April 30, 2026 • 54 mins
What happens when the Roswell crash, the Kennedy years, and Hollywood storytelling all collide? In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce and Brent use the Showtime Roswell film as their portal into one of America’s most enduring mysteries: what really happened in New Mexico in 1947, and how that event may have echoed all the way into the Camelot era. They revisit how their own NBC series Dark Skies boldly fused JFK and UFO lore in what Bryce calls “an atom collider of conspiracy,” asking whether history’s most famous secrets may be more connected than we’ve been told.
Along the way, the hosts share a terrific personal JFK-and-Marilyn Monroe story from inside old Hollywood circles, examine why Roswell continues to grip the culture nearly eighty years later, and wander into some modern mystery-making as Brent casts a skeptical eye toward CERN and today’s scientific gatekeepers. It’s an episode about crashed saucers, presidential shadows, pop culture, and the strange way the past keeps refusing to stay buried.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
People will say, just so you know, I'm not feeling suicidal.
I love my life, and if you hear anything other
about me, you'll know it's not the real deal. Because
people have controversially died, and Forrestall is the first one
when that happened in forty nine, and people think he
was all over this UFO issue after Roswell, that he
(00:22):
was tied into Roswell, and then later Kennedy was tied
into him.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Of course, don't even get me started on the twelve scientists.
By the way, all of them are linked to classified
nuclear and aerospace projects, who are all currently missing or dead,
some by suicide allegedly.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm bryce able. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
And in this episode, we're putting JFK and Roswell in
an atom collider and we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Then we're going to a real atom collider on the
Swiss Franco border and we're going to ask some very
interesting questions. Last episode, we talked about some very interesting
postcards that we were sent in the mail during the
(01:38):
whole Dark Sky's experience, which, as we talked about, set
off a whole series of questions and intrigue and frankly
put us into a state of paranoia. And so today
what we'd like to do is start to ask why
did those postcards get sent to us? And was it
at all connected to specifically what we did in the
(02:00):
Dark Sky's pilot.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Well, I'm joining you today, Brent, from my San Francisco
office of the Vast Stellar Productions Holdings. Anyway, I take
your point about those postcards, and the purpose of today's podcast, Brent,
is to ask ourselves a question. We got those cards
in the middle of the summer as we were starting
to shoot Dark Sky, so all it was out there
(02:22):
was a pilot script and a bible, and so that
we've always asked ourselves what was in those things that
would have made anybody say, let's send semi threatening postcards
to this Zabele guy so he can show him to
Freedman and they can freak out. Why would that happen?
And I think what you and I have decided is
at least one of the leading theories. It goes back
(02:45):
to when we were working on creating darks guys, and
we said, let's try the unified field theory of conspiracy.
Let's take the two greatest conspiracies of the twentieth century
Roswell nineteen forty seven, JFK nineteen sixty three. Let's put
them in Adam Collider and see what happens. And that's
what dark Skuys was. And as you said, that's one
(03:08):
of the things JC first told us when he met
us over a year later. You got a lot of things, right.
Do you think maybe he was talking about that.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's a good theory, and I think today what we
need to do is put each one of those conspiracies
under the microscope and examine them. And I just want
to say, as a bit of a tease for later
in the episode, we're going to look at a third conspiracy,
or I should say a third emerging conspiracy set in
the twenty first century around cern.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
That's a real album collider if I'm not.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Mistaken, exactly, And we are going to be connecting some
dots back to the formula as we move that subplot forward,
So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, Bryce you
had suggested, do we do a lightning round and start
looking at the cultural footprint that Roswell has left since
nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
It is interesting to look at Roswell. It is culture
right now. If you say the word Roswell to people,
it's sort of like a shorthand way to say the
government's lying to you, because we know the government light
about something. Back in nineteen forty seven. They basically said
we have a flying disc and then the next day
they said, no, we don't. It was a weatherbloon. So
they were lying at the beginning or the end somewhere
(04:22):
in there. And so movies and television always picked these
things up. So let's do this. You go first, tell
me something you remember that you've seen where Roswell is mentioned,
and then I'll give you one, and let's see how
how long we can keep this going.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
All right, Low Hanging Fruit, Dark Skies.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
That's true, we've already said what that one was. I've
got one that came out the same year as Dark Skys, though,
and I think it's a pretty good one. And that
would be literally the Rock. You remember this movie. It
takes place literally at Alcatraz, which is important because I'm
in San Francisco right now, and Sean Connery's involved in it,
and they invoke Roswell as one of the biggest governments secrets,
(05:00):
and they literally pair it, Brent with quote the truth
about JFK. So this is all purpose. It is a
great example. That is the single passport to conspiracy. If
you say it, the audience absolutely understands it has to
do with deep state secrets. And it's not a big
part of the movie. It's just so casually invoked in
the Rock. But you have to mention it because it
(05:23):
was one of the first times where you could just
go wow, didn't expect to see or hear that.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well. It's nice too, because the movie wasn't about Roswell
or JFK. That was just this tossed off little piece
of dialogue. It was about this guy who supposedly knew
all about it. Right, you give me one, I'm going
to give you a two fer oh X Files and
it's spin off The Lone Gunman.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, all right. What was their take on Roswell?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Their take, if I remember correctly, was it was basically
a variation on a theme. It did happen, but they
had a much more kind of interesting twist on the
actual conspirac itself.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
If I recall, the best way to describe X Files
with Roswell is it's some mythic cornerstone inside their larger mythology, right,
It's a mythology inside of mythology. And they had one
episode called EBE, which we know stands for extraterrestrial biological entity.
But what's strange about it is, if I'm remembering this correctly,
(06:20):
their deep throat tells Molder that after Roswell, he says,
governments made a pack that any live extraterrestrial EBE would
be killed, which sort of adds to the Roswell cosmology
in a very dark way. And then in a later
one they did something called The Unnatural that literally takes
place at Roswell in nineteen forty seven and involves baseball.
(06:42):
So they've literally in X Files made it serious conspiracy
canon and American folklore at the same time, which I
thought was interesting. I enjoyed it. The Lone Gunman. To
the best of my knowledge, I don't think they ever
invoke it by name. They live in a world where
Roswell happened. Okay, here's another one now, eighteen ninety six.
There's a lot going in the nineties. You got dark
(07:03):
skys You Got the Rock, You Got X Files is on.
And here's another big one, which we covered in a
previous episode, Independence Day.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yep, No, that's a big one. I'm going to take Actually,
a project you worked.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
On, Taken, is a great example because what happens in
Taken is it is the inciting incident. I'm talking about Roswell. Now.
In Taken, Roswell is the inciting incident of the entire
mini series, and it launches the government conspiracy. There are
ten episodes to take in and they all deal with that.
I guess this is the way you would say it.
(07:35):
In Taken. It is a multi generational launch point, right,
Roswell happens, and these families are involved in it, and
it goes across generations. When you hear Roswell in that series,
you're invoking abduction and hybrids. But of course state power.
Another one that we shouldn't miss here is Project Blue Book,
(07:55):
which was on History Channel not long ago. They did
two seasons. It's a buried origin story. They don't make
tons about it. They do say it's a real extraterrestrial
event that was hidden by military authority. So it's invoked
a lot. But so is JFK. Frankly, in season two
of Project Bluebook. JFK is a character. I mean he's
(08:16):
literally a character. So there's that anything else.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
I'm going to maybe finish this up with a last
unlikely one, but from our old friend Steven Spielberg once again,
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I
just watched it two nights ago. Okay, maybe give us
a recap on how that I didn't.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Honestly, I do think Spielberg is a film genius, of course,
but that's not his best film. But I will say this.
It begins with Indiana Jones in nineteen forty seven being
at Area fifty one and he gets taken by these
Soviet spies, and these guys want him to help locate
the preserved body of an alien recovered at the Roswell incident.
