March 12, 2026 • 50 mins
For forty-four years, Brent Friedman has carried a story he has never fully told in public. A few fragments slipped out here and there, but never the names, never the full context, and never the larger implication of what it all meant. In this episode, that changes. Brent finally revisits a startling conversation from the summer of 1981, when an older family friend with extraordinary government access shared something so unsettling it stayed with Brent for the rest of his life. It was the kind of moment that sounds impossible — until you hear the details — and the kind of confidence given only because the speaker believed no one would ever believe it.
That same year, the scrappy UFO thriller Hangar 18 was floating provocative ideas into the culture long before most people were ready to take them seriously. Bryce and Brent use the film as a portal into a bigger conversation about secrecy, storytelling, and the uneasy space where Hollywood and hidden history may overlap. As Brent tells his account in full for the first time, Bryce adds new pieces that don’t close the case so much as deepen it — and together they point toward the central question behind Sound, Light & Frequency: what if movies and television weren’t just reflecting the mystery, but helping us live with it?
Hosted by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman.
Find us on iHeartPodcasts or wherever you get your podcasts (just search SOUND LIGHT FREQUENCY).
Visit us at SoundLightFrequency.com
Sound, Light & Frequency is produced by Stellar Productions. Executive Producers are Bryce Zabel, Brent Friedman, Nick Johnson, and Jackie Zabel.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
He seemed to have a very very important role. And
I said, you know what, how do you how do
you get a job like that? And he said, well,
I was briefed every day for months in an underground
facility in West Virginia and I used to cry myself
(00:22):
to sleep every night. The first time you told me
that cry myself to sleep every night, it freaks me out.
Today I still get goose sumps. I'm brice able. Have
(00:52):
you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between Hollywood
and UFOs?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm Bran Friedman, and you are listening.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
To Sound Light and Freak and see.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This is the episode where we discuss a crazy UFO
movie you probably never heard of, but strangely, this one
aligns with modern ufology big time.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Now, I'm going to tell you about the family friend
in the Reagan administration who disclosed me that aliens were
real and he'd seen them.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
You and I had the experience. I was going to
say the good experience, but it was just an experience
where we sat down and watched Hangar eighteen together. That's
not something we've done often or more than that one time,
but we decided to do it because we think it's
kind of an important lynch pin in the whole UFO
Hollywood kind of tail. And just to set this up,
(01:56):
we had Close Encounters in nineteen seventy seven coming out,
and in nineteen eighty you had Spielberg's special edition of it.
So that's the same year as Hangar eighteen. Hanger eighteen
happens to be a film that didn't do great in
the theaters, but I remember seeing it because it was
on either late night television or cable or something, and
(02:18):
it just has a lot of euphological things, and it
probably some that are a little more on target with
what people think today than even what Spielberg did well,
So agreed.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
I think I was shocked by the plot of it,
how ambitious it was in many ways. Let's talk a
little bit about what was the plot, because it's.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
A little hard to summarize. Well, we did work out
a little logline here. I'll read that for everyone, after
a UFO collides with a satellite and crashes to the Earth,
two astronauts must defy a government cover up to expose
the truth behind the mysteries at Hanger eighteen. Sounds a
lot better than the movie was to be honest with you.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, and to be fair, the movie was clearly low budget,
didn't have a lot of big names in it, and
it certainly didn't have the visionary director like Steven Spielberg.
All of that said, I think the thing that really
intrigued me was when you look at what it was
introducing in terms of new ideas to ufology. A lot
(03:16):
of those hold up under more scrutiny today, I would argue,
than close encounters. So for instance, they had a captured
craft at a secret base. They had humanoid aliens, not
our gray space brothers. They had the concept of ancient
aliens shaping our history. Now, to be fair, there was
another movie, Galactica in nineteen eighty that was about ancient astronauts,
(03:41):
and at this point Chariots of the Gods had already
been out there, So this wasn't an idea that was
new to Hangar eighteen. But they put it in, and
they wove it into the plot in ways that I
thought were really fascinating. It seems like Hangar eighteen had
a lot of big ideas and a very small budget,
which I'm familiar because, as you know, my film Official
(04:02):
Denial had a really big idea or two behind it,
and then they cast a twelve year old ballerina to
play the alien and the rest is history. Listen, Hangar
eighteen is the most chock full of euphological references since
Close Encounters. And they're crazier and the budget is low,
and there's really zero reality the way it's portrayed on screen.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
But if you take a step back and ask yourself,
what are they actually saying here? They're saying in this
film that these aliens had been here before, they've come back.
They are surveying our nuclear sites, they're surveying our power stations,
they're surveying our military. Does that sound familiar.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
By the way, this sounds like it was made in
twenty twenty. Yeah, And so that's the thing. As compromised
as the movie is from a production standpoint. I mean, honestly,
as I was watching it, it made me wonder, was
my guy in the Reagan administration, John Harrington, was he
shown Hangar eighteen as part of his debrief I'm just
(05:04):
trying to imagine a guy being debriefed in Washington, DC
who was just sort of showing up there. He's a
member of Reagan's kitchen cabinet, which you'll be getting in
two more later. And it's nighttime and they say, you
know enough briefings about aliens today, let's all just watch
a movie together, right, And up comes Hangar eighteen, which
would be kind of mind blowing. The other thing, by
(05:26):
the way, about Hangar eighteen for people that have ever
seen Capricorn one with the astronauts on the run in
the desert pursued by killers who may or may not
be from NASA in Capricorn one, NASA's got a big
role in this movie too.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yes, yep. The idea that well, I mean, how would
you describe the NASA role They seem to be working
with them. It was a part of.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
The cover up, I think is again and that's a
lot of people believe that to be true today. So
there was some really bold ideas. But I think let's
take a detour now from Hanger eighteen. Let me throw
one thing in before we detoured. Yes, there is some
historical reference. I get hung up on talking trash talking
the movie, which I'm not saying everyone should run out
(06:10):
and watch it anyway, but it is historically interesting. It's
also a Megadeath song, but I don't think that matters
right now. The thing that does matter is that Leonard Stringfield,
who was a very important guy and wrote numerous books
and researched all his life basically into crash wreckage, and
when he was actually writing these books, people acted like
he was insane. Crash wreckage. Why write a book about that?
(06:33):
There couldn't have been more than there couldn't have been
any but if there was one, there can't be fifty.
And yet he was writing about these things. And it
turns out Leonard Stringfield may not have been as crazy
as people were trying to say he was. So tip
of the hat to Leonard Stringfield because he's the guy
that introduced Hangar eighteen in a regular sustained way. He
(06:54):
said that it was a place where they took the
Roswell wreckage in nineteen forty seven, to write Patterson, where
a lot of it ended up there, and that it
was called Hangar eighteen.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yes, now, I don't know if there's ever been a
real Hangar eighteen, and write Patterson, I don't think so. Well.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Again, this is another case of if you go online,
there's a lot of people that have devoted a lot
of time and energy into investigating Hangar eighteen, and a
lot of people believe it to be true.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, is it? Can't say it is interesting, though, and
let's just give it its due. This movie managed to
sort of change the dialogue again because I think a
lot of people saw it. Not in the theaters. I
think a lot of people saw it because it was
this low budget thing that you could watch for free.
(07:41):
And I remember watching it, and you know, I can't
say I loved it, but I was so starved for
something to follow up close encounter, something that had UFOs
in it and some of this rich UFO history. At
least it gave that. I probably watched it at three
in the morning, and I might have been stoned when
I did, so maybe that's why I liked it. I
(08:02):
don't remember.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yes, I wish I had been stoned when we watched it.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, yeah, Okay, moving on back to our detour.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
The story I'm about to tell you I've only told
twice on camera, once a very truncated version for our
Dark Skies extras for the DVD release, and then interestingly,
the other time was with Bryce's former partner I need
to know, Ross Colhart. He did an interview with me
which has never aired. Now here's the thing about this story.
(08:36):
There's obvious risks about telling the story. It involves someone
very high up and high level in government who happens
to still be alive. But I've got to say something
on a personal note, A couple of years ago, something
happened to me that convinced me that I needed to
go public in a much bigger way with this story.
(08:56):
I'm not going to go into the whole recap, but
four years ago I had cancer and I almost died.
I was literally on my deathbed, ironically, from a complication
in my recovery. I developed sepsis almost a year to
the date that my father had died of sepsis in
(09:17):
a hospital, and so there I was during COVID no
one could come and visit me. I was in an ICU.
My temperature was one hundred and five point five and
as I felt myself slipping away, I saw light beings
come to the foot of my bed. I'm talking light
(09:38):
beings like we saw at the end of contact, right,
and they were formless. I didn't know who they were.
I didn't recognize them as relatives or anyone I was
connected to, but I felt a sense of relief. I
felt a sense of all I had to do was
in my mind say I'm ready, but I wasn't ready.
(10:00):
And I don't even know if I could articulate why
I wasn't ready, but I felt I had more to do.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Well.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Cut to months later, when I was actually onto my
recovery and doing much better, my family said something to me,
which really it stuck with me, and they said, you know,
there was a point when we thought we were going
to lose you, and we were going to lose all
of these stories you've told us growing up, and it
was it reminded me of that moment in one of
(10:26):
my favorite movies, Blade Runner. All of those memories were
going to be lost like tears and rain, and I thought,
you know what, I have to tell this story. And
that is partly why when Bryce and I started talking
about this podcast, I felt emboldened that this was the time,
this was the place. This may be the reason that
I didn't check out right, or at.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Least one of them. You know, I didn't want to
interrupt you there because that's very personal and I didn't
know you were going to I didn't know you were
going to bring that up. I didn't really experience that
with you, although I knew about it, and it couldn't
have been a good thing, And you know, I'm very
(11:08):
sorry you had to go through that, and we can
talk more about that off camera, I guess, But in
the context of this, I'm sort of glad that you
took out of that experience that it's time to give
voice to some of these things. And partly that's because
if any of us have anything we need to do,
(11:29):
it's to bear witness. You know, you are bearing witness
to something that happened that years from now. Even when
they are writing the story of why did it take
so long for humans to wake up to this reality?
