I think yes, we both work with
(33:10):
them ironically on UFO alien projects, right that were not
dark skuys. We're not close encounters. My experience was, you know,
somewhat less than yours, which is I was working at
Electronic Arts on a game when he had a deal
down the hall on a project code named Lmno, which
(33:30):
was about a female alien who is on Earth and
kind of like the man who fell to Earth, has
interesting powers and you're playing as this alien woman navigating
trying to escape the clutches of various government people who
are trying to catch her and whatnot. And so my
experiences sitting in the room with Steven, you know, bouncing
(33:51):
story ideas on occasion was he has that childlike wonder
right that he was looking to capture in close encore.
He asked a lot of questions. I didn't personally feel
that he was any expert on the topic, but he
certainly had a lot of interest and enthusiasm for it.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Absolutely. I met him three times, but only once in
a hard UFO context. First time I met him was
literally I got hired to write a video game called
Ghost in the machine for DreamWorks and had a meeting
with him. This is when Dark Skies was on, though
I will say this as I was introduced to him
at that time. He shook my hand and said, great
(34:33):
to see you again. And this is the first time
I ever met him, so I'm sure that's a line
that he must have to use. And he said, I'm
a big fan of Dark Skys and I was a
surprise to me for reasons that we will go into
in an episode further downstream, but anyway, that happened. Then
in nineteen ninety nine, I was hired to work on
(34:53):
the Taken mini series and was part of that original
writer's room and was one of the three time producers
on it. And we had I think three different There
was no zoom back then, right, so instead of a zoom,
he had somebody. He was in the Hamptons and he
had a photographer there and we had a photographer where
(35:14):
we were out here in Hollywood, and the three of
us had a meeting with Spielberg and I'll come back
to it. And second, the third time I met him
was I was chairman of the TV Academy and they said,
who do you want to sit with? At the Emmys,
and this was the year that he and Hanks were
nominated for Band of Brothers and won the Emmy, and
I said, I get to pick and they said sure,
and I went, what about them? So they sat me
(35:35):
with them and that was wonderful. Back to Taken though,
as people know, I think it's a ten part mini
series that was on Sci Fi and it actually is
very similar in some respects to Dark Skies, which preceded
it by three years, I believe. And we had worked
out a lot of things. The writer's room really knocked
out all kinds of things about UFOs and it was
(35:57):
a pretty darn good story and we were sort of
I think we had sent the paperwork to him and
then he was responding to it. All I'm going to
say is this, He didn't sound like a guy that
was briefed. He sounded like a guy. I wouldn't say
childlike wonder that's what the movie version of him was.
I would just say he sounded like a guy of
which I've talked to hundreds, who is really into the
(36:19):
UFO UAP topic, wants to know what you know, knows
enough about certain incidents that he wants to say what
do you think about this? What about that? And it
was a pretty lively interesting conversation all three times where
he would, yes, he had story points about the arc
of everything, but he would also want to stop and
(36:40):
talk about the UFO angle of something. It blew my mind.
I was so I felt really great that I got
to be a part of that and we could talk
about that.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
For a while.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
What I'd rather say, though, is people constantly do allege
that he was briefed and that somehow he was to
do things to help acclimate us to the alien contact issue,
to make it easier for us to understand what's going on.
Let's put that under a microscope for a second, because
(37:11):
I look, I'd love to believe it. It sounds interesting and
it happened to us, so why not. I mean, it
could easily have happened if they're coming to us. It's
why go to Friedman and Zabel when you got Spielberg
to go to I mean, so, yeah, I can definitely
believe that. But if there's a message that was imparted
to Spielberg in which he was supposed to impart to
(37:32):
the public, it's a very confused message. Think about this
close encounters they're the space Brothers.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
They're benevolent space.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Benevolent space brother aliens, et cuddly scientists running around. Okay,
war of the world's badass martians, marauding the countryside and
killing people, falling skies, a full on alien invasion.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
What's the message there?
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, so this is a very interesting topic. I think,
first of all, I have to personally ask myself, why
would Toby lie to me? I had been friends with
him for years. He had a southern charm to him.
He grew up in Texas, obviously, and he was honest
to a fault, and so the thought that he would
lie to me seems strange. Now, then you could say, well,
(38:19):
maybe Stephen lied to him. Maybe, But if he's gone
on record as saying I was never why would he
be telling a good friend a lie? Right, So that
part is I'm stuck in that the paradox of that.
But let's go back to the other question you asked,
which is what's the message. Well, I think we have
to look at time is not static. Time is constantly flowing.