(08:56):
One other quick one, though, would have to be American
horror story because that's very recent, that's on TV, and
of course they turned it into a campy, paranoid alt
history nightmare. And what's interesting about it, I thought you
and I took everything but the kitchen sink of conspiracy
and threw it into a blender for dark skies. But
(09:16):
these guys took everything anything that people have ever said
about anything about Roswell. Boom, it's in there. You got
the presidents and they're making deals with aliens and people
are levitating, and it's crazy. I guess the point that
we're making here by just going through all these this
was not exhaustive. And in fact, if you want to
laugh instead of get all bent out of shape, I
(09:37):
would recommend Brent that people should watch Paul. They never
quite say, and Paul, by the way, that he is
the original Roswell alien, but for my money is implied,
hears implied. Roswell has become a cultural thing. So it's
in the movies and all that. Let's talk about what
it really is. First time, I was.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Going to say, we've done Hollywood at least a nice
fly over. Now let's do history.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Okay, people like you and me, we probably know enough
about Roswell that we could talk for a couple of
our episodes about it before we ran completely dry. But
one of the people I know very well is a
guy named Don Schmidt, who is one of the researchers
of Roswell. Don has been researching since the late eighties
he worked for Kufos JL and Heinik was his boss
(10:21):
for a while. He has written multiple books about it,
and he has been investigating it forever, literally all through
the nineties, the two thousand's, the twenty tens and now,
and he has been the guy that, as he put it,
was racing the undertaker, and boy did he run a
good race. Because between Don and his partners, they literally
(10:42):
have turned up hundreds of witnesses to create what I
call a mosaic that tells you what's really going on
or what did go on and implied what's going on.
So I interviewed Don late in twenty twenty five for
Need to Know, and I asked him to tell the
story in a minute, is what I said. Don give
me Roswell in a minute. So I've got that queued
(11:03):
up right now. Let's just take a look at that
and then see if there's anything that we need to add.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
I need to quickly point out what was so important
about New Mexico at the end of World War Two,
and within just years thereafter first atomic bomb was detonated
just two hours west of Roswell, you had all the
testing that captured German Vy two rockets at the White
Sands Proving Grounds just to the south of that area,
had ongoing atomic research at Los Alamos, and in Roswell
(11:35):
itself you had the Roso Army Airfield, which was the
headquarters of the first atomic bomb squadron in the world.
So it was the hotbed of military activity research testing
in the world bar none at that time. According to
Project Bluebook, there were more UFO sidings in New Mexico
at that time than anywhere else in the world. And
(11:57):
wouldn't you know that, on the late evening of July second,
nineteen forty seven, something crashed in the high desert just
sixty five miles northwest of Roswell. Rancher would notify the base.
It was the colonel based Commander William Blanchard, who woul
dispatched his two intel officers to check it out. Within days,
(12:18):
they put out a press release that they had actually
captured a flying saucer within five hours. Blanchard's boss, General
Roger Rainey, explained it all away as just a conventional
off the show weather balloon with the radar reflector kite.
And it wasn't until thirty years later that the very
intelligence officer who led the investigation who was first to
(12:41):
go investigate the crash site. He was diagnosed with terminal episima,
and he broke his security oath. He went public and said, quote,
being familiar with all materials, both foreign and domestic, this
was nothing made on this earth end quote.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
I'd love that. It's so unfair. It is not fair
for me to say, hey, Don, you've been studying something
for many, many decades, and you've interviewed six hundred witnesses
or whatever, and now just boil it down to one minute.
But I thought he did a pretty good job.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's a great recap, and hopefully anyone that hadn't heard
about Roswell now has the primmer on which we can
build the rest of this episode.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I have a book of Don's under option. It's called
Witness to Roswell, and I would urge people who would
like to go a little deeper and say, I really
want to know some of the details here that they
probably do want to read Witness to Roswell by Don
Schmidt and his partner Tom Carey, who did a really
good job with it. Just one thing to add to that,
because there's not a lot again, there are many more details.
(13:44):
There's a lot of testimony. When I first went to
Roswell over a decade ago, Don had invited me and
I was a speaker there, and Don introduced me to
Frankie Rowe, who at the time was a woman I
believe in her sixties. She had been thirteen years old
Brent when her father, who was a local Roswell fireman,
came home from having gone to the site and let
(14:05):
her play with some of the memory medal, So she
was folding stuff up and releasing it and then capturing
it and doing that.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Let me just interject for anyone that doesn't know. The
memory metal is what is purported to have been the
material that the craft was made out of that crashed
that the government later said was tinfoil, But in fact
everyone that dealt with it, including this girl and Jesse
Marcel and several others, said that it actually had a
memory to it, so that when you crunched it up,
(14:36):
it would immediately snap back to its original form.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Let me put it this way, fireman and even a
thirteen year old girl know the difference between tinfoil and
something that's extraordinary. And certainly Jesse Marcel, who you mentioned
was the intelligence officer at Roswell, who also showed some
of it to his own son that first night. And
in order to believe the weather balloon as an aside,
you'd have to believe that Roswell, which as Don Schmid
(15:01):
pointed out, was the only nuclear bomber base in the
freaking world at the time, that the people who were
in charge of intelligence at that base, which is the
most important base in the world, couldn't tell the difference
between a crashed interplanetary vehicle and a weather balloon, of
which they launched them regularly. But I digress back to
(15:24):
Frankie Rowe. She told me to my face this story.
She's thirteen years old. She'd been playing with this memory
metal at the fire station and they were at home
having dinner, and some men showed up. They drive up
in the car. You've seen scenes like that before, and
these people take her parents to separate parts of the
house and talk to them. And then the scariest guy
(15:45):
I believe, she said, he was a guy that always
wore sunglasses right, and he had those military aviators right,
and he takes her aside. And I'm not going to
quote the exact quote because I don't have it in
front of me. But the essence was he said, listen,
little girl, you're not going to talk to anybody about
what you saw and what you did, because if you do,
your body will end up in the desert and Wi'll
(16:07):
just be bones scattered to the wind, and nobody will
ever know what happened to you, not even your parents. Ooh,
this is a.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Thirteen year old girl. This man gave this threat to listen.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Let me put it this way. Why would people do
that about a weather balloon, even if it was a
classified weather balloon. It's hard to imagine.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
I'm curious, though, Bryce, when you met her years later
in Oswell, how old was she?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I think, if you do the math, this is probably
twenty ten and she was thirteen and forty seven. Now
we're really going to test our math skills.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I'm looking at you. She might have been in her seventies. Okay,
here's my question. I don't know if you asked her this,
But had she ever told anyone this before she told you?
When did she start not worrying about being bones in
the desert?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Exactly? I can't claim that she told me first. I
heard her story only because Don Schmid said, Bryce, come
over here. You need to meet Frankie. Frankie, this is
bryce she had started later in her life, as many
of these people do, which is what Don Schmidt was
saying in Racing the Entertaining People. You don't have to
quite be on your deathbed to say, screw this. I
am tired of living in fear and I'm going to
(17:14):
get clear with my maker by telling the truth about
this extraordinary thing that happened to me. And that seemed
to be where she was. She was a fierce and
tough woman. When I met her, I did say to her,
are you concerned? So I did ask her kind of
your question, and she said she basically said, no, I'm not.
What are they going to do to me?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah? I share that feeling. You had some of those
same qualms before we did this exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
You do know that? And that is that a description
that would match your own about your meeting with Harrington
and how you had to keep that close for so
many years. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
I think there was always a fear that hung over
ever going public. And it wasn't until I stopped worrying
about death quite frankly, that I didn't care anymore, and
I just felt that it is time to tell our stories.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I'm glad they did. I'm glad all these witnesses have talked.
And again, our podcast isn't about trying to prove Roswell
to anybody. There's other podcasts that have tried to do that.
We talk about film and TV and try to look
into some of what has happened in the world like
that and try to interpret it. We have to talk
right now about what I think is the seminal film
(18:23):
about Roswell that has been made to this point, and
it's a movie that's called Oh wait, it's called Roswell.
Yes it is.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
But one last thing I just want to put on
the docket because I think it's going to inform some
of what we're going to talk about with this movie,
and that is that Roswell is generally considered ground zero
for the UFO cover up, which is going on seventy
nine years now. I think it's really interesting some of
the things we're going to talk about, not just what's
in the movie, but everything surrounding that movie as well.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
One of the great things about doing this podcast with you, Brent,
is that we've said a general area we're going to
talk about this, So in this case, we're saying, we're
going to look into whether our JFK. Roswell connection actually
could have been real, and it was out why they
came to us, So you start to look into things.