And why did they make this thing about secrecy and
why were they doing all this? This is an important
part of that. So I'm glad that you're telling it here,
(11:52):
and I'm glad you're telling it in the full form
and that you are bearing witness. And all I can
say is that I've heard you tell this story before,
and I always wanted you to tell it in a
larger form. I wasn't wild about telling it to Ross
at that time, yeah, because I thought, you know, this
(12:13):
is just going to become an ephemeral piece of TV
news business. Nothing against Ross. I'm just saying that's how
News Nation would have treated it. And I think that
what you're about to do here is a qualitative difference.
You're going to go deep other than me. You won't
be interrupted, I don't think, and I want you to
go ahead and do that. But let's remember it's nineteen
(12:35):
eighty one when this happens, just so we're all clear
on it. It's the summer of nineteen eighty one, and
your neighbor is part of Reagan's inner circle. And I'll
let your teed up go yes.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
So just to give a little bit more context, this
was a man a family that I grew up next
door to from the age of about five to twelve.
He has two daughters that were a little younger than me,
and my father was an artist, growing up very introverted,
and this man, John Harrington, was very much a man's man.
(13:13):
He was the one that taught me how to throw
a football and how to hit a baseball and all
of these boy things, right, and I remember watching football
games with.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Him in his living room.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
He was a huge Washington Redskins fan, which made me
a little competitive kid want to be a Dallas Cowboys fan,
and I still am a Dallas Cowboys fan, and so
I had this really wonderful relationship with him, and when
we moved away when I was twelve, we still stayed
very close with the family. Cut to the summer after
(13:44):
I've graduated from high school, we hadn't heard from him
in a while, although my parents had told me that
he had gotten some job in the government and his
family had moved back east.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
So during the summer.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Of nineteen eighty one, between going to high scho and
when I ultimately went to UCLA that fall, I got
a phone call from him and he said, Hey, Brent,
I've moved the family back east and how'd you like
to make some money. I said, well, great, what's the job?
And he said, well, we still have our house in
the Bay Area, and I'd like you to get a
(14:18):
couple friends and drive our two cars and our dog
across the country. And if you do that, I'm going
to pay you X amount of dollars and I'll take
you around. I'll take you into the White House, I'll
show you around, and then I'll fly you guys back home.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Right. What do you think? How could I not do
that deal that sounds like the greatest deal on earth
for an eighteen year old, right. And there's a whole
story that I won't be telling on this podcast about
that road trip, which I'm surprised that I'm still alive.
But here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
When we arrived at his house in Langley Farms, Virginia,
back east, it was late at night. We obviously we
didn't have cell phones, we didn't have Google Maps, we
didn't have any of that, and so by the time
we got there, we misjudged how late we would get there,
and it was three o'clock in the morning, and we
didn't know what else to do. So we just parked
these two cars with a dog and some other things
(15:10):
they asked us to bring from the garage in front
of this very nice house in Langley Farms, and we
said we'll just sleep off thrust the night. And then
about ten minutes in, tap tap tap on the window,
and there was some security guards pointing flashlights in and
they thought that we had just robbed somebody in the.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Neighborhood and fallen asleep.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Fallen asleep, right, And so I try and explain, oh, no,
we're it's John Harrington, and so they have to go
wake him up at three point thirty in the morning.
He has to explain what's going on. He says, stay
in the car, go back to I'm not going to
wake the rest of the family for this.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Go back to bed.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I'll see you tonight when I get back, all right.
Cut two that night, I remember thinking, wow, I want
to know what John is doing, like, what is his
job now? Because again, no one in our family really knew.
There'd been about a year or so before we had
been contact that I believe by the NSA or the
CIA or somebody that did some interviews with each of
(16:05):
us about his character, right, which was very strange, which
I suppose was part of him getting this.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Job and a security clearance.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
And a security clearance yes, which I will get to
in a second, that was quite impressive. So anyway, come
dinner time, everyone's ready to have dinner. I've got these
two friends with me who are very interested in the
two daughters that I grew up with, and we're waiting
for John to come home. And so I'm kind of
pacing in the living room like excite. I haven't seen
(16:33):
him in years, and I see a black town car
pull up out front, and he gets.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Out with these two look like secret service.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Guys, you know, and he's got a briefcase handcuffed to
his wrist, and they walk him up to the front
door and they escort him into his office right off
the front door, where I'm kind of trying to take
some of this in peeking around the corner, and his
briefcase goes into a wall safe right, and one of
the guys leaves and another person stays behind, and he
(17:03):
comes out and reads me and says, all right, let's
go have dinner. And I'm thinking, what is going on? Right?
Remember this is nineteen eighty one, right, So I am
not I'm eighteen years old. I don't know anything about
politics or how government works with and what I learned
in Civics, which wasn't I think I got like a
sea in.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Civic So I didn't really know much.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
This all just felt very strange to me. So I
sit through dinner just like anxiously wanting to ask him
all these questions. And afterwards he kind of says, hey, Brent,
let's let everyone else, you know, go do their thing.
Let's you and I go out onto the back veranda
and you know, let's have a conversation. Well, the first
thing I noticed was that this was a guy who,
(17:46):
when I was growing up was I believe, a strict
Calvinist and didn't drink, didn't swear, and he actually took
a bottle of jim Beam with him out onto the
veranda and was pouring in what I later heard from
my parents called two fingers, just like a little tumbler
glass of just like little bits, kept drinking it. And honestly,
(18:06):
this guy was was really super fit when I was
growing up. He was again a real man's man, and
it looked like he was heavier, he was haggard, he
looked like he'd been through a lot. And this was
only eighty summer of eighty one, so he'd only been
in the administration theoretically for six seven months maybe correct, so,
(18:26):
but it looked like he was wearing all of that
stress on him.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
You know, I just want to stop you for one
moment and say we're going to take a break and
we are going to come back. Now that you've teed
up mister Harrington and a bottle of jim Beam and
an eighteen year old kid in the back patio, what
could go wrong.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
All right, we're back on the patio. Somebody's drinking, it's
not me, and we start to talk, just catching up.
He was giving me about going to UCLA instead of
his alma mater, Stanford, which, by the way, apparently he
went through Stanford in three years with a four point zero.
That's the type of ice person we're talking about here.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
And he was a lawyer.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
He was a very successful lawyer in the Bay Area,
So super smart guy. Anyway, we're talking. Once we get
past all of the niceties, I say, so, what is
this job you have?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Right?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
I tell him about how people came to our house
and he apologizes and I said, you know, people coming
riving with a briefcase, handcuffed your risk.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
What is going on?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
He said, well, I'm working at a very high level
in the Reagan administration. And I you know, he had
been the advance man for Reagan's campaign, so he and
Reagan were quite close.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Am I correct in saying though, that his actual job
description at that time was the assistant to the Undersecretary
of the Navy. I believe, so, yes, okay, he did
have an official title. I know that at the time
he was working on something behind the scenes with the
abscam situation.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
But what he ends up telling me is that he
has a very high level position, and in fact, his
clearance is higher than the president's. I didn't know that
that was possible. I thought the President of the United
States was in charge of everything and made all the decisions.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I think, as we've come to.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Learn that true not always true, and thankfully so in
some cases. But in this particular case, he seemed to
have a very very important role. And I said, how
do you get a job like that? And he said, well,
I was briefed every day for months in an underground
(20:55):
facility in West Virginia. And you know, I used to
cry myself to sleep every night.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Which the first time you told me that, cry myself
to sleep every night, it freaks me out. Today I
still get goosebumps. And yes, the first time you ever
told that to me, you were very specific. You said
eight weeks. Am I just imagining it was months? It
was months? It was months.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So at any rate, this is a situation where exactly
your reaction when he says he cried himself to sleep
every night. Remember the guy that I grew up was
Captain Kilgore, an apocalypse. Now, it was Robert Duval's character.
It was a tough, tough man. So for him to
(21:40):
cry once struck me as unbelievable. To cry every night, obviously,
I said, well, I don't Why would you cry every night?
And he said, because this is not the world I
thought I was bringing my daughters into. And that gave
me a lot of pause, because he said it with
a certain sadness and gravity that it suddenly made me question, well,
(22:05):
what is this world that you brought your daughters into?
And by the way, I'm kind of like a half
sun to you, And I said, well, can you what
does that mean? He is, Look, this is all highly
classified materials. That's the nature of the job. I can't
tell you any of those things. I said, yeah, but
now my brain is going to go off into a
(22:26):
million different directions. And he said, okay, all right, look,
I know growing up you were into comic books and
sci fi and all that other stuff. I can tell
you one thing. Aliens are here. They're real and I've
seen them.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Let's take a moment. Let's have a moment of silence. Okay, okay, continue.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yes, exactly, And he said it with such casualness that.
