February 19, 2026 • 47 mins
At the Hollywood premiere party for the NBC series Dark Skies in the late 90s, a stranger—“J.C.”—crashed the celebration and claimed he was sent by the Office of Naval Intelligence. He offered the series creators Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman a chilling bargain: help “slow-roll” UFO disclosure through their NBC series, and he’d provide insider truth—then he scribbled a cryptic “formula” on a bank envelope and called it “Sound, Light & Frequency,” the “secrets of the universe.”
In this debut episode, Bryce and Brent relive the night that became Ground Zero for their current active investigation into Hollywood, UAPs, and secrecy—and ask the question that still can’t be denied: who else in showbiz was offered “the deal”?
Our podcast focuses on the treatment of non-human intelligence and the UAP issue in movies and TV series going back to “War of the Worlds” and looking ahead to the upcoming Spielberg film “Disclosure Day.”
Please follow us on X, and YouTube. Our website home base is SoundLightFrequency.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're having a Dark Sky's premiere party for this TV series,
and it appears that somebody from the Intel community of
the United States of America crashes our party and tries
to offer us a deal.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Halfway through the pilot, I'm out there by myself, and
all of a sudden, I hear footsteps and like Bush
is wrestling behind me, and I turn around and this
guy starts walking out of the shadows and he comes up.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
As I recall, he said they thought we had done
a good job. He was saying that he had been
sent by people who had seen our pilot, and they
thought it was pretty good and there was a lot
to like about it, but there are a few things
that they thought we should know about. I'm brice Able.
(01:01):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
UFOs and Hollywood and even sometimes a real man in black.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I'm Brent Friedman, and I have definitely wondered that for
about thirty years now. That question has haunted me.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Hollywood loves aliens. They've been making movies about at forever,
and we'll be taking a look at all those movies
on sound, light and frequency, going back to the very beginning.
But also going into the future and even talking about
some films and TV series that aren't even on yet.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I know you're probably wondering, why are these two guys
qualified to tell this story. Well, we're both Hollywood insiders
with lots of credits. I'm a writer, producer who's worked
in film, TV and games. I'm a world builder. I've
worked on some really big franchises, from Star Wars to
Star Trek, from Halo to Call of Duty.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Rice I started out in TV news, came to Los
Angeles as the first CNN correspondent. I eventually started writing screenplays,
ended up creating five primetime TV series, wrote some movies,
won a Writer's Guild Award, got to hang out with
some fabulous people like Stan Lee and Steven Spielberg and
a lot of others. And the strangest thing was I
became CEO of the Television Academy during nine to eleven.
(02:09):
The one thing I'll say is through it all, I
always kept thinking about UFOs and the phenomena.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well and Bryce, I think we can both agree that
our most important credit is Dark Sky's the Alien Invasion
series that we co created for NBC.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
What a time.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
It was supposed to be a TV series about an
alien invasion, which it was, and it was very good
at that, but so many things happened during that time
that were outside of the series itself that when I
look back on it, I think it changed how we
even look at reality.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
In Hollywood, there's something called the inciting incident. It's the
point in every story where the protagonist's normal life is interrupted,
setting them on an unexpected journey. Well, for us, that
inciting incident was the Dark Sky's premiere party you heard
about at the top of the episode.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
That's the thing I do want to make clear. We're
going to tell this inciting incident, if you will, of
how it all happened, But it started before that. It
started with our pilot script. It was turned in and
the show wasn't even being filmed yet, and we started
getting communications from anonymous sources who seem to know what
we were up to. That kind of stuff, the development stuff,
(03:21):
the production, the post network life, all of that kind
of informs this new podcast and we'll tell that story.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing to remember is as much
emphasis as we're putting on this story about the Men
in Black, that was really just the center that set
everything off for us. The actual series that we're going
to be doing is much more expansive, and it's going
to look at how we really were at the center
and still are in many ways of this whole experience
(03:51):
within the phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
It's a wild story, a wild ride. It was wilder
to be inside it. But the bottom line is it
allows us to talk about UF, Hollywood and sometimes government,
So those three things kind of mix together in the
night of that party. And there have been people that
have raised a lot of questions over the years. Here's one,
has Uncle Sam been working with showbiz to make alien
(04:15):
movies in order to acclimate the public to the idea
that we're not alone? People actually say that, they've been
saying it for years. On the other hand, though, I
always wonder too, does Hollywood make movies about aliens because
they're good box office? And do they make movies about
alien invasions because they're even better box office? These are
a lot of really good questions.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I personally think the answer to both questions is yes.
And look, we're going to be talking a lot about
the anomalous nature of our experiences on dark skies, But
the fact of the matter is we actually have our
own personal experiences outside of Dark Skies that relate to
the phenomenon, and I think that's one of the things
(04:55):
that as an experience for myself, I'm most excited to share.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I can't wait to I know most. I think I
know most of those stories, all of them. That's the
thing that makes me come back. I can't wait to
hear them. I know that we both have had moments
where we felt we've been staring face to face into
the phenomenon, and it's kind of unnerving. We had some
of them happen at Dark Skies, we've had some of
them happen outside of that. Plus, whether you want to
(05:20):
call it the phenomenon or just the UFO issue, I
feel like we've both been interacting with it for a
long time. For me, it goes back well, I mean
from the beginning of my career as a journalist, and
even as we'll be talking about in this series, I
was a CNN correspondent here in Los Angeles, and when
I tried to pitch UFOs it went nowhere. So I mean,
(05:41):
there's a lot of interesting things that I think we
can talk.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
About right well. The other thing I love about this
is that we're both coming at it from two different places, right.
I think you're much more of a journalist. You're looking
for answers and you're looking for the rational. I am
much more of, as I said, an experiencer, who is
really just believe it. Only the things that happened to me, right,
those are my truth. But we've come together as writers
(06:06):
of a lot of science fiction right, in both movies
and television, so we have a common knowledge. But I
think it's that intersection of our point of views that's
going to be so fascinating as we start to try
and make sense of all of this strangeness.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
You know what I've enjoyed just getting ready to go
on the air with Satellite Infrequency. There are stories that
are really great stories that I'd forgotten, and I've been
going through all the files and everything, and my gosh,
there's a lot of great stuff in there. I can't
wait to tell people about it. And we're going to
start with that crazy night. It kind of started for
(06:42):
us in an Italian restaurant near the Universal cod Cod Iilsul,
great food, great meeting place, and you and I met
with our wives for lunch, and while they talked about
whatever they talked about. You told me a story I did.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
That is a story that, to just be very brief,
it was essentially a story of when I was disclosed
to at age eighteen by a family friend who was
in the Reagan administration at the time. This was nineteen
eighty one, and I, for reasons I cannot fully explain,
he unloaded everything on me. And I told you that
(07:22):
story got my attention. Yeah, it's a great story, and
you know, not to be too much of a tease,
but a future episode will be all about that story.
Absolutely suffice it to say, I was already trying to
do a UFO TV series, and so it was kind
of the diversion to say, I think I'll do one
with this guy I just met.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
But that's what we ended up doing. We ended up
breaking the Dark Sky's series. And this is in nineteen
ninety five, right, and we wrote a briefing book that
was a pretty phenomenal sales tool and it worked and
we sold a series well.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
And the cool thing about the briefing book was we
presented it as though it were a real classified document.
We sealed it, we put it, wrapped it in paper
and said, for your eyes only and you had to
sign something that allowed you to see it.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
I believe you were out of town and so you
didn't get the experience that I had. There was no
GPS or anything. I had a Thomas Brothers map guide,
and I'm in charge of driving the studio guy around
to three networks and getting there on time.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
No pressure there.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
And we went to ABC first, and then I believe
we went to CBS, and then at the end of
the day we went to NBC and we had quite
an experience at nb we did. But you know, just
so I just want to paint this picture a little bit,
because there was a couple of years ago that said
our Dark Sky's Briefing Book was one of the top
twelve pitches for a television series in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Wow, which was kind of them. That's quite a compliment.
It was very nice what it was.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Just so everyone's very clear, you and I just made
a briefing book in a black notebook with a bunch
of papers and fake documents in everything, and that briefing book,
that black briefing book was sealed with a gold foil seal.
Then it was wrapped in brown wrapping paper. Then there
was string tied around it, and it was stamped above
(09:18):
top secret and all that, and it really did look
like something you might get in nineteen forty seven over
the Roswell thing.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
One of my favorite memories of that whole time period
when we were assembling that was we would have to
take all of the materials to the Agora Hills Kinkos,
and at some point, after enough trips, we'd get this
look as they were seeing all of the stuff we
were putting together and had probably had no idea we
were trying to tell sell a TV show. The thing
that was so great about the notebook that was so
(09:45):
subversive is first they had to cut the twine, then
they had to break open the paper, very interactive, and
now they see a thing a notebook that says top secret,
and there's a gold foil seal and it says on
the notebook, if you break this seal, you accept the
consequences of treason. Yes, well, that's a pretty bold thing
(10:07):
to give to a network executive. And all of them
open the gold foil seal. So I guess they're all
risk takers by a career anyway. So we ended up
pitching at all three Ultimately we had CBS and NBC
both wanting the show, but we pitched to Don Olmeyer,
who was the top guy at NBC ahead of Warren Littlefield.
