March 26, 2026 • 57 mins
Using James Cameron’s The Abyss as a springboard, this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency dives beneath the surface of the UFO mystery to explore the strange and increasingly serious world of USOs—Unidentified Submerged Objects. Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace the connection between Hollywood’s long fascination with underwater unknowns and the growing real-world evidence that some anomalous craft may move seamlessly through oceans, lakes, and rivers as easily as they move through the sky. Along the way, they connect classic and modern screen stories—from The Abyss to Atlantis: The Lost Empire and beyond—to the deeper question of whether Non-Human Intelligence may have been hiding in Earth’s last great frontier all along.
The episode also brings the mystery closer to home with two stories that includes the host’s wives. First, Brent shares the story of seeing an unidentified object plunge into the water near Vancouver Island, with his wife as a witness, then Bryce reflects on his own creative connection to the enduring Atlantis myth when he and his wife were the original writers on Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Smart, eerie, and highly entertaining, “Staring into the Abyss” uses movies and television as a portal into one of the most unsettling possibilities in the entire UAP conversation: that whatever is out there may not only be above us—but deep below us as well.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The idea that aliens would come from space was much
more palatable to the general public than the idea of USOS,
which was considered pure science fiction fantasy. I fast forward
now to present day, when people are having very serious
discussions about USOS in Congress.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
We have basically mapped Mars better than we have mapped
the oceans. Our oceans are more of a mystery to
us currently than Mars. I think, I'm Bryce s Able.
(00:48):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs and.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to Sound, Light and Frequency.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Hey, on this episode of Sound, Light and Frequency, we're
ticking the f out of UFOs and we're swapping in
an S for USOS Unidentified submerged Objects. Now, for decades,
(01:20):
we have been trained by movies, by headlines, and even
by our own neck muscles to look straight up. But
what if some of the most important unknowns are in
the sky at all? What if they're down there in
the deep, in the trenches and the places we haven't
even mapped because the pressure would turn us into pancakes.
Hollywood has been quietly rehearsing that idea for a long
(01:41):
time back in nineteen eighty nine, Cameron gave us the
Abyss that was a first contact story, but Jules Verne
in hg Wells long before we're down there treating the
sea like outer space before cinema even could. And then
there's Atlantis, which is basically the original Plato myth that says,
what if the ocean is hiding a whole nother world?
And you can add in the modern iterations Aquaman Namur,
(02:04):
even TV shows like Stargate Atlantis, which makes the submerged
city idea and turns it into a literal portal, and
you start to see a pattern. We keep coming back
to the water because we want to hide the impossible,
because here's the thing. If usos are real, and it
increasingly looks like they are, then all those underwater NHI
(02:26):
stories stop being just entertainment. They become a kind of
cultural X ray what we fear, what we hope, and
what we suspect me already be in the neighborhood. I'm
brice Able and speaking of oceans. I was born on
the Oregon Coast. I live on the California coast now
and Brent Friedman, my co host, lives on an island
in Washington State, So all I can say, Brent is
(02:48):
come on in Water's fine.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I am recording this from my island paradise up here
on San Juan's. You know, it's interesting listening to your intro.
I was looking back on the first couple episodes we've done,
which we're all about UFOs that came from space, interstellar, interdimensional,
and as you said, now we're going to kind of
take a deep dive into USOS, and it naturally brings
(03:11):
up The Abyss, a wonderful film by James Cameron, and
like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron's one of the most successful
directors in Hollywood, and he's also, like Steven Spielberg, made
a handful of alien movies, starting with Aliens in nineteen
eighty six and then the Avatar trilogy starting in two
thousand and nine, which is still going strong today. But
(03:33):
it's really his nineteen eighty nine movie The Abyss, which
has prompted a lot of online speculation that Cameron, again
like Spielberg, might have had some insider information about UAP,
and I think that's going to be a really interesting
topic for us to focus on in this episode.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It's a great film. I did enjoy seeing it again
now I think I've seen it three times, and it's
just fun. It's a fun movie. As I understand it,
this is something that Cameron was planning to do since
he was a kid. He wrote some kind of short
story or something about it, and then finally said, Okay,
I'm a big shot director who just did Aliens. Now
I'm going to try to do Aliens underwater. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
The story you're talking about is that when he was
a teenager, he was very interested in diving, and he
went to some presentation and met a famous diver I'm
going to try and pronounce his name, Francis Felushka, and
apparently hearing about the experiences of this diver and some
of the technologies that were being invented at the time,
(04:34):
in particular that liquid oxygen breathing system, really sparked him
to create the story of the Abyss. At least that's
the official story that we hear. You know, I'm thinking,
before we go any further, why don't we give a
plot summary of what the Abyss is about in case
someone hasn't seen it. I'll do the honors this time.
The story follows the civilian crew of an underwater oil
(04:55):
rig recruited by the Navy to investigate a sunken nuclear submarine.
This leads to a tense encounter with mysterious, intelligent aquatic
aliens who challenge humanity's violent nature. At the center of
this is the estranged relationship between the oil rigs foreman
Bud and his engineer wife Lindsay, as they put aside
(05:17):
their differences and put both their lives at risk to
complete the mission.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
That's pretty good reading of it. Interestingly enough, it starts
out almost like the plot of Armageddon, that famous comet
movie with Bruce Willison. It because he and his gang
are oil workers and you know they need to go
stop a comet. But what do they do. Well, let's
get some oil workers and let's send them to the
comet to do it. At least these guys are doing
the right thing. They're going to the bottom of the ocean.
(05:41):
And I have to say, there are many things to
like about the Abyss. There's a few things not to
like about it, but there are many things to like
about it. And most of all is that liquid breathing.
The idea that you can fill a helmet up with
a liquid and you're breathing. I mean, I think there's
almost nothing as closedphobic that I can imagine as having
(06:02):
somebody put a helmet on me, fill it with a liquid,
and then tell me don't worry, just relax, it's going
to be fine, which is what they basically tell Ed
Harris in the movie. And I guess it is fine.
But that's how he gets down to this city, which,
if I remember correctly, is like four miles under the ocean.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yes, yeah, it's deep. It's down to the point where
obviously no human has ever been before. I agree though
the liquid breathing thing was the scariest part of the
movie for me. I couldn't get past that. There's no
way I could do that. But the couple other interesting
things jumped out at me. For one, when I first
saw the movie, I had a different recollection in my
(06:41):
mind of the craft were underwater craft, and then the
aliens were angelic manta rays, if you will. But watching
it again, the craft are actually biological entities. I think
they call them machines but alive. That really was interesting
because I'm sure at the time that was absolutely revolutionary.
(07:03):
No one had ever considered the alien craft being biological entities.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Now, I guess I could be accused of stealing it
because I wrote it into my nineteen ninety three movie
Official Denial. The craft they shoot down has a big
hole in it, and then it heals itself because it's
partially biological. But honestly, that isn't that crazy of an
idea anymore, because what is the thing that David Grush
has his favorite word in his testimony before the House
(07:29):
Oversight Committee seemed to be biologics? Yes, and I always wonder, well,
do you mean bodies or things that are biologically alive?
Or what exactly does that mean? And it easily could
be that part of the craft is a biological organism.
We don't really know, but certainly that's true with what
Cameron did, and he plays this very interestingly. At first,
(07:52):
of course, is they're underwater to do this rescue mission,
they start seeing things, littler things, and the tension builds
and they're wondering, what are we seeing? Then these do
look like craft, and it isn't until you get toward
the late middle part of the movie where you actually
go down and realize, holy shit, there's a whole group
of something living down there, which is kind of disturbing.
(08:16):
Although if you really start to think about what we
are being told these days, just through release of documents, etc.
There's a lot of concern that there are things in
the ocean, and that those things in the ocean may
also be the things that we see in the sky
because of trans medium characteristics. So Cameron was probably ahead
(08:36):
of the curve on a lot of things. Now. It's
interesting though, because they don't actually make clear in the
movie exactly what's going on, who exactly these creatures are, whatever,
But they did do a book serialization after the movie
was released, and that states that what's down there is
a colonizing species that sought a high pressure, deep water
(08:59):
world in order to build new ships as they travel
further into the galaxy. Which I have to say, I'm
a human being, so I'm going to react to water
the way people react to water. You know, some people
love being in the water. Some people are nervous about
being the water. I like being in the water, but
I don't think I could build anything in the water.
I feel like I need a sterile room to build
craft or ships. So I don't really know how they
(09:21):
were doing that. But that's certainly part of it. Here
are some quotes from Cameron about alien life being in
these hidden oceans, and these are just a few that
we picked out at random. One of them he said,
if there's another species in the cosmos that's advanced, it's
probably not living on Earth. Well, okay, then he said,
it's more likely living on a subsurface ocean somewhere like
(09:43):
Europa or Ensuladis. Is that right, insulatus? I don't think so.
Who knows, you know what. I'm not even going to
get into all the things that Cameron has said, but
he clearly believes in at least making alien movies. But
do we have any evidence he actually believes that aliens
are here now and that they may or may not
be in e Osians. That's the question I have.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
He has not been forthcoming with that information. I think
all we can do is take him at face value
in terms of the stories he told. One thing I
will say is that in the movie he does have
the character of Bud obviously encounter the aliens at some
point when he takes them onto the ship. And by
the way, a lesson he did not learn from Steven Spielberg,
(10:24):
whom apparently he's a big fan of When Steven Spielberg
took us into the ship in Close Encounters, a lot
of people groaned and moaned and said, all the magic
had been taken out of the movie, right, And of
course when we go into the ship at the end
of the Abyss, that was actually, in my mind, the
weakest part of the movie, right, because all of the
(10:44):
mystery and the magic was gone, and now we're in
a set. That being said, one of the things that
the aliens tell Bud is that they are friends of humanity,
and they have been living on the earth a long
time and have chosen to leave us alone. But then
the only reason that they are intervening now is they
are becoming aware that we are hurting each other and
(11:07):
we need to grow up a lot.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
How nice of them. I'm touched. I'm so deeply touched
by that. Let's see if we can clarify this. I've
seen the Abyss movie three times. I saw it when
it first came out in nineteen eighty nine, and I
do not recall an ending where we see tidal waves
about to destroy cities. And then there was a director's
cut version where he added almost an hour's worth of
(11:30):
stuff to it. And that's where I do recall the
wave about to destroy cities. And I don't even know
if that was the director's cut, that was just an
enhanced version. Yeah, maybe I'm thinking about the director's cut.
We both just saw together. That does take us there,
and I agree he certainly did a credible technical job.
But by the way, we don't actually believe in spoilers.
(11:52):
It sound light and frequency, partly because this movie is
close to forty years old now, so if you haven't
seen it, you can't really write us letters about spoiling things.
At the end, though, the aliens are about to take
out a bunch of these aliens in the ocean are
going to take out cities because they're sending title waves,
and because Bud professes his love for his soon to
(12:16):
be xife or his current ex wife. I don't remember
whether they're actually divorced or not, but they stopped the
title waves in mid wave, and that seemed a bit fanciful.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
One other thing I wanted to point out that I
think it's really interesting and I had completely forgotten about it.
We use this term USO and people have adopted it widely.
We're hearing it in congressional hearings. But in the movie
they make reference to underwater aliens and they use the
term NTI non terrestrial intelligence. I had never heard that before.
(12:49):
I mean, I don't remember hearing it. I'm sure i'd
heard it in the movie the first couple of times
I saw it, but I haven't heard it recently, and
I haven't heard it used in public discourse. So I'm
wondering what's wrong with NTI. It actually sounds pretty interesting
to me.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
It is a mystery. The biggest mystery is who actually
gets to name these things? Who actually first came up
with UAP? And I know there's an answer to it.