And I watched the Roswell movie back when it aired,
(19:14):
and it was on Showtime back in nineteen ninety four,
and I've seen it another time in between, and I
watched it last week where I found a copy of
it on YouTube. It's a powerful film and it has
so many behind the scenes things. But just to give
people what we say is the log line, there's many
ways to describe the log line. Here's the shortest one
(19:34):
I could figure out. In nineteen forty seven, Roswell, a
military intelligence officer uncovers evidence of a crashed alien craft,
only to be drawn into a sweeping government cover up
that will haunt him for decades.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's a good description. We're talking about Jesse Marcel played
by Kyle McLaughlin.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yes, of Twin Peaks, which, by the way, just before
we get in and do the Roswell thing, we could
have mentioned Twin Peaks when we were doing our lightning.
That's kind of thing because Twin Peaks clearly has a
lot to say about aliens or not even aliens, because
in Twin Peaks, the mysterious force may not be alien
(20:14):
at all.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
It's a non human intelligence.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, it sounds like it's interdimensional. It's ancient, it's psychic,
it's evil, and it's already here. And one thing I
did find though, while we're researching it, they don't, specifically,
the best of my knowledge, invoke Roswell in Twin Peaks.
That's in the series. But Mark Frost, who I believe
is the creator of co creator with co creator along
with the peopleage, he wrote a book, The Secret History
(20:40):
of Twin Peaks, and he does invoke it there. He
does say that this Douglas Milford character was building a
shadow blue book inside of Twin Peaks and it was
based on Roswell. That kind of thing. So Roswell got
its fair share of discussion then. But let's talk about
that movie. You just saw it. Tell me your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I thought the recreation of the time period back in
the forties was quite well done. I've always liked Kyle maclachan.
I thought he was quite good overall. I really liked it.
The writing, the direction, the production design, the acting. It
was all top quality, and I think that what appealed
to me most was that kind of emotional arc that
Jesse Marcel had somebody who you know back in the
(21:27):
forties was portrayed as a very solid and reliable intelligence
officer who gets caught up in this whole thing and
they make him the fall guy. He then is, as
you said, haunted for the rest of his life by
this choice that he made to go along with the
cover up. The nice thing they do in this movie
is they're jumping back and forth between the forties when
(21:50):
this happened and later in life when he's coming together
for a reunion with the five h ninth bomber squad
back at the base, and him trying to as he's
getting old and they imply he's close to death, trying
to make sense of what happened and get some information
that would close the loop for him on what really happened.
(22:12):
Did I remember this correctly? Have I forgotten that? Like
what really happened? And I thought that part of the
story that a man trying to close the book on
something that happened to him, possibly a bad choice he
made earlier in his life, was very compelling. It was moving.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Jesse Marcel's son is a character in that movie. I
actually met his real son who was passed on, but
he certainly suffered fools, not gladly at all, and said, no,
this was not a weather balloon that dad brought home
in the middle of the night. It was clearly something extraordinary.
Speaking of extraordinary things, though you did say it was
(22:48):
so well written, it was written by a playwright, and
I believe that is Arthur Koppitt playwright, and Jeremy Kagan
was the director, but the creative force behind it was
a gentleman called Paul David's. Paul David's is the one
that sort of made it happen, and we'll get into
that in a second. We like to say there's a
story behind the story. So what you just described and
(23:09):
the logline I gave you, that's the top level, the
top of the pyramid about what it's about. But there's
a story behind it. Here's one for you. The Roswell
film was originally set up at HBO, but it aired
on Showtime and apparently HBO's I don't know if he
was the chair or the president or whatever. Michael Fuchs.
(23:31):
By the way, it's based on a book that Don
Schmidt wrote with his first partner, Kevin Randall and Michael
Fuchs was on the plane back from New York and
got off and they were already casting. And when he
got off the plane, he said, we're not doing the
movie anymore because it's too controversial. That's what Don Schmitt
was told. Wow, and they dropped it. And God bless
(23:51):
Showtime because within one week apparently it was then set
up at Showtime and the entire creative team in Moss
moved moved from HBO to Showtime and one other quick
aside when it was at HBO. At the very beginning,
HBO hired a guy named John Adam who was a
stringer for Spy magazine and also for the New York Times,
(24:14):
and they hired him at HBO to conduct an independent investigation.
I've read this report. It's ninety five pages long, right,
and John Adam concludes at the end of this report
there are only two possibilities. A. It happened as exactly
stated in the book okay, which is called UFO Crash
at Roswell or b the most elaborate hoax he's ever seen.
(24:38):
Those are the only two choices. Interesting, Yeah, here's one
other factoid, the entire project got set up before the
book was even written. They heard that Schmidt and his
partner Randall were writing this thing, and Paul David's, who
I mentioned, option this thing and set it up at HBO.
So yeah, kind of behind the scenes kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, on the topic of it being a hoax, there
were a couple things that jumped out at me as
related to eufology that I really appreciated in the movie
because I knew a lot of the story at the
high level, but there were some specific details that I
didn't know. One was I didn't remember, or maybe I
didn't even know that the Army, when they were trying
to spin the whole thing as a cover up, said oh, no,
(25:25):
the bodies that were found were monkeys. They were test monkeys.
And someone in the movie has the line, well, the
government didn't launch monkeys into space until fifty two, which
is five whole years later, so I didn't know that
they were trying to pass them off as monkeys. And again,
you have an intelligence officer, you have a bunch of
like very smart people, capable people that are mistaking monkeys
(25:47):
for aliens. It's very strange. Another thing that I really
liked was how they represented the Rashamon effect, and that
was when they had several people trying to remember what
the UFO looked like and they couldn't agree on it.
They were like, oh, it was cylindrical, No it was domed,
and no it was it had you know, a weird
(26:08):
it was metal. No, it was more like a human
skin or like a reptile skin. And so I think,
as I've said before in various episodes, there's a subjectivity
to all of these experiences, and I think that plays
a big part in it. And that's one of the
things that made that it feel real to me when
I saw the characters not agreeing on exactly what they saw.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Kind of like you and me trying to describe what
kind of pants Jacon exactly. It's a great example where
we both had the same experience. There are things that
people don't agree on. Listen a couple of very quick factoids,
But I would be remiss if I didn't throw these
onto the fire here at this point because they're so interesting. First,
you are right, it is such a great film. It
was nominated for Best TV Movie by the Golden Globes
(26:53):
and by the way, Don Schmid was such an active investigator.
He didn't go to the Golden Globes. You know where
he was. He was in the Marriott Hotel in Albuquerque
because he was interviewing witnesses. So he saw it in
the lobby of the Marriott. This one will kind of
blow your mind. Kyle McLaughlin got the actual role. Christopher
Reeve wanted to play it. Really, Christopher Reeve wanted to
(27:15):
play it. He had read the book. And HBO did
not consider him an A or a B actor. They
considered him a C level actor. Wow. Hard to believe.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No, I don't believe it. I thought he was a
great actor.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
And Showtime when they took it to Showtime, they were
originally pushing for Don Johnson or Ted Danson. Wow. Okay,
well you can just imagine you've just seen this movie.
Those are slightly different movies. Okay. And here's one that's
really important. There is an autopsy scene in the film,
and you get to see the gray that they're working on,
(27:51):
and I believe there's a living one that wakes up
during the autopsy. I talked to Don Schmid about this
just less than a week ago. This astonished me. I
had to write it down because I was like, what
are you kidding me? He said, when it came to
rendering the Grays, we were very strict that we did
not want an accurate portrayal. Really why now, Everything else
(28:12):
I've ever heard dancay about this movie is, oh, you know,
we're trying to get you know, they did a great job.
As you said, they time period, why the Grays, And
the reason was they didn't want to make it so
real that people would watch it and then claim that
they were witnesses or Dad told me he had done this.
They wanted something that wasn't quite right about the Grays
(28:34):
in that film, so that they could weed out people
that were bullshitting them. Interesting, really interesting. This leads me
to the one that I just have been waiting to
talk to you about, because here's what happens in the movie, folks.