(10:29):
So we pitch it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
We leave this document, we leave I'm going into the
parking lot with Jeff, and you know what people do
in parking lots.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
They go, well, I don't know, do you think it
was any good? I don't know if he understood it, you.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Know, And you're just sort of doing the post mortem,
the post mortem, and Don Olmeyer comes out onto his
veranda on the second story. He had the premier office,
and he comes out on his veranda. He sees us
in the parking lot and he shouts at us, can
I buy it in the parking lot? And so that's
how the show got started, and it was a long development,
(11:03):
just so everyone understands. First there was the pilot that
we had to write two hour pilot, two hour pilot,
and then we had to shoot the two hour pilot.
But then they had to decide if they were going
to order episodes, So.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
They tested the pilot. People liked it apparently.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Enough for them to order some episodes. So we were
working on Dark Skies for the better.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Part of three years. By the time it's all over.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Wow, crazy, Now let's get moving forward. In the summer
of nineteen ninety six, we were going to be on
television on NBC on Saturday nights for what they would
call the trilogy. We were eight o'clock then it was
Profiler profiling, the Pretender, the Pretender, and then the Profiler right,
(11:48):
and so NBC was like, okay, we'll get them in
with Dark Skies and they'll stick around. So because Dark
Skys had to open up that night, NBC was all about,
let's all sell sell this thing. So it was a
wild time in the middle of the summer of ninety
six because just who everyone understands Independence Day. The movie
(12:09):
came out on July second of that year, and a
couple of days later, Time magazine had a cover article
about Aliens have Landed, sci Fi Mix a Comeback where
they were talking about X files and Independence Day and
Dark Skies. And I talked to a guy for like
two hours from Time Magazine anyway, So things are crazy, right,
(12:32):
And I remember vividly how there was an alien flag
design which people can see on our website. Yeah, fantastic,
it's an American flag with an alien looking between the
stars and the strip I mean the stripes, right. And
it was done by a wonderful graphic artist, Alicia Fernandez,
and it was all over hundreds of LA buses, billboards, magazines.
(12:58):
You couldn't go anywhere without seeing it. I loved the tagline.
In nineteen forty seven, America was invaded, they never left.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
I love that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
And by the way, you and I didn't even come
up with that, I don't think. I think that was
the NBC promo department, which at that time was vaunted
as being an irresistible force. Yes, if NBC was marketing
at watch out. Yeah, and so they did a whole
selection of promos. I remember, specifically, when you're talking about
this marketing blitz. I was at the beach in Santa
(13:29):
Monica and everyone started pointing up in the sky and
there was a plane carrying or pulling a dark Sky's banner.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
I think it was the weekend that it was premiering
or something, and I just thought, Wow, those are heady days. Yeah,
I have arrived. Yeah, it was so cool. This was
your first TV series. Yes, I'd been on a number
of series and even created some but I never had that.
I never had that kind of treatment. And listen, we'll
go into more of the details as time goes on
(13:59):
in this podcast. But what I think was important about
what we just said was to paint a picture that
this was a big deal. Yeah, it was a big
deal to the network. Therefore it was a big deal
in television, and it was also a big deal apparently
in that the media had said aliens are the thing.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yes, we were.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Part of that wave. So to put in context what
we're having happened now so that you can really appreciate
the story we're about to tell you is the show
was going to air on September twenty first, nineteen ninety six,
which was a Saturday night, and we were going to
have a party, and we were going to have television
(14:39):
sets everywhere and people were going to get a chance
to watch this. And this party was going to happen
at my house, which was pretty crazy, and we invited
roughly two hundred people to that party.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Cast crew, was executives from NBC, from Sony. Yeah, there
was a lot of people there. And we did this
really cool thing where we wanted to give everyone kind
of a party Memento, and so you know, in our show,
the characters were set inside Majestic twelve, which was you know,
we can go into that. That's a whole deep dive
into kind of a secret government agency that was set
(15:14):
on focusing on UFOs. We decided to do was give
everyone a badge, so when they came in the door,
they had their photo taken. We got a little kind
of black and white polaroid and we made a Majestic
twelve badge for them that gave them access to the party,
and everyone was wearing these with lanyards all around the party.
(15:35):
It was a very specific and interesting detail that'll come
back later.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
The thing I just want to make clear is that
this was going to be a good party. I mean,
everybody had their Majestic badges. We had I believe three
different televisions outside for people to watch and multiple televisions
inside the house. We had good food, and at eleven o'clock.
At ten o'clock when the show was over, we were
(16:00):
going to have a Beatles tribute band play in the backyard.
Because I think our fourth episode was called Dark Day's Night,
and so we knew these Beatles guys from they did
the show for us.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
So it was a good party, Yeah, really good party.
All right, enough for play, enough for play. Let's get
right to the story. And since it began with you
kick it off.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Okay, all right, So we've set up that it's a
pretty good party. But I've got a lot of pressure
on me, Brent, because not only are these people all
people that you and I know, but some of them
are pretty major guys, I mean, and women who were
executives at the studio which was Columbia TV on the
network and the network which was NBC, plus directors that
(16:46):
had worked for us, and there were just a lot
of important people there. And so I had two hundred
of these people in my house and I'm also trying
to throw the party, and I don't want the electrical
grid to fall apart while I've got three TVs and
I'm dealing with things like, you know, the three TVs
are out of sync in their audio, and people are
asking me questions about that, and at the same time,
(17:08):
someone's tugging on my shoulder going, you know, there's no
or dervs or anything. I'm just you know, I'm on overload. Yes,
and one of our producers. Brad mark Witz comes up
to me during this time where it's so hectic and
we're all waiting to go on, and Brad says, there's
this guy I.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Think you need to talk to.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
And I'm like, okay, who is he?
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah, just he's over here. Let me get him.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
And he brings this guy over and that's where you
are so right. This guy does not have a majestic
badge on. He doesn't have one. Everyone else has one,
but he doesn't have one. He's about thirty years old,
by my estimation, kind of look kind of preppy or
whatever seems to my memory. You may have a different memory,
but I think he had some kind of blazer and
(17:56):
khaki slacks on ors.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
He looked like a you know, he wasn't he was.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Lean and young and whatever.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
And he.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Let me put it this way, folks, memory is a
funny thing. Thirty years later, some of the details slip,
but I just remember him being introduced or introducing himself
and saying that he had come just to congratulate us,
and as I recall, he said, they thought we had
done a good job. Like, well, who's what are you
(18:27):
talking about?
Speaker 3 (18:28):
They? And who are you?
Speaker 1 (18:30):
By the way, and this gentleman said his name was JC,
or call me JC.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
I don't know if that was his name. He said,
call me JC.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And he was saying that he had been sent by
people who had seen our pilot. Now, remember it hasn't
aired yet. It's not like it's a government secret under
lock and key, but very few people had seen it.
They had seen it, and they thought it was pretty good,
and there was a lot to like about it, but
there are a few things that they thought we should
(18:58):
know about. I guess I was in a hurry, and
you know, I guess I was being brusque or whatever.
Body said, Okay, so you've seen the pilot. What happens
after the crop circle, which was just a very specific thing,
and the guy goes, oh, well, they take the guy
back to Majestic twelve and they do that operation and
they pull that thing out of his head. And I thought, well,
(19:21):
that's exactly what happened. Nobody and my party necessarily had
seen it that night. It had not aired yet. Now
I want to throw this over to you, because I
didn't talk to him much longer because again people were tagging,
you know, tugging on my shirt and saying you got
to go put this fire out here, or you got
to go talk. And I just, you know, I just, frankly, Brent,
(19:44):
I invited him to leave the party. I said, I
don't know who you are, and I have other things
on my mind, and I'm not sure why you're here,
and I think you should probably go, And then I
left and I assumed he had to, but you know differently.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Well, so so now to set the stage that was
before the show aired. For the show aired, okay, so
now fast forward to about an hour into the two
hour pilot. So, well, Bryce is glad handing and whatnot.
Remember I'm the nube. I'm I'm I don't evenmber what
my title was, but I was not.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
You were supervisor. I produced.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
We weren't that much of a newb right I was,
But well, I was a nube to like this level
of the industry. And one of the things that I
remember was I had never been through a post production
process where I had to watch a cut of this
pilot probably over a hundred times as we went through
cut after cut and then mixing and then testing and
(20:38):
all this other. So by the time it aired, the
last thing I wanted to do was sit and watch
it again. What I became very interested in was watching
people's reactions to it, especially in the back half, because
there was some really scary stuff. And so I decided, well,
I'm going to break away from the party and go
out to the backyard and find it kind of a
vantage point where I'm just by myself and just watching
(21:01):
people watch it. So again, halfway through the pilot, I'm
out there by myself, and all of a sudden, I
hear footsteps and like bushes rustling behind me, and I
turn around and this guy starts walking out of the
shadows and he comes up and as Bryce described him
thirty something, I would say he was like a cross
between like you know, military and fraternity, right, not super handsome,
(21:26):
but really kind of agreeable like, and he didn't seem
threatening at all. He had a navy blue blazer on
with a white shirt and press jeans and black shoes.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
And respectfully, we've done all right, already, we've undercut our
own story. I'm going with khakis and you're going with
press gens, right, all right, continue, Okay, So.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
What happens is I'm standing there, this guy comes out,
and the first thing I notice is he has no
majestic badge on, right, because I don't know who this
person is, and I'm counting on that badge to give
me a name so that I don't look like the
nube that I.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Know I am.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
But he has no badge. So I go, hey, how's
it going, And he goes, well, you must be really proud,
and I'm thinking, oh, well, yeah, I mean this is
my first show. Yeah, yeah, I got to tell you
you got a lot, right, And I just remember thinking, well,
that's an interesting thing to say, like meaning we had
a lot of good shots, we had a lot of
good cuts. The music was like, I don't what do
(22:22):
you mean we got to lift stuff?