I didn't quite know how to respond, and all I
could say was, wait, you've seen them? And he said yes,
and I said, and are they alive? He said, I
can't say. You can't say, or you won't say. I
(23:15):
can't say. And that spun me off in a million
different directions and I thought, wait, okay, stop. If what
you're saying is true, how is it that lots of
people don't know this? And he said, oh, lots of
people do know this. If you walk into any bookstore
(23:37):
and you go to the UFO shelf, you're going to
find lots of books that have a lot of truth
in there. You know what, else, You're going to find
books right next to them that have a lot of
disinformation in them.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
We wrote those books.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
The cover up is a multi billion dollar operation. And
I remember thinking, what is a billion? This was nineteen
eighty one. I don't know that i'd ever heard the
term billion before. So by now my mind is reeling
and I'm thinking, okay, so.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Is this is this truth ever going to come out?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Obviously it's been covered up for a long time, and
when when is it going to come out? And he said, well,
you need to understand something again, nineteen eighty one. This
is a god fearing country. If the truth were to
come out, and by the way, we don't know the
full truth, but if what we knew were to come out,
(24:36):
it would pull the rug out from under everything. The
whole fabric of society would come unraveled. And what I've
come to learn is that there is only one thing
that keeps everything together. It is the global economy. And
if you disrupt people's lives, and you disrupt the global economy,
(24:57):
then the control structure that the entire world has, all
of those world governments have on their populace, will come apart,
and then you have chaos. What is the value then,
of disclosure?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Wow? I wish I'd known this guy when I was
writing the Disclosure Book with Dolan, because I'd have had
some questions for him. Okay, not to stop you in
the middle of this, but for context, I want everyone
to understand something. This is an outrageous story that this
guy is telling you and yet true. And this guy
(25:35):
in nineteen eighty one, when he told it to you,
was going into a job in the Navy Department of
the Reagan administration. And if he'd been a screw up
or anybody had thought, you know, this guy talked to
Brent Friedman. Boy, we got to get rid of him.
That didn't happen. In Reagan's second term, he was the
Secretary of Energy, and anyone who knows anything about the
(25:57):
UFO field says, the Navy's all over it, and so
is the Energy Department. So this guy had perfect bonafides
for telling you this crazy story. I now see the
ground back to user.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Well, and here's the interesting thing. Whether it's the underground
base that he in West Virginia that he said he
was briefed in the details of which we'll talk about
a little bit later, whether it was his connection to
the Navy, and ultimately than the Department of Energy, all
of those details that have been in my story since
(26:28):
nineteen eighty one, I did not know. I did not
know anything about ufology at that time, and yet all
of those things have come to light as being super
important and foundational to the ufology. So I think that
when people ask me, you know, you're a writer, how
(26:49):
do we know that you didn't come up with this, Well,
it's laced with details I just could not have invented.
It's beyond my capabilities. I'm just not that good of
a writer. Let me include how the whole story essentially ended,
which was I said, I just my mind is reeling,
and what I don't understand is you've told me all
(27:11):
of this, and how do you know I'm not going
to go tell people myself about this? And he said, oh,
I'm sure you will, But the question is who's going
to believe you? That kind of hit me in the
solar plexus, like, Wow, you're right, who is going to
believe an eighteen year old kid who's going off to
(27:33):
UCLA to b a theater major. Secondarily, he said, if
you tell this story and you use my name, I'll
just deny it because that's how the cover up works.
And so there I was, with this incredible story and
already realizing there was no value to it in terms
(27:54):
of me telling anyone and being the whistleblower. Right, if
that was even crossing my mind, I have to say
that at eighteen years old. I remember we'd stayed up
late enough talking and by the time I got downstairs
where my friends were asleep down in the rumpus room,
I remember laying there on my sleeping bag on the floor,
looking up at this window and seeing the stars and
(28:16):
I thought, my whole world has just been turned upside down,
and I don't think I fully understood how to process it.
But I told that story to my family when I
got back home, and I don't think I told it
again until probably close to thirty, when I was thirty,
because even my family had trouble believing it.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So basically, when you started telling it again was close
to when we met.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I told it to the woman who had become my wife, Patricia,
because I was marrying her and I felt she needed
to know certain things that had happened in my life.
So by me telling her the fact that she was
working for you, Mantis was what prompted her to say
when she saw your UFO books on your bookshelf, hey,
(29:05):
my husband has a really interesting UFO story.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
You should hear it. Well, let me just on the
subject of belief. I can't comment on all the details
of your story. It certainly has impacted me. And going
back to that first time where you told me that story,
at caught his soul in the Italian restaurant and I
heard it. My first reaction, to be honest with you
(29:29):
completely is I thought, I don't know if I buy
this because it was so detailed and it was so
well told. I just thought it's too good to be true.
That's what I thought. But and this is where history
gets changed. I said, I don't even care if it's true.
This guy is a great storyteller. This is a great story.
(29:50):
If we can come up with more stuff like this,
we'll have a great TV show. And that's why we
started working together. Now, over the years, I have heard
this story a couple of other times in different incarnations,
and they've always been and I say this for the
people listening, not for you. It has always been consistent.
It's never deviated from the story you just heard. So
(30:11):
that's kind of hard to do. People that are making
up stuff they have nothing to hang on to, so
they kind they kind of lose their gravity and float
off in other directions. But this one's been the same.
And I just want to leave us with this one thought,
which is recently, and by recently I mean twenty twenty
three and twenty twenty five, a couple of things have
occurred that make this story that you just told even
(30:34):
more real and relevant to what's going on today. And
if that doesn't keep people around to the next after
the break. I don't know what will but we'll be
back with that story. Well we're back, and we're squarely
in the nineteen eighty nineteen eighty one time zone where
(30:55):
things got a little squarely in the last act. There
just as a as a way of just sort of
judging how revolutionary the story was. And that's why we
brought up Hangar eighteen, where they're floating these kind of
big ideas, but it's in a silly movie. This is
very real. What happened to you at the time you
were doing that. By the way, I was a CNN
(31:15):
correspondent and I had an office mate, just so you
can sort of I mean, this has nothing to do
with the level of John Harrington telling you this, but
my office mate was the entertainment reporter at CNN, a
guy named Fred Sachs and a great friend. He's passed on.
But Fred, in addition to being mister Hollywood, was mister UFO,
(31:36):
So we sort of bonded. We would close the doors,
you know, and talk about UFOs when we were goofing off,
and Fred would tell me stories about crashed craft and
you can't believe what's really going on, And he would
tell me stories that sort of had some of the
essence of what you said and some of Hangar eighteen.
(31:57):
But as I heard it from Fred, I thought, this is, yeah,
I think there's UFOs out there, But this other stuff,
this seems a little it's like a bridge too far.
So it is kind of interesting. Society has changed what
it's willing to think about. Some of the things that
you just said, which were super shocking to me when
I heard him in ninety four and ninety five, but
(32:17):
they were super, super super shocking to an eighteen year
old in nineteen eighty one. And all I can tell
you is, while I was a CNN correspondent, I did
pitch UFOs a couple of times to the assignment editor
and then also to somebody in Atlanta. We were in
LA and boy did I get shut down hard. We're
not doing that. And I was in fact warned by
(32:38):
one person who said, please don't bring this up again,
because if you do, it's really going to negatively impact
your career here. So actually, the reason I bring that
up is that supports what Harrington was telling you, Like,
who's going to believe you? We've done such a good
job of putting the disinformation next to the information, nobody
knows what the hell is going on, And I would
(32:59):
say my life at that time is very true. So
one thing I did want to ask you. Hearing this
story again, it makes me just well, new questions come up.
Here's what I don't think i've asked you. Did you
have any contact with John Harrington after this event in
nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Oh, that's a good question. No, not in person, but
while we were in production on Dark Skies. I remember
one day my assistant came in and said, oh, you
got something in the mail, which was weird because who
would send mail to the production office for me? But
I opened it up and it was one of those
buck slips, remember those kind of like long vertical things.
(33:37):
I said, from the desk of John Harrington, and he
wrote out in long hand, congratulations on finally getting your
story out there. And I thought, wow, I had never
considered it because he said, go ahead and tell your story.
No one's going to believe you. But clearly he wasn't
upset that I was. You know, had Dark Skies on
(33:58):
the air and it was inspired by our conversation. But
it also made me realize at that time is it
possible that he told me this story as part of
the disinformation program. And as hard as it is for
me to admit that, because this was a man that
I trusted and I respected, I idolized to a certain
(34:22):
degree to think that he would potentially be using me,
me an eighteen year old kid who I'm nobody, as
part of the disinformation campaign. It hurts to even think
of that, and I don't believe it, but I have
to acknowledge that that is one possible explanation. And I
think you've got a story that connects to that with
(34:43):
about William Moore.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh, yes, because that is kind of what was going down.
There was a guy in the eighties, a UFO researcher,
William Moore, who was considered one of the hot shots.
I mean, he was very popular at UFO conventions. He
is one of the people who was a co author
of that nineteen eighty book Incident at Roswell. Is that
what it was called the Roswell Incident. He co wrote
(35:07):
it with Charles Burlitz, and everybody saw that book. I
bought it because it was at a grocery store point
of purchase, and I saw this little book about Roswell
and read it. So this guy was a big deal.
And in nineteen eighty nine William Moore, who again big draw.
If you saw him at the UFO conference and he
(35:28):
was on the list, you'd say, let's go to that
two o'clock session. I want to hear him. So he
goes to this nineteen eighty nine session and what does
he do. He gets up there for two hours and
starts by admitting that he has been working for the
people in charge of the cover up. He's been promoting disinformation.
(35:49):
Sure was this nineteen eighty nine and he is basically saying, listen,
they came to me and made me a deal, like
JC came to like JC came bus and the deal, hey,
you got to help us with some of what we're doing,
but we'll give you this great access. And his thinking,
he said, was that he felt that if they gave
(36:12):
him a little bit of access, he could ingratiate his
way in there and then get more access and actually
get to the truth. So from his point of view,
he was doing something almost heroic. I mean, he is
getting inside. Yes, and let's face it, that is a
heavy thing. I mean I know that when you and
I were approached, we both went, where does this go?
(36:33):
I mean, is this something we should be a part of?
So very intriguing. I always thought two things about the
Harrington thing. It made you almost a non credible witness
to do dark Skuy. So he might not have been
totally disappointed because here's a guy that could say this
is what the guy told me. Only now you're out
(36:54):
promoting a TV series, right that's got crazy stuff, lots
and lots of fiction in it, and so in a
way that makes anything you say on the topic less credible.