Cale McLachlan playing Jesse Marcel is talking to the people
at his reunion and he's asking them to come forward,
(28:55):
and some of them don't want to. He's sort of
an investigator, as he's portrayed in the who's trying to
get straight on what really happened toward the end of
his life. And there are a lot of flashbacks to
his experience back in July of nineteen forty seven, and
while he's at this thing, Martin Sheen is one of
the leads in this movie, and you keep seeing Martin
Sheen with sunglasses on or without him, but he's always
(29:18):
at a distance. He's watching him. And at one point,
Martin Sheen takes Kyle McLaughlin into an airplane hangar and
lays it out for it. What'd you think when you
saw that scene?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
You know what? Honestly, it felt like a scene we
would have written in Dark Skies. I loved it. I
thought it was great. Well, first of all, Martin Sheen's
a great actor, Kyle McLaughlin's a great actors, So seeing
the two of them in this huge, enormous space having
this incredible conversation felt like the climax of the movie.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
By the way, I think Paul David's is responsible for
this scene, which is interesting because he doesn't get credit
for it. He gets one third of the story credit
and doesn't share regular credit, but he's the guy that
came up with all this stuff. And what's so incredible.
Martin Sheen plays a guy named Townshend. I believe, and
it just comes pouring out of him. He lays this
(30:04):
all out. He says, these aliens have been observing humanity
for centuries. They've influenced human history, and there's a quote
in Critical and Startling Ways. He says they'd been genetically
altering human DNA from our very beginnings, and he even
says they inspired humanity's greatest spiritual leaders. I mean, it's
(30:26):
just an avalanche, as you said, of ufology. But here's
the part that is so dark Skiesian to me, okay,
because we went with this kind of thing so often.
Marcel reacts and he says, oh my god, you're telling
me that the missing link could be the result of
alien genetics, and townshend answers, I believe this information is correct,
but who can really say for certain? Yes? And it
(30:48):
reminded me of that scene you and I wrote with
Loanguard talking to Bach who's running Majestic twelve. Loanguard says,
I'm pretty close to the truth, and Buck says, well,
the truth is overrated. Nothing is all true, John. Anyway,
there's only one thing for us to put a bow
on this thing with. We've complained that it's been hard
to watch Dark skies. We talk about it and people
I'd like to watch it, you can't. The DVD took
(31:10):
fourteen years to get made, got made in twenty eleven,
and just last year they don't make it anymore. You
can't watch the DVD. You can't buy the DVD. It's
not streaming anywhere. Guess what other film has that problem?
Roswell it was released once, then it went away as
a VHS. I believe it's been released as a DVD.
You can't get the DVD right now. It's not streaming anywhere.
(31:32):
The only place you and I were able to watch it,
I believe, was on YouTube. Is that true for you?
And according to Don Schmidt, again who knows what he's
talking about, he said that at one time it was
the highest viewed movie at military bases all around the world. Wow,
that's for a period time. And guess what. Then it
went away and now you can't get it.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
So the truth is overrated and sometimes the truth is suppressed.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yeah, listen, nobody wants to be the guy that's claiming
they're suppressing my pride, you know, listen. I mean there's
a lot of reasons why a lot of things are
not available in Hollywood, right, there's distribution issues and all that.
I don't want to wrap myself in victimhood here, but
it is curious because both projects, which came out in
the mid to late nineties, you can't watch right now,
(32:18):
and in particular, Roswell is one that's, you know, really
specific about what happened. It does a really good job.
So I say, I don't care how you have to
watch it. If you could watch it, yeah, I do
recommend it as well. And by the way, I think
that this is a conspiracy episode, so for today anyway,
we can believe that our show was suppressed, just like
(32:40):
the Roswell movie. Let's move on now to the other
big conspiracy theory of the twentieth century, JFK, and how
it connects to Roswell potentially. Boy, what is your take
at this point when you think about what we said?
First of all, I guess we have to say it
though we said in that film that John Loan Guard,
our main character, got a piece of the Roswell crash,
(33:03):
got it to Bobby Kennedy, who got it to JFK,
who got a message to him that said he was
going to tell the story in his second term and
The final scene in Dark Skies is Kennedy being killed
and it being on television and Loan Guard watching it.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
With the implication being that he was silenced because he
was going to go public about Roswell and the larger
truth about UFOs. So, yes, that's what we posited in
our pilot, and I think that if I look it
back on it today, there's a couple things that get
me thinking, are we already mentioned it once? When jac
said you got a lot right, was he talking about
(33:41):
that connection between JFK and UFOs. I think, as we
talked about in a previous episode, there's a really weird
factor where we put out something that we thought was
fiction and now there's these little trace pieces of evidence
and a lot of people connecting dots saying that they're
there's truth behind what we thought was fiction.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
There was no Internet for us during Dark Guys. I
remember in promotion you and I had to get in
a car and drive to NBC where somebody allowed us
to have a chat with.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Little chat room.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
That's all I'm saying. There's no anybody leaked anything to us.
We just made it up. We said, let's take JFK,
let's take UFOs Adam kllider Boom. However, now that we've
done that and time has passed, I have done a
little looking into that, and there is something that's very
true that we should say that we did not know then.
And that was on November twelfth of nineteen sixty three,
(34:37):
which let's do the math, ten days before JFK dies
National Security Action Memorandum two seven to one. So that's
referred to as NSAM two seven to one. It's JFK
pushing space cooperation with the Russians, with the Soviets in
order to avoid starting World War three for an unidentified threat. Now,
(35:03):
he never comes out and says UFOs in this memorandum,
and you can go look it up again NSAM two
seven to one, and it's real. Nobody's doubting that. So
he was concerned ten days before his death about this.
Now he was motivated by fear that these misidentified objects
in orbit would trigger some sort of catastrophic misunderstanding. And
(35:24):
well he should be. I mean, we're still worried about
that today. Right now. There's two other documents. They are
a lot more dicey. There's a second one that's the
same date November twelfth, nineteen sixty three, and it's far
more controversial. This is an alleged memo that JFK wrote
to CI director John McCone requesting UFO intelligence. All right,
(35:47):
and again people debate this heartily, Brent, They talk about
it all the time. Its authenticity is very unproven, but
there are more people willing to say this might have
been the thing. And then there's a third one called
the Burn Memo, which is another highly disputed document suggesting
concern with intelligence circles about Kennedy's inquiries on this. And
(36:09):
so you got these three memos, one of which is
for sure real but isn't specific to UFOs, the second
of which is ify but is about UFOs, and the third,
which is even more iffy but is very specific about
people within the intelligence community worried about JFK. And then
I'll end with this. And then there's Marilyn Monroe. What well.
(36:32):
The other unconfirmed part of the whole JFK UFO thing
is people persistently believe that JFK shared something about UFO
reality with Marilyn Monroe and that she was going to
go public with it, and then she got killed in
nineteen sixty two, I didn't even want to take that
one on, Brent. That's too big for that's above my
pay grade. But that is what people say from time
(36:54):
to time. There's a lot to chew on. There.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
One other thing that I'd love to try and connect
some dots here between Roswell and JFK is a character
from history, not a fictional character, James Forrestall. Oh, yeah,
he appears in the Roswell movie. But why don't you
give us a quick overview on who he was in
relationship to JFK. Potentially?
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Okay, JFK, as many people know, was in the Navy,
and he went into the Navy in late forty one.
I think between October of forty one and I believe
something like February of forty two, he was actually being
looked at by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Does that
ring a bell?
Speaker 2 (37:39):
I've heard that somewhere.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Yeah. And then he ended up being the famous guy
that was the skipper of Pt. One oh nine and
that historic rescue and all of that. But there was
this short window where Oh and I had their hooks
in him for three months or so, and then the
other part of it, to go to your forestall thing
is James Forstall, which I'm going to let you do that.