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Right?
Speaker 2 (22:23):
And he goes, yeah, it seems pretty clear. You talk
to someone. Now, as Bryce mentioned, we're not going to
get into the story of what I'll call a briefing
that I got when I was eighteen years old by
someone very high up in the Reagan administration who was
a friend of the family. But in fact, I had
talked to someone and I probably knew a lot more
about ufology and the conspiracies and whatnot than I should have,
(22:48):
or that I even wanted to. But in that moment,
I thought Oh my god, I'm going to be arrested.
I have told Bryce the stories of what I knew,
and we put some of them in dark skies. And
now there's a guy here who's not part of Sony
or NBC saying I spoke to someone and now I'm
(23:09):
seeing him not as a fraternity guy, but as some
sort of FBI CI agent who's going to take me away.
And so for a moment, I was frozen. I was
just like a deer in headlights. And then he said, yeah,
so you got a lot right, but there are some
things you got wrong, and that's why I'm here. I
represent a group that would like to work with you
(23:30):
and Bryce to get more truth into your show, and
we'd like to make a deal with you.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Guys.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Now you have to understand, this was all I didn't
know this level of Hollywood before, so this was all
like incredibly surreal to me. There's a guy talking to
me about making a deal. He's from some branch of
the military in the government, and I don't even know
what to say. And I said, well, okay, well what
(23:57):
would that mean exactly? Well, we we want to get
you some truth in the form of some facts, maybe
even some media, and we'd like to have you integrate
that into your show as part of what what we
would call kind of a slow rollout disclosure program, because
work from a branch of the military that believes the
truth does need to come out, and that is kind
(24:18):
of one of the central conceits of your show. In fact,
that was what Longuard's whole mantra was, that the public
needs to know. And so just a loan guard being
the name of our main character. Yes, correct. And so
I'm listening to all of this, and in the midst
of this, my wife, Patricia walks up, as I'm sure
many couples do, you have your own kind of coded language.
(24:41):
And my wife walks up and says, Brent, Bryce is
looking for you, which I took to mean, oh, she's
offering me an off ramp out of a conversation I
might not want to be in. I didn't think you
were really looking for me. You had much more important
things to do. But I told her hold on. I
gave her kind of the one minute because I wanted
to hear more from this guy. And I said, okay,
so how would this deal work? And he said, well,
(25:06):
we can have a deeper discussion about this. Let me
give you my card, and he pulls out a card
and all it said on the front was J Dot
C Dot with a phone number three to one zero number,
and there was nothing on the back. Now, that part
is happening completely to you, and we're a little fuzzy
on some of the actual deal here. But what I
(25:26):
think I remember, and what I think you remember, is
you were standing at the barbecue. And I know this
because the barbecue is where I do a lot of
work in my house, right and it's near the kitchen door.
So I think I which is how people were getting
into the house, and I think I was walking by
to go inside, and I look over at this barbecue
and there is Brent Friedman, the supervising producer of Dark Skies,
(25:51):
talking to this guy JC, who about an hour and
a half earlier, i'd said you need to leave the party,
and I wasn't particularly happy that. I wasn't sure what
I was going to do about it, but I believe
that stopped me from going in because I do remember
very clearly watching what happened next. And I'm going to
let you pick up the story there. Okay, So he's
(26:13):
given me the card, and he says, so, what I'd
like you to do is talk to Bryce and then
give me a call if you guys are interested in
discussing this this deal. And I in that moment I thought,
I did not know that you had already spoken that
you'd had an encounter with him, And so in that moment,
(26:35):
I had a quick flash of I'm going to tell
Bryce that a guy came out of what felt like
the bushes at the shadows at his backyard without a
badge from the government that wants to make a deal.
And I know what Bryce's response is going to be.
It was going to be hell no. And I chuckled,
just like I involuntarily. I went, well, okay, I'll talk
(26:58):
to Bryce, and the the kind of like very amicable
demeanor that he had immediately left and he said, I
can see that you're not taking this seriously. And he
turns to Patricia, my wife, and he says, ma'am, do
you have a piece of paper and a pencil like a.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Borrow just to set the table here. That probably explains
why Patricia, your wife, who was there, You think she
only came to pull you out of an uncomfortable conversation.
But I think she probably was telling the truth, because
it was weird enough for me that I would have said,
if i'd ran into her, I need to talk to Brent. Yes,
because this was crazy. Even though I was distracted mightily,
(27:40):
it was crazy. Yes, So that's why I was lurking nearby.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
So pick it up.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
So she fumbles through her purse and she pulls out
a piece of paper which actually happened to be a
we're going back to nineteen ninety six, an ATM deposit
slip envelope, right where you put the slip in with
with the cash or the check or whatever. And she
tears off the triangular kind of backside with the stickum
(28:07):
on it, and she gives that to him with a pin,
and he takes it and he starts drawing something on
his palm right there in front of us, and after
about thirty seconds, he kind of looks at it like, Yep,
that's what I wanted to do. He folds it in
his palm and he hands it to me, and he says,
do me a favor, hold on to this for about
ten fifteen years, put it in a safety deposit box,
(28:29):
and in case we don't end up working together at
that time, you'll know that this was serious and that
I was for real. And I said, uh, okay, I'm
getting chills just hearing this again. Can I can I
look at it now? And he said sure. So I
unfold it and I look at it and it's hieroglyphics.
It's what we've come to call the formula. But it
(28:52):
means nothing to me. And I said, well, I don't
understand what is this?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
And before you answered that no, it was something that
when you showed it to other people later and when
I saw it that night, all of this were like,
what exactly is this thing? But it was very specific.
We'll be talking more about it in future episodes as
we try to uncover what it really is. But I
just wanted to get that in there because you're asking
(29:19):
this guy, what is this?
Speaker 3 (29:21):
What's his answer?
Speaker 2 (29:23):
His answer is very casually, very straightforward. Sound Light and
Frequency Secrets of the Universe. Sound Light and Frequency Secrets.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Of the Universe.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
All right, we're back, and Brett, I have to say
I loved the mic drop moment of sound, light and Frequency,
and I have to tell you part of me just
wanted to end the podcast right there and go away
for a week and come back because I don't know
if we can do anything that makes it better, but
it raised so many questions.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
It does, and I think we're obligated at this point
to answer or at least try and answer, some of
those questions. And I think the first one is why
why did this guy come to us? We've talked about
the fact that Aliens were big and our show was
huge at that time, but let's look at some of
the facts here. First fact is I was disclosed to
(30:19):
when I was eighteen by a high level person in
the Reagan administration. That was the inspiration for our series.
And while we didn't take anything specifically from that conversation,
we did lean into the idea that there had been
a cover up going on for a long time. Right
number two, The fact that there was obviously some sort
(30:41):
of secret government agencies working behind the scenes. Those were
pillars for us in terms of what the Dark Sky
Show was. Let's look at another interesting fact. When we
sold Dark Skies, we sold it with this concept that
it was the truth under the veil of fiction, and
even in our Dark Guy's notebook, in our briefing book,
(31:02):
we had a letter from John Lowngard the character, saying
that he was trying to tell the story under the
veil of fiction. Well, that was what JC wanted to do, right,
He wanted us to use Dark Skies as the fiction
to pump in his truth. Is that a coincidence?
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Well, let me just point out to anybody, if you
go to our website Soundlightfrequency dot com, you can read
that so famous Loan Guard letter and you can see
I believe the phrase he uses in the letter is
quote cover of fiction.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Yes, which I like.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
A couple of quick thoughts on why us, why then?
And it goes back to that context issue, for better
or worse. It's not like we set out to do it,
but we suddenly had an extremely high profile show. A
lot was writing on it, a network's actual bottom line
financially was writing on it because they were trying to
(32:01):
open a new Saturday night thing. And if it worked,
that rising tide raised all the boats at NBC. And
if it didn't work, that was a problem, and you're
weren't going to get any numbers for the nine o'clock
or ten o'clock show. If us the eight o'clock show failed,
just a lot of profile, and then that time magazine
things like that. And I had just come off making
(32:22):
a movie for the Sci Fi Channel, which was very
high profile for them. It was their first one and
it was all about eufology and abduction, official official denial crash,
And will more on that later. But there was a
certain visibility at that time. So when you were telling
me your story about the briefing you had, I was
telling you the experience with making this movie. And then
(32:46):
and again this will come up in a later episode
in detail.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
And you'll be able to see it.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
But in the summer of ninety five, this is a
year before the show. A year before the show, I
got a postcard at my house with a nineteen sixty
two book sci fi book called The Flying Eyes on
the outside of it, and it was typed in a
dark typewriter ribbon on the other side, and its message
(33:13):
was we are watching you. And it freaked me out.
As you remember, I came to you in that summer
and said, who wrote this?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah? Did you?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
I think you thought you did it?