I think it was actually used sometime in the fifties
or sixties. I don't have that in front of me,
but not embraced. It didn't get embraced until the government
decided that, hey, we're probably going to tell people a
(13:21):
little bit about this mystery, so instead of calling them UFOs,
let's embrace this UAP thing. It won't have the same
stigma around it and we can start moving forward. So
there is that interesting thing about the ABYSS. Though it's
beautifully made, there's nothing wrong with the movie. Other than
(13:41):
we can parse whether the ending is right or not.
But at the end of the day, you kind of
ask yourself, did Cameron actually hear anything from anybody about
the actual likelihood of alien life in the ocean? And
unlike Spielberg, I haven't been able to turn up anything
where anybody's actually even pointing a finger at that. Have
you and your research found anybody saying, you know that
(14:04):
James Cameron he got briefed into the program.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
I have not heard anyone say it that directly, but
I have seen in various chat rooms and whatnot people speculating.
And it goes to the simple fact that if you
look at this movie when it came out, nobody was
talking about usos, right, and now that's one of the
main things people are talking about. And so how could
(14:28):
he have been so far ahead of the curve to
tell a story about, like you said, a whole underwater
city of aliens highly advanced? And that just be pure imagination,
which then coincidentally is being borne out to be true,
at least by a lot of whistleblowers who we have
(14:48):
to take at face value when they put their hand
on a bible and take an oath and go in
Congress and talk about it. So I think that's where
the speculation comes from. But no, I have not heard
anyone directly say with Steven Spielberg that he has taken
a deal.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I've heard more people say because I watched all the
extras that came with the film today, with the director's cut,
it sounds like a lot of the actors were ready
to go strangle cameraon after the shoot because it was
a super hard shoot and these guys were wearing, you know,
we're down in the water for six to eight hours
a day or something crazy like that, and of course
(15:25):
they didn't have quite the same ability to communicate. It was.
In fact, in some cases, I don't think they actually
had communication in the suits themselves. So it was an
extraordinarily difficult thing. But the one thing that also struck
me though, is we always talk about UFOs going in waves,
and that's been true. You go through the fifties, the sixties,
(15:46):
the seventies, there's always years where there's a UFO wave.
Sometimes we have waves in movies. Obviously, you know when
I was saying about Armageddon a while ago, I believe
that came out in ninety eight and another movie that
came out that same year was Deep Impact. You have
two movies released at the same time about a comet
that's going to hit Earth and having to go out
and stop it. Well, interestingly enough, in the same exact
(16:09):
year that The Abyss came out, there were three movies
released that year about underwater aliens. There was, of course
The Abyss, but there is also a very semi popular
movie called Leviathan back then, and then there was a
Corman low budget one called Lords of the Deep. So
sometimes when ideas are in the air, they're in the air.
Sometimes that's just the way it's gonna be. Now, I
(16:31):
have to say I never saw Lords of the Deep.
Never really watch a lot of Corman movies. I think
I did see the Leviathan, but I really can't tell
you one simple thing about it, can you.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
I think there was about a big sea monster.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yep, that's it. It's a big sea monster. Telling the
big sea monsters had been a thing over the years.
I believe there's a big sea monster in twenty thousand
leagues under the sea. I think that's the driving thing there.
So I guess you could call a giant sea monster.
You wouldn't call it an alien, so it's not really
an alien movie. But we don't know if that sea
(17:03):
monster was intelligent. If it was, then it would be
an NTI or an Nhi, as you pointed out. So
I don't really know. But clearly the idea that they're
out there and under there is something that these movies
profoundly floated. And yet I have to say, we know
that Abyss was a really really big film and a
(17:24):
lot of people saw it, and the people that saw
it talked about it, but it didn't really put into
the UFO conversation among the UFO community that these things
are possibly in Erosans and if they are in Erosians,
what are they doing? Are they living there? Are they
hiding there? What are they doing there? And in the
serialization book that they put out about the Abyss, they
(17:46):
were building ships. And one thing that always struck me,
and I don't remember actually where I read this, but
somebody was sort of positive, why would they be here
on Earth? Well, that they could have been here all along,
so they may is relevant to Earth as we are,
we may share Earth. But another thing is water is
(18:07):
very very important in the universe. It's not as common
as you might think, and we are a water planet. Now,
say you were an adventurous spirit from a water planet
and you heard about Earth and you came here to Earth,
would you set up a location in the desert or
would you go to the ocean. If you were from
a water planet, you'd go to the ocean. So, for
(18:29):
all we know, they've been there thousands of years. They
came from someplace else, and you know, we really really
just don't know.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Well, it's true. I mean, we do know that all
life needs water. All life is largely comprised of water.
So it does make a lot of sense that if
you have an interstellar even interdimensional race, that they're going
to probably feel most comfortable in water. That would be
one of the unifying kind of elements cross any world,
(19:01):
any planet. One of the things I want to talk
about that struck me as interesting is, yes, there were
those movies all in the same year, but there's been
some other big Hollywood directors that have made some underwater
alien movies as well, starting with Sphere made by Barry
Levinson in nineteen ninety eight, and then also Battleship made
(19:23):
by Peter Berg in twenty twelve. Obviously, none of those
two were not as successful as the ABYSS. But I
think what's interesting is look at them kind of stacked up,
and look at the difference in the stories they tell,
very so different. The ABYSS, which came out first, told
a story of benevolent aliens, and by the way, that
(19:43):
was made with no participation from the military. Sphere told
a story of neutral aliens who kind of reflected humanity
spears back on them. That was made without participation of
the military as well. Battleship, though, which was last that
came out again in twenty twelve, that was a story
(20:03):
of hostile aliens, and that was made with the participation
of the Navy. So it's interesting to me that the
one movie that the military got behind was the one
that featured the hostile aliens.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
No mystery there, really, if you think about it. Quite
often the military has turned down working on various movies
because they say, we're just going to look bad, and
why should we help you prove UFOs are real if
we don't believe in them. In Battleship, of course, the
military looks really good. I mean this alien Expeditionary Force.
I guess in Battleship, the twenty twelve movie shows up
(20:37):
and we end up having to fight them with the
very best that our Navy's got and we send them packing.
So from a military cooperation point of view, that's precisely
what you'd think they would want to do. Just one
actual thing about Sphere. By the way, Sphere and Battleship
did pretty good at the box office, they weren't movies
that no one's ever heard of. Sphere is interesting, though.
(20:59):
It uses that standard thing where something has happened and
you've got to go collect the team and get them
together to go investigate. So that's how Sphere starts. Dustin
Hoffman's and at Sharon Stone's in it. The concept of
the film is that there is a giant craft on
the bottom of the ocean, which certainly sounds like aliens,
and they're sent down there to look into it. And
(21:20):
this craft has been there since the seventeen hundreds, which
I kind of loved that when I first heard that
that was the concept of the movie. That's what made
me go see Sphere. I thought, that's pretty cool because
that's a mystery wrapped inside of a riddle, inside an
enigma kind of thing. I can't wait to figure out
(21:41):
what that's going to be. All about. But when they
get down there, and again I'm sorry, but we just
don't do spoilers on thirty some year old movies. But
they get down there and it's not an alien craft.
It's got US logos on it down there. So somehow
this is a craft from the future that ended up
crashing into the ocean in the seventeen hundreds and is
(22:04):
found in whatever year's sphere is made. So it's alien light,
it's not quite alien, and it doesn't really say anything
to us about whether aliens are real or not existing
in the water, whereas Battleship doesn't say that they're here
in our water. It says they've come here. So what
really for me made Abyss stand out is the idea
(22:26):
that this was another civilization that actually lived here on
Earth at the same time as us, and was a
mystery in itself. So anyway, I liked all three of those,
but each one brings something different to the party, you know.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
The last thing I will say is I was doing
some research on the state of mind of the public
with regards to UFOs back in eighty nine, and the
idea that aliens would come from space was much more
palatable to the general public. Then then the idea of USOS,
which was considered pure science fiction fantasy. But again, I
(23:07):
fast forward now to present day when people are having
very serious discussions about USOS in Congress. So it raises
this question in my mind the ABYSS does is was
it a coincidence that Cameron somehow imagined USOS nearly forty
years before they became a legitimate, verifiable reality. Maybe maybe not,
(23:33):
I don't know. It does open the door in terms
of was this a consciousness play? You know, as you
mentioned between those three movies that came out all at
the same year as the ABYSS. How is that possible?
You said it's something in the air? Well is it
something more specifically in the collective consciousness? These ideas are
just out there and they're being pulled down at the
(23:54):
same time, or are they being planted by some non
human intelligence that says it's time to start telling these stories.
Obviously we can't answer those questions, but it's fascinating to
me to even ask them.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, I'll tell you, I do like asking them, and
I'm frustrated sometimes that we can't answer them. We're just
talking about Yes, Cameron is a leader, a trendsetter and
all that. We didn't start us down this road. Back
in eighteen ninety six, HG. Wells wrote a short story
called In the Abyss, which I found kind of intriguing.
(24:27):
And in that one, he's got a tale about a
thrill seeking inventor who drops five miles to the ocean floor,
there by beating Cameron by an entire mile of ocean depth.
I believe he goes down there in a steel sphere
and he returns, of course, with his mind scrambled, and
a story about a bioluminescent amphibious and this is a
(24:49):
quote people of the Abyss who mistake him for a
god before he vanishes. So even HG. Wells was saying
what if? What if there are creatures? And this is HG.
Well's writing before he wrote War the Worlds. I think
his next project after writing In the Abyss was War
of the World's. So I'll find that pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah. Absolutely, And obviously another question we cannot answer is
did James Cameron read that short story at some point
and was inspired by it. Possibly. I had never even
heard of it, and I was a big fan of HG.
Wells growing up, so so interesting that that story has
been brought to the surface, as it were, because it
also makes you realize that well before we started contemplating
(25:36):
the idea that the government might be informing entertainment with
their agenda of disclosure and disinformation, there were people telling
stories that had no agenda other than just getting published
and having an audience as far as we know, and
so between Jules Verne with his story of twenty thousand
leagues under the Sea and HG. Wells with his story
(26:00):
in the Abyss, we've got stories that were being told
well before anyone could even contemplate these type of ideas.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to
be alive at that time reading that and thinking about
the ocean in that way holding under seat, because I
was pretty stunned to watch the Abyss, So reading a story,
(26:22):
you know, at the turn of the twentieth century would
have just blown my mind.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I just want to put a steak in the Abyss?
Is that too many mixed metaphors? Can you put a
steak in the Abyss? I don't think you can. But Nietzsche,
we can deflate the ability out the air out of
you just to put the water steak In. He said,
if you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks
into you. Now I don't know exactly what he meant there,
(26:48):
but that dude he was thinking. He was thinking early on,
and I've always enjoyed that quote. But the other thing
I just wanted to say is what makes the ocean
so interesting for this topic in film but also in reality,
of course, is that we have basically mapped Mars better
than we have mapped the oceans. Our oceans are more
(27:08):
of a mystery to us currently than Mars. I think
because we put landers on Mars, we've basically sent craft
around Mars to map everything. But we don't have the
ocean all mapped. And there's just a lot of people
who deal with the ocean on a regular basis who say,
we don't know the half of it. Other things that
are kind of interesting that would explain how you can
possibly have something living on the bottom of the ocean, though,
(27:31):
is if you think about it. We've been told that
the UFOs are traveling at such incredible speed, say twelve
thousand miles an hour, that if a human being was
in it, it may one of those extreme right turns.