The other thing I always thought, and listen, only you
can judge this, but my feeling was there may have
been no agenda with him other than there's Brent. You know,
(37:17):
he reminds me of another time back when I taught
him to play football and things like that. He feels
good about you, yeah, right, and he's under this incredible tension.
I mean, I can't even imagine if his story that
he told you is a true story, and I believe
it is. If he told you that story and it
was real, he did it because he probably wasn't telling
(37:38):
anybody else. He wasn't telling his wife and his children,
He wasn't telling his friends and his coworkers. He wasn't
telling anybody at the Navy Department because he was sworn
to secrecy, and he realized I can tell Brent something
and not have to own it. And the fact that
he was drinking a bit, Let's face it, that loose
(38:00):
people up a little bit. So I don't know whether
it was to pass information to you or to pass
disinformation to you, or whether it's more about the human condition.
A guy that just said, I don't know what to
do with the shit they have put me through, right,
and I'm going to tell this kid, Yeah, well, I
got to tell you.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
That's the version of the story that I want to believe, right,
that he was telling me, both maybe as unburdening himself
in a way that maybe he didn't tell his wife
and daughters, and here was this guy that was like
a son in some ways, and also just this notion
of I'm giving you a warning the world is not
(38:40):
the way you think it is.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
One little detail I just realized I left out was
after he had told me all of this, I said
to him, Wow, I guess I now understood why. I
understand why you cried yourself to sleep. Every night, and
he said, no, Brent, you don't understand all of this stuff.
I just told you that was day three.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
What yes, okay, okay, I have to take a second
to assimilate that into my thought process here. But he
was there for months months? What else could it have been? Exactly?
Where was he going for the rest of this time? Exactly?
And so I think, look, I know again, that's the
(39:23):
most profound thing that I mean, you tell that really
interesting story, but for him to actually say that raises
so many relevant and frankly impossible questions. Well, but let's
go back to something you said a few minutes ago,
which I appreciate that the candor, which is you didn't
(39:44):
believe the story one hundred percent when you first heard it,
right as most people don't. And that's fine. I get it.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I understand it was something that was a lived experience
for me and anyone else. It's just a Hollywood writer
telling what could be a really cool story. What I'm
curious is when did didn't you finally believe me. I'm
glad for getting into this, and I want to make
one thing clear. As I got to know you better
and heard the story another time or two, I accepted
(40:12):
it because I accepted you.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Right. A lot of a lot of journalism, a lot
of anything, is being able to look at someone who's
telling you a story and go is this person credible?
And I always thought this is a very credible story.
I just don't see Brent making this thing up and
then wanting to tell it to people, but then also
trying to keep it from not being told to people.
(40:35):
It just seemed like too much to ask of a story.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
And I.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Believed you with qualifications, the qualifications being, you know what,
lots of people in life have told a story and
then they get and when they tell it again, then
they tell it a little better, and people give them
props for how they told it, and so they do
the next one a little better. But I never saw
that with you. See you doing that? Okay, there are
(41:02):
two great things that we can bring to this podcast
that we did not know. You did not know in
nineteen eighty one, for sure, and I and you did
not know in nineteen ninety four when you told it
to me for sure that we know now, Yes, that's okay.
Number one, Your man Harrington, where did he say this
(41:22):
had happened?
Speaker 1 (41:23):
He said in an underground facility in West Virginia.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Okay, guess what, As it turns out, in nineteen ninety two,
when Clinton was president, two years before you tell me
the story even Okay, Ted Gup of the Washington Post
breaks the story that there is a secret, vast underground
facility beneath the Greenbrier Resort, which was built between nineteen
(41:46):
fifty nine and nineteen sixty two in West Virginia, Okay,
designed to have Congress stay there, all of Congress, which
is five hundred and thirty five people after a nuclear war,
and for thirty years they stocked it with supplies and
never acknowledged it by the government. As soon as by
the way this story was outed, the government admitted it
(42:08):
and they conduct tours there. Now, So wow, you know,
we could always maybe we should offer sound, light and
frequency tours to this place. But I find that to
be just a profound thing that he mentioned the specificity
of West Virginia, something you would not have known at all, right,
because maybe he wouldn't have even well, he knew it
(42:28):
because he went there, right, But I mean, it was
not a thing.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
No. But and here's the crazy thing. So it wasn't until.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Even earlier this year when.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
I was telling this story to someone, when they were
asking about what is this podcast, and I was giving
them a little preview, and they asked me a question
no one had ever asked before. They said, well, what
is this facility in West Virginia? And I thought, wow,
there's so many other details in the story that people
focus on. The conversation never went to the Greenbrier Resort.
(42:58):
And so when you and I started talking about it
and we did some research, lo and behold, there's this
underground facility that completely matches and holds up with the
story that he told. So, Okay, that's a very compelling
piece of evidence. What else you got, Well, by the way,
I'm just finding the notes here. Obviously, this facility had
a name they codenamed Project Greek Island, which I find interesting. Yeah,
(43:23):
and I remember, by the way, it's being built at
the same time our Dark Sky series starts. Remember we
started in sixty one, and they were building it between
fifty nine. Yeah, and sixty two. That's interesting and is
an interesting side thing because the pilot of Dark Guys
has a lot to do with the Cuban missile crisis.
Early on, nobody actually went to this place during the
Cuban missile crisis, which I think is interesting because I
(43:45):
would have bet they filled the place up with Congress. Yeah,
that one got so tense. Okay, here's the second one, Brent,
And this one makes me feel good for you because
it just gives credibility and credit to your story in
a way.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
It's pretty solid. Okay, in twenty twenty three, and I
should tell everyone, we're recording this particular episode of the
podcast in my media room here at my house. So
you're sitting here in this room, and I wanted to
just point out it was in this room in twenty
twenty three. On May eighth, I believe that Dave Grush
(44:21):
was here and Dave Grush got interviewed for the very
first time on video because Ross Coldart, my partner at
the time, who you had mentioned, had said that Grush
was coming to town, and I'd met with Grush and
Ross and everybody that was at this lunch was concerned, Well,
if he's going to talk to News Nation tomorrow, he's
had no practice whatsoever in talking on camera. Let's give
(44:45):
him some practice. So everyone was all pre whistleblower. Yeah, Okay,
he'd not done. He's not talked, he talks in July,
but this is when Ross is getting set to tell
his story. And so everybody said, well, we should tell
We should put him on camera and give him a
practice session. Which is what happened here at this house,
in this room where you're sitting right now. Dave Grush
sat there in between, you know, because people were working
(45:08):
on lights and microphones and all that stuff. I asked
Crush if he had ever heard of the name John Harrington.
And Dave Grush, who again was the guy that raised
his hand before Congress in July of twenty three and
promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but the
truth will helpe him God. Dave Grush looks at me
(45:28):
and goes, ye, I've heard of Harrington. And I said, well,
what do you know about him? And he said, well,
I'm really I don't know. If you use the word
at liberty that might be too but that's what I felt.
I think he said something like, I really can't talk
about that. Okay, all right, Well he knows the guy,
(45:49):
but he can't talk about him. Very interesting. But here's
where it gets fascinating. This year, this year, it's twenty
twenty five. This year, I get first a message and
then a call from Ross Coulthard. And I believe I
can say this because you know, he didn't swear me
to secrecy. It was a public I mean, he was
calling me to ask me something. He said that Grush,
(46:11):
who was now working for one of the congressional congressman
what's his name, that he works for one of the
guys who's on the committee. But people will look it up.
Grush works for him, or I believe still does. And
Ross wanted to know because Grush had ask him. I
think he wanted my phone number or whatever. And Ross said,
(46:33):
you know what, let me ask him. What do you
want me to ask him? And what Ross asked me
was do you think Brent, your friend Brent would get
in a car and drive John Harrington to Washington, d C.
To testify. I almost fell off my chair when I
heard that. And I also found the irony, which I'm
(46:54):
sure you can find, which as an eighteen year old,
you drove a car across America to d C right
to get your briefing, and now all these years later,
they want you to drive the man who gave you
the briefing to Washington, d C. So he can give
another briefing to Congress. Okay, that's interesting enough, I said,
I don't think Brent's probably going to go along with that,
(47:17):
but I'll ask him, you know. I mean, it wasn't
untoward for Ross to ask for that. I mean, of
course that's reasonable. But then he said, well, what do
you think his reaction would be if if he was subpoena?
And I don't think he was talking about Grush. I
think he was talking about you at that moment. Yeah,
I'm not Grush on Tarrington, but I think he was
talking about you. Anyway. I look at these two things,
(47:38):
the West Virginia thing and the Grush angle, and I
say that, well, that's not smoking gun level. You know,
that's not finding a trove of UFO documents in his
briefcase that was locked away. It's still pretty good. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Well, I have to tell you when you called me
about that conversation and the word subpoena was tossed out,
I started to feel queasy at the thought of it.
The thing is, I have no problem going under oath, right,
but at that point we had already decided we were
going to do this podcast, and I thought, you know,
if I'm going to tell my story, my stories, honestly,
(48:18):
I want them to be under my terms, right for us, right,
not with congressional investigators peppering me with things and making
me look like an idiot, right which I can pretty
much guarantee what happen. And I thought, I want to
tell this story. I want to tell a bunch of stories,
because at the end of the day, this Harrington story
is effectively the backstory right of sound, light and frequency.
(48:42):
But there's much more to sound, light and frequency than
even just this story. And I think you know, as
of for instance, we've got a bunch of stories about
how the next meeting with jac plays out and what
happened with the deal, and there are other things downstream
that are much are that paint a much bigger picture
(49:03):
here than just what happened in nineteen eighty one, a
seminal event for me and granted the inspiration for dark Skies.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
I know it's a challenge to have to lay all
this out, and I also appreciate the impetus that you
shared with us about why you did it, and I
think people are probably very appreciative that you did. And
here's all I'll say to you, right now. Thank you,
But also you ask well, when did I start believing
or what do I I believe this story one hundred percent.