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah? I thought, you know.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
I mean, this is kind of funny and I appreciate it,
you know, as a piece of humor, but what's going
on here? And then we you know, so we'll be
talking about that later. But the point is we were
high profile, there was reason to come to us. But
I want to take it one other level, though, those
are the reasons why somebody might be interested in the
show just because of it is a delivery vehicle. But
(33:49):
there's a whole other level to this, Brent that has
me thinking, which is, Okay, what would be since this
guy JC had seen Dark Skies before most people had, right,
and they saw our Bible too, and seen our Bible,
read the script and said we got a lot right,
said we got a lot right, had actually said that
(34:10):
he had read some of our scripts that had not
even be shot yet. I mean, this guy that seemed
deeply briefed in not through no intent on our own,
this guy knew all this stuff. So I asked myself
a different question, and that is, what was it that
was in the Dark Sky's pilot, which is what he
(34:32):
had seen, that would cause anybody in the intelligence community
of the US government to say, these guys would be
a good delivery system for us. What did we have
that they thought we got right?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I mean, I've asked myself that same question. I think
there's probably a long list of stuff. There's so many
things in that dark sky's pilot, but I think let's
focus on the things that were unique. What were we
bringing to ufology that might have got their attention. Well,
let's go down the list. The first one is the
big one, linking JFK and Roswell. Yeah, and I think
(35:09):
you know you had this great idea right out of
the gate. Let's take the two biggest conspiracies and put
them in an atom collider and see what happens and
allow us to create kind of the unified field theory
of not just upology, but conspiracies. And that was our
big idea. The strangest thing though, is that since then
(35:32):
what we felt was a big, high concept fictional idea
has actually gained traction within the UFO community, and a
lot of people believe it's true. It's amazing and of
course you can read all about it on the internet now,
But when we were coming up with the atom collider
theory of conspiracy, there was no real internet to tell
(35:56):
us any of that stuff. So we just made this
stuff up. And now, of course certain documents are being
looked at and certain ideas that John Kennedy, for example,
going back to the post war period was in the Navy.
The guys that said they came to us were from
the Office of Naval Intelligence. Yes, supposedly. The man that
(36:16):
gave you your briefing at the age of eighteen was
Secretary of the Navy. So the strong Navy thing. And
one of the things they did tell us I remember
was that that was something they thought we got very right. Yes,
that it was the Navy, and everybody always thinks it's
the Air Force because they're unidentified flying objects.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
So now let's go to another thing. This one is
a little more fringe, but we introduced this idea of
crop circles being an alien communication device, not alien to human,
but alien to alien, that they were essentially markers of
where abductions had taken place. Very strange idea, but that
(37:00):
that was something that certainly no one else had posited,
and since then I don't know that anyone has actually
said that that is a theory that they buy into.
But that is again something unique that we put into
the Dark Sky's Pilot.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
There are three things that I am proud we put
in there, because I believe they're the triad of some
of this stuff we put in abductions. I mean, our
story begins in its early pages with John Loanguard's girlfriend
Kim Sayers being abducted, so we take on the abduction
phenomenon right away. We put Loan guard versus a target.
(37:37):
Then as a member of Majestic twelve, we put that
out there, and a lot of people at that time
were saying, well, I don't know, there's some documents, but
I think they're fake. But we bought into it. We said,
Majestic twelve, that's the hot zone and also involving Roswell
in it, because remember one of our central tenets from
(37:58):
the beginning was if Roswell is a true event, that is,
if Roswell is an anomalous event that represents a non
human intelligence interacting, colliding, crashing around humanity, that changes everything.
So if you're going to land in the Kennedy Administration
in nineteen sixty one, and that's where your main character
(38:20):
is going to work, it means if everyone thinks everything
is great, it's the new Frontier and everything, there's still
an alien issue going on underneath the surface. And I
think it was our underneath the surface part of it
that was also probably interesting and attractive to them.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeah, And that was the essence of our idea was,
let's take this notion that Roswell was real and it's
this truth that's lurking beneath the surface, and let's have
our characters decide that JFK, the man of the people,
is the one to blow the whistle, right, and that's
what gets him killed.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Now, there's also one very crazy idea in the Dark
Sky's pilot that, if indeed it is true, would cause
somebody in the government to freak out. Yes, and that
had to do with the grays. Now, we had grays
in Dark Skies, and a lot of people have grays.
I mean, X Files has grays, and grays are like
(39:17):
a staple. But what we did with the grays in
Dark Skies is we brought in a guy called Patient zero.
He was a farmer at that crop circle and it
turned out that he had an alien ganglion implanted in
his brain and they took him to MJ twelve and
as we said earlier, they pull it out. Yeah, okay,
(39:39):
and that ganglion was there to sort of modify his
behavior as a body snatcher's kind of thing. But even
gnarlier and what's interesting about that is that as soon
as they see that, the head of Majestic twelve says,
get me the Roswell sample, and they bring in a
formaldehyde beaker full of raws Zwellian stuff, and it is
(40:02):
a ganglion that looks identical to the guy they just
pulled out of this human being, But it was pulled
out of one of the Roswell Grays.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yes well, And so that idea that the Grays are
this enslaved race essentially by some larger hive mind was
crazy at the time. And yet what is going on
in current day ufology. A lot of people are saying
that the Grays are just automatons that are working for
some larger alien intelligence. Right, So was our show a
(40:34):
metaphor for that idea? Were we truly ahead of the
times and dialed into a truth that we didn't even
know at the time. These are the coincidences and the
questions that will you drive this show forward?
Speaker 1 (40:48):
I guess if I had to speculate, I'd have to say,
any of those are possibilities that could have drawn somebody
to us. But the bigger issue, it seems like if
Dark Skies said anything, it said what we actually say
in the main titles History is a lie. All right, now,
(41:12):
that's what we originally wrote. The network made us change
it to history as we know it is a lie, which, okay, whatever,
But I think that is the subversive bit of dark
Skies that just could get in somebody's mind and make
them say, these guys are telling a pretty interesting story
because we weren't saying ancient alien's history, although we did
(41:35):
say that, we were saying current modern American history is
a lie.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
And there was one review that came out for the show.
I wish I could remember who actually wrote these words,
but they called it the most subversive show on television,
which I actually take as a badge of honor. Yeah,
but that may be why they thought it was so interesting,
because if in fact, they were working behind the scenes,
are under the reality that we face, and they realized
(42:04):
history was a lie and we were saying it every week, well,
that would get their attention.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Let's just put this party crasher thing in final content.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
I think over the years, both of us have talked
about this at nauseum. Now we're talking about it in public,
but there are a number of questions that keep coming
up and the first one I think we have to ask,
is this deal that JC proposed. He said it was
for disclosure, it was for this honorable like, let's get
the truth out to the people. But I don't think
(42:34):
that we can discount the idea that maybe it was
all part of a disinformation campaign.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
I've never discounted that because my first take was that's
what it was. My first take was, first of all,
it's a hoax and this guy's not who he says
he is. But then as I began to say, I'm
giving him more credibility than that, I then began to say,
but that doesn't mean he's telling me the truth. I
mean that's where the journalist of me came in. I mean,
(43:01):
as I like to say, I've been lied to by experts,
and I thought, there's no reason in the world to
accept on face value what this guy is saying. So
it could easily have been disinformation. In fact, Brent, the
more we have learned over time about disinformation, the government
has been disinforming as a matter of policy or military strategy,
(43:21):
going back to D Day and before. Yeah, right, so, yeah,
of course it could be disinformation. But then that raised
all its other questions, which is, why are they disinforming
me and Brent Yes, yeah, why do they need us?
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Anyway, then another interesting question is when you start looking
at some of the kind of the coincidences around what
we had as content in the pilot and the series,
how certain things have come to be seemingly true years later.
It raises this very interesting question that lives you know,
firmly in the phenomenon is does fiction somehow become truth
(43:59):
over time through the miracle of consciousness? Right, we are
in an age right now where everyone is doing deep
dives on consciousness to try and understand how we are
co creating our own reality. Right, some of the shows
we're going to be looking at in the future we're
very prescient. But there's another possibility that they actually seeded
the public consciousness with ideas that then became true once
(44:23):
enough people started to believe them. Can't discount that. The
last thing I want to go into is, as we
mentioned earlier, we can't have been the only ones in
Hollywood to been offered such a deal. It raises the
question who else was visited by a man in black
and offered us what jac did? And by the way,
(44:44):
Brent even as we talk about this, we're not actually
telling anyone at this point what our response was to
this offer. That's true, that's part of the story. And
again we're not trying to be KOI or over hype
it or anything, but we sort of want people to
go on the same journey that we went on so
that they can understand what we're thinking when certain details
(45:06):
are coming out. And your point about the deal is
well taken. I guess I'm thrilled that they came to me.
Maybe I am, but it certainly doesn't mean other people
might not have been approached. And in fact, as you
and I have dug deeper into this over time, we
keep running across cooperation between the military and certain movies
(45:29):
and certain directors, which I guess takes us to the
big mcgilla here, which is, if there's anyone who has
done more for films that relate to ufology and TV
shows and TV shows, it would have to be, you know,
Steven Spielberg. At the same time, you'd also say there
has been a persistent belief in the UFO community that
(45:53):
somehow Steven Spielberg was briefed or offered a deal like
our deal. So we're going to look into that. That's
going to be the next episode. Next episode, we are
going to do a deep dive into Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, which is probably the seminal film in ufology,
and take a look at all of the rumors that
are surrounding it.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
And tell you a little bit about the film so
that you can sort of do what we just did
with Dark Skies as you dissect it into its pieces.