They would be just a puddle of blood because of
the pressure. And the same is true if you go
down to some of these depths four or five miles
and even further, we would be killed instantly, and we
(27:53):
have to have equipment to go do it. But that's
one of the things that Louel Azana has been talking
about in his book and other people have been talking
about that whatever is behind the technology that is behind
this phenomena as we perceive it, is able to do
something about space time and create a situation where those
things are physically possible, even though they don't look physically possible.
(28:17):
And that certainly seems to be true because there are
reports of craft that are underwater that have been tracked
that appear to be going two hundred miles per hour,
and even though it's classified how fast a nuclear submarine
can go, the best guess is maybe forty miles an hour, so,
and some of these craft that are seen underwater are
(28:39):
much larger than our nuclear submarines. There are several football
fields long and cruising along, not cruising, zipping along through
the ocean. So I'm not really sure exactly what's going on,
but just to complete the sort of the riff about
what other films and things have been on. Of course,
the film a lot of people grew up on was
(29:00):
The twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. There was also
Mysterious Island which preceded it, so you had the vern
and the Wells people there. But the first major film film.
There were some serials that came out. I believe there
was a serial in nineteen thirty six about Undersea Kingdom,
but there was one called The Atomic Submarine in nineteen
(29:22):
fifty nine where there were aliens in the Arctic here
to conquer. I tried to watch it, you know, I
got halfway through it and I said, I just I
believe in sound, light and frequency, and I want to
be a good citizen of sound, light and frequency. But
I can't do this.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
So I all had it exact same experience.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
You know. Some of these movies just don't date that well.
But they have big ideas but small budgets. And that's
part of the problem with writing UFO. I've run into
it myself, and so of you. You write a big
idea movie that requires a Spielbergian budget, and instead you're
getting a lifetime budget and you can't do as much
(30:00):
field to the Bottom of the Sea. By the way,
I don't know this precede. I mean, you were barely
a zygote at the time this was on television, but
that was one that a lot of people were very into.
And it's interesting there's always mission creep on these things.
I think when Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
started in the sixties, it was really kind of like
twenty thousand leagues the submarine going around looking at the world,
(30:24):
and then they ran into monsters, and then pretty soon
they had to start running into aliens. So lots of movies.
People have been talking about it for a while. No
real evidence from my view that I've been able to
turn up that any of those people writing earlier were
told anything or new anything. No same here.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
I do think that in looking at that list we
put together, the one movie that I had forgotten was
about under sea aliens was Cocoon, the Ron Howard movie
from I think nineteen eighty five that actually hinted that
some Atlanteans had come back and were doing stuff in
(31:01):
a rest home up on Earth upon the surface. Anyway,
I guess the point being is that even though most people,
when you ask them, have you ever seen a movie
about underwater aliens. They're probably going to say, I saw
the abyss, maybe they saw sphere, maybe they saw battleship,
and the rest is all a blur. But let's take
this on too dry land now and look at the
(31:23):
real world. One of the other things that I think
is fascinating is in the category of where there's smoke,
there's fire your partner on need to know, Richard Dolan
has become the expert, I would say, the reigning expert
right now on usos. He went out, I guess to
write one book, but you can probably tell this story
better than I. He went out to set up to
write one book and is now actually writing three books
(31:46):
that look at six hundred and seventy two cases across
over one hundred years. Well, you've said everything I know
about that now. No, Actually it is interesting Dolan. Richard Dolan,
and he and I wrote the ad after just closure books,
so I know I'm going back to that, and so
I know the speed he writes books, and I know
how intelligent he is and what a thorough writer is.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
But when he told me this story was shocking. He
set out, as you mentioned, he was going to write
a book about usos. That was the goal. And he
found so many cases, six hundred and seventy two, and
by now I'm sure he's found a few more, but
there were so many he decided to write a trilogy
of books. Now, I got to tell you that's not
(32:30):
something I would ever do, but he's capable of doing it,
and I've read the first book, and those cases. He's
doing it in chronological order. Those cases of usos go
back to the seventeen hundreds. All I can say is this,
If you want to know more about the specific hardcore
science and or history of this, you probably should read
(32:51):
Richard Dolan's book, because this is happened many many times
and usually observed by more more than one person. Because
you've got a ship and people call people out to
take a look at it, and there areft scene in
the air going in the water, there's craft in the water,
scene coming out into the air. That's called trans medium travel.
(33:14):
You see a lot of that stuff, a lot of
great cases. And I know we're going to come back
to some more of those cases, and I know that
you've had a sighting yourself. I want to talk about
Atlantis in a minute, but I think this might be
a great time for you just to tell us you've
actually had a personal experience where you actually saw a USO.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So lay it on as my friend. Well, yes, thank you.
That is why reading through some of Richard's stories and
listening to some of his interviews online about some of
his favorite cases that he's been researching, they really resonated
with me because I heard a lot of description of
almost identical experiences or aspects of my experience that I
(33:55):
had had. And so let me set the stage. It
was August twelfth, twenty twenty three, if you remember, that
was the period of the Perseed meteor showers, and just
by coincidence, I happened to be on Vancouver Island on
the northern part up near to Fino, and I got
(34:15):
wind that these meteor showers were happening. It was beautiful
weather up there, and I thought, you know what, I'm
going to go out onto the beach tonight and take
a pair of binoculars and go watch these meteor showers.
So I went out there and I you know, it
was probably eleven o'clock. It was you know, a night,
so pretty late. But there was a lot of people
out there who had a very similar idea to me.
(34:38):
So scattered along this whole moonlit beach, we're all out
there kind of watching, and sure enough, I don't know
if anyone actually had the opportunity to see it, but
I was. We were seeing, you know, big streaks of
light as these meteors were coming. And because it was
you know, we're pretty far up north, the sky felt
like it was only like twenty feet away, like you
(34:59):
could reach out and touch. They were so big and
so bright. So we're having this experience, and I noticed
that other people are watching through their binoculars, and I'm thinking,
you know, I don't need binoculars to see these are
like right in my face. But maybe there's I can
see more, Maybe there's more details. So I put on
the binoculars and I start kind of scanning the sky's
waiting for the meteor shower, and lo and behold, I
(35:23):
see these small dots that look probably the same size
as any of the stars in the starfield start to move.
And there's two of them, and they're moving kind of
in parallel, and they're moving in a diagonal direction, and
then all of a sudden, one of them splits off
and goes a different direction. And the other one keeps
(35:44):
going and then stops and goes straight up. And I'm
I'm watching this thinking what am I looking at? Those
can't be planes. And let me just for the record say,
I have never seen a UFO before. I know many
people that have. It's not that I ever wanted to
or didn't want to. I wasn't looking for them on
(36:06):
this night. But it was clear to me that these
were not stars. This was not star link or whatever
Elon Musk shoots up into the sky. These were two
little dots of light that were moving around in impossible trajectories.
If they were human craft. Well, I took the binoculars down,
(36:31):
looking to see if anyone else was noticing this. I
didn't notice that. But what I realized I couldn't see
them with my naked eye. I could only see them
when I had the binoculars on. So I kept watching,
and then all of a sudden a couple more came through. Well.
I watched this for about forty five minutes. They would
shoot across, they would move down, they would dance around.
It was almost like they were playing tag or something
(36:53):
up in the sky. And then all of a sudden,
one would just disappear until I saw one come straight
down and go all the way in to the water,
right off to the west coast. And I, you know,
obviously knew about usos at this point, and I thought, Wow,
that was exactly what people talk about. There was no
(37:17):
I didn't see. I had the binoculars. I did not
see a ripple. It didn't look like it changed the
water's surface at all. It just disappeared down into the water,
and within about another five minutes I saw another one
do the exact same thing. Now I don't know how
else to explain what this could have been. If this
was a plane it crashed, it would have been in
(37:38):
the news the next day, right If it was a helicopter,
if it was anything any kind of human craft doing
any of the movement that I saw, it would have
been a tragedy. I heard nothing the next day, nothing
about it. Well, anyway, at the end of the night,
once the meteor showers kind of left, several other people
were all chattering about the same thing. Did you see
(38:00):
those UFOs? Did you see that stuff up in the sky?
So I was not the only one. And interestingly, the
next day I saw a couple of the people that
were out there talking. They didn't say anything about it.
It was all just, you know, interesting little tourist sighting
and back to your lives.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
That's fascinating that people, But that's been reported over and
over again. You made a distinction about you couldn't see
them with your bare eyes, but then you used your binoculars,
and I suppose that makes sense, and the binoculars are
supposed to make things easier to see. But do you
make any more of that. Were the binoculars revealing something
because of a filter or a lens or something.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
So that's a great question. I really can't answer it
in that I've spent you know, a couple of minutes
going binoculars, no binoculars, binoculars, but trying to understand why
I couldn't see the UAP with my naked eye. When
I looked through the binoculars, they were, as I said,
the exact same size and brightness as stars. But I
(39:03):
have to believe that if I was seeing them, they
were much closer. So was it an optical illusion? I
don't know. I know that you know you've heard reports
before of people saying I couldn't see the UFO until
I looked through a lens right until and a lot
of times you're hearing about special filters and that kind
(39:23):
of thing. There was no special filter on the binoculars.
They were just binocular.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Sometimes people say I didn't actually see anything, and then
we were taking photos and I saw it in the
photo later kind of thing, Right, Yeah, So I.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Think it's it's it's doesn't make any sense on the
surface because they for them to be moving around and
going into the water here on Earth, they have to
be much closer than stars in the sky. But I
could see the stars in the sky and I couldn't
see them with my naked eye. So I really have
no explanation for it. If anything, it just gives more
(39:56):
credence to the fact that there's something anomalous about these
objects that are flying around in our skies.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Well, I don't have a personal story to match that one,
although I'm fascinated by it and it makes me believe
it's probably a more common thing than we think that
it can be seen. I do happen to, though, have
a couple of other cases that sort of amplify on
what Brenda is saying that sort of take it from.
If he's at the one vision it kind of takes
(40:30):
the POV in a little bit. There was one case
which many people have heard about in Agudya, Puerto Rico,
and they saw a UAP that was near their airport
and they tracked it by a helicopter from the US
Department of Homeland Security. Now many people have seen this video.
It's kind of widely out there right now. First they
thought maybe it's a drug runner, you know, maybe it's
a drone or whatever. But the object was small, it
(40:53):
was asymmetrical, and it was being monitored by this helicopter.
And then when it seemed to be away it was
being monitored, it zipped away. The pilots watched as it
headed out across an airfield and headed straight for the
open waters of the Atlantic. So this is where the
story gets really interesting and kind of mind blowing. The
(41:14):
helicopter pursues it and it dives in the ocean, just
as you suggested in your story, Brent, And that ought
to be the end of the story, right this thing
is disappeared in the ocean. Okay, Well, wow, that was crazy,
kind of interesting. What to make of it? We have
a little video from Department of Homeland Security, But what
(41:34):
instead happens, is this thing pops up out of the ocean. Again,
it's gone in the ocean. Now it pops up out
of the ocean. And when it does, just when you think, well,
that would be weird enough, wouldn't it, you see something
on the land, goes out, disappears in the ocean. Okay,
that was interesting. Now it comes out of the ocean. Okay,
that should be the end of the story. No, not
the end of the story. It splits itself into two
(41:56):
seemingly different craft after it comes out of the ocean. Whoa,
and then it disappears from view. And all the time
it does this, it doesn't make a splash or awake.