(38:40):
And let's go back to the seventies. What we had
come out of in the fifties and sixties was a
lot of movies where aliens were scary and hostile. Right.
Certainly the fifties are Earth versus the Flying Saucers, Yes,
and even the day there stood still like big Intelligence
is coming down and telling humans how to live, and
they were imposed and scary, they were not benevolent space brothers.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
So you could make the point that in the seventies,
maybe the message from on high was let's try and
acclimate people to the idea that they don't have to
be scared to watch the skies, right, that they're benevolent
space brothers. Now, as we move into the eighties and
nineties and beyond, maybe the messaging has changed. Maybe there's
(39:24):
a bigger point here in well, let's put out many
different messages through Hollywood so that everything is out there
and it's all confusing and people don't know what to believe,
which is pretty much the state of the world we're in.
It pretty much explains where we are right this very second. Yeah,
so I think again, we don't have the hard evidence
(39:44):
to back any of this up. It's just we're looking
at pieces of history and saying, isn't this interesting?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Right?
Speaker 1 (39:51):
So now, don't forget that when Steven Spielberg started to
make the movie. He sought Oh, he sought co op
from two places, the Air Force and NASA.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Right, let's take a look at do we have those
I do?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
I do.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
It is fascinating because on one level, it just contextualizes
what we're talking about. Obviously, if somebody did come to him,
they came in a more covert way. This is the
overt part of this story. First off, NASA. In nineteen
seventy eight, he was talking in an interview Spielberg himself,
and he said that NASA wrote him a twenty page
letter asking him not to make the film, which I
(40:31):
thought was pretty fascinating. He had wanted cooperation, but they,
as he put it, they read the script and got
very angry and felt it was a film that would
be dangerous. That's wild. But then this part actually humanizes it,
he said. I think they mainly wrote the letter because
Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there
(40:51):
were sharks and toilets and baptizs, not just in the
oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of
epidemic would happen with UFOs, which in some respects did
right because I mean close encounters. Let me put it
this way. I already knew about UFOs, and you did
two when we saw it, and it played on one
level for that, But a whole lot of people just
(41:13):
went to see what's this guy who just directed Jaws
got up his sleeve and they saw aliens and they went,
holy crap, what's this all about. Here's the one that
I find more interesting because it pertains to you and me.
He got a letter from It was actually the National
Guard Bureau in DC who wrote Columbia Pictures, but they
(41:35):
were writing on behalf of the Air Force. Okay, this
is a direct quote from the letter written to Columbia Pictures.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
We have reviewed the script and believe it would be
inappropriate for the Air Force to support the production. In
nineteen sixty nine, the US Air Force completed a study
which concluded there is no evidence concerning the evidence of
UFOs that would.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Be Project Bluebook.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
By the way, we have not been involved in UFOs
since that study, other than answering queries about the study.
Here's the good part. Now, the proposed film leaves the
distinct impression that UFOs in fact do exist. It also
involves the government and military in a big cover up
of the existence of UFOs. These two points are counter
(42:19):
to Air Force and Department of Defense policy and make
support to the production inappropriate. Well, they're simply reacting to
what Spielbury actually said he wanted to do. He himself says,
I was into UFOs, but then Watergate happened and I thought, oh,
that's my story, the government cover up. So they were saying,
(42:41):
we don't buy it. But that's where it gets interesting
to us, because this is the Air Force thing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
They don't want to help.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, so this is the last little piece of circumstantial
evidence that ties everything back to Dark Skies and our
friend JC. So going back to that deal we were offered,
it was coming from ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence,
and they claimed to us that the Air Force was
actually against disclosure and that they, as the Office of
(43:17):
Naval Intelligence, were the ones who were trying to get
the truth out there, kind of using the veil of
fiction to drip feed and condition the public over time. Well,
what they were basically telling us was that there were
two warring factions within the government, within the military industrial complex,
and they named them as the Aviary and the Aquarium.
(43:38):
And so going back to this idea that the Air
Force was telling Steven Spielberg, do not make this movie. Well,
that actually conforms quite nicely to what we were.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Told by JC.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Absolutely true. And I will tell you my Street Nielsen's
on telling the story about how the people who came
to us from the Office of Naval Intelligence and by
the way, Dark Skies, so you know, folks, the pilot
itself said that the head of Majestic twelve in our
pilot was a naval officer. And that's one of the
(44:10):
things that the people who approached us said is we
think you got a lot of things right, one of
which was you put the Navy in charge of the
cover up. So that's very interesting. When I've used the
word aquarium to even UFO insiders, they do that plight
ha ha. But I'm telling you that's what he said. Yeah,
you know, we didn't make this up. And it makes
(44:31):
a certain amount of sense if you believe the aviary designation,
which was most famously brought out. I believe in that
nineteen eighty eight documentary where they had the guy hidden
in the shadows and he talked about the aviary. So
I don't know, all we can ever say in things
like that is that's our experience. I will say, I
(44:52):
want a second what you said about Toby Hooper, though,
Toby Hooper, you had already known him, but I got
to know him as a human being and as a
director and as a decent man. You know, I had
met him as recently as I think I was in
can a few years ago before he passed away and
got to hang out with him for a night. This
is a decent guy.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Down to earth, totally down earth.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
He is not the kind of guy that says, let
me just float something. It's not true, but let me
just float something to somebody and see if they buy it.