But James Forestall was someone who was a family friend
(38:04):
of Joseph Kennedy and actually knew the Kennedy kids from
an early age. So in the same way that Harrington
was someone in your neighborhood or in your viewpoint who
you knew, who was a lot older and was obviously
a lot more wired into things.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Okay, So the interesting thing about Forestall is, as I said,
he was a character in the movie and he was
appointed the i think Undersecretary of the Navy, as you mentioned,
he was that from forty four to forty seven. He's
also been linked though to Majestic twelve. According to the
official version of history, though, Forestall was admitted to the
(38:45):
Bethesden Naval Hospital in nineteen forty nine after experiencing a
bit of a mental breakdown from exhaustion and some other stuff.
A few weeks later, he apparently committed suicide, or so
the official story goes. A bunch of people that spent
time with him around then, including his chauffeur and his
replacement for the as the Defense Secretary, found him acting
(39:08):
in good spirits, very normal, as did his nurse at
that time and his psychiatric doctor. For a guy who
was going to kill himself, he gave off no signs
at all that he was in distress, and in fact,
everyone said he seemed to be getting better. One of
the things that's interesting is that because it was a suicide,
there was never an autopsy'd done on him, so any
(39:29):
suspicious or murderous behavior was never going to come to
the surface because there was no reason to think anything
other than suicide. Now, one of the things that is
interesting about how he killed himself is he apparently took
a blanket or a sheet and jumped out his window
and tried to hang himself, but it didn't work and
he fell to his death. Several stories below, someone raised
(39:53):
the question, well, but as a navy veteran, he would
know how to tie a knot, and he wouldn't be
so incompetent be able to figure out how to hang himself.
But anyway, all of that being said, I guess the
question just comes up. Okay, if it wasn't suicide, why
would someone want him dead. It turns out he was
writing some memoirs at the.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Time, and that moment of him jumping out of the
window is taken on and they take the position obviously
that he wasn't suicidal, as you just mentioned. That's why,
by the way, a lot of people you see it
on X all the time, people will say, just so
(40:33):
you know, I'm not feeling suicidal. I love my life,
and if you hear anything other about me, you'll know
it's not the real deal. Because people have controversially died,
and Forrestall is the first one when that happened in
forty nine, and people think he was all over this
UFO issue after Roswell, that he was tied into Roswell,
(40:56):
and then later Kennedy was tied into him. Of course.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Now don't even get me started on the twelve scientists.
By the way, all of them are linked to classified
nuclear and aerospace projects who are all currently missing or dead,
some by suicide allegedly.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
There's just a lot of connections here. I don't think
we'll ever resolve it, Brent. That's the I think that's
the problem with some of these things. We talk about them,
and yeah, we can go back and forth on them,
but can we solve them Unless there's a smoking gun
memo that exists and that has been hidden successfully for
eighty years, we aren't going to know for sure.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, well, and I think the other thing we can't know,
which is frustrating, is going back to how we started
the episode. What was it about our pilot that had
JC say you got a lot right Now that we've
gone down the rabbit hole on both these conspiracies, it
seems to me that it must have had something to
do with the combination of those two. As we said,
(41:53):
that atom collider that we threw them both into, that
was totally unique. At that time.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Our take guarded with Roswell. We did say, let's take
these two conspiracy theories put them together. But we started
with Roswell and said, if you believe Roswell is a
true event, and both of us did. At that time,
we'd done the research and read some books and talked
to some people, and we're relatively sure that you could
make a strong case that Roswell was an anomalous event.
(42:21):
Our take, though, was Roswell's real. If Roswell was real
in nineteen forty seven, the national security state coming out
of World War two would have had to treat it
as a extremely important and be extremely worth keeping secret, to.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
The point that you would threaten the life of a
thirteen year old girl.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
And possibly a president of the United United States. And
so that's where we went with that whole thing. I've
wrestled with this, to be quite honest, I have wrestled
with this, as I'm sure you have for decades, where
I've asked myself, were we really onto something or was
it just coincidence and happenstance. Based on my lived experience
(43:02):
with JC and with what I know today, I think
we had a lot of things right besides just JFK
and Roswell. For example, one of the things was the
Navy's role in all of this, which it then goes
back to Forestall and all that I think it was
that That's what I think.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
I can't validate why JC said what he said. We
didn't think to ask him. But what I can do
is validate him in a really interesting way with regards
to the formula. So we've talked about basically the two
largest conspiracies from the twentieth century, and now let's move
into the twenty first century and to something called CERN.
(43:42):
And maybe before I get into the story, can you
give us a quick recap on what CERN is.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Oh God, I was afraid you'd ask me that, you know,
my friend, if you were going to bring up CERN,
then you have to do that, because I've run dry
so far. So okay.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
So CERN was the largest particle phys laboratory in the world,
located on what's called the Franco Swiss border near Geneva.
It was established in nineteen fifty four. It uses advanced
particle accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider also called the LHC,
to study the fundamental constituents of matter and the universe's structure.
(44:19):
So big heady things they're doing there. The LHC and
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or the RHIC have been
the focus of multiple conspiracy theories because both colliders accelerate
particles to near light speed before letting them smash into
each other. These collisions create and show force interactions similar
(44:42):
to what the universe was like the instant after the
Big Bang. And if I'm not mistaken, are you saying
that this is why people have speculated, and I underline
and put in bold, speculate that somehow, when you turn
on CERN, you are creating parallel universes and portal to
different dimensions and all that absolutely, and there's people who believe,
(45:05):
for various reasons, that we are not just opening portals
to other dimensions, but that it's being used to summon demons,
possibly even the Antichrist. Now obviously these are all just
conspiracy theories, but this is out there, and I think
the real concern, and interestingly to me, how this even
(45:25):
connects back to Roswell and the nuclear bomb base, is
that going back even further to the Manhattan Project. The
Manhattan Project was essentially, as Don Schmidt implied, that whole
area as we were looking for and trying to unlock
our nuclear capabilities, was being visited by UFOs. It was
the most visited area on the planet. Similarly, now today
(45:49):
with the area of CERN, there's been tons of UFO reports.
So it seems that every time we start meddling with
the very fabric of nature, it brings UFOs. So this
is an interesting connection between these two places. So you say, okay, well,
wait a minute, how are you connecting CERN to the formula?
Let me explain something.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
I am saying that by the way, as you said that,
I'm saying, wait, how is he connecting CERN to the formula?
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So yes, okay, So if you remember, or if you
listen to our first episode, JC, at the end of
our meeting with him in the backyard of Bryce's house,
scribbled out something on the back of an ATM deposit
envelope and he folded it up and he handed it
to me and he said, put this in a safety
deposit box for about ten to fifteen years. Then if
(46:36):
we don't make a deal, you'll know that I was
for real. I did just that. I put it in
a safety deposit box. There's a whole Keystone Cops situation
about how it was moved from one box to another
and it was almost lost. But during this time, initially
I didn't realize it was lost. I thought I still
had it somewhere in my possession. As we talked about
the actual symbols on the envelope, what we call the formula,
(46:59):
are inscrutable. They don't make any sense at first glance,
and so I didn't really have anything to go off
in terms of trying to validate this message, this cryptic
message that he gave us. And as Brice said in
ninety six, the Internet wasn't much of a thing. But
as the Internet evolved over the next decade or so,
I started on a fairly regular basis googling or searching
(47:22):
at the time before Google even sound light and frequency,
and I would do that trick where you would put
those words in that order in quotations, so that the
only search results I would get were ones that had
those three words in that order. I didn't want something
I wanted at all, and up until twenty twelve, I
never got anything back. I never got any search results. Now,
(47:45):
to clarify something, there is a quote attributed to Tesla
that's similar, if you want to find the secrets of
the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
But there's actually no official confirmation that Tesla or said
that or wrote that, and it actually doesn't appear to
have surfaced as an Internet meme until around twenty ten. Anyway,
(48:08):
in twenty twelve, around fifteen years after The Dark Sky's
premiere party, just as JC had predicted, I finally got
a hit on my search for sound light and frequency
and Bryce. Do you know where those search results came up? No,
they came up with in reference to a white paper
(48:29):
on cern oh Boy and the discovery of what's known
then as the Higgs bosun or better known as the
God particle, which is a key piece of the quantum
puzzle in terms of understanding where all of matter comes from.