They exist not just as a film, but they exist
as a reflection of what's going on in ufology when
the film came out. Remember Spielberg did this in nineteen
seventy seven. I mean, this is early stuff. It's not
(46:34):
that far removed from some really really terrible movies of
the fifties and sixties, and nobody touched the mythology of
UFOs if you will, like Spielberg did and has continued
to do. So he's our next guy. Yeah, it's going
to be a great episode. We'll see you next week.
Thank you, see you. Sound Light and Frequency is an
iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by
(46:57):
Nick Johnson and for Stellar Key'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
We're having a Dark Sky's premiere party for this TV series,
and it appears that somebody from the Intel community of
the United States of America crashes our party and tries
to offer us a deal.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Halfway through the pilot, I'm out there by myself, and
all of a sudden, I hear footsteps and like Bush
is wrestling behind me, and I turn around and this
guy starts walking out of the shadows and he comes up.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
As I recall, he said they thought we had done
a good job. He was saying that he had been
sent by people who had seen our pilot, and they
thought it was pretty good and there was a lot
to like about it, but there are a few things
that they thought we should know about. I'm brice Able.
(01:01):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
UFOs and Hollywood and even sometimes a real man in black.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I'm Brent Friedman, and I have definitely wondered that for
about thirty years now. That question has haunted me.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Hollywood loves aliens. They've been making movies about at forever,
and we'll be taking a look at all those movies
on sound, light and frequency, going back to the very beginning.
But also going into the future and even talking about
some films and TV series that aren't even on yet.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I know you're probably wondering, why are these two guys
qualified to tell this story. Well, we're both Hollywood insiders
with lots of credits. I'm a writer, producer who's worked
in film, TV and games. I'm a world builder. I've
worked on some really big franchises, from Star Wars to
Star Trek, from Halo to Call of Duty.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Rice I started out in TV news, came to Los
Angeles as the first CNN correspondent. I eventually started writing screenplays,
ended up creating five primetime TV series, wrote some movies,
won a Writer's Guild Award, got to hang out with
some fabulous people like Stan Lee and Steven Spielberg and
a lot of others. And the strangest thing was I
became CEO of the Television Academy during nine to eleven.
(02:09):
The one thing I'll say is through it all, I
always kept thinking about UFOs and the phenomena.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well and Bryce, I think we can both agree that
our most important credit is Dark Sky's the Alien Invasion
series that we co created for NBC.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
What a time.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
It was supposed to be a TV series about an
alien invasion, which it was, and it was very good
at that, but so many things happened during that time
that were outside of the series itself that when I
look back on it, I think it changed how we
even look at reality.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
In Hollywood, there's something called the inciting incident. It's the
point in every story where the protagonist's normal life is interrupted,
setting them on an unexpected journey. Well, for us, that
inciting incident was the Dark Sky's premiere party you heard
about at the top of the episode.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
That's the thing I do want to make clear. We're
going to tell this inciting incident, if you will, of
how it all happened, But it started before that. It
started with our pilot script. It was turned in and
the show wasn't even being filmed yet, and we started
getting communications from anonymous sources who seem to know what
we were up to. That kind of stuff, the development stuff,
(03:21):
the production, the post network life, all of that kind
of informs this new podcast and we'll tell that story.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing to remember is as much
emphasis as we're putting on this story about the Men
in Black, that was really just the center that set
everything off for us. The actual series that we're going
to be doing is much more expansive, and it's going
to look at how we really were at the center
and still are in many ways of this whole experience
(03:51):
within the phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
It's a wild story, a wild ride. It was wilder
to be inside it. But the bottom line is it
allows us to talk about UF, Hollywood and sometimes government,
So those three things kind of mix together in the
night of that party. And there have been people that
have raised a lot of questions over the years. Here's one,
has Uncle Sam been working with showbiz to make alien
(04:15):
movies in order to acclimate the public to the idea
that we're not alone? People actually say that, they've been
saying it for years. On the other hand, though, I
always wonder too, does Hollywood make movies about aliens because
they're good box office? And do they make movies about
alien invasions because they're even better box office? These are
a lot of really good questions.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I personally think the answer to both questions is yes.
And look, we're going to be talking a lot about
the anomalous nature of our experiences on dark skies, But
the fact of the matter is we actually have our
own personal experiences outside of Dark Skies that relate to
the phenomenon, and I think that's one of the things
(04:55):
that as an experience for myself, I'm most excited to share.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I can't wait to I know most. I think I
know most of those stories, all of them. That's the
thing that makes me come back. I can't wait to
hear them. I know that we both have had moments
where we felt we've been staring face to face into
the phenomenon, and it's kind of unnerving. We had some
of them happen at Dark Skies, we've had some of
them happen outside of that. Plus, whether you want to
(05:20):
call it the phenomenon or just the UFO issue, I
feel like we've both been interacting with it for a
long time. For me, it goes back well, I mean
from the beginning of my career as a journalist, and
even as we'll be talking about in this series, I
was a CNN correspondent here in Los Angeles, and when
I tried to pitch UFOs it went nowhere. So I mean,
(05:41):
there's a lot of interesting things that I think we
can talk.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
About right well. The other thing I love about this
is that we're both coming at it from two different places, right.
I think you're much more of a journalist. You're looking
for answers and you're looking for the rational. I am
much more of, as I said, an experiencer, who is
really just believe it. Only the things that happened to me, right,
those are my truth. But we've come together as writers
(06:06):
of a lot of science fiction right, in both movies
and television, so we have a common knowledge. But I
think it's that intersection of our point of views that's
going to be so fascinating as we start to try
and make sense of all of this strangeness.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
You know what I've enjoyed just getting ready to go
on the air with Satellite Infrequency. There are stories that
are really great stories that I'd forgotten, and I've been
going through all the files and everything, and my gosh,
there's a lot of great stuff in there. I can't
wait to tell people about it. And we're going to
start with that crazy night. It kind of started for
(06:42):
us in an Italian restaurant near the Universal cod Cod Iilsul,
great food, great meeting place, and you and I met
with our wives for lunch, and while they talked about
whatever they talked about. You told me a story I did.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
That is a story that, to just be very brief,
it was essentially a story of when I was disclosed
to at age eighteen by a family friend who was
in the Reagan administration at the time. This was nineteen
eighty one, and I, for reasons I cannot fully explain,
he unloaded everything on me. And I told you that
(07:22):
story got my attention. Yeah, it's a great story, and
you know, not to be too much of a tease,
but a future episode will be all about that story.
Absolutely suffice it to say, I was already trying to
do a UFO TV series, and so it was kind
of the diversion to say, I think I'll do one
with this guy I just met.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
But that's what we ended up doing. We ended up
breaking the Dark Sky's series. And this is in nineteen
ninety five, right, and we wrote a briefing book that
was a pretty phenomenal sales tool and it worked and
we sold a series well.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
And the cool thing about the briefing book was we
presented it as though it were a real classified document.
We sealed it, we put it, wrapped it in paper
and said, for your eyes only and you had to
sign something that allowed you to see it.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
I believe you were out of town and so you
didn't get the experience that I had. There was no
GPS or anything. I had a Thomas Brothers map guide,
and I'm in charge of driving the studio guy around
to three networks and getting there on time.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
No pressure there.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
And we went to ABC first, and then I believe
we went to CBS, and then at the end of
the day we went to NBC and we had quite
an experience at nb we did. But you know, just
so I just want to paint this picture a little bit,
because there was a couple of years ago that said
our Dark Sky's Briefing Book was one of the top
twelve pitches for a television series in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Wow, which was kind of them. That's quite a compliment.
It was very nice what it was.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Just so everyone's very clear, you and I just made
a briefing book in a black notebook with a bunch
of papers and fake documents in everything, and that briefing book,
that black briefing book was sealed with a gold foil seal.
Then it was wrapped in brown wrapping paper. Then there
was string tied around it, and it was stamped above
(09:18):
top secret and all that, and it really did look
like something you might get in nineteen forty seven over
the Roswell thing.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
One of my favorite memories of that whole time period
when we were assembling that was we would have to
take all of the materials to the Agora Hills Kinkos,
and at some point, after enough trips, we'd get this
look as they were seeing all of the stuff we
were putting together and had probably had no idea we
were trying to tell sell a TV show. The thing
that was so great about the notebook that was so
(09:45):
subversive is first they had to cut the twine, then
they had to break open the paper, very interactive, and
now they see a thing a notebook that says top secret,
and there's a gold foil seal and it says on
the notebook, if you break this seal, you accept the
consequences of treason. Yes, well, that's a pretty bold thing
(10:07):
to give to a network executive. And all of them
open the gold foil seal. So I guess they're all
risk takers by a career anyway. So we ended up
pitching at all three Ultimately we had CBS and NBC
both wanting the show, but we pitched to Don Olmeyer,
who was the top guy at NBC ahead of Warren Littlefield.
(10:29):
So we pitch it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
We leave this document, we leave I'm going into the
parking lot with Jeff, and you know what people do
in parking lots.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
They go, well, I don't know, do you think it
was any good? I don't know if he understood it, you.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Know, And you're just sort of doing the post mortem,
the post mortem, and Don Olmeyer comes out onto his
veranda on the second story. He had the premier office,
and he comes out on his veranda. He sees us
in the parking lot and he shouts at us, can
I buy it in the parking lot? And so that's
how the show got started, and it was a long development,
(11:03):
just so everyone understands. First there was the pilot that
we had to write two hour pilot, two hour pilot,
and then we had to shoot the two hour pilot.