So these when we talk about anomalists, well that's anomalist, baby,
I mean that. Yeah that.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
It doesn't get more anomalists than that. As we come
to the end of the episode here, I think an
interesting way to try and bring all of this together
is we start to look for is there a common
denominator to some of the movies we've talked about, some
even some of these real life reports that we've heard,
And well, if you guessed it, if you guess the Navy,
(42:34):
then give yourself a gold star, because the Navy seems
to be at the center of many of these stories
in different ways, whether they were cooperating with the filmmakers
or whether they were the stars of the movie, as
in The Navy Seals and the Abyss. I think the
Navy is something that oftentimes is counterintuitive to how people
(42:56):
think about UAP. Right in terms of who's investigation and
who's connected to the UAP, you almost always go to
the Air Force. But yet there's so many ways to
connect the Navy based on things we've heard and things
that have even happened to us. So, for instance, if
we go back and we talk about the guy who
(43:17):
offered us the deal, our friend JC, he was from
the Office of Naval Intelligence, John Harrington, who disclosed to
me was the Undersecretary of the Navy before becoming Secretary
of Energy in Reagan's second term, And as a nod
to John Errington, we made Frank Bachi and also one
(43:38):
last Dark Sky's point, we even had an episode set
in Vietnam called White Rabbit, where our Frank Back character
was out trying to recover a crashed UFO in the
Gulf of Tonkin, which, of course, in typical Dark Sky's fashion.
We said, the revisionist history version is this is what
started the Vietnam War. So yes, we had some fun
with that, but I think there's some real world connections.
(44:01):
And then that also takes us all the way back
to those congressional hearings where several pilots got up again
put their hand on a bible and took an oath
and talked about that famous tic tac in the Nimitz case,
all of which involved the oceans, and these.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Are Navy pilots. One of the things that's been clear,
and it drove Chris Mellon, who's one of the leaders
of this Soule Disclosure movement MAD, which is the Air Force,
when they were told by Congress to put forward cases
barely cooperated and the Navy did cooperate. And so it
(44:37):
does make clear one thing. When we were approached by
these folks that said they were from Office of Naval Intelligence,
they did make it clear that they were impressed that
we recognized the Navy's leading role by naming one of
our characters a guy from the Navy. The guy from
the Navy was running Majestic twelve in our series. So
(44:59):
there's that I do know that even on a need
to know with Back when I was doing it with Coltheart,
we did a whole episode about the Air Force versus
the Navy. The Air Force, of course, they're the guys
that did Project Blue Book, which many people thought was
kind of a half baked cover up for the many
years it was going on. And now the Navy seems
to be stepping forward a little bit, and that kind
(45:23):
of makes this whole topic relevant. Now. I know we
don't have a lot of time, Brent, but I got it.
Can I talk Atlantis for just a little bit of time? Yes, absolutely,
I forgot. We need to talk about Atlantis, and I
hope you'll take a little side trip through the Bermuda Triangle,
which is also another fasciating part of the lore. Here's
the thing that makes Atlantis interesting to me. It's basically
(45:44):
the Swiss Army Knife of mythology. Okay Plato started it,
of course, but you pop open this Swiss Army Knife
and what do you have in the middle of Atlantis.
You got a lost Golden Age, You've got a global catastrophe,
you've got moral warning, geopolitical thriller, treasure hunt, superhero Kingdom,
Sci fi portal conspiracy engine. I mean, it's got everything,
(46:06):
and it is a myth that comes with its built
in production value. It already has a movie spinning in
your head. If you're hearing this right now, you can
think about the massive architecture, the glowing technology, and of
course it's tragic downfall, it's survivors, it's secrets, and as
we've said during the show, many people have mentioned Atlantis.
(46:28):
I mean, think about it. Marvel and DC have Aquaman
and Namar and interesting sidebar by the way, Namar first
appeared in nineteen thirty nine and he was the leader
of Atlantis. Aquaman didn't show up for two more years
nineteen forty one, but also the leader of Atlantis. Atlantis
is just a big deal. Now. There is a movie
(46:48):
that a lot of people remember called Atlantis The Lost Kingdom,
and I know a little bit about that because about
a million years ago in Hollywood terms anyway, about five
development cycles maybe. But my wife Jackie and I wrote
the treatment and the outline for Atlantis at the very beginning,
and so we've really had to steep ourselves. There was
(47:09):
no Internet or chat GPT for us to look into
to do our research at that time. So we had
to fall into Atlantis research quite a bit and we
had a great time doing it. And what we ended
up doing originally is I don't know what this reflects
on UFOs, but it reflects maybe on me. Because Jackie
and I went into Disney. They wanted us to write
(47:31):
some dialogue for Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was going
to be coming out, and we said, ah, we're going
to pass because the truth is, the movie's already been done,
there's no credit to be had, and this is not
our thing. You don't want to pay much money, will pass.
So we passed on Hunchback of Notre Dame and we said, Hey,
what we'd really like to do is create something from scratch,
(47:53):
and so Disney said, you can do Atlantis. We said great,
and I remember getting a great note from Disney. They said,
you know, great job you guys. The story you pitch
really came together. And so what we ended up doing
with Atlantis is just taking seriously that there was a
city at the bottom of the ocean. But one of
(48:15):
the things we had to ask ourselves when writing Atlantis
is it a human civilization or is it an alien civilization?
It could be either we kind of opted for human
because that's the Plato thing, right, this city sinks to
the bottom of the ocean, well, by then they'd be hybrids,
I guess, is what our take was. There'd be certain
(48:36):
powers and mysteries about it. We had a great time
Atlantis mystifies people to this day, and well, I'm not
sure that we'll ever find a real Atlantis at the
bottom of the ocean. We very well may find some
kind of life, intelligent life at the bottom of the ocean,
which would be really fascinating to me. So I guess
(49:00):
the question really becomes is this a myth or is
it something that sort of touches a basic human understanding.
Plato acted like it was the real thing? But come on, right,
how would he know? I mean, how would Plato have
known that it was this real civilization that passed away?
(49:21):
What knowledge had he been imparted with? I don't know,
So I'll just go through it to you. Do you
think we'll ever find a real Atlantis? What do you
have a take on that.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I don't know if we'll find a real Atlantis, but
I do feel that it seems to me that we're
finding increasing evidence of ancient civilizations that we weren't aware of,
and so whether one of those turns out to be Atlantis,
it really wouldn't surprise me. I think that the more
research and exploration I do, the more I start to realize.
(49:50):
You know, a line from Dark Skies that we use
was history, as you know, it is a lie. And
I think there's a lot more to history than we
right now. I think that jumping off into the Atlantis
from the Atlantis idea. Atlantis was also one of the theories
of it is that it's in the Bermuda Triangle, right,
(50:12):
And that's why the Bermuda Triangle has all of this
lore written about it. It was first written in a
book by Charles Burlitz in nineteen seventy four and it
led to a bunch of documentaries and movies. And I
think the Bermuda Triangle is so interesting because instead of
saying there's weirdness throughout the whole ocean, it concentrated it
in one area. It's like, well, the rest of the
(50:34):
oceans are safe, but the Bermuda Triangle. Never go into
the Bermuda Triangle. But of course, bringing everything full circle,
I did not know this until we were preparing for
this episode. There was actually a Naval Air Force station
in Bermuda right near the Bermuda Triangle, and even today
it still has detachments for operations that are going on there.
(50:56):
And also several whistleblowers have come forward and said, oh no,
there's a whole underground alien base in the Bermuda Triangle
and that's why there is a naval base there. And
this base has ancient humans on it and maybe that's Atlantis,
I don't know, requoting myself. Where there's smoke, there's fire,
six hundred and seventy two cases that Dolan is investigating,
(51:19):
everything that we've just talked about, plus all of the
congressional hearings, plus these whistleblowers, I think, let me bring
back one last James Cameron quote to put it all
in context. He said, from what we know now, submersibles
have only seen about five percent of the ocean bottom,
so we know more about the surface of the Moon
(51:41):
in Mars than our own deep ocean.
Speaker 2 (51:44):
Absolutely, it's crazy. And by the way, just to bring
this back, this actually relates back to Spielberg because remember
in Close Encounters, which we talked about a few episodes ago,
what happens at the very beginning a number of aircraft
from World War Two, and they're pilots are returned aircraft
attack gas still in the tank, pilots kind of numbed
(52:05):
but alive and unaged. Well, that kind of goes back
to this flight nineteen, which was in nineteen forty five.
There was a disappearance of US Navy, five of them
US Navy bombers. So that's a lot of where that
stuff started. That planes would fly in and disappear into
the I don't know, some kind of portal vacuum ocean.
(52:26):
I don't know where they were supposed to be going.
I just wanted to throw one thought out here. We've
talked a lot about the ocean, and of course that
is hugely important when you're talking about USOS scientifically, I guess.
But remember it's not just the ocean. These UFO usos
have been seen over rivers, they've been seen over lakes.
(52:48):
Bodies of water are important, yes, reservoirs. They have been
seen literally hovering over bodies of water with water being
funneled up into the craft supposedly. So don't know what
that's all about. I know that even if we're talking
about movies, think about The Man who Fell to Earth
with David Bowie in nineteen seventy six and then they
(53:11):
made the mini series about it in twenty twenty two.
Why was he here? He was here because his drought
stricken planet needed water and he was building a craft.
I never understood this part of the movie. He was
supposedly building a craft to bring water back to his
star planet. How big would that craft have to be
to bring Very ambitious. It is an ambitious plan. Possibly
(53:33):
more on that later in our series as we talk
about these things. But water is important. It gives life.
We have a lot of it here on Earth. We
have fresh water, we have salt water, and somebody's interested
in it and maybe somebody is living in it. So
I feel like that's an important thing. But I will
throw a closing comment out with a prediction, and that
(53:54):
would be filmmakers are apt to watch what's going on
in sort of the dialogue that affects society, and many
of them increasingly are paying attention to the whole UFO
UAP issue. And these are people who are going to
hear about USOS. This is not something that people have
(54:16):
been focused on, but now they're starting to. Now they're
starting to. So I think we are apt to get
a movie or two in the reasonably near future where
somebody tries to go back to that I was going
to say, go back to that ground, I don't know what,
back to the bottom of that particular ocean environment and
try to find a story. I don't think these movies
(54:39):
and TV series we've talked about are over at all.
It's a mystery. And sometimes the way we try to
resolve the answers to mysteries is we make movies and
TV series and video games and all that about them.
And that's probably going to happen here again too. I
completely agree. I look forward to it as well, because
(54:59):
I was interested in this topic. But as we've studied it,
and we've looked backwards and we've looked into transcripts and
all sorts of things, I am deeply fascinated by this
topic now, and it's actually caused me to kind of
reframe the central question you always hear, which is are
we alone in the universe? I think the question I
have now is how many races do we share this
planet with? Oh? Well, I gave a speech from Palm
(55:23):
Desert this weekend. This last weekend, and somebody asked that question.
They said, well, how many kinds of intelligent life are
out there? And I'm like, hey, I'm glad to play
an expert on a podcast, but I'm not that kind
of expert. I can't tell you how many, but it
does appear when you sort of see the characteristics more
than one. Certainly in the movies it's more than one.
(55:43):
I mean that much. We can say there's a full
collection of life out there, just waiting for you and
me to watch it on the screen and talk about it. Anyway,
It's been good. One final thought here, though, You were
talking about the Nimetz case, and that is the Navy,
But it's the famous two thousand and four case which
was largely Navy pilots chasing and or being chased by
(56:08):
some kind of UAP and multiple people seeing it seeing
it on radar. But what's interesting about the case from
a USO point of view, just throw this out there.