(49:35):
I won't say one hundred and ten or one thousand
percent because those don't count, but I believe one hundred percent.
I've heard it, I've looked into it, I've had these
things occur that John Harrington story passes for me, and
so again on behalf of everybody who's listening and people
who will hear this in the future. Thank you very much.
(49:58):
Sound Blind and Frequency is an eye heart podcast produced
by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and
for Steller Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by
Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthouse and Your hosts and executive
producers are Bryce Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman Watch
the Skies
He seemed to have a very very important role. And
I said, you know what, how do you how do
you get a job like that? And he said, well,
I was briefed every day for months in an underground
facility in West Virginia and I used to cry myself
(00:22):
to sleep every night. The first time you told me
that cry myself to sleep every night, it freaks me out.
Today I still get goose sumps. I'm brice able. Have
(00:52):
you ever wondered if there's a secret connection between Hollywood
and UFOs?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm Bran Friedman, and you are listening.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
To Sound Light and Freak and see.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This is the episode where we discuss a crazy UFO
movie you probably never heard of, but strangely, this one
aligns with modern ufology big time.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Now, I'm going to tell you about the family friend
in the Reagan administration who disclosed me that aliens were
real and he'd seen them.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
You and I had the experience. I was going to
say the good experience, but it was just an experience
where we sat down and watched Hangar eighteen together. That's
not something we've done often or more than that one time,
but we decided to do it because we think it's
kind of an important lynch pin in the whole UFO
Hollywood kind of tail. And just to set this up,
(01:56):
we had Close Encounters in nineteen seventy seven coming out,
and in nineteen eighty you had Spielberg's special edition of it.
So that's the same year as Hangar eighteen. Hanger eighteen
happens to be a film that didn't do great in
the theaters, but I remember seeing it because it was
on either late night television or cable or something, and
(02:18):
it just has a lot of euphological things, and it
probably some that are a little more on target with
what people think today than even what Spielberg did well,
So agreed.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
I think I was shocked by the plot of it,
how ambitious it was in many ways. Let's talk a
little bit about what was the plot, because it's.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
A little hard to summarize. Well, we did work out
a little logline here. I'll read that for everyone, after
a UFO collides with a satellite and crashes to the Earth,
two astronauts must defy a government cover up to expose
the truth behind the mysteries at Hanger eighteen. Sounds a
lot better than the movie was to be honest with you.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, and to be fair, the movie was clearly low budget,
didn't have a lot of big names in it, and
it certainly didn't have the visionary director like Steven Spielberg.
All of that said, I think the thing that really
intrigued me was when you look at what it was
introducing in terms of new ideas to ufology. A lot
(03:16):
of those hold up under more scrutiny today, I would argue,
than close encounters. So for instance, they had a captured
craft at a secret base. They had humanoid aliens, not
our gray space brothers. They had the concept of ancient
aliens shaping our history. Now, to be fair, there was
another movie, Galactica in nineteen eighty that was about ancient astronauts,
(03:41):
and at this point Chariots of the Gods had already
been out there, So this wasn't an idea that was
new to Hangar eighteen. But they put it in, and
they wove it into the plot in ways that I
thought were really fascinating. It seems like Hangar eighteen had
a lot of big ideas and a very small budget,
which I'm familiar because, as you know, my film Official
(04:02):
Denial had a really big idea or two behind it,
and then they cast a twelve year old ballerina to
play the alien and the rest is history. Listen, Hangar
eighteen is the most chock full of euphological references since
Close Encounters. And they're crazier and the budget is low,
and there's really zero reality the way it's portrayed on screen.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
But if you take a step back and ask yourself,
what are they actually saying here? They're saying in this
film that these aliens had been here before, they've come back.
They are surveying our nuclear sites, they're surveying our power stations,
they're surveying our military. Does that sound familiar.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
By the way, this sounds like it was made in
twenty twenty. Yeah, And so that's the thing. As compromised
as the movie is from a production standpoint. I mean, honestly,
as I was watching it, it made me wonder, was
my guy in the Reagan administration, John Harrington, was he
shown Hangar eighteen as part of his debrief I'm just
(05:04):
trying to imagine a guy being debriefed in Washington, DC
who was just sort of showing up there. He's a
member of Reagan's kitchen cabinet, which you'll be getting in
two more later. And it's nighttime and they say, you
know enough briefings about aliens today, let's all just watch
a movie together, right, And up comes Hangar eighteen, which
would be kind of mind blowing. The other thing, by
(05:26):
the way, about Hangar eighteen for people that have ever
seen Capricorn one with the astronauts on the run in
the desert pursued by killers who may or may not
be from NASA in Capricorn one, NASA's got a big
role in this movie too.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yes, yep. The idea that well, I mean, how would
you describe the NASA role They seem to be working
with them. It was a part of.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
The cover up, I think is again and that's a
lot of people believe that to be true today. So
there was some really bold ideas. But I think let's
take a detour now from Hanger eighteen. Let me throw
one thing in before we detoured. Yes, there is some
historical reference. I get hung up on talking trash talking
the movie, which I'm not saying everyone should run out
(06:10):
and watch it anyway, but it is historically interesting. It's
also a Megadeath song, but I don't think that matters
right now. The thing that does matter is that Leonard Stringfield,
who was a very important guy and wrote numerous books
and researched all his life basically into crash wreckage, and
when he was actually writing these books, people acted like
he was insane. Crash wreckage. Why write a book about that?
(06:33):
There couldn't have been more than there couldn't have been
any but if there was one, there can't be fifty.
And yet he was writing about these things. And it
turns out Leonard Stringfield may not have been as crazy
as people were trying to say he was. So tip
of the hat to Leonard Stringfield because he's the guy
that introduced Hangar eighteen in a regular sustained way. He
(06:54):
said that it was a place where they took the
Roswell wreckage in nineteen forty seven, to write Patterson, where
a lot of it ended up there, and that it
was called Hangar eighteen.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yes, now, I don't know if there's ever been a
real Hangar eighteen, and write Patterson, I don't think so. Well.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Again, this is another case of if you go online,
there's a lot of people that have devoted a lot
of time and energy into investigating Hangar eighteen, and a
lot of people believe it to be true.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, is it? Can't say it is interesting, though, and
let's just give it its due. This movie managed to
sort of change the dialogue again because I think a
lot of people saw it. Not in the theaters. I
think a lot of people saw it because it was
this low budget thing that you could watch for free.
(07:41):
And I remember watching it, and you know, I can't
say I loved it, but I was so starved for
something to follow up close encounter, something that had UFOs
in it and some of this rich UFO history. At
least it gave that. I probably watched it at three
in the morning, and I might have been stoned when
I did, so maybe that's why I liked it. I
(08:02):
don't remember.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yes, I wish I had been stoned when we watched it.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, yeah, Okay, moving on back to our detour.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
The story I'm about to tell you I've only told
twice on camera, once a very truncated version for our
Dark Skies extras for the DVD release, and then interestingly,
the other time was with Bryce's former partner I need
to know, Ross Colhart. He did an interview with me
which has never aired. Now here's the thing about this story.
(08:36):
There's obvious risks about telling the story. It involves someone
very high up and high level in government who happens
to still be alive. But I've got to say something
on a personal note, A couple of years ago, something
happened to me that convinced me that I needed to
go public in a much bigger way with this story.
(08:56):
I'm not going to go into the whole recap, but
four years ago I had cancer and I almost died.
I was literally on my deathbed, ironically, from a complication
in my recovery. I developed sepsis almost a year to
the date that my father had died of sepsis in
(09:17):
a hospital, and so there I was during COVID no
one could come and visit me. I was in an ICU.
My temperature was one hundred and five point five and
as I felt myself slipping away, I saw light beings
come to the foot of my bed. I'm talking light
(09:38):
beings like we saw at the end of contact, right,
and they were formless. I didn't know who they were.
I didn't recognize them as relatives or anyone I was
connected to, but I felt a sense of relief. I
felt a sense of all I had to do was
in my mind say I'm ready, but I wasn't ready.
(10:00):
And I don't even know if I could articulate why
I wasn't ready, but I felt I had more to do.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Well.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Cut to months later, when I was actually onto my
recovery and doing much better, my family said something to me,
which really it stuck with me, and they said, you know,
there was a point when we thought we were going
to lose you, and we were going to lose all
of these stories you've told us growing up, and it
was it reminded me of that moment in one of
(10:26):
my favorite movies, Blade Runner. All of those memories were
going to be lost like tears and rain, and I thought,
you know what, I have to tell this story. And
that is partly why when Bryce and I started talking
about this podcast, I felt emboldened that this was the time,
this was the place. This may be the reason that
I didn't check out right, or at.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Least one of them. You know, I didn't want to
interrupt you there because that's very personal and I didn't
know you were going to I didn't know you were
going to bring that up. I didn't really experience that
with you, although I knew about it, and it couldn't
have been a good thing, And you know, I'm very
(11:08):
sorry you had to go through that, and we can
talk more about that off camera, I guess, But in
the context of this, I'm sort of glad that you
took out of that experience that it's time to give
voice to some of these things. And partly that's because
if any of us have anything we need to do,
(11:29):
it's to bear witness. You know, you are bearing witness
to something that happened that years from now. Even when
they are writing the story of why did it take
so long for humans to wake up to this reality?
And why did they make this thing about secrecy and
why were they doing all this? This is an important
part of that. So I'm glad that you're telling it here,
(11:52):
and I'm glad you're telling it in the full form
and that you are bearing witness. And all I can
say is that I've heard you tell this story before,
and I always wanted you to tell it in a
larger form. I wasn't wild about telling it to Ross
at that time, yeah, because I thought, you know, this
(12:13):
is just going to become an ephemeral piece of TV
news business. Nothing against Ross. I'm just saying that's how
News Nation would have treated it. And I think that
what you're about to do here is a qualitative difference.