But then they had to decide if they were going
to order episodes, So.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
They tested the pilot. People liked it apparently.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Enough for them to order some episodes. So we were
working on Dark Skies for the better.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Part of three years. By the time it's all over.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Wow, crazy, Now let's get moving forward. In the summer
of nineteen ninety six, we were going to be on
television on NBC on Saturday nights for what they would
call the trilogy. We were eight o'clock then it was
Profiler profiling, the Pretender, the Pretender, and then the Profiler right,
(11:48):
and so NBC was like, okay, we'll get them in
with Dark Skies and they'll stick around. So because Dark
Skys had to open up that night, NBC was all about,
let's all sell sell this thing. So it was a
wild time in the middle of the summer of ninety
six because just who everyone understands Independence Day. The movie
(12:09):
came out on July second of that year, and a
couple of days later, Time magazine had a cover article
about Aliens have Landed, sci Fi Mix a Comeback where
they were talking about X files and Independence Day and
Dark Skies. And I talked to a guy for like
two hours from Time Magazine anyway, So things are crazy, right,
(12:32):
And I remember vividly how there was an alien flag
design which people can see on our website. Yeah, fantastic,
it's an American flag with an alien looking between the
stars and the strip I mean the stripes, right. And
it was done by a wonderful graphic artist, Alicia Fernandez,
and it was all over hundreds of LA buses, billboards, magazines.
(12:58):
You couldn't go anywhere without seeing it. I loved the tagline.
In nineteen forty seven, America was invaded, they never left.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
I love that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
And by the way, you and I didn't even come
up with that, I don't think. I think that was
the NBC promo department, which at that time was vaunted
as being an irresistible force. Yes, if NBC was marketing
at watch out. Yeah, and so they did a whole
selection of promos. I remember, specifically, when you're talking about
this marketing blitz. I was at the beach in Santa
(13:29):
Monica and everyone started pointing up in the sky and
there was a plane carrying or pulling a dark Sky's banner.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
I think it was the weekend that it was premiering
or something, and I just thought, Wow, those are heady days. Yeah,
I have arrived. Yeah, it was so cool. This was
your first TV series. Yes, I'd been on a number
of series and even created some but I never had that.
I never had that kind of treatment. And listen, we'll
go into more of the details as time goes on
(13:59):
in this podcast. But what I think was important about
what we just said was to paint a picture that
this was a big deal. Yeah, it was a big
deal to the network. Therefore it was a big deal
in television, and it was also a big deal apparently
in that the media had said aliens are the thing.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yes, we were.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Part of that wave. So to put in context what
we're having happened now so that you can really appreciate
the story we're about to tell you is the show
was going to air on September twenty first, nineteen ninety six,
which was a Saturday night, and we were going to
have a party, and we were going to have television
(14:39):
sets everywhere and people were going to get a chance
to watch this. And this party was going to happen
at my house, which was pretty crazy, and we invited
roughly two hundred people to that party.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Cast crew, was executives from NBC, from Sony. Yeah, there
was a lot of people there. And we did this
really cool thing where we wanted to give everyone kind
of a party Memento, and so you know, in our show,
the characters were set inside Majestic twelve, which was you know,
we can go into that. That's a whole deep dive
into kind of a secret government agency that was set
(15:14):
on focusing on UFOs. We decided to do was give
everyone a badge, so when they came in the door,
they had their photo taken. We got a little kind
of black and white polaroid and we made a Majestic
twelve badge for them that gave them access to the party,
and everyone was wearing these with lanyards all around the party.
(15:35):
It was a very specific and interesting detail that'll come
back later.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
The thing I just want to make clear is that
this was going to be a good party. I mean,
everybody had their Majestic badges. We had I believe three
different televisions outside for people to watch and multiple televisions
inside the house. We had good food, and at eleven o'clock.
At ten o'clock when the show was over, we were
(16:00):
going to have a Beatles tribute band play in the backyard.
Because I think our fourth episode was called Dark Day's Night,
and so we knew these Beatles guys from they did
the show for us.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
So it was a good party, Yeah, really good party.
All right, enough for play, enough for play. Let's get
right to the story. And since it began with you
kick it off.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Okay, all right, So we've set up that it's a
pretty good party. But I've got a lot of pressure
on me, Brent, because not only are these people all
people that you and I know, but some of them
are pretty major guys, I mean, and women who were
executives at the studio which was Columbia TV on the
network and the network which was NBC, plus directors that
(16:46):
had worked for us, and there were just a lot
of important people there. And so I had two hundred
of these people in my house and I'm also trying
to throw the party, and I don't want the electrical
grid to fall apart while I've got three TVs and
I'm dealing with things like, you know, the three TVs
are out of sync in their audio, and people are
asking me questions about that, and at the same time,
(17:08):
someone's tugging on my shoulder going, you know, there's no
or dervs or anything. I'm just you know, I'm on overload. Yes,
and one of our producers. Brad mark Witz comes up
to me during this time where it's so hectic and
we're all waiting to go on, and Brad says, there's
this guy I.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Think you need to talk to.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
And I'm like, okay, who is he?
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah, just he's over here. Let me get him.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
And he brings this guy over and that's where you
are so right. This guy does not have a majestic
badge on. He doesn't have one. Everyone else has one,
but he doesn't have one. He's about thirty years old,
by my estimation, kind of look kind of preppy or
whatever seems to my memory. You may have a different memory,
but I think he had some kind of blazer and
(17:56):
khaki slacks on ors.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
He looked like a you know, he wasn't he was.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Lean and young and whatever.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
And he.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Let me put it this way, folks, memory is a
funny thing. Thirty years later, some of the details slip,
but I just remember him being introduced or introducing himself
and saying that he had come just to congratulate us,
and as I recall, he said, they thought we had
done a good job. Like, well, who's what are you
(18:27):
talking about?
Speaker 3 (18:28):
They? And who are you?
Speaker 1 (18:30):
By the way, and this gentleman said his name was JC,
or call me JC.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
I don't know if that was his name. He said,
call me JC.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And he was saying that he had been sent by
people who had seen our pilot. Now, remember it hasn't
aired yet. It's not like it's a government secret under
lock and key, but very few people had seen it.
They had seen it, and they thought it was pretty good,
and there was a lot to like about it, but
there are a few things that they thought we should
(18:58):
know about. I guess I was in a hurry, and
you know, I guess I was being brusque or whatever.
Body said, Okay, so you've seen the pilot. What happens
after the crop circle, which was just a very specific thing,
and the guy goes, oh, well, they take the guy
back to Majestic twelve and they do that operation and
they pull that thing out of his head. And I thought, well,
(19:21):
that's exactly what happened. Nobody and my party necessarily had
seen it that night. It had not aired yet. Now
I want to throw this over to you, because I
didn't talk to him much longer because again people were tagging,
you know, tugging on my shirt and saying you got
to go put this fire out here, or you got
to go talk. And I just, you know, I just, frankly, Brent,
(19:44):
I invited him to leave the party. I said, I
don't know who you are, and I have other things
on my mind, and I'm not sure why you're here,
and I think you should probably go, And then I
left and I assumed he had to, but you know differently.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Well, so so now to set the stage that was
before the show aired. For the show aired, okay, so
now fast forward to about an hour into the two
hour pilot. So, well, Bryce is glad handing and whatnot.
Remember I'm the nube. I'm I'm I don't evenmber what
my title was, but I was not.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
You were supervisor. I produced.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
We weren't that much of a newb right I was,
But well, I was a nube to like this level
of the industry. And one of the things that I
remember was I had never been through a post production
process where I had to watch a cut of this
pilot probably over a hundred times as we went through
cut after cut and then mixing and then testing and
(20:38):
all this other. So by the time it aired, the
last thing I wanted to do was sit and watch
it again. What I became very interested in was watching
people's reactions to it, especially in the back half, because
there was some really scary stuff. And so I decided, well,
I'm going to break away from the party and go
out to the backyard and find it kind of a
vantage point where I'm just by myself and just watching
(21:01):
people watch it. So again, halfway through the pilot, I'm
out there by myself, and all of a sudden, I
hear footsteps and like bushes rustling behind me, and I
turn around and this guy starts walking out of the
shadows and he comes up and as Bryce described him
thirty something, I would say he was like a cross
between like you know, military and fraternity, right, not super handsome,
(21:26):
but really kind of agreeable like, and he didn't seem
threatening at all. He had a navy blue blazer on
with a white shirt and press jeans and black shoes.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
And respectfully, we've done all right, already, we've undercut our
own story. I'm going with khakis and you're going with
press gens, right, all right, continue, Okay, So.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
What happens is I'm standing there, this guy comes out,
and the first thing I notice is he has no
majestic badge on, right, because I don't know who this
person is, and I'm counting on that badge to give
me a name so that I don't look like the
nube that I.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Know I am.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
But he has no badge. So I go, hey, how's
it going, And he goes, well, you must be really proud,
and I'm thinking, oh, well, yeah, I mean this is
my first show. Yeah, yeah, I got to tell you
you got a lot, right, And I just remember thinking, well,
that's an interesting thing to say, like meaning we had
a lot of good shots, we had a lot of
good cuts. The music was like, I don't what do
(22:22):
you mean we got to lift stuff?
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Right?