What David Fraverer and other pilots saw was this tic
tac craft UAP zipping around close to the ocean surface,
(56:28):
just you know, going quickly one way right, turn, boom,
just zig zig zag zig Like what I saw in
the sky Like what you saw in the sky. Cheers everybody. Calculator, Sound, Light,
and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions.
It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel.
(56:51):
Our show's music was written by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton
Lighthauser and Your hosts and executive producers are Brice Abel,
That's me and Brent Friedman. Why this guise
Speaker 1 (57:08):
H
The idea that aliens would come from space was much
more palatable to the general public than the idea of USOS,
which was considered pure science fiction fantasy. I fast forward
now to present day, when people are having very serious
discussions about USOS in Congress.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
We have basically mapped Mars better than we have mapped
the oceans. Our oceans are more of a mystery to
us currently than Mars. I think, I'm Bryce s Able.
(00:48):
Have you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between
Hollywood and UFOs and.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to Sound, Light and Frequency.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Hey, on this episode of Sound, Light and Frequency, we're
ticking the f out of UFOs and we're swapping in
an S for USOS Unidentified submerged Objects. Now, for decades,
(01:20):
we have been trained by movies, by headlines, and even
by our own neck muscles to look straight up. But
what if some of the most important unknowns are in
the sky at all? What if they're down there in
the deep, in the trenches and the places we haven't
even mapped because the pressure would turn us into pancakes.
Hollywood has been quietly rehearsing that idea for a long
(01:41):
time back in nineteen eighty nine, Cameron gave us the
Abyss that was a first contact story, but Jules Verne
in hg Wells long before we're down there treating the
sea like outer space before cinema even could. And then
there's Atlantis, which is basically the original Plato myth that says,
what if the ocean is hiding a whole nother world?
And you can add in the modern iterations Aquaman Namur,
(02:04):
even TV shows like Stargate Atlantis, which makes the submerged
city idea and turns it into a literal portal, and
you start to see a pattern. We keep coming back
to the water because we want to hide the impossible,
because here's the thing. If usos are real, and it
increasingly looks like they are, then all those underwater NHI
(02:26):
stories stop being just entertainment. They become a kind of
cultural X ray what we fear, what we hope, and
what we suspect me already be in the neighborhood. I'm
brice Able and speaking of oceans. I was born on
the Oregon Coast. I live on the California coast now
and Brent Friedman, my co host, lives on an island
in Washington State, So all I can say, Brent is
(02:48):
come on in Water's fine.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I am recording this from my island paradise up here
on San Juan's. You know, it's interesting listening to your intro.
I was looking back on the first couple episodes we've done,
which we're all about UFOs that came from space, interstellar, interdimensional,
and as you said, now we're going to kind of
take a deep dive into USOS, and it naturally brings
(03:11):
up The Abyss, a wonderful film by James Cameron, and
like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron's one of the most successful
directors in Hollywood, and he's also, like Steven Spielberg, made
a handful of alien movies, starting with Aliens in nineteen
eighty six and then the Avatar trilogy starting in two
thousand and nine, which is still going strong today. But
(03:33):
it's really his nineteen eighty nine movie The Abyss, which
has prompted a lot of online speculation that Cameron, again
like Spielberg, might have had some insider information about UAP,
and I think that's going to be a really interesting
topic for us to focus on in this episode.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It's a great film. I did enjoy seeing it again
now I think I've seen it three times, and it's
just fun. It's a fun movie. As I understand it,
this is something that Cameron was planning to do since
he was a kid. He wrote some kind of short
story or something about it, and then finally said, Okay,
I'm a big shot director who just did Aliens. Now
I'm going to try to do Aliens underwater. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
The story you're talking about is that when he was
a teenager, he was very interested in diving, and he
went to some presentation and met a famous diver I'm
going to try and pronounce his name, Francis Felushka, and
apparently hearing about the experiences of this diver and some
of the technologies that were being invented at the time,
(04:34):
in particular that liquid oxygen breathing system, really sparked him
to create the story of the Abyss. At least that's
the official story that we hear. You know, I'm thinking,
before we go any further, why don't we give a
plot summary of what the Abyss is about in case
someone hasn't seen it. I'll do the honors this time.
The story follows the civilian crew of an underwater oil
(04:55):
rig recruited by the Navy to investigate a sunken nuclear submarine.
This leads to a tense encounter with mysterious, intelligent aquatic
aliens who challenge humanity's violent nature. At the center of
this is the estranged relationship between the oil rigs foreman
Bud and his engineer wife Lindsay, as they put aside
(05:17):
their differences and put both their lives at risk to
complete the mission.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
That's pretty good reading of it. Interestingly enough, it starts
out almost like the plot of Armageddon, that famous comet
movie with Bruce Willison. It because he and his gang
are oil workers and you know they need to go
stop a comet. But what do they do. Well, let's
get some oil workers and let's send them to the
comet to do it. At least these guys are doing
the right thing. They're going to the bottom of the ocean.
(05:41):
And I have to say, there are many things to
like about the Abyss. There's a few things not to
like about it, but there are many things to like
about it. And most of all is that liquid breathing.
The idea that you can fill a helmet up with
a liquid and you're breathing. I mean, I think there's
almost nothing as closedphobic that I can imagine as having
(06:02):
somebody put a helmet on me, fill it with a liquid,
and then tell me don't worry, just relax, it's going
to be fine, which is what they basically tell Ed
Harris in the movie. And I guess it is fine.
But that's how he gets down to this city, which,
if I remember correctly, is like four miles under the ocean.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yes, yeah, it's deep. It's down to the point where
obviously no human has ever been before. I agree though
the liquid breathing thing was the scariest part of the
movie for me. I couldn't get past that. There's no
way I could do that. But the couple other interesting
things jumped out at me. For one, when I first
saw the movie, I had a different recollection in my
(06:41):
mind of the craft were underwater craft, and then the
aliens were angelic manta rays, if you will. But watching
it again, the craft are actually biological entities. I think
they call them machines but alive. That really was interesting
because I'm sure at the time that was absolutely revolutionary.
(07:03):
No one had ever considered the alien craft being biological entities.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Now, I guess I could be accused of stealing it
because I wrote it into my nineteen ninety three movie
Official Denial. The craft they shoot down has a big
hole in it, and then it heals itself because it's
partially biological. But honestly, that isn't that crazy of an
idea anymore, because what is the thing that David Grush
has his favorite word in his testimony before the House
(07:29):
Oversight Committee seemed to be biologics? Yes, and I always wonder, well,
do you mean bodies or things that are biologically alive?
Or what exactly does that mean? And it easily could
be that part of the craft is a biological organism.
We don't really know, but certainly that's true with what
Cameron did, and he plays this very interestingly. At first,
(07:52):
of course, is they're underwater to do this rescue mission,
they start seeing things, littler things, and the tension builds
and they're wondering, what are we seeing? Then these do
look like craft, and it isn't until you get toward
the late middle part of the movie where you actually
go down and realize, holy shit, there's a whole group
of something living down there, which is kind of disturbing.
(08:16):
Although if you really start to think about what we
are being told these days, just through release of documents, etc.
There's a lot of concern that there are things in
the ocean, and that those things in the ocean may
also be the things that we see in the sky
because of trans medium characteristics. So Cameron was probably ahead
(08:36):
of the curve on a lot of things. Now. It's
interesting though, because they don't actually make clear in the
movie exactly what's going on, who exactly these creatures are, whatever,
But they did do a book serialization after the movie
was released, and that states that what's down there is
a colonizing species that sought a high pressure, deep water
(08:59):
world in order to build new ships as they travel
further into the galaxy. Which I have to say, I'm
a human being, so I'm going to react to water
the way people react to water. You know, some people
love being in the water. Some people are nervous about
being the water. I like being in the water, but
I don't think I could build anything in the water.
I feel like I need a sterile room to build
craft or ships. So I don't really know how they
(09:21):
were doing that. But that's certainly part of it. Here
are some quotes from Cameron about alien life being in
these hidden oceans, and these are just a few that
we picked out at random. One of them he said,
if there's another species in the cosmos that's advanced, it's
probably not living on Earth. Well, okay, then he said,
it's more likely living on a subsurface ocean somewhere like
(09:43):
Europa or Ensuladis. Is that right, insulatus? I don't think so.
Who knows, you know what. I'm not even going to
get into all the things that Cameron has said, but
he clearly believes in at least making alien movies. But
do we have any evidence he actually believes that aliens
are here now and that they may or may not
be in e Osians. That's the question I have.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
He has not been forthcoming with that information. I think
all we can do is take him at face value
in terms of the stories he told. One thing I
will say is that in the movie he does have
the character of Bud obviously encounter the aliens at some
point when he takes them onto the ship. And by
the way, a lesson he did not learn from Steven Spielberg,
(10:24):
whom apparently he's a big fan of When Steven Spielberg
took us into the ship in Close Encounters, a lot
of people groaned and moaned and said, all the magic
had been taken out of the movie, right, And of
course when we go into the ship at the end
of the Abyss, that was actually, in my mind, the
weakest part of the movie, right, because all of the
(10:44):
mystery and the magic was gone, and now we're in
a set. That being said, one of the things that
the aliens tell Bud is that they are friends of humanity,
and they have been living on the earth a long
time and have chosen to leave us alone. But then
the only reason that they are intervening now is they
are becoming aware that we are hurting each other and
(11:07):
we need to grow up a lot.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
How nice of them. I'm touched. I'm so deeply touched
by that. Let's see if we can clarify this. I've
seen the Abyss movie three times. I saw it when
it first came out in nineteen eighty nine, and I
do not recall an ending where we see tidal waves
about to destroy cities. And then there was a director's
cut version where he added almost an hour's worth of
(11:30):
stuff to it. And that's where I do recall the
wave about to destroy cities. And I don't even know
if that was the director's cut, that was just an
enhanced version. Yeah, maybe I'm thinking about the director's cut.
We both just saw together. That does take us there,
and I agree he certainly did a credible technical job.
But by the way, we don't actually believe in spoilers.
(11:52):
It sound light and frequency, partly because this movie is
close to forty years old now, so if you haven't
seen it, you can't really write us letters about spoiling things.
At the end, though, the aliens are about to take
out a bunch of these aliens in the ocean are
going to take out cities because they're sending title waves,
and because Bud professes his love for his soon to
(12:16):
be xife or his current ex wife. I don't remember
whether they're actually divorced or not, but they stopped the
title waves in mid wave, and that seemed a bit fanciful.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
One other thing I wanted to point out that I
think it's really interesting and I had completely forgotten about it.
We use this term USO and people have adopted it widely.
We're hearing it in congressional hearings. But in the movie
they make reference to underwater aliens and they use the
term NTI non terrestrial intelligence. I had never heard that before.
(12:49):
I mean, I don't remember hearing it. I'm sure i'd
heard it in the movie the first couple of times
I saw it, but I haven't heard it recently, and
I haven't heard it used in public discourse. So I'm
wondering what's wrong with NTI. It actually sounds pretty interesting
to me.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
It is a mystery. The biggest mystery is who actually
gets to name these things? Who actually first came up
with UAP? And I know there's an answer to it.
I think it was actually used sometime in the fifties
or sixties. I don't have that in front of me,
but not embraced. It didn't get embraced until the government
decided that, hey, we're probably going to tell people a
(13:21):
little bit about this mystery, so instead of calling them UFOs,
let's embrace this UAP thing. It won't have the same
stigma around it and we can start moving forward. So
there is that interesting thing about the ABYSS. Though it's
beautifully made, there's nothing wrong with the movie. Other than
(13:41):
we can parse whether the ending is right or not.