So that article, which unfortunately is no longer online, was
hosted on the cern CDs or the Official Document Server,
(48:52):
and I should have at the time, I didn't know
what would go away gotten a copy of it. But
it was about what was called the Soification of the
God particle. And just to explain that, that's basically where
when the particles are collided in this huge underground facility.
If you're interested in this, please go and do a
(49:13):
deep dive on it. It's fascinating. Basically, it's this huge
atom collider. The particles collide and every once in a
while they create a new particle, and they finally created
something called the Higgs bosson and it was of course
being measured in every way you can imagine. And they
captured the audio of that collision and they did a
(49:35):
study of it and what was called the Soonification, and
they took all of the raw data from that collision
which revealed this key piece of the universe and it
actually has a melodic pattern to it. So what we're
talking about is essentially the soundtrack of Creation.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
So I say, this soundtrack on y Apple music or anything.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
It's online, you can find it. I think we could
play a little sample of right here.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Oh this is exciting. Okay, I'm ready. Excuse me, Brent,
but WT Yeah, what am I listening to? Well, it's
(50:21):
obviously a musicians interpretation of that raw data. So it
was all of the sound frequency that came through had
corresponding data to it, and when played as a musical scale,
this is what it sounds like. So this wasn't actually
what it sounded like, but this is what it looked
like and how it was interpreted by musicians. What I
(50:44):
find fascinating is that people have always said, you know,
mathematics is the language of the universe, but music is mathematics,
and so the idea that it's all tied together is
just fascinating. You could say, well, oh, it's just a
coincidence that this happened to make music notes, But when
you think about it, the creation of a particle that
(51:04):
seems to be a key element in understanding reality has
its own musical signature. It implies a lot. I don't
know how to explain it exactly, but it seems fantastic.
The only thing that would be stranger is if it
sounded like the five notes of Close Encounters.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
I was going to say, it isn't exactly on the
level of John Williams, but if maybe if you give
it to him and you let him turn it into something.
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Has cern been turned on? Have we made a black hole?
And are we all doomed?
Speaker 2 (51:34):
What is your thought of Well, similarly to the Manhattan Project,
there were fears that they were going to kill us
all right, trying to make a nuclear bomb. That didn't happen. Similarly,
as far as we know, we are still all alive
and living in reality, unless we're in an episode of
Lost somehow. So I think that the real interesting thing
(51:54):
to me is, let's go back to JC. Yeah, he
gives us this piece of paper, tells us to put
it away for ten to fifteen years, right in case
we don't make a deal. Right, he wants to prove
that he's for real. Wow, what a long tail on validation. Right,
So what I have to ask, and I'm going to
ask you, and I'm going to ask our listeners, how
(52:16):
could JC in nineteen ninety six have given us a
piece of paper with a phrase sound, light and frequency
told us to put it away and that at that time,
around fifteen years, we would have proof that he was
for real. Does that How do you explain that he
connected the dots somehow in ninety six to the discovery
(52:38):
of the God particle, which proves basically the foundation of
quantum physics. Is that just a coincidence? Maybe my head
just exploded over that. I think it's still exploding. I
don't have a good answer to that question right now, Brent,
But I do have an answer to another question. People
are asking if I can diverge long enough to talk
(52:59):
about the formula, which I sometimes call the envelope because
it was written on an envelope. People say, why don't
you guys just put it out on the internet right
now and we'll all take a look at it. And
I think the answer is we're still investigating it, we're
sharing it with people. We're trying to get our own
act together about what we think it is. We're not
hiding it. We're going to put it out there. Our plan, folks,
(53:22):
is to do what we just did with those postcards,
which if you go to our website you can look
at them right now. They were out when the episode
came out, and if you want to put something on
your calendar, our plan right now is that on September seventeenth,
we're going to do an episode of Sound Light and
Frequency about the formula slash envelope. We're going to put
it in that episode, we're going to put it on
(53:43):
our website, and we're going to let everybody else take
a crack at it. That sound about right, yes, and
we're going to share the analysis we've collected from a
number of people. And just in the intervening episodes, I
want to say, as with this chapter in the subplot
of the formula, there are ever more chapters to tell
and I'm embracing you now. They get weirder. You're in
(54:05):
for a wild ride.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman. Watch the
Skies
People will say, just so you know, I'm not feeling suicidal.
I love my life, and if you hear anything other
about me, you'll know it's not the real deal. Because
people have controversially died, and Forrestall is the first one
when that happened in forty nine, and people think he
was all over this UFO issue after Roswell, that he
(00:22):
was tied into Roswell, and then later Kennedy was tied
into him.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Of course, don't even get me started on the twelve scientists.
By the way, all of them are linked to classified
nuclear and aerospace projects, who are all currently missing or dead,
some by suicide allegedly.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm bryce able. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
And in this episode, we're putting JFK and Roswell in
an atom collider and we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Then we're going to a real atom collider on the
Swiss Franco border and we're going to ask some very
interesting questions. Last episode, we talked about some very interesting
postcards that we were sent in the mail during the
(01:38):
whole Dark Sky's experience, which, as we talked about, set
off a whole series of questions and intrigue and frankly
put us into a state of paranoia. And so today
what we'd like to do is start to ask why
did those postcards get sent to us? And was it
at all connected to specifically what we did in the
(02:00):
Dark Sky's pilot.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Well, I'm joining you today, Brent, from my San Francisco
office of the Vast Stellar Productions Holdings. Anyway, I take
your point about those postcards, and the purpose of today's podcast, Brent,
is to ask ourselves a question. We got those cards
in the middle of the summer as we were starting
to shoot Dark Sky, so all it was out there
(02:22):
was a pilot script and a bible, and so that
we've always asked ourselves what was in those things that
would have made anybody say, let's send semi threatening postcards
to this Zabele guy so he can show him to
Freedman and they can freak out. Why would that happen?
And I think what you and I have decided is
at least one of the leading theories. It goes back
(02:45):
to when we were working on creating darks guys, and
we said, let's try the unified field theory of conspiracy.
Let's take the two greatest conspiracies of the twentieth century
Roswell nineteen forty seven, JFK nineteen sixty three. Let's put
them in Adam Collider and see what happens. And that's
what dark Skuys was. And as you said, that's one
(03:08):
of the things JC first told us when he met
us over a year later. You got a lot of things, right.
Do you think maybe he was talking about that.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's a good theory, and I think today what we
need to do is put each one of those conspiracies
under the microscope and examine them. And I just want
to say, as a bit of a tease for later
in the episode, we're going to look at a third conspiracy,
or I should say a third emerging conspiracy set in
the twenty first century around cern.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
That's a real album collider if I'm not.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Mistaken, exactly, And we are going to be connecting some
dots back to the formula as we move that subplot forward,
So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, Bryce you
had suggested, do we do a lightning round and start
looking at the cultural footprint that Roswell has left since
nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
It is interesting to look at Roswell. It is culture
right now. If you say the word Roswell to people,
it's sort of like a shorthand way to say the
government's lying to you, because we know the government light
about something. Back in nineteen forty seven. They basically said
we have a flying disc and then the next day
they said, no, we don't. It was a weatherbloon. So
they were lying at the beginning or the end somewhere
(04:22):
in there. And so movies and television always picked these
things up. So let's do this. You go first, tell
me something you remember that you've seen where Roswell is mentioned,
and then I'll give you one, and let's see how
how long we can keep this going.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
All right, Low Hanging Fruit, Dark Skies.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
That's true, we've already said what that one was. I've
got one that came out the same year as Dark Skys, though,
and I think it's a pretty good one. And that
would be literally the Rock. You remember this movie. It
takes place literally at Alcatraz, which is important because I'm
in San Francisco right now, and Sean Connery's involved in it,
and they invoke Roswell as one of the biggest governments secrets,
(05:00):
and they literally pair it, Brent with quote the truth
about JFK. So this is all purpose. It is a
great example. That is the single passport to conspiracy. If
you say it, the audience absolutely understands it has to
do with deep state secrets. And it's not a big
part of the movie. It's just so casually invoked in
the Rock. But you have to mention it because it
(05:23):
was one of the first times where you could just
go wow, didn't expect to see or hear that.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well. It's nice too, because the movie wasn't about Roswell
or JFK. That was just this tossed off little piece
of dialogue. It was about this guy who supposedly knew
all about it. Right, you give me one, I'm going
to give you a two fer oh X Files and
it's spin off The Lone Gunman.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, all right. What was their take on Roswell?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Their take, if I remember correctly, was it was basically
a variation on a theme. It did happen, but they
had a much more kind of interesting twist on the
actual conspirac itself.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
If I recall, the best way to describe X Files
with Roswell is it's some mythic cornerstone inside their larger mythology, right,
It's a mythology inside of mythology. And they had one
episode called EBE, which we know stands for extraterrestrial biological entity.