You're going to go deep other than me. You won't
be interrupted, I don't think, and I want you to
go ahead and do that. But let's remember it's nineteen
(12:35):
eighty one when this happens, just so we're all clear
on it. It's the summer of nineteen eighty one, and
your neighbor is part of Reagan's inner circle. And I'll
let your teed up go yes.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
So just to give a little bit more context, this
was a man a family that I grew up next
door to from the age of about five to twelve.
He has two daughters that were a little younger than me,
and my father was an artist, growing up very introverted,
and this man, John Harrington, was very much a man's man.
(13:13):
He was the one that taught me how to throw
a football and how to hit a baseball and all
of these boy things, right, and I remember watching football
games with.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Him in his living room.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
He was a huge Washington Redskins fan, which made me
a little competitive kid want to be a Dallas Cowboys fan,
and I still am a Dallas Cowboys fan, and so
I had this really wonderful relationship with him, and when
we moved away when I was twelve, we still stayed
very close with the family. Cut to the summer after
(13:44):
I've graduated from high school, we hadn't heard from him
in a while, although my parents had told me that
he had gotten some job in the government and his
family had moved back east.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
So during the summer.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Of nineteen eighty one, between going to high scho and
when I ultimately went to UCLA that fall, I got
a phone call from him and he said, Hey, Brent,
I've moved the family back east and how'd you like
to make some money. I said, well, great, what's the job?
And he said, well, we still have our house in
the Bay Area, and I'd like you to get a
(14:18):
couple friends and drive our two cars and our dog
across the country. And if you do that, I'm going
to pay you X amount of dollars and I'll take
you around. I'll take you into the White House, I'll
show you around, and then I'll fly you guys back home.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Right. What do you think? How could I not do
that deal that sounds like the greatest deal on earth
for an eighteen year old, right. And there's a whole
story that I won't be telling on this podcast about
that road trip, which I'm surprised that I'm still alive.
But here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
When we arrived at his house in Langley Farms, Virginia,
back east, it was late at night. We obviously we
didn't have cell phones, we didn't have Google Maps, we
didn't have any of that, and so by the time
we got there, we misjudged how late we would get there,
and it was three o'clock in the morning, and we
didn't know what else to do. So we just parked
these two cars with a dog and some other things
(15:10):
they asked us to bring from the garage in front
of this very nice house in Langley Farms, and we
said we'll just sleep off thrust the night. And then
about ten minutes in, tap tap tap on the window,
and there was some security guards pointing flashlights in and
they thought that we had just robbed somebody in the.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Neighborhood and fallen asleep.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Fallen asleep, right, And so I try and explain, oh, no,
we're it's John Harrington, and so they have to go
wake him up at three point thirty in the morning.
He has to explain what's going on. He says, stay
in the car, go back to I'm not going to
wake the rest of the family for this.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Go back to bed.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I'll see you tonight when I get back, all right.
Cut two that night, I remember thinking, wow, I want
to know what John is doing, like, what is his
job now? Because again, no one in our family really knew.
There'd been about a year or so before we had
been contact that I believe by the NSA or the
CIA or somebody that did some interviews with each of
(16:05):
us about his character, right, which was very strange, which
I suppose was part of him getting this.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Job and a security clearance.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
And a security clearance yes, which I will get to
in a second, that was quite impressive. So anyway, come
dinner time, everyone's ready to have dinner. I've got these
two friends with me who are very interested in the
two daughters that I grew up with, and we're waiting
for John to come home. And so I'm kind of
pacing in the living room like excite. I haven't seen
(16:33):
him in years, and I see a black town car
pull up out front, and he gets.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Out with these two look like secret service.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Guys, you know, and he's got a briefcase handcuffed to
his wrist, and they walk him up to the front
door and they escort him into his office right off
the front door, where I'm kind of trying to take
some of this in peeking around the corner, and his
briefcase goes into a wall safe right, and one of
the guys leaves and another person stays behind, and he
(17:03):
comes out and reads me and says, all right, let's
go have dinner. And I'm thinking, what is going on? Right?
Remember this is nineteen eighty one, right, So I am
not I'm eighteen years old. I don't know anything about
politics or how government works with and what I learned
in Civics, which wasn't I think I got like a
sea in.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Civic So I didn't really know much.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
This all just felt very strange to me. So I
sit through dinner just like anxiously wanting to ask him
all these questions. And afterwards he kind of says, hey, Brent,
let's let everyone else, you know, go do their thing.
Let's you and I go out onto the back veranda
and you know, let's have a conversation. Well, the first
thing I noticed was that this was a guy who,
(17:46):
when I was growing up was I believe, a strict
Calvinist and didn't drink, didn't swear, and he actually took
a bottle of jim Beam with him out onto the
veranda and was pouring in what I later heard from
my parents called two fingers, just like a little tumbler
glass of just like little bits, kept drinking it. And honestly,
(18:06):
this guy was was really super fit when I was
growing up. He was again a real man's man, and
it looked like he was heavier, he was haggard, he
looked like he'd been through a lot. And this was
only eighty summer of eighty one, so he'd only been
in the administration theoretically for six seven months maybe correct, so,
(18:26):
but it looked like he was wearing all of that
stress on him.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
You know, I just want to stop you for one
moment and say we're going to take a break and
we are going to come back. Now that you've teed
up mister Harrington and a bottle of jim Beam and
an eighteen year old kid in the back patio, what
could go wrong.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
All right, we're back on the patio. Somebody's drinking, it's
not me, and we start to talk, just catching up.
He was giving me about going to UCLA instead of
his alma mater, Stanford, which, by the way, apparently he
went through Stanford in three years with a four point zero.
That's the type of ice person we're talking about here.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
And he was a lawyer.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
He was a very successful lawyer in the Bay Area,
So super smart guy. Anyway, we're talking. Once we get
past all of the niceties, I say, so, what is
this job you have?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Right?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
I tell him about how people came to our house
and he apologizes and I said, you know, people coming
riving with a briefcase, handcuffed your risk.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
What is going on?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
He said, well, I'm working at a very high level
in the Reagan administration. And I you know, he had
been the advance man for Reagan's campaign, so he and
Reagan were quite close.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Am I correct in saying though, that his actual job
description at that time was the assistant to the Undersecretary
of the Navy. I believe, so, yes, okay, he did
have an official title. I know that at the time
he was working on something behind the scenes with the
abscam situation.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
But what he ends up telling me is that he
has a very high level position, and in fact, his
clearance is higher than the president's. I didn't know that
that was possible. I thought the President of the United
States was in charge of everything and made all the decisions.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I think, as we've come to.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Learn that true not always true, and thankfully so in
some cases. But in this particular case, he seemed to
have a very very important role. And I said, how
do you get a job like that? And he said, well,
I was briefed every day for months in an underground
(20:55):
facility in West Virginia. And you know, I used to
cry myself to sleep every night.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Which the first time you told me that, cry myself
to sleep every night, it freaks me out. Today I
still get goosebumps. And yes, the first time you ever
told that to me, you were very specific. You said
eight weeks. Am I just imagining it was months? It
was months? It was months.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So at any rate, this is a situation where exactly
your reaction when he says he cried himself to sleep
every night. Remember the guy that I grew up was
Captain Kilgore, an apocalypse. Now, it was Robert Duval's character.
It was a tough, tough man. So for him to
(21:40):
cry once struck me as unbelievable. To cry every night, obviously,
I said, well, I don't Why would you cry every night?
And he said, because this is not the world I
thought I was bringing my daughters into. And that gave
me a lot of pause, because he said it with
a certain sadness and gravity that it suddenly made me question, well,
(22:05):
what is this world that you brought your daughters into?
And by the way, I'm kind of like a half
sun to you, And I said, well, can you what
does that mean? He is, Look, this is all highly
classified materials. That's the nature of the job. I can't
tell you any of those things. I said, yeah, but
now my brain is going to go off into a
(22:26):
million different directions. And he said, okay, all right, look,
I know growing up you were into comic books and
sci fi and all that other stuff. I can tell
you one thing. Aliens are here. They're real and I've
seen them.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Let's take a moment. Let's have a moment of silence. Okay, okay, continue.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yes, exactly, And he said it with such casualness that.
I didn't quite know how to respond, and all I
could say was, wait, you've seen them? And he said yes,
and I said, and are they alive? He said, I
can't say. You can't say, or you won't say. I
(23:15):
can't say. And that spun me off in a million
different directions and I thought, wait, okay, stop. If what
you're saying is true, how is it that lots of
people don't know this? And he said, oh, lots of
people do know this. If you walk into any bookstore
(23:37):
and you go to the UFO shelf, you're going to
find lots of books that have a lot of truth
in there. You know what, else, You're going to find
books right next to them that have a lot of
disinformation in them.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
We wrote those books.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
The cover up is a multi billion dollar operation. And
I remember thinking, what is a billion? This was nineteen
eighty one. I don't know that i'd ever heard the
term billion before. So by now my mind is reeling
and I'm thinking, okay, so.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Is this is this truth ever going to come out?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Obviously it's been covered up for a long time, and
when when is it going to come out? And he said, well,
you need to understand something again, nineteen eighty one. This
is a god fearing country. If the truth were to
come out, and by the way, we don't know the
full truth, but if what we knew were to come out,
(24:36):
it would pull the rug out from under everything. The
whole fabric of society would come unraveled. And what I've
come to learn is that there is only one thing
that keeps everything together. It is the global economy. And
if you disrupt people's lives, and you disrupt the global economy,
(24:57):
then the control structure that the entire world has, all
of those world governments have on their populace, will come apart,
and then you have chaos. What is the value then,
of disclosure?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Wow? I wish I'd known this guy when I was
writing the Disclosure Book with Dolan, because I'd have had
some questions for him. Okay, not to stop you in
the middle of this, but for context, I want everyone
to understand something. This is an outrageous story that this
guy is telling you and yet true. And this guy
(25:35):
in nineteen eighty one, when he told it to you,
was going into a job in the Navy Department of
the Reagan administration. And if he'd been a screw up
or anybody had thought, you know, this guy talked to
Brent Friedman. Boy, we got to get rid of him.