But at the end of the day, you kind of
ask yourself, did Cameron actually hear anything from anybody about
the actual likelihood of alien life in the ocean? And
unlike Spielberg, I haven't been able to turn up anything
where anybody's actually even pointing a finger at that. Have
you and your research found anybody saying, you know that
(14:04):
James Cameron he got briefed into the program.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
I have not heard anyone say it that directly, but
I have seen in various chat rooms and whatnot people speculating.
And it goes to the simple fact that if you
look at this movie when it came out, nobody was
talking about usos, right, and now that's one of the
main things people are talking about. And so how could
(14:28):
he have been so far ahead of the curve to
tell a story about, like you said, a whole underwater
city of aliens highly advanced? And that just be pure imagination,
which then coincidentally is being borne out to be true,
at least by a lot of whistleblowers who we have
(14:48):
to take at face value when they put their hand
on a bible and take an oath and go in
Congress and talk about it. So I think that's where
the speculation comes from. But no, I have not heard
anyone directly say with Steven Spielberg that he has taken
a deal.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I've heard more people say because I watched all the
extras that came with the film today, with the director's cut,
it sounds like a lot of the actors were ready
to go strangle cameraon after the shoot because it was
a super hard shoot and these guys were wearing, you know,
we're down in the water for six to eight hours
a day or something crazy like that, and of course
(15:25):
they didn't have quite the same ability to communicate. It was.
In fact, in some cases, I don't think they actually
had communication in the suits themselves. So it was an
extraordinarily difficult thing. But the one thing that also struck
me though, is we always talk about UFOs going in waves,
and that's been true. You go through the fifties, the sixties,
(15:46):
the seventies, there's always years where there's a UFO wave.
Sometimes we have waves in movies. Obviously, you know when
I was saying about Armageddon a while ago, I believe
that came out in ninety eight and another movie that
came out that same year was Deep Impact. You have
two movies released at the same time about a comet
that's going to hit Earth and having to go out
and stop it. Well, interestingly enough, in the same exact
(16:09):
year that The Abyss came out, there were three movies
released that year about underwater aliens. There was, of course
The Abyss, but there is also a very semi popular
movie called Leviathan back then, and then there was a
Corman low budget one called Lords of the Deep. So
sometimes when ideas are in the air, they're in the air.
Sometimes that's just the way it's gonna be. Now, I
(16:31):
have to say I never saw Lords of the Deep.
Never really watch a lot of Corman movies. I think
I did see the Leviathan, but I really can't tell
you one simple thing about it, can you.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
I think there was about a big sea monster.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yep, that's it. It's a big sea monster. Telling the
big sea monsters had been a thing over the years.
I believe there's a big sea monster in twenty thousand
leagues under the sea. I think that's the driving thing there.
So I guess you could call a giant sea monster.
You wouldn't call it an alien, so it's not really
an alien movie. But we don't know if that sea
(17:03):
monster was intelligent. If it was, then it would be
an NTI or an Nhi, as you pointed out. So
I don't really know. But clearly the idea that they're
out there and under there is something that these movies
profoundly floated. And yet I have to say, we know
that Abyss was a really really big film and a
(17:24):
lot of people saw it, and the people that saw
it talked about it, but it didn't really put into
the UFO conversation among the UFO community that these things
are possibly in Erosans and if they are in Erosians,
what are they doing? Are they living there? Are they
hiding there? What are they doing there? And in the
serialization book that they put out about the Abyss, they
(17:46):
were building ships. And one thing that always struck me,
and I don't remember actually where I read this, but
somebody was sort of positive, why would they be here
on Earth? Well, that they could have been here all along,
so they may is relevant to Earth as we are,
we may share Earth. But another thing is water is
(18:07):
very very important in the universe. It's not as common
as you might think, and we are a water planet. Now,
say you were an adventurous spirit from a water planet
and you heard about Earth and you came here to Earth,
would you set up a location in the desert or
would you go to the ocean. If you were from
a water planet, you'd go to the ocean. So, for
(18:29):
all we know, they've been there thousands of years. They
came from someplace else, and you know, we really really
just don't know.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Well, it's true. I mean, we do know that all
life needs water. All life is largely comprised of water.
So it does make a lot of sense that if
you have an interstellar even interdimensional race, that they're going
to probably feel most comfortable in water. That would be
one of the unifying kind of elements cross any world,
(19:01):
any planet. One of the things I want to talk
about that struck me as interesting is, yes, there were
those movies all in the same year, but there's been
some other big Hollywood directors that have made some underwater
alien movies as well, starting with Sphere made by Barry
Levinson in nineteen ninety eight, and then also Battleship made
(19:23):
by Peter Berg in twenty twelve. Obviously, none of those
two were not as successful as the ABYSS. But I
think what's interesting is look at them kind of stacked up,
and look at the difference in the stories they tell,
very so different. The ABYSS, which came out first, told
a story of benevolent aliens, and by the way, that
(19:43):
was made with no participation from the military. Sphere told
a story of neutral aliens who kind of reflected humanity
spears back on them. That was made without participation of
the military as well. Battleship, though, which was last that
came out again in twenty twelve, that was a story
(20:03):
of hostile aliens, and that was made with the participation
of the Navy. So it's interesting to me that the
one movie that the military got behind was the one
that featured the hostile aliens.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
No mystery there, really, if you think about it. Quite
often the military has turned down working on various movies
because they say, we're just going to look bad, and
why should we help you prove UFOs are real if
we don't believe in them. In Battleship, of course, the
military looks really good. I mean this alien Expeditionary Force.
I guess in Battleship, the twenty twelve movie shows up
(20:37):
and we end up having to fight them with the
very best that our Navy's got and we send them packing.
So from a military cooperation point of view, that's precisely
what you'd think they would want to do. Just one
actual thing about Sphere. By the way, Sphere and Battleship
did pretty good at the box office, they weren't movies
that no one's ever heard of. Sphere is interesting, though.
(20:59):
It uses that standard thing where something has happened and
you've got to go collect the team and get them
together to go investigate. So that's how Sphere starts. Dustin
Hoffman's and at Sharon Stone's in it. The concept of
the film is that there is a giant craft on
the bottom of the ocean, which certainly sounds like aliens,
and they're sent down there to look into it. And
(21:20):
this craft has been there since the seventeen hundreds, which
I kind of loved that when I first heard that
that was the concept of the movie. That's what made
me go see Sphere. I thought, that's pretty cool because
that's a mystery wrapped inside of a riddle, inside an
enigma kind of thing. I can't wait to figure out
(21:41):
what that's going to be. All about. But when they
get down there, and again I'm sorry, but we just
don't do spoilers on thirty some year old movies. But
they get down there and it's not an alien craft.
It's got US logos on it down there. So somehow
this is a craft from the future that ended up
crashing into the ocean in the seventeen hundreds and is
(22:04):
found in whatever year's sphere is made. So it's alien light,
it's not quite alien, and it doesn't really say anything
to us about whether aliens are real or not existing
in the water, whereas Battleship doesn't say that they're here
in our water. It says they've come here. So what
really for me made Abyss stand out is the idea
(22:26):
that this was another civilization that actually lived here on
Earth at the same time as us, and was a
mystery in itself. So anyway, I liked all three of those,
but each one brings something different to the party, you know.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
The last thing I will say is I was doing
some research on the state of mind of the public
with regards to UFOs back in eighty nine, and the
idea that aliens would come from space was much more
palatable to the general public. Then then the idea of USOS,
which was considered pure science fiction fantasy. But again, I
(23:07):
fast forward now to present day when people are having
very serious discussions about USOS in Congress. So it raises
this question in my mind the ABYSS does is was
it a coincidence that Cameron somehow imagined USOS nearly forty
years before they became a legitimate, verifiable reality. Maybe maybe not,
(23:33):
I don't know. It does open the door in terms
of was this a consciousness play? You know, as you
mentioned between those three movies that came out all at
the same year as the ABYSS. How is that possible?
You said it's something in the air? Well is it
something more specifically in the collective consciousness? These ideas are
just out there and they're being pulled down at the
(23:54):
same time, or are they being planted by some non
human intelligence that says it's time to start telling these stories.
Obviously we can't answer those questions, but it's fascinating to
me to even ask them.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, I'll tell you, I do like asking them, and
I'm frustrated sometimes that we can't answer them. We're just
talking about Yes, Cameron is a leader, a trendsetter and
all that. We didn't start us down this road. Back
in eighteen ninety six, HG. Wells wrote a short story
called In the Abyss, which I found kind of intriguing.
(24:27):
And in that one, he's got a tale about a
thrill seeking inventor who drops five miles to the ocean floor,
there by beating Cameron by an entire mile of ocean depth.
I believe he goes down there in a steel sphere
and he returns, of course, with his mind scrambled, and
a story about a bioluminescent amphibious and this is a
(24:49):
quote people of the Abyss who mistake him for a
god before he vanishes. So even HG. Wells was saying
what if? What if there are creatures? And this is HG.
Well's writing before he wrote War the Worlds. I think
his next project after writing In the Abyss was War
of the World's. So I'll find that pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah. Absolutely, And obviously another question we cannot answer is
did James Cameron read that short story at some point
and was inspired by it. Possibly. I had never even
heard of it, and I was a big fan of HG.
Wells growing up, so so interesting that that story has
been brought to the surface, as it were, because it
also makes you realize that well before we started contemplating
(25:36):
the idea that the government might be informing entertainment with
their agenda of disclosure and disinformation, there were people telling
stories that had no agenda other than just getting published
and having an audience as far as we know, and
so between Jules Verne with his story of twenty thousand
leagues under the Sea and HG. Wells with his story
(26:00):
in the Abyss, we've got stories that were being told
well before anyone could even contemplate these type of ideas.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to
be alive at that time reading that and thinking about
the ocean in that way holding under seat, because I
was pretty stunned to watch the Abyss, So reading a story,
(26:22):
you know, at the turn of the twentieth century would
have just blown my mind.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I just want to put a steak in the Abyss?
Is that too many mixed metaphors? Can you put a
steak in the Abyss? I don't think you can. But Nietzsche,
we can deflate the ability out the air out of
you just to put the water steak In. He said,
if you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks
into you. Now I don't know exactly what he meant there,
(26:48):
but that dude he was thinking. He was thinking early on,
and I've always enjoyed that quote. But the other thing
I just wanted to say is what makes the ocean
so interesting for this topic in film but also in reality,
of course, is that we have basically mapped Mars better
than we have mapped the oceans. Our oceans are more
(27:08):
of a mystery to us currently than Mars. I think
because we put landers on Mars, we've basically sent craft
around Mars to map everything. But we don't have the
ocean all mapped. And there's just a lot of people
who deal with the ocean on a regular basis who say,
we don't know the half of it. Other things that
are kind of interesting that would explain how you can
possibly have something living on the bottom of the ocean, though,
(27:31):
is if you think about it. We've been told that
the UFOs are traveling at such incredible speed, say twelve
thousand miles an hour, that if a human being was
in it, it may one of those extreme right turns.
They would be just a puddle of blood because of
the pressure. And the same is true if you go
down to some of these depths four or five miles
and even further, we would be killed instantly, and we
(27:53):
have to have equipment to go do it. But that's
one of the things that Louel Azana has been talking
about in his book and other people have been talking
about that whatever is behind the technology that is behind
this phenomena as we perceive it, is able to do
something about space time and create a situation where those
things are physically possible, even though they don't look physically possible.