But what's strange about it is, if I'm remembering this correctly,
(06:20):
their deep throat tells Molder that after Roswell, he says,
governments made a pack that any live extraterrestrial EBE would
be killed, which sort of adds to the Roswell cosmology
in a very dark way. And then in a later
one they did something called The Unnatural that literally takes
place at Roswell in nineteen forty seven and involves baseball.
(06:42):
So they've literally in X Files made it serious conspiracy
canon and American folklore at the same time, which I
thought was interesting. I enjoyed it. The Lone Gunman. To
the best of my knowledge, I don't think they ever
invoke it by name. They live in a world where
Roswell happened. Okay, here's another one now, eighteen ninety six.
There's a lot going in the nineties. You got dark
(07:03):
skys You Got the Rock, You Got X Files is on.
And here's another big one, which we covered in a
previous episode, Independence Day.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yep, No, that's a big one. I'm going to take Actually,
a project you worked.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
On, Taken, is a great example because what happens in
Taken is it is the inciting incident. I'm talking about Roswell. Now.
In Taken, Roswell is the inciting incident of the entire
mini series, and it launches the government conspiracy. There are
ten episodes to take in and they all deal with that.
I guess this is the way you would say it.
(07:35):
In Taken. It is a multi generational launch point, right,
Roswell happens, and these families are involved in it, and
it goes across generations. When you hear Roswell in that series,
you're invoking abduction and hybrids. But of course state power.
Another one that we shouldn't miss here is Project Blue Book,
(07:55):
which was on History Channel not long ago. They did
two seasons. It's a buried origin story. They don't make
tons about it. They do say it's a real extraterrestrial
event that was hidden by military authority. So it's invoked
a lot. But so is JFK. Frankly, in season two
of Project Bluebook. JFK is a character. I mean he's
(08:16):
literally a character. So there's that anything else.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
I'm going to maybe finish this up with a last
unlikely one, but from our old friend Steven Spielberg once again,
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I
just watched it two nights ago. Okay, maybe give us
a recap on how that I didn't.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Honestly, I do think Spielberg is a film genius, of course,
but that's not his best film. But I will say this.
It begins with Indiana Jones in nineteen forty seven being
at Area fifty one and he gets taken by these
Soviet spies, and these guys want him to help locate
the preserved body of an alien recovered at the Roswell incident.
(08:56):
One other quick one, though, would have to be American
horror story because that's very recent, that's on TV, and
of course they turned it into a campy, paranoid alt
history nightmare. And what's interesting about it, I thought you
and I took everything but the kitchen sink of conspiracy
and threw it into a blender for dark skies. But
(09:16):
these guys took everything anything that people have ever said
about anything about Roswell. Boom, it's in there. You got
the presidents and they're making deals with aliens and people
are levitating, and it's crazy. I guess the point that
we're making here by just going through all these this
was not exhaustive. And in fact, if you want to
laugh instead of get all bent out of shape, I
(09:37):
would recommend Brent that people should watch Paul. They never
quite say, and Paul, by the way, that he is
the original Roswell alien, but for my money is implied,
hears implied. Roswell has become a cultural thing. So it's
in the movies and all that. Let's talk about what
it really is. First time, I was.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Going to say, we've done Hollywood at least a nice
fly over. Now let's do history.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Okay, people like you and me, we probably know enough
about Roswell that we could talk for a couple of
our episodes about it before we ran completely dry. But
one of the people I know very well is a
guy named Don Schmidt, who is one of the researchers
of Roswell. Don has been researching since the late eighties
he worked for Kufos JL and Heinik was his boss
(10:21):
for a while. He has written multiple books about it,
and he has been investigating it forever, literally all through
the nineties, the two thousand's, the twenty tens and now,
and he has been the guy that, as he put it,
was racing the undertaker, and boy did he run a
good race. Because between Don and his partners, they literally
(10:42):
have turned up hundreds of witnesses to create what I
call a mosaic that tells you what's really going on
or what did go on and implied what's going on.
So I interviewed Don late in twenty twenty five for
Need to Know, and I asked him to tell the
story in a minute, is what I said. Don give
me Roswell in a minute. So I've got that queued
(11:03):
up right now. Let's just take a look at that
and then see if there's anything that we need to add.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
I need to quickly point out what was so important
about New Mexico at the end of World War Two,
and within just years thereafter first atomic bomb was detonated
just two hours west of Roswell, you had all the
testing that captured German Vy two rockets at the White
Sands Proving Grounds just to the south of that area,
had ongoing atomic research at Los Alamos, and in Roswell
(11:35):
itself you had the Roso Army Airfield, which was the
headquarters of the first atomic bomb squadron in the world.
So it was the hotbed of military activity research testing
in the world bar none at that time. According to
Project Bluebook, there were more UFO sidings in New Mexico
at that time than anywhere else in the world. And
(11:57):
wouldn't you know that, on the late evening of July second,
nineteen forty seven, something crashed in the high desert just
sixty five miles northwest of Roswell. Rancher would notify the base.
It was the colonel based Commander William Blanchard, who woul
dispatched his two intel officers to check it out. Within days,
(12:18):
they put out a press release that they had actually
captured a flying saucer within five hours. Blanchard's boss, General
Roger Rainey, explained it all away as just a conventional
off the show weather balloon with the radar reflector kite.
And it wasn't until thirty years later that the very
intelligence officer who led the investigation who was first to
(12:41):
go investigate the crash site. He was diagnosed with terminal episima,
and he broke his security oath. He went public and said, quote,
being familiar with all materials, both foreign and domestic, this
was nothing made on this earth end quote.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
I'd love that. It's so unfair. It is not fair
for me to say, hey, Don, you've been studying something
for many, many decades, and you've interviewed six hundred witnesses
or whatever, and now just boil it down to one minute.
But I thought he did a pretty good job.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's a great recap, and hopefully anyone that hadn't heard
about Roswell now has the primmer on which we can
build the rest of this episode.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I have a book of Don's under option. It's called
Witness to Roswell, and I would urge people who would
like to go a little deeper and say, I really
want to know some of the details here that they
probably do want to read Witness to Roswell by Don
Schmidt and his partner Tom Carey, who did a really
good job with it. Just one thing to add to that,
because there's not a lot again, there are many more details.
(13:44):
There's a lot of testimony. When I first went to
Roswell over a decade ago, Don had invited me and
I was a speaker there, and Don introduced me to
Frankie Rowe, who at the time was a woman I
believe in her sixties. She had been thirteen years old
Brent when her father, who was a local Roswell fireman,
came home from having gone to the site and let
(14:05):
her play with some of the memory medal, So she
was folding stuff up and releasing it and then capturing
it and doing that.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Let me just interject for anyone that doesn't know. The
memory metal is what is purported to have been the
material that the craft was made out of that crashed
that the government later said was tinfoil, But in fact
everyone that dealt with it, including this girl and Jesse
Marcel and several others, said that it actually had a
memory to it, so that when you crunched it up,
(14:36):
it would immediately snap back to its original form.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Let me put it this way, fireman and even a
thirteen year old girl know the difference between tinfoil and
something that's extraordinary. And certainly Jesse Marcel, who you mentioned
was the intelligence officer at Roswell, who also showed some
of it to his own son that first night. And
in order to believe the weather balloon as an aside,
you'd have to believe that Roswell, which as Don Schmid
(15:01):
pointed out, was the only nuclear bomber base in the
freaking world at the time, that the people who were
in charge of intelligence at that base, which is the
most important base in the world, couldn't tell the difference
between a crashed interplanetary vehicle and a weather balloon, of
which they launched them regularly. But I digress back to
(15:24):
Frankie Rowe. She told me to my face this story.