That didn't happen. In Reagan's second term, he was the
Secretary of Energy, and anyone who knows anything about the
(25:57):
UFO field says, the Navy's all over it, and so
is the Energy Department. So this guy had perfect bonafides
for telling you this crazy story. I now see the
ground back to user.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Well, and here's the interesting thing. Whether it's the underground
base that he in West Virginia that he said he
was briefed in the details of which we'll talk about
a little bit later, whether it was his connection to
the Navy, and ultimately than the Department of Energy, all
of those details that have been in my story since
(26:28):
nineteen eighty one, I did not know. I did not
know anything about ufology at that time, and yet all
of those things have come to light as being super
important and foundational to the ufology. So I think that
when people ask me, you know, you're a writer, how
(26:49):
do we know that you didn't come up with this, Well,
it's laced with details I just could not have invented.
It's beyond my capabilities. I'm just not that good of
a writer. Let me include how the whole story essentially ended,
which was I said, I just my mind is reeling,
and what I don't understand is you've told me all
(27:11):
of this, and how do you know I'm not going
to go tell people myself about this? And he said, oh,
I'm sure you will, But the question is who's going
to believe you? That kind of hit me in the
solar plexus, like, Wow, you're right, who is going to
believe an eighteen year old kid who's going off to
(27:33):
UCLA to b a theater major. Secondarily, he said, if
you tell this story and you use my name, I'll
just deny it because that's how the cover up works.
And so there I was, with this incredible story and
already realizing there was no value to it in terms
(27:54):
of me telling anyone and being the whistleblower. Right, if
that was even crossing my mind, I have to say
that at eighteen years old. I remember we'd stayed up
late enough talking and by the time I got downstairs
where my friends were asleep down in the rumpus room,
I remember laying there on my sleeping bag on the floor,
looking up at this window and seeing the stars and
(28:16):
I thought, my whole world has just been turned upside down,
and I don't think I fully understood how to process it.
But I told that story to my family when I
got back home, and I don't think I told it
again until probably close to thirty, when I was thirty,
because even my family had trouble believing it.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So basically, when you started telling it again was close
to when we met.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I told it to the woman who had become my wife, Patricia,
because I was marrying her and I felt she needed
to know certain things that had happened in my life.
So by me telling her the fact that she was
working for you, Mantis was what prompted her to say
when she saw your UFO books on your bookshelf, hey,
(29:05):
my husband has a really interesting UFO story.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
You should hear it. Well, let me just on the
subject of belief. I can't comment on all the details
of your story. It certainly has impacted me. And going
back to that first time where you told me that story,
at caught his soul in the Italian restaurant and I
heard it. My first reaction, to be honest with you
(29:29):
completely is I thought, I don't know if I buy
this because it was so detailed and it was so
well told. I just thought it's too good to be true.
That's what I thought. But and this is where history
gets changed. I said, I don't even care if it's true.
This guy is a great storyteller. This is a great story.
(29:50):
If we can come up with more stuff like this,
we'll have a great TV show. And that's why we
started working together. Now, over the years, I have heard
this story a couple of other times in different incarnations,
and they've always been and I say this for the
people listening, not for you. It has always been consistent.
It's never deviated from the story you just heard. So
(30:11):
that's kind of hard to do. People that are making
up stuff they have nothing to hang on to, so
they kind they kind of lose their gravity and float
off in other directions. But this one's been the same.
And I just want to leave us with this one thought,
which is recently, and by recently I mean twenty twenty
three and twenty twenty five, a couple of things have
occurred that make this story that you just told even
(30:34):
more real and relevant to what's going on today. And
if that doesn't keep people around to the next after
the break. I don't know what will but we'll be
back with that story. Well we're back, and we're squarely
in the nineteen eighty nineteen eighty one time zone where
(30:55):
things got a little squarely in the last act. There
just as a as a way of just sort of
judging how revolutionary the story was. And that's why we
brought up Hangar eighteen, where they're floating these kind of
big ideas, but it's in a silly movie. This is
very real. What happened to you at the time you
were doing that. By the way, I was a CNN
(31:15):
correspondent and I had an office mate, just so you
can sort of I mean, this has nothing to do
with the level of John Harrington telling you this, but
my office mate was the entertainment reporter at CNN, a
guy named Fred Sachs and a great friend. He's passed on.
But Fred, in addition to being mister Hollywood, was mister UFO,
(31:36):
So we sort of bonded. We would close the doors,
you know, and talk about UFOs when we were goofing off,
and Fred would tell me stories about crashed craft and
you can't believe what's really going on, And he would
tell me stories that sort of had some of the
essence of what you said and some of Hangar eighteen.
(31:57):
But as I heard it from Fred, I thought, this is, yeah,
I think there's UFOs out there, But this other stuff,
this seems a little it's like a bridge too far.
So it is kind of interesting. Society has changed what
it's willing to think about. Some of the things that
you just said, which were super shocking to me when
I heard him in ninety four and ninety five, but
(32:17):
they were super, super super shocking to an eighteen year
old in nineteen eighty one. And all I can tell
you is, while I was a CNN correspondent, I did
pitch UFOs a couple of times to the assignment editor
and then also to somebody in Atlanta. We were in
LA and boy did I get shut down hard. We're
not doing that. And I was in fact warned by
(32:38):
one person who said, please don't bring this up again,
because if you do, it's really going to negatively impact
your career here. So actually, the reason I bring that
up is that supports what Harrington was telling you, Like,
who's going to believe you? We've done such a good
job of putting the disinformation next to the information, nobody
knows what the hell is going on, And I would
(32:59):
say my life at that time is very true. So
one thing I did want to ask you. Hearing this
story again, it makes me just well, new questions come up.
Here's what I don't think i've asked you. Did you
have any contact with John Harrington after this event in
nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Oh, that's a good question. No, not in person, but
while we were in production on Dark Skies. I remember
one day my assistant came in and said, oh, you
got something in the mail, which was weird because who
would send mail to the production office for me? But
I opened it up and it was one of those
buck slips, remember those kind of like long vertical things.
(33:37):
I said, from the desk of John Harrington, and he
wrote out in long hand, congratulations on finally getting your
story out there. And I thought, wow, I had never
considered it because he said, go ahead and tell your story.
No one's going to believe you. But clearly he wasn't
upset that I was. You know, had Dark Skies on
(33:58):
the air and it was inspired by our conversation. But
it also made me realize at that time is it
possible that he told me this story as part of
the disinformation program. And as hard as it is for
me to admit that, because this was a man that
I trusted and I respected, I idolized to a certain
(34:22):
degree to think that he would potentially be using me,
me an eighteen year old kid who I'm nobody, as
part of the disinformation campaign. It hurts to even think
of that, and I don't believe it, but I have
to acknowledge that that is one possible explanation. And I
think you've got a story that connects to that with
(34:43):
about William Moore.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh, yes, because that is kind of what was going down.
There was a guy in the eighties, a UFO researcher,
William Moore, who was considered one of the hot shots.
I mean, he was very popular at UFO conventions. He
is one of the people who was a co author
of that nineteen eighty book Incident at Roswell. Is that
what it was called the Roswell Incident. He co wrote
(35:07):
it with Charles Burlitz, and everybody saw that book. I
bought it because it was at a grocery store point
of purchase, and I saw this little book about Roswell
and read it. So this guy was a big deal.
And in nineteen eighty nine William Moore, who again big draw.
If you saw him at the UFO conference and he
(35:28):
was on the list, you'd say, let's go to that
two o'clock session. I want to hear him. So he
goes to this nineteen eighty nine session and what does
he do. He gets up there for two hours and
starts by admitting that he has been working for the
people in charge of the cover up. He's been promoting disinformation.
(35:49):
Sure was this nineteen eighty nine and he is basically saying, listen,
they came to me and made me a deal, like
JC came to like JC came bus and the deal, hey,
you got to help us with some of what we're doing,
but we'll give you this great access. And his thinking,
he said, was that he felt that if they gave
(36:12):
him a little bit of access, he could ingratiate his
way in there and then get more access and actually
get to the truth. So from his point of view,
he was doing something almost heroic. I mean, he is
getting inside. Yes, and let's face it, that is a
heavy thing. I mean I know that when you and
I were approached, we both went, where does this go?
(36:33):
I mean, is this something we should be a part of?
So very intriguing. I always thought two things about the
Harrington thing. It made you almost a non credible witness
to do dark Skuy. So he might not have been
totally disappointed because here's a guy that could say this
is what the guy told me. Only now you're out
(36:54):
promoting a TV series, right that's got crazy stuff, lots
and lots of fiction in it, and so in a
way that makes anything you say on the topic less credible.
The other thing I always thought, and listen, only you
can judge this, but my feeling was there may have
been no agenda with him other than there's Brent. You know,
(37:17):
he reminds me of another time back when I taught
him to play football and things like that. He feels
good about you, yeah, right, and he's under this incredible tension.
I mean, I can't even imagine if his story that
he told you is a true story, and I believe
it is. If he told you that story and it
was real, he did it because he probably wasn't telling
(37:38):
anybody else. He wasn't telling his wife and his children,
He wasn't telling his friends and his coworkers. He wasn't
telling anybody at the Navy Department because he was sworn
to secrecy, and he realized I can tell Brent something
and not have to own it. And the fact that
he was drinking a bit, Let's face it, that loose
(38:00):
people up a little bit. So I don't know whether
it was to pass information to you or to pass
disinformation to you, or whether it's more about the human condition.