(28:17):
And that certainly seems to be true because there are
reports of craft that are underwater that have been tracked
that appear to be going two hundred miles per hour,
and even though it's classified how fast a nuclear submarine
can go, the best guess is maybe forty miles an hour, so,
and some of these craft that are seen underwater are
(28:39):
much larger than our nuclear submarines. There are several football
fields long and cruising along, not cruising, zipping along through
the ocean. So I'm not really sure exactly what's going on,
but just to complete the sort of the riff about
what other films and things have been on. Of course,
the film a lot of people grew up on was
(29:00):
The twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. There was also
Mysterious Island which preceded it, so you had the vern
and the Wells people there. But the first major film film.
There were some serials that came out. I believe there
was a serial in nineteen thirty six about Undersea Kingdom,
but there was one called The Atomic Submarine in nineteen
(29:22):
fifty nine where there were aliens in the Arctic here
to conquer. I tried to watch it, you know, I
got halfway through it and I said, I just I
believe in sound, light and frequency, and I want to
be a good citizen of sound, light and frequency. But
I can't do this.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
So I all had it exact same experience.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
You know. Some of these movies just don't date that well.
But they have big ideas but small budgets. And that's
part of the problem with writing UFO. I've run into
it myself, and so of you. You write a big
idea movie that requires a Spielbergian budget, and instead you're
getting a lifetime budget and you can't do as much
(30:00):
field to the Bottom of the Sea. By the way,
I don't know this precede. I mean, you were barely
a zygote at the time this was on television, but
that was one that a lot of people were very into.
And it's interesting there's always mission creep on these things.
I think when Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
started in the sixties, it was really kind of like
twenty thousand leagues the submarine going around looking at the world,
(30:24):
and then they ran into monsters, and then pretty soon
they had to start running into aliens. So lots of movies.
People have been talking about it for a while. No
real evidence from my view that I've been able to
turn up that any of those people writing earlier were
told anything or new anything. No same here.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
I do think that in looking at that list we
put together, the one movie that I had forgotten was
about under sea aliens was Cocoon, the Ron Howard movie
from I think nineteen eighty five that actually hinted that
some Atlanteans had come back and were doing stuff in
(31:01):
a rest home up on Earth upon the surface. Anyway,
I guess the point being is that even though most people,
when you ask them, have you ever seen a movie
about underwater aliens. They're probably going to say, I saw
the abyss, maybe they saw sphere, maybe they saw battleship,
and the rest is all a blur. But let's take
this on too dry land now and look at the
(31:23):
real world. One of the other things that I think
is fascinating is in the category of where there's smoke,
there's fire your partner on need to know, Richard Dolan
has become the expert, I would say, the reigning expert
right now on usos. He went out, I guess to
write one book, but you can probably tell this story
better than I. He went out to set up to
write one book and is now actually writing three books
(31:46):
that look at six hundred and seventy two cases across
over one hundred years. Well, you've said everything I know
about that now. No, Actually it is interesting Dolan. Richard Dolan,
and he and I wrote the ad after just closure books,
so I know I'm going back to that, and so
I know the speed he writes books, and I know
how intelligent he is and what a thorough writer is.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
But when he told me this story was shocking. He
set out, as you mentioned, he was going to write
a book about usos. That was the goal. And he
found so many cases, six hundred and seventy two, and
by now I'm sure he's found a few more, but
there were so many he decided to write a trilogy
of books. Now, I got to tell you that's not
(32:30):
something I would ever do, but he's capable of doing it,
and I've read the first book, and those cases. He's
doing it in chronological order. Those cases of usos go
back to the seventeen hundreds. All I can say is this,
If you want to know more about the specific hardcore
science and or history of this, you probably should read
(32:51):
Richard Dolan's book, because this is happened many many times
and usually observed by more more than one person. Because
you've got a ship and people call people out to
take a look at it, and there areft scene in
the air going in the water, there's craft in the water,
scene coming out into the air. That's called trans medium travel.
(33:14):
You see a lot of that stuff, a lot of
great cases. And I know we're going to come back
to some more of those cases, and I know that
you've had a sighting yourself. I want to talk about
Atlantis in a minute, but I think this might be
a great time for you just to tell us you've
actually had a personal experience where you actually saw a USO.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So lay it on as my friend. Well, yes, thank you.
That is why reading through some of Richard's stories and
listening to some of his interviews online about some of
his favorite cases that he's been researching, they really resonated
with me because I heard a lot of description of
almost identical experiences or aspects of my experience that I
(33:55):
had had. And so let me set the stage. It
was August twelfth, twenty twenty three, if you remember, that
was the period of the Perseed meteor showers, and just
by coincidence, I happened to be on Vancouver Island on
the northern part up near to Fino, and I got
(34:15):
wind that these meteor showers were happening. It was beautiful
weather up there, and I thought, you know what, I'm
going to go out onto the beach tonight and take
a pair of binoculars and go watch these meteor showers.
So I went out there and I you know, it
was probably eleven o'clock. It was you know, a night,
so pretty late. But there was a lot of people
out there who had a very similar idea to me.
(34:38):
So scattered along this whole moonlit beach, we're all out
there kind of watching, and sure enough, I don't know
if anyone actually had the opportunity to see it, but
I was. We were seeing, you know, big streaks of
light as these meteors were coming. And because it was
you know, we're pretty far up north, the sky felt
like it was only like twenty feet away, like you
(34:59):
could reach out and touch. They were so big and
so bright. So we're having this experience, and I noticed
that other people are watching through their binoculars, and I'm thinking,
you know, I don't need binoculars to see these are
like right in my face. But maybe there's I can
see more, Maybe there's more details. So I put on
the binoculars and I start kind of scanning the sky's
waiting for the meteor shower, and lo and behold, I
(35:23):
see these small dots that look probably the same size
as any of the stars in the starfield start to move.
And there's two of them, and they're moving kind of
in parallel, and they're moving in a diagonal direction, and
then all of a sudden, one of them splits off
and goes a different direction. And the other one keeps
(35:44):
going and then stops and goes straight up. And I'm
I'm watching this thinking what am I looking at? Those
can't be planes. And let me just for the record say,
I have never seen a UFO before. I know many
people that have. It's not that I ever wanted to
or didn't want to. I wasn't looking for them on
(36:06):
this night. But it was clear to me that these
were not stars. This was not star link or whatever
Elon Musk shoots up into the sky. These were two
little dots of light that were moving around in impossible trajectories.
If they were human craft. Well, I took the binoculars down,
(36:31):
looking to see if anyone else was noticing this. I
didn't notice that. But what I realized I couldn't see
them with my naked eye. I could only see them
when I had the binoculars on. So I kept watching,
and then all of a sudden a couple more came through. Well.
I watched this for about forty five minutes. They would
shoot across, they would move down, they would dance around.
It was almost like they were playing tag or something
(36:53):
up in the sky. And then all of a sudden,
one would just disappear until I saw one come straight
down and go all the way in to the water,
right off to the west coast. And I, you know,
obviously knew about usos at this point, and I thought, Wow,
that was exactly what people talk about. There was no
(37:17):
I didn't see. I had the binoculars. I did not
see a ripple. It didn't look like it changed the
water's surface at all. It just disappeared down into the water,
and within about another five minutes I saw another one
do the exact same thing. Now I don't know how
else to explain what this could have been. If this
was a plane it crashed, it would have been in
(37:38):
the news the next day, right If it was a helicopter,
if it was anything any kind of human craft doing
any of the movement that I saw, it would have
been a tragedy. I heard nothing the next day, nothing
about it. Well, anyway, at the end of the night,
once the meteor showers kind of left, several other people
were all chattering about the same thing. Did you see
(38:00):
those UFOs? Did you see that stuff up in the sky?
So I was not the only one. And interestingly, the
next day I saw a couple of the people that
were out there talking. They didn't say anything about it.
It was all just, you know, interesting little tourist sighting
and back to your lives.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
That's fascinating that people, But that's been reported over and
over again. You made a distinction about you couldn't see
them with your bare eyes, but then you used your binoculars,
and I suppose that makes sense, and the binoculars are
supposed to make things easier to see. But do you
make any more of that. Were the binoculars revealing something
because of a filter or a lens or something.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
So that's a great question. I really can't answer it
in that I've spent you know, a couple of minutes
going binoculars, no binoculars, binoculars, but trying to understand why
I couldn't see the UAP with my naked eye. When
I looked through the binoculars, they were, as I said,
the exact same size and brightness as stars. But I
(39:03):
have to believe that if I was seeing them, they
were much closer. So was it an optical illusion? I
don't know. I know that you know you've heard reports
before of people saying I couldn't see the UFO until
I looked through a lens right until and a lot
of times you're hearing about special filters and that kind
(39:23):
of thing. There was no special filter on the binoculars.
They were just binocular.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Sometimes people say I didn't actually see anything, and then
we were taking photos and I saw it in the
photo later kind of thing, Right, Yeah, So I.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Think it's it's it's doesn't make any sense on the
surface because they for them to be moving around and
going into the water here on Earth, they have to
be much closer than stars in the sky. But I
could see the stars in the sky and I couldn't
see them with my naked eye. So I really have
no explanation for it. If anything, it just gives more
(39:56):
credence to the fact that there's something anomalous about these
objects that are flying around in our skies.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Well, I don't have a personal story to match that one,
although I'm fascinated by it and it makes me believe
it's probably a more common thing than we think that
it can be seen. I do happen to, though, have
a couple of other cases that sort of amplify on
what Brenda is saying that sort of take it from.
If he's at the one vision it kind of takes
(40:30):
the POV in a little bit. There was one case
which many people have heard about in Agudya, Puerto Rico,
and they saw a UAP that was near their airport
and they tracked it by a helicopter from the US
Department of Homeland Security. Now many people have seen this video.
It's kind of widely out there right now. First they
thought maybe it's a drug runner, you know, maybe it's
a drone or whatever. But the object was small, it
(40:53):
was asymmetrical, and it was being monitored by this helicopter.
And then when it seemed to be away it was
being monitored, it zipped away. The pilots watched as it
headed out across an airfield and headed straight for the
open waters of the Atlantic. So this is where the
story gets really interesting and kind of mind blowing. The
(41:14):
helicopter pursues it and it dives in the ocean, just
as you suggested in your story, Brent, And that ought
to be the end of the story, right this thing
is disappeared in the ocean. Okay, Well, wow, that was crazy,
kind of interesting. What to make of it? We have
a little video from Department of Homeland Security, But what
(41:34):
instead happens, is this thing pops up out of the ocean. Again,
it's gone in the ocean. Now it pops up out
of the ocean. And when it does, just when you think, well,
that would be weird enough, wouldn't it, you see something
on the land, goes out, disappears in the ocean. Okay,
that was interesting. Now it comes out of the ocean. Okay,
that should be the end of the story. No, not
the end of the story. It splits itself into two
(41:56):
seemingly different craft after it comes out of the ocean. Whoa,
and then it disappears from view. And all the time
it does this, it doesn't make a splash or awake.