Speaker 2 (22:23):
And he goes, yeah, it seems pretty clear. You talk
to someone. Now, as Bryce mentioned, we're not going to
get into the story of what I'll call a briefing
that I got when I was eighteen years old by
someone very high up in the Reagan administration who was
a friend of the family. But in fact, I had
talked to someone and I probably knew a lot more
about ufology and the conspiracies and whatnot than I should have,
(22:48):
or that I even wanted to. But in that moment,
I thought Oh my god, I'm going to be arrested.
I have told Bryce the stories of what I knew,
and we put some of them in dark skies. And
now there's a guy here who's not part of Sony
or NBC saying I spoke to someone and now I'm
(23:09):
seeing him not as a fraternity guy, but as some
sort of FBI CI agent who's going to take me away.
And so for a moment, I was frozen. I was
just like a deer in headlights. And then he said, yeah,
so you got a lot right, but there are some
things you got wrong, and that's why I'm here. I
represent a group that would like to work with you
(23:30):
and Bryce to get more truth into your show, and
we'd like to make a deal with you.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Guys.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Now you have to understand, this was all I didn't
know this level of Hollywood before, so this was all
like incredibly surreal to me. There's a guy talking to
me about making a deal. He's from some branch of
the military in the government, and I don't even know
what to say. And I said, well, okay, well what
(23:57):
would that mean exactly? Well, we we want to get
you some truth in the form of some facts, maybe
even some media, and we'd like to have you integrate
that into your show as part of what what we
would call kind of a slow rollout disclosure program, because
work from a branch of the military that believes the
truth does need to come out, and that is kind
(24:18):
of one of the central conceits of your show. In fact,
that was what Longuard's whole mantra was, that the public
needs to know. And so just a loan guard being
the name of our main character. Yes, correct. And so
I'm listening to all of this, and in the midst
of this, my wife, Patricia walks up, as I'm sure
many couples do, you have your own kind of coded language.
(24:41):
And my wife walks up and says, Brent, Bryce is
looking for you, which I took to mean, oh, she's
offering me an off ramp out of a conversation I
might not want to be in. I didn't think you
were really looking for me. You had much more important
things to do. But I told her hold on. I
gave her kind of the one minute because I wanted
to hear more from this guy. And I said, okay,
so how would this deal work? And he said, well,
(25:06):
we can have a deeper discussion about this. Let me
give you my card, and he pulls out a card
and all it said on the front was J Dot
C Dot with a phone number three to one zero number,
and there was nothing on the back. Now, that part
is happening completely to you, and we're a little fuzzy
on some of the actual deal here. But what I
(25:26):
think I remember, and what I think you remember, is
you were standing at the barbecue. And I know this
because the barbecue is where I do a lot of
work in my house, right and it's near the kitchen door.
So I think I which is how people were getting
into the house, and I think I was walking by
to go inside, and I look over at this barbecue
and there is Brent Friedman, the supervising producer of Dark Skies,
(25:51):
talking to this guy JC, who about an hour and
a half earlier, i'd said you need to leave the party,
and I wasn't particularly happy that. I wasn't sure what
I was going to do about it, but I believe
that stopped me from going in because I do remember
very clearly watching what happened next. And I'm going to
let you pick up the story there. Okay, So he's
(26:13):
given me the card, and he says, so, what I'd
like you to do is talk to Bryce and then
give me a call if you guys are interested in
discussing this this deal. And I in that moment I thought,
I did not know that you had already spoken that
you'd had an encounter with him, And so in that moment,
(26:35):
I had a quick flash of I'm going to tell
Bryce that a guy came out of what felt like
the bushes at the shadows at his backyard without a
badge from the government that wants to make a deal.
And I know what Bryce's response is going to be.
It was going to be hell no. And I chuckled,
just like I involuntarily. I went, well, okay, I'll talk
(26:58):
to Bryce, and the the kind of like very amicable
demeanor that he had immediately left and he said, I
can see that you're not taking this seriously. And he
turns to Patricia, my wife, and he says, ma'am, do
you have a piece of paper and a pencil like a.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Borrow just to set the table here. That probably explains
why Patricia, your wife, who was there, You think she
only came to pull you out of an uncomfortable conversation.
But I think she probably was telling the truth, because
it was weird enough for me that I would have said,
if i'd ran into her, I need to talk to Brent. Yes,
because this was crazy. Even though I was distracted mightily,
(27:40):
it was crazy. Yes, So that's why I was lurking nearby.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
So pick it up.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
So she fumbles through her purse and she pulls out
a piece of paper which actually happened to be a
we're going back to nineteen ninety six, an ATM deposit
slip envelope, right where you put the slip in with
with the cash or the check or whatever. And she
tears off the triangular kind of backside with the stickum
(28:07):
on it, and she gives that to him with a pin,
and he takes it and he starts drawing something on
his palm right there in front of us, and after
about thirty seconds, he kind of looks at it like, Yep,
that's what I wanted to do. He folds it in
his palm and he hands it to me, and he says,
do me a favor, hold on to this for about
ten fifteen years, put it in a safety deposit box,
(28:29):
and in case we don't end up working together at
that time, you'll know that this was serious and that
I was for real. And I said, uh, okay, I'm
getting chills just hearing this again. Can I can I
look at it now? And he said sure. So I
unfold it and I look at it and it's hieroglyphics.
It's what we've come to call the formula. But it
(28:52):
means nothing to me. And I said, well, I don't
understand what is this?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
And before you answered that no, it was something that
when you showed it to other people later and when
I saw it that night, all of this were like,
what exactly is this thing? But it was very specific.
We'll be talking more about it in future episodes as
we try to uncover what it really is. But I
just wanted to get that in there because you're asking
(29:19):
this guy, what is this?
Speaker 3 (29:21):
What's his answer?
Speaker 2 (29:23):
His answer is very casually, very straightforward. Sound Light and
Frequency Secrets of the Universe. Sound Light and Frequency Secrets.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Of the Universe.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
All right, we're back, and Brett, I have to say
I loved the mic drop moment of sound, light and Frequency,
and I have to tell you part of me just
wanted to end the podcast right there and go away
for a week and come back because I don't know
if we can do anything that makes it better, but
it raised so many questions.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
It does, and I think we're obligated at this point
to answer or at least try and answer, some of
those questions. And I think the first one is why
why did this guy come to us? We've talked about
the fact that Aliens were big and our show was
huge at that time, but let's look at some of
the facts here. First fact is I was disclosed to
(30:19):
when I was eighteen by a high level person in
the Reagan administration. That was the inspiration for our series.
And while we didn't take anything specifically from that conversation,
we did lean into the idea that there had been
a cover up going on for a long time. Right
number two, The fact that there was obviously some sort
(30:41):
of secret government agencies working behind the scenes. Those were
pillars for us in terms of what the Dark Sky
Show was. Let's look at another interesting fact. When we
sold Dark Skies, we sold it with this concept that
it was the truth under the veil of fiction, and
even in our Dark Guy's notebook, in our briefing book,
(31:02):
we had a letter from John Lowngard the character, saying
that he was trying to tell the story under the
veil of fiction. Well, that was what JC wanted to do, right,
He wanted us to use Dark Skies as the fiction
to pump in his truth. Is that a coincidence?
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Well, let me just point out to anybody, if you
go to our website Soundlightfrequency dot com, you can read
that so famous Loan Guard letter and you can see
I believe the phrase he uses in the letter is
quote cover of fiction.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Yes, which I like.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
A couple of quick thoughts on why us, why then?
And it goes back to that context issue, for better
or worse. It's not like we set out to do it,
but we suddenly had an extremely high profile show. A
lot was writing on it, a network's actual bottom line
financially was writing on it because they were trying to
(32:01):
open a new Saturday night thing. And if it worked,
that rising tide raised all the boats at NBC. And
if it didn't work, that was a problem, and you're
weren't going to get any numbers for the nine o'clock
or ten o'clock show. If us the eight o'clock show failed,
just a lot of profile, and then that time magazine
things like that. And I had just come off making
(32:22):
a movie for the Sci Fi Channel, which was very
high profile for them. It was their first one and
it was all about eufology and abduction, official official denial crash,
And will more on that later. But there was a
certain visibility at that time. So when you were telling
me your story about the briefing you had, I was
telling you the experience with making this movie. And then
(32:46):
and again this will come up in a later episode
in detail.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
And you'll be able to see it.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
But in the summer of ninety five, this is a
year before the show. A year before the show, I
got a postcard at my house with a nineteen sixty
two book sci fi book called The Flying Eyes on
the outside of it, and it was typed in a
dark typewriter ribbon on the other side, and its message
(33:13):
was we are watching you. And it freaked me out.
As you remember, I came to you in that summer
and said, who wrote this?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah? Did you?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
I think you thought you did it?