There are people out there that do that. I mean,
you know, I'm a rehabilitated journalist. I know that I've
been lied to by professionals, is what I like to say.
But I think I'm a pretty good judge of human nature,
(45:35):
and I think you are too. Toby Hooper was a
decent guy. I never heard him say anything but the
truth to somebody as he understood it. And that applied
to the set. If somebody's performance was no good, he
wouldn't sugarcoat it. He just got we got it. We
gotta go again, you know, we gotta go again.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
That that won't work.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
I mean, and our lead Eric Close would confirm that
as well, that Toby never spared his feelings or anybody's feelings,
not in a bad way, just a supremely honest way.
So I'm just going to underline three times that if
Toby Hooper told you that he wasn't blowing smoke, he
believed that to be true. And since it's a personal
(46:19):
story about him talking to Steven Spielberg, who he did
know and worked for, I got to give it some credence.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Well, I think the last thing before we wrap this
up to think about which I find particularly interesting, and
it basically conforms with a lot of my experiences with
the phenomenon as an experiencer, and that is this idea
of the leap of faith. It's a key component of storytelling.
You see it all the time. But I think, look
(46:48):
at what Roy Neary had to do to get the truth.
He lost his job, he lost his family, he was
willing to lose his life, right, great scene in the
helicopter when he's pushed as far as he can, he's
been caught. He was so close to getting the truth.
He's got a gas mask on because they've put up
(47:09):
a whole fake quarantine to scare off the public, and
he alone takes the gas mask off because he believes
there's something else going on here, and he's willing to
die to find the truth.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
That's a very powerful thing, and I think that's when
the phenomenon recognizes you. When you're at that state and
you're willing to put everything on the line and take risks,
and there's something burning inside you, you inter something happens
to you at that time. I think we did it
with Lowngard Low and Guard wanted the truth about what
was going on. He sat and he talked with Betty
(47:44):
and Barney Hill. He believed them he was beaten up
and abducted by Majestic twelve. And when they said if
you want answers, you have to walk through the door
and join us, well, he had no idea that they
wouldn't just kill him, right, right, And so he put
everything on the line for the truth. And I think
that is a hallmark of not just great UFO storytelling
(48:04):
or great storytelling in general, but what it takes the
key that unlocks the phenomenon. I don't want to leave
the impression that whether Spielberg was approached or not approached
reflects on him in any way. Nor do I want
to leave an impression that whether he listened to them
or didn't listen to him reflects on him in any way.
We didn't select ourselves, probably wouldn't have selected himself. He
(48:26):
seems like a very decent guy in my interactions on
almost every level that I've interacted with them, you know, personally,
So it's not out of the question. It's a good question.
Not everything is equal. Project CIRPO is not as well
documented as other things. I would only leave us with
this thought. In nineteen eighty two, when he was debuting
(48:47):
Et at the White House, Ronald Reagan after the movie said,
you know, there's only two people in this room that
knows exactly how true this is. So that's an odd
thing to say. Maybe it says more about Reagan than Spielberg,
but there's no doubt that the number one person associated
with UFOs and aliens in the film and television community
(49:09):
bar nounn is Steven Spielberg. That's why we talk about him. Yeah,
so obviously very interesting that Ronald Reagan made this quote.
This brings us all the way back to how Dark
Skies was born with the story I was told by
someone in the Reagan administration right around this time period. Boy,
we're just so full of teases. We get we got
(49:31):
to get going on all this stuff. Anyway, we want
to thank everybody for listening to us, because it's a
conversation we're trying to have that we haven't heard too often.
And you know, sometimes you write a movie or a
book because you want to read it or see it
and nobody else has done it. I think that's why
we're doing this podcast, and so thanks all for paying attention.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yes, thanks for listening, and Watch the Skies.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Watch the Skies. Soundland and Frequency is an iHeart podcast
produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson
and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written
by Anna Stump and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and
executive producers are Brice Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the Skies.
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