A guy that just said, I don't know what to
do with the shit they have put me through, right,
and I'm going to tell this kid, Yeah, well, I
got to tell you.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
That's the version of the story that I want to believe, right,
that he was telling me, both maybe as unburdening himself
in a way that maybe he didn't tell his wife
and daughters, and here was this guy that was like
a son in some ways, and also just this notion
of I'm giving you a warning the world is not
(38:40):
the way you think it is.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
One little detail I just realized I left out was
after he had told me all of this, I said
to him, Wow, I guess I now understood why. I
understand why you cried yourself to sleep. Every night, and
he said, no, Brent, you don't understand all of this stuff.
I just told you that was day three.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
What yes, okay, okay, I have to take a second
to assimilate that into my thought process here. But he
was there for months months? What else could it have been? Exactly?
Where was he going for the rest of this time? Exactly?
And so I think, look, I know again, that's the
(39:23):
most profound thing that I mean, you tell that really
interesting story, but for him to actually say that raises
so many relevant and frankly impossible questions. Well, but let's
go back to something you said a few minutes ago,
which I appreciate that the candor, which is you didn't
(39:44):
believe the story one hundred percent when you first heard it,
right as most people don't. And that's fine. I get it.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I understand it was something that was a lived experience
for me and anyone else. It's just a Hollywood writer
telling what could be a really cool story. What I'm
curious is when did didn't you finally believe me. I'm
glad for getting into this, and I want to make
one thing clear. As I got to know you better
and heard the story another time or two, I accepted
(40:12):
it because I accepted you.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Right. A lot of a lot of journalism, a lot
of anything, is being able to look at someone who's
telling you a story and go is this person credible?
And I always thought this is a very credible story.
I just don't see Brent making this thing up and
then wanting to tell it to people, but then also
trying to keep it from not being told to people.
(40:35):
It just seemed like too much to ask of a story.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
And I.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Believed you with qualifications, the qualifications being, you know what,
lots of people in life have told a story and
then they get and when they tell it again, then
they tell it a little better, and people give them
props for how they told it, and so they do
the next one a little better. But I never saw
that with you. See you doing that? Okay, there are
(41:02):
two great things that we can bring to this podcast
that we did not know. You did not know in
nineteen eighty one, for sure, and I and you did
not know in nineteen ninety four when you told it
to me for sure that we know now, Yes, that's okay.
Number one, Your man Harrington, where did he say this
(41:22):
had happened?
Speaker 1 (41:23):
He said in an underground facility in West Virginia.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Okay, guess what, As it turns out, in nineteen ninety two,
when Clinton was president, two years before you tell me
the story even Okay, Ted Gup of the Washington Post
breaks the story that there is a secret, vast underground
facility beneath the Greenbrier Resort, which was built between nineteen
(41:46):
fifty nine and nineteen sixty two in West Virginia, Okay,
designed to have Congress stay there, all of Congress, which
is five hundred and thirty five people after a nuclear war,
and for thirty years they stocked it with supplies and
never acknowledged it by the government. As soon as by
the way this story was outed, the government admitted it
(42:08):
and they conduct tours there. Now, So wow, you know,
we could always maybe we should offer sound, light and
frequency tours to this place. But I find that to
be just a profound thing that he mentioned the specificity
of West Virginia, something you would not have known at all, right,
because maybe he wouldn't have even well, he knew it
(42:28):
because he went there, right, But I mean, it was
not a thing.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
No. But and here's the crazy thing. So it wasn't until.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Even earlier this year when.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
I was telling this story to someone, when they were
asking about what is this podcast, and I was giving
them a little preview, and they asked me a question
no one had ever asked before. They said, well, what
is this facility in West Virginia? And I thought, wow,
there's so many other details in the story that people
focus on. The conversation never went to the Greenbrier Resort.
(42:58):
And so when you and I started talking about it
and we did some research, lo and behold, there's this
underground facility that completely matches and holds up with the
story that he told. So, Okay, that's a very compelling
piece of evidence. What else you got, Well, by the way,
I'm just finding the notes here. Obviously, this facility had
a name they codenamed Project Greek Island, which I find interesting. Yeah,
(43:23):
and I remember, by the way, it's being built at
the same time our Dark Sky series starts. Remember we
started in sixty one, and they were building it between
fifty nine. Yeah, and sixty two. That's interesting and is
an interesting side thing because the pilot of Dark Guys
has a lot to do with the Cuban missile crisis.
Early on, nobody actually went to this place during the
Cuban missile crisis, which I think is interesting because I
(43:45):
would have bet they filled the place up with Congress. Yeah,
that one got so tense. Okay, here's the second one, Brent,
And this one makes me feel good for you because
it just gives credibility and credit to your story in
a way.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
It's pretty solid. Okay, in twenty twenty three, and I
should tell everyone, we're recording this particular episode of the
podcast in my media room here at my house. So
you're sitting here in this room, and I wanted to
just point out it was in this room in twenty
twenty three. On May eighth, I believe that Dave Grush
(44:21):
was here and Dave Grush got interviewed for the very
first time on video because Ross Coldart, my partner at
the time, who you had mentioned, had said that Grush
was coming to town, and I'd met with Grush and
Ross and everybody that was at this lunch was concerned, Well,
if he's going to talk to News Nation tomorrow, he's
had no practice whatsoever in talking on camera. Let's give
(44:45):
him some practice. So everyone was all pre whistleblower. Yeah, Okay,
he'd not done. He's not talked, he talks in July,
but this is when Ross is getting set to tell
his story. And so everybody said, well, we should tell
We should put him on camera and give him a
practice session. Which is what happened here at this house,
in this room where you're sitting right now. Dave Grush
sat there in between, you know, because people were working
(45:08):
on lights and microphones and all that stuff. I asked
Crush if he had ever heard of the name John Harrington.
And Dave Grush, who again was the guy that raised
his hand before Congress in July of twenty three and
promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but the
truth will helpe him God. Dave Grush looks at me
(45:28):
and goes, ye, I've heard of Harrington. And I said, well,
what do you know about him? And he said, well,
I'm really I don't know. If you use the word
at liberty that might be too but that's what I felt.
I think he said something like, I really can't talk
about that. Okay, all right, Well he knows the guy,
(45:49):
but he can't talk about him. Very interesting. But here's
where it gets fascinating. This year, this year, it's twenty
twenty five. This year, I get first a message and
then a call from Ross Coulthard. And I believe I
can say this because you know, he didn't swear me
to secrecy. It was a public I mean, he was
calling me to ask me something. He said that Grush,
(46:11):
who was now working for one of the congressional congressman
what's his name, that he works for one of the
guys who's on the committee. But people will look it up.
Grush works for him, or I believe still does. And
Ross wanted to know because Grush had ask him. I
think he wanted my phone number or whatever. And Ross said,
(46:33):
you know what, let me ask him. What do you
want me to ask him? And what Ross asked me
was do you think Brent, your friend Brent would get
in a car and drive John Harrington to Washington, d C.
To testify. I almost fell off my chair when I
heard that. And I also found the irony, which I'm
(46:54):
sure you can find, which as an eighteen year old,
you drove a car across America to d C right
to get your briefing, and now all these years later,
they want you to drive the man who gave you
the briefing to Washington, d C. So he can give
another briefing to Congress. Okay, that's interesting enough, I said,
I don't think Brent's probably going to go along with that,
(47:17):
but I'll ask him, you know. I mean, it wasn't
untoward for Ross to ask for that. I mean, of
course that's reasonable. But then he said, well, what do
you think his reaction would be if if he was subpoena?
And I don't think he was talking about Grush. I
think he was talking about you at that moment. Yeah,
I'm not Grush on Tarrington, but I think he was
talking about you. Anyway. I look at these two things,
(47:38):
the West Virginia thing and the Grush angle, and I
say that, well, that's not smoking gun level. You know,
that's not finding a trove of UFO documents in his
briefcase that was locked away. It's still pretty good. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Well, I have to tell you when you called me
about that conversation and the word subpoena was tossed out,
I started to feel queasy at the thought of it.
The thing is, I have no problem going under oath, right,
but at that point we had already decided we were
going to do this podcast, and I thought, you know,
if I'm going to tell my story, my stories, honestly,
(48:18):
I want them to be under my terms, right for us, right,
not with congressional investigators peppering me with things and making
me look like an idiot, right which I can pretty
much guarantee what happen. And I thought, I want to
tell this story. I want to tell a bunch of stories,
because at the end of the day, this Harrington story
is effectively the backstory right of sound, light and frequency.
(48:42):
But there's much more to sound, light and frequency than
even just this story. And I think you know, as
of for instance, we've got a bunch of stories about
how the next meeting with jac plays out and what
happened with the deal, and there are other things downstream
that are much are that paint a much bigger picture
(49:03):
here than just what happened in nineteen eighty one, a
seminal event for me and granted the inspiration for dark Skies.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
I know it's a challenge to have to lay all
this out, and I also appreciate the impetus that you
shared with us about why you did it, and I
think people are probably very appreciative that you did. And
here's all I'll say to you, right now. Thank you,
But also you ask well, when did I start believing
or what do I I believe this story one hundred percent.
(49:35):
I won't say one hundred and ten or one thousand
percent because those don't count, but I believe one hundred percent.
I've heard it, I've looked into it, I've had these
things occur that John Harrington story passes for me, and
so again on behalf of everybody who's listening and people
who will hear this in the future. Thank you very much.
(49:58):
Sound Blind and Frequency is an eye heart podcast produced
by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and
for Steller Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by
Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthouse and Your hosts and executive
producers are Bryce Abel, That's me and Brent Friedman Watch
the Skies
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