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah? I thought, you know.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
I mean, this is kind of funny and I appreciate it,
you know, as a piece of humor, but what's going
on here? And then we you know, so we'll be
talking about that later. But the point is we were
high profile, there was reason to come to us. But
I want to take it one other level, though, those
are the reasons why somebody might be interested in the
show just because of it is a delivery vehicle. But
(33:49):
there's a whole other level to this, Brent that has
me thinking, which is, Okay, what would be since this
guy JC had seen Dark Skies before most people had, right,
and they saw our Bible too, and seen our Bible,
read the script and said we got a lot right,
said we got a lot right, had actually said that
(34:10):
he had read some of our scripts that had not
even be shot yet. I mean, this guy that seemed
deeply briefed in not through no intent on our own,
this guy knew all this stuff. So I asked myself
a different question, and that is, what was it that
was in the Dark Sky's pilot, which is what he
(34:32):
had seen, that would cause anybody in the intelligence community
of the US government to say, these guys would be
a good delivery system for us. What did we have
that they thought we got right?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I mean, I've asked myself that same question. I think
there's probably a long list of stuff. There's so many
things in that dark sky's pilot, but I think let's
focus on the things that were unique. What were we
bringing to ufology that might have got their attention. Well,
let's go down the list. The first one is the
big one, linking JFK and Roswell. Yeah, and I think
(35:09):
you know you had this great idea right out of
the gate. Let's take the two biggest conspiracies and put
them in an atom collider and see what happens and
allow us to create kind of the unified field theory
of not just upology, but conspiracies. And that was our
big idea. The strangest thing though, is that since then
(35:32):
what we felt was a big, high concept fictional idea
has actually gained traction within the UFO community, and a
lot of people believe it's true. It's amazing and of
course you can read all about it on the internet now,
But when we were coming up with the atom collider
theory of conspiracy, there was no real internet to tell
(35:56):
us any of that stuff. So we just made this
stuff up. And now, of course certain documents are being
looked at and certain ideas that John Kennedy, for example,
going back to the post war period was in the Navy.
The guys that said they came to us were from
the Office of Naval Intelligence. Yes, supposedly. The man that
(36:16):
gave you your briefing at the age of eighteen was
Secretary of the Navy. So the strong Navy thing. And
one of the things they did tell us I remember
was that that was something they thought we got very right. Yes,
that it was the Navy, and everybody always thinks it's
the Air Force because they're unidentified flying objects.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
So now let's go to another thing. This one is
a little more fringe, but we introduced this idea of
crop circles being an alien communication device, not alien to human,
but alien to alien, that they were essentially markers of
where abductions had taken place. Very strange idea, but that
(37:00):
that was something that certainly no one else had posited,
and since then I don't know that anyone has actually
said that that is a theory that they buy into.
But that is again something unique that we put into
the Dark Sky's Pilot.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
There are three things that I am proud we put
in there, because I believe they're the triad of some
of this stuff we put in abductions. I mean, our
story begins in its early pages with John Loanguard's girlfriend
Kim Sayers being abducted, so we take on the abduction
phenomenon right away. We put Loan guard versus a target.
(37:37):
Then as a member of Majestic twelve, we put that
out there, and a lot of people at that time
were saying, well, I don't know, there's some documents, but
I think they're fake. But we bought into it. We said,
Majestic twelve, that's the hot zone and also involving Roswell
in it, because remember one of our central tenets from
(37:58):
the beginning was if Roswell is a true event, that is,
if Roswell is an anomalous event that represents a non
human intelligence interacting, colliding, crashing around humanity, that changes everything.
So if you're going to land in the Kennedy Administration
in nineteen sixty one, and that's where your main character
(38:20):
is going to work, it means if everyone thinks everything
is great, it's the new Frontier and everything, there's still
an alien issue going on underneath the surface. And I
think it was our underneath the surface part of it
that was also probably interesting and attractive to them.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeah, And that was the essence of our idea was,
let's take this notion that Roswell was real and it's
this truth that's lurking beneath the surface, and let's have
our characters decide that JFK, the man of the people,
is the one to blow the whistle, right, and that's
what gets him killed.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Now, there's also one very crazy idea in the Dark
Sky's pilot that, if indeed it is true, would cause
somebody in the government to freak out. Yes, and that
had to do with the grays. Now, we had grays
in Dark Skies, and a lot of people have grays.
I mean, X Files has grays, and grays are like
(39:17):
a staple. But what we did with the grays in
Dark Skies is we brought in a guy called Patient zero.
He was a farmer at that crop circle and it
turned out that he had an alien ganglion implanted in
his brain and they took him to MJ twelve and
as we said earlier, they pull it out. Yeah, okay,
(39:39):
and that ganglion was there to sort of modify his
behavior as a body snatcher's kind of thing. But even
gnarlier and what's interesting about that is that as soon
as they see that, the head of Majestic twelve says,
get me the Roswell sample, and they bring in a
formaldehyde beaker full of raws Zwellian stuff, and it is
(40:02):
a ganglion that looks identical to the guy they just
pulled out of this human being, But it was pulled
out of one of the Roswell Grays.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yes well, And so that idea that the Grays are
this enslaved race essentially by some larger hive mind was
crazy at the time. And yet what is going on
in current day ufology. A lot of people are saying
that the Grays are just automatons that are working for
some larger alien intelligence. Right, So was our show a
(40:34):
metaphor for that idea? Were we truly ahead of the
times and dialed into a truth that we didn't even
know at the time. These are the coincidences and the
questions that will you drive this show forward?
Speaker 1 (40:48):
I guess if I had to speculate, I'd have to say,
any of those are possibilities that could have drawn somebody
to us. But the bigger issue, it seems like if
Dark Skies said anything, it said what we actually say
in the main titles History is a lie. All right, now,
(41:12):
that's what we originally wrote. The network made us change
it to history as we know it is a lie, which, okay, whatever,
But I think that is the subversive bit of dark
Skies that just could get in somebody's mind and make
them say, these guys are telling a pretty interesting story
because we weren't saying ancient alien's history, although we did
(41:35):
say that, we were saying current modern American history is
a lie.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
And there was one review that came out for the show.
I wish I could remember who actually wrote these words,
but they called it the most subversive show on television,
which I actually take as a badge of honor. Yeah,
but that may be why they thought it was so interesting,
because if in fact, they were working behind the scenes,
are under the reality that we face, and they realized
(42:04):
history was a lie and we were saying it every week, well,
that would get their attention.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Let's just put this party crasher thing in final content.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
I think over the years, both of us have talked
about this at nauseum. Now we're talking about it in public,
but there are a number of questions that keep coming
up and the first one I think we have to ask,
is this deal that JC proposed. He said it was
for disclosure, it was for this honorable like, let's get
the truth out to the people. But I don't think
(42:34):
that we can discount the idea that maybe it was
all part of a disinformation campaign.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
I've never discounted that because my first take was that's
what it was. My first take was, first of all,
it's a hoax and this guy's not who he says
he is. But then as I began to say, I'm
giving him more credibility than that, I then began to say,
but that doesn't mean he's telling me the truth. I
mean that's where the journalist of me came in. I mean,
(43:01):
as I like to say, I've been lied to by experts,
and I thought, there's no reason in the world to
accept on face value what this guy is saying. So
it could easily have been disinformation. In fact, Brent, the
more we have learned over time about disinformation, the government
has been disinforming as a matter of policy or military strategy,
(43:21):
going back to D Day and before. Yeah, right, so, yeah,
of course it could be disinformation. But then that raised
all its other questions, which is, why are they disinforming
me and Brent Yes, yeah, why do they need us?
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Anyway, then another interesting question is when you start looking
at some of the kind of the coincidences around what
we had as content in the pilot and the series,
how certain things have come to be seemingly true years later.
It raises this very interesting question that lives you know,
firmly in the phenomenon is does fiction somehow become truth
(43:59):
over time through the miracle of consciousness? Right, we are
in an age right now where everyone is doing deep
dives on consciousness to try and understand how we are
co creating our own reality. Right, some of the shows
we're going to be looking at in the future we're
very prescient. But there's another possibility that they actually seeded
the public consciousness with ideas that then became true once
(44:23):
enough people started to believe them. Can't discount that. The
last thing I want to go into is, as we
mentioned earlier, we can't have been the only ones in
Hollywood to been offered such a deal. It raises the
question who else was visited by a man in black
and offered us what jac did? And by the way,
(44:44):
Brent even as we talk about this, we're not actually
telling anyone at this point what our response was to
this offer. That's true, that's part of the story. And
again we're not trying to be KOI or over hype
it or anything, but we sort of want people to
go on the same journey that we went on so
that they can understand what we're thinking when certain details
(45:06):
are coming out. And your point about the deal is
well taken. I guess I'm thrilled that they came to me.
Maybe I am, but it certainly doesn't mean other people
might not have been approached. And in fact, as you
and I have dug deeper into this over time, we
keep running across cooperation between the military and certain movies
(45:29):
and certain directors, which I guess takes us to the
big mcgilla here, which is, if there's anyone who has
done more for films that relate to ufology and TV
shows and TV shows, it would have to be, you know,
Steven Spielberg. At the same time, you'd also say there
has been a persistent belief in the UFO community that
(45:53):
somehow Steven Spielberg was briefed or offered a deal like
our deal. So we're going to look into that. That's
going to be the next episode. Next episode, we are
going to do a deep dive into Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, which is probably the seminal film in ufology,
and take a look at all of the rumors that
are surrounding it.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
And tell you a little bit about the film so
that you can sort of do what we just did
with Dark Skies as you dissect it into its pieces.
They exist not just as a film, but they exist
as a reflection of what's going on in ufology when
the film came out. Remember Spielberg did this in nineteen
seventy seven. I mean, this is early stuff. It's not
(46:34):
that far removed from some really really terrible movies of
the fifties and sixties, and nobody touched the mythology of
UFOs if you will, like Spielberg did and has continued
to do. So he's our next guy. Yeah, it's going
to be a great episode. We'll see you next week.
Thank you, see you. Sound Light and Frequency is an
iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by
(46:57):
Nick Johnson and for Stellar Key'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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