So these when we talk about anomalists, well that's anomalist, baby,
I mean that. Yeah that.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
It doesn't get more anomalists than that. As we come
to the end of the episode here, I think an
interesting way to try and bring all of this together
is we start to look for is there a common
denominator to some of the movies we've talked about, some
even some of these real life reports that we've heard,
And well, if you guessed it, if you guess the Navy,
(42:34):
then give yourself a gold star, because the Navy seems
to be at the center of many of these stories
in different ways, whether they were cooperating with the filmmakers
or whether they were the stars of the movie, as
in The Navy Seals and the Abyss. I think the
Navy is something that oftentimes is counterintuitive to how people
(42:56):
think about UAP. Right in terms of who's investigation and
who's connected to the UAP, you almost always go to
the Air Force. But yet there's so many ways to
connect the Navy based on things we've heard and things
that have even happened to us. So, for instance, if
we go back and we talk about the guy who
(43:17):
offered us the deal, our friend JC, he was from
the Office of Naval Intelligence, John Harrington, who disclosed to
me was the Undersecretary of the Navy before becoming Secretary
of Energy in Reagan's second term, And as a nod
to John Errington, we made Frank Bachi and also one
(43:38):
last Dark Sky's point, we even had an episode set
in Vietnam called White Rabbit, where our Frank Back character
was out trying to recover a crashed UFO in the
Gulf of Tonkin, which, of course, in typical Dark Sky's fashion.
We said, the revisionist history version is this is what
started the Vietnam War. So yes, we had some fun
with that, but I think there's some real world connections.
(44:01):
And then that also takes us all the way back
to those congressional hearings where several pilots got up again
put their hand on a bible and took an oath
and talked about that famous tic tac in the Nimitz case,
all of which involved the oceans, and these.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Are Navy pilots. One of the things that's been clear,
and it drove Chris Mellon, who's one of the leaders
of this Soule Disclosure movement MAD, which is the Air Force,
when they were told by Congress to put forward cases
barely cooperated and the Navy did cooperate. And so it
(44:37):
does make clear one thing. When we were approached by
these folks that said they were from Office of Naval Intelligence,
they did make it clear that they were impressed that
we recognized the Navy's leading role by naming one of
our characters a guy from the Navy. The guy from
the Navy was running Majestic twelve in our series. So
(44:59):
there's that I do know that even on a need
to know with Back when I was doing it with Coltheart,
we did a whole episode about the Air Force versus
the Navy. The Air Force, of course, they're the guys
that did Project Blue Book, which many people thought was
kind of a half baked cover up for the many
years it was going on. And now the Navy seems
to be stepping forward a little bit, and that kind
(45:23):
of makes this whole topic relevant. Now. I know we
don't have a lot of time, Brent, but I got it.
Can I talk Atlantis for just a little bit of time? Yes, absolutely,
I forgot. We need to talk about Atlantis, and I
hope you'll take a little side trip through the Bermuda Triangle,
which is also another fasciating part of the lore. Here's
the thing that makes Atlantis interesting to me. It's basically
(45:44):
the Swiss Army Knife of mythology. Okay Plato started it,
of course, but you pop open this Swiss Army Knife
and what do you have in the middle of Atlantis.
You got a lost Golden Age, You've got a global catastrophe,
you've got moral warning, geopolitical thriller, treasure hunt, superhero Kingdom,
Sci fi portal conspiracy engine. I mean, it's got everything,
(46:06):
and it is a myth that comes with its built
in production value. It already has a movie spinning in
your head. If you're hearing this right now, you can
think about the massive architecture, the glowing technology, and of
course it's tragic downfall, it's survivors, it's secrets, and as
we've said during the show, many people have mentioned Atlantis.
(46:28):
I mean, think about it. Marvel and DC have Aquaman
and Namar and interesting sidebar by the way, Namar first
appeared in nineteen thirty nine and he was the leader
of Atlantis. Aquaman didn't show up for two more years
nineteen forty one, but also the leader of Atlantis. Atlantis
is just a big deal. Now. There is a movie
(46:48):
that a lot of people remember called Atlantis The Lost Kingdom,
and I know a little bit about that because about
a million years ago in Hollywood terms anyway, about five
development cycles maybe. But my wife Jackie and I wrote
the treatment and the outline for Atlantis at the very beginning,
and so we've really had to steep ourselves. There was
(47:09):
no Internet or chat GPT for us to look into
to do our research at that time. So we had
to fall into Atlantis research quite a bit and we
had a great time doing it. And what we ended
up doing originally is I don't know what this reflects
on UFOs, but it reflects maybe on me. Because Jackie
and I went into Disney. They wanted us to write
(47:31):
some dialogue for Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was going
to be coming out, and we said, ah, we're going
to pass because the truth is, the movie's already been done,
there's no credit to be had, and this is not
our thing. You don't want to pay much money, will pass.
So we passed on Hunchback of Notre Dame and we said, Hey,
what we'd really like to do is create something from scratch,
(47:53):
and so Disney said, you can do Atlantis. We said great,
and I remember getting a great note from Disney. They said,
you know, great job you guys. The story you pitch
really came together. And so what we ended up doing
with Atlantis is just taking seriously that there was a
city at the bottom of the ocean. But one of
(48:15):
the things we had to ask ourselves when writing Atlantis
is it a human civilization or is it an alien civilization?
It could be either we kind of opted for human
because that's the Plato thing, right, this city sinks to
the bottom of the ocean, well, by then they'd be hybrids,
I guess, is what our take was. There'd be certain
(48:36):
powers and mysteries about it. We had a great time
Atlantis mystifies people to this day, and well, I'm not
sure that we'll ever find a real Atlantis at the
bottom of the ocean. We very well may find some
kind of life, intelligent life at the bottom of the ocean,
which would be really fascinating to me. So I guess
(49:00):
the question really becomes is this a myth or is
it something that sort of touches a basic human understanding.
Plato acted like it was the real thing? But come on, right,
how would he know? I mean, how would Plato have
known that it was this real civilization that passed away?
(49:21):
What knowledge had he been imparted with? I don't know,
So I'll just go through it to you. Do you
think we'll ever find a real Atlantis? What do you
have a take on that.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I don't know if we'll find a real Atlantis, but
I do feel that it seems to me that we're
finding increasing evidence of ancient civilizations that we weren't aware of,
and so whether one of those turns out to be Atlantis,
it really wouldn't surprise me. I think that the more
research and exploration I do, the more I start to realize.
(49:50):
You know, a line from Dark Skies that we use
was history, as you know, it is a lie. And
I think there's a lot more to history than we
right now. I think that jumping off into the Atlantis
from the Atlantis idea. Atlantis was also one of the theories
of it is that it's in the Bermuda Triangle, right,
(50:12):
And that's why the Bermuda Triangle has all of this
lore written about it. It was first written in a
book by Charles Burlitz in nineteen seventy four and it
led to a bunch of documentaries and movies. And I
think the Bermuda Triangle is so interesting because instead of
saying there's weirdness throughout the whole ocean, it concentrated it
in one area. It's like, well, the rest of the
(50:34):
oceans are safe, but the Bermuda Triangle. Never go into
the Bermuda Triangle. But of course, bringing everything full circle,
I did not know this until we were preparing for
this episode. There was actually a Naval Air Force station
in Bermuda right near the Bermuda Triangle, and even today
it still has detachments for operations that are going on there.
(50:56):
And also several whistleblowers have come forward and said, oh no,
there's a whole underground alien base in the Bermuda Triangle
and that's why there is a naval base there. And
this base has ancient humans on it and maybe that's Atlantis,
I don't know, requoting myself. Where there's smoke, there's fire,
six hundred and seventy two cases that Dolan is investigating,
(51:19):
everything that we've just talked about, plus all of the
congressional hearings, plus these whistleblowers, I think, let me bring
back one last James Cameron quote to put it all
in context. He said, from what we know now, submersibles
have only seen about five percent of the ocean bottom,
so we know more about the surface of the Moon
(51:41):
in Mars than our own deep ocean.
Speaker 2 (51:44):
Absolutely, it's crazy. And by the way, just to bring
this back, this actually relates back to Spielberg because remember
in Close Encounters, which we talked about a few episodes ago,
what happens at the very beginning a number of aircraft
from World War Two, and they're pilots are returned aircraft
attack gas still in the tank, pilots kind of numbed
(52:05):
but alive and unaged. Well, that kind of goes back
to this flight nineteen, which was in nineteen forty five.
There was a disappearance of US Navy, five of them
US Navy bombers. So that's a lot of where that
stuff started. That planes would fly in and disappear into
the I don't know, some kind of portal vacuum ocean.
(52:26):
I don't know where they were supposed to be going.
I just wanted to throw one thought out here. We've
talked a lot about the ocean, and of course that
is hugely important when you're talking about USOS scientifically, I guess.
But remember it's not just the ocean. These UFO usos
have been seen over rivers, they've been seen over lakes.
(52:48):
Bodies of water are important, yes, reservoirs. They have been
seen literally hovering over bodies of water with water being
funneled up into the craft supposedly. So don't know what
that's all about. I know that even if we're talking
about movies, think about The Man who Fell to Earth
with David Bowie in nineteen seventy six and then they
(53:11):
made the mini series about it in twenty twenty two.
Why was he here? He was here because his drought
stricken planet needed water and he was building a craft.
I never understood this part of the movie. He was
supposedly building a craft to bring water back to his
star planet. How big would that craft have to be
to bring Very ambitious. It is an ambitious plan. Possibly
(53:33):
more on that later in our series as we talk
about these things. But water is important. It gives life.
We have a lot of it here on Earth. We
have fresh water, we have salt water, and somebody's interested
in it and maybe somebody is living in it. So
I feel like that's an important thing. But I will
throw a closing comment out with a prediction, and that
(53:54):
would be filmmakers are apt to watch what's going on
in sort of the dialogue that affects society, and many
of them increasingly are paying attention to the whole UFO
UAP issue. And these are people who are going to
hear about USOS. This is not something that people have
(54:16):
been focused on, but now they're starting to. Now they're
starting to. So I think we are apt to get
a movie or two in the reasonably near future where
somebody tries to go back to that I was going
to say, go back to that ground, I don't know what,
back to the bottom of that particular ocean environment and
try to find a story. I don't think these movies
(54:39):
and TV series we've talked about are over at all.
It's a mystery. And sometimes the way we try to
resolve the answers to mysteries is we make movies and
TV series and video games and all that about them.
And that's probably going to happen here again too. I
completely agree. I look forward to it as well, because
(54:59):
I was interested in this topic. But as we've studied it,
and we've looked backwards and we've looked into transcripts and
all sorts of things, I am deeply fascinated by this
topic now, and it's actually caused me to kind of
reframe the central question you always hear, which is are
we alone in the universe? I think the question I
have now is how many races do we share this
planet with? Oh? Well, I gave a speech from Palm
(55:23):
Desert this weekend. This last weekend, and somebody asked that question.
They said, well, how many kinds of intelligent life are
out there? And I'm like, hey, I'm glad to play
an expert on a podcast, but I'm not that kind
of expert. I can't tell you how many, but it
does appear when you sort of see the characteristics more
than one. Certainly in the movies it's more than one.
(55:43):
I mean that much. We can say there's a full
collection of life out there, just waiting for you and
me to watch it on the screen and talk about it. Anyway,
It's been good. One final thought here, though, You were
talking about the Nimetz case, and that is the Navy,
But it's the famous two thousand and four case which
was largely Navy pilots chasing and or being chased by
(56:08):
some kind of UAP and multiple people seeing it seeing
it on radar. But what's interesting about the case from
a USO point of view, just throw this out there.
What David Fraverer and other pilots saw was this tic
tac craft UAP zipping around close to the ocean surface,
(56:28):
just you know, going quickly one way right, turn, boom,
just zig zig zag zig Like what I saw in
the sky Like what you saw in the sky. Cheers everybody. Calculator, Sound, Light,
and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions.
It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel.
(56:51):
Our show's music was written by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton
Lighthauser and Your hosts and executive producers are Brice Abel,
That's me and Brent Friedman. Why this guise
Speaker 1 (57:08):
H
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