She's thirteen years old. She'd been playing with this memory
metal at the fire station and they were at home
having dinner, and some men showed up. They drive up
in the car. You've seen scenes like that before, and
these people take her parents to separate parts of the
house and talk to them. And then the scariest guy
(15:45):
I believe, she said, he was a guy that always
wore sunglasses right, and he had those military aviators right,
and he takes her aside. And I'm not going to
quote the exact quote because I don't have it in
front of me. But the essence was he said, listen,
little girl, you're not going to talk to anybody about
what you saw and what you did, because if you do,
your body will end up in the desert and Wi'll
(16:07):
just be bones scattered to the wind, and nobody will
ever know what happened to you, not even your parents. Ooh,
this is a.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Thirteen year old girl. This man gave this threat to listen.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Let me put it this way. Why would people do
that about a weather balloon, even if it was a
classified weather balloon. It's hard to imagine.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
I'm curious, though, Bryce, when you met her years later
in Oswell, how old was she?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I think, if you do the math, this is probably
twenty ten and she was thirteen and forty seven. Now
we're really going to test our math skills.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I'm looking at you. She might have been in her seventies. Okay,
here's my question. I don't know if you asked her this,
But had she ever told anyone this before she told you?
When did she start not worrying about being bones in
the desert?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Exactly? I can't claim that she told me first. I
heard her story only because Don Schmid said, Bryce, come
over here. You need to meet Frankie. Frankie, this is
bryce she had started later in her life, as many
of these people do, which is what Don Schmidt was
saying in Racing the Entertaining People. You don't have to
quite be on your deathbed to say, screw this. I
am tired of living in fear and I'm going to
(17:14):
get clear with my maker by telling the truth about
this extraordinary thing that happened to me. And that seemed
to be where she was. She was a fierce and
tough woman. When I met her, I did say to her,
are you concerned? So I did ask her kind of
your question, and she said she basically said, no, I'm not.
What are they going to do to me?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah? I share that feeling. You had some of those
same qualms before we did this exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
You do know that? And that is that a description
that would match your own about your meeting with Harrington
and how you had to keep that close for so
many years. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
I think there was always a fear that hung over
ever going public. And it wasn't until I stopped worrying
about death quite frankly, that I didn't care anymore, and
I just felt that it is time to tell our stories.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I'm glad they did. I'm glad all these witnesses have talked.
And again, our podcast isn't about trying to prove Roswell
to anybody. There's other podcasts that have tried to do that.
We talk about film and TV and try to look
into some of what has happened in the world like
that and try to interpret it. We have to talk
right now about what I think is the seminal film
(18:23):
about Roswell that has been made to this point, and
it's a movie that's called Oh wait, it's called Roswell.
Yes it is.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
But one last thing I just want to put on
the docket because I think it's going to inform some
of what we're going to talk about with this movie,
and that is that Roswell is generally considered ground zero
for the UFO cover up, which is going on seventy
nine years now. I think it's really interesting some of
the things we're going to talk about, not just what's
in the movie, but everything surrounding that movie as well.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
One of the great things about doing this podcast with you, Brent,
is that we've said a general area we're going to
talk about this, So in this case, we're saying, we're
going to look into whether our JFK. Roswell connection actually
could have been real, and it was out why they
came to us, So you start to look into things.
And I watched the Roswell movie back when it aired,
(19:14):
and it was on Showtime back in nineteen ninety four,
and I've seen it another time in between, and I
watched it last week where I found a copy of
it on YouTube. It's a powerful film and it has
so many behind the scenes things. But just to give
people what we say is the log line, there's many
ways to describe the log line. Here's the shortest one
(19:34):
I could figure out. In nineteen forty seven, Roswell, a
military intelligence officer uncovers evidence of a crashed alien craft,
only to be drawn into a sweeping government cover up
that will haunt him for decades.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's a good description. We're talking about Jesse Marcel played
by Kyle McLaughlin.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yes, of Twin Peaks, which, by the way, just before
we get in and do the Roswell thing, we could
have mentioned Twin Peaks when we were doing our lightning.
That's kind of thing because Twin Peaks clearly has a
lot to say about aliens or not even aliens, because
in Twin Peaks, the mysterious force may not be alien
(20:14):
at all.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
It's a non human intelligence.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, it sounds like it's interdimensional. It's ancient, it's psychic,
it's evil, and it's already here. And one thing I
did find though, while we're researching it, they don't, specifically,
the best of my knowledge, invoke Roswell in Twin Peaks.
That's in the series. But Mark Frost, who I believe
is the creator of co creator with co creator along
with the peopleage, he wrote a book, The Secret History
(20:40):
of Twin Peaks, and he does invoke it there. He
does say that this Douglas Milford character was building a
shadow blue book inside of Twin Peaks and it was
based on Roswell. That kind of thing. So Roswell got
its fair share of discussion then. But let's talk about
that movie. You just saw it. Tell me your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I thought the recreation of the time period back in
the forties was quite well done. I've always liked Kyle maclachan.
I thought he was quite good overall. I really liked it.
The writing, the direction, the production design, the acting. It
was all top quality, and I think that what appealed
to me most was that kind of emotional arc that
Jesse Marcel had somebody who you know back in the
(21:27):
forties was portrayed as a very solid and reliable intelligence
officer who gets caught up in this whole thing and
they make him the fall guy. He then is, as
you said, haunted for the rest of his life by
this choice that he made to go along with the
cover up. The nice thing they do in this movie
is they're jumping back and forth between the forties when
(21:50):
this happened and later in life when he's coming together
for a reunion with the five h ninth bomber squad
back at the base, and him trying to as he's
getting old and they imply he's close to death, trying
to make sense of what happened and get some information
that would close the loop for him on what really happened.
(22:12):
Did I remember this correctly? Have I forgotten that? Like
what really happened? And I thought that part of the
story that a man trying to close the book on
something that happened to him, possibly a bad choice he
made earlier in his life, was very compelling. It was moving.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Jesse Marcel's son is a character in that movie. I
actually met his real son who was passed on, but
he certainly suffered fools, not gladly at all, and said, no,
this was not a weather balloon that dad brought home
in the middle of the night. It was clearly something extraordinary.
Speaking of extraordinary things, though you did say it was
(22:48):
so well written, it was written by a playwright, and
I believe that is Arthur Koppitt playwright, and Jeremy Kagan
was the director, but the creative force behind it was
a gentleman called Paul David's. Paul David's is the one
that sort of made it happen, and we'll get into
that in a second. We like to say there's a
story behind the story. So what you just described and
(23:09):
the logline I gave you, that's the top level, the
top of the pyramid about what it's about. But there's
a story behind it. Here's one for you. The Roswell
film was originally set up at HBO, but it aired
on Showtime and apparently HBO's I don't know if he
was the chair or the president or whatever. Michael Fuchs.
(23:31):
By the way, it's based on a book that Don
Schmidt wrote with his first partner, Kevin Randall and Michael
Fuchs was on the plane back from New York and
got off and they were already casting. And when he
got off the plane, he said, we're not doing the
movie anymore because it's too controversial. That's what Don Schmitt
was told. Wow, and they dropped it. And God bless
(23:51):
Showtime because within one week apparently it was then set
up at Showtime and the entire creative team in Moss
moved moved from HBO to Showtime and one other quick
aside when it was at HBO. At the very beginning,
HBO hired a guy named John Adam who was a
stringer for Spy magazine and also for the New York Times,
(24:14):
and they hired him at HBO to conduct an independent investigation.
I've read this report. It's ninety five pages long, right,
and John Adam concludes at the end of this report
there are only two possibilities. A. It happened as exactly
stated in the book okay, which is called UFO Crash
at Roswell or b the most elaborate hoax he's ever seen.
(24:38):
Those are the only two choices. Interesting, Yeah, here's one
other factoid, the entire project got set up before the
book was even written. They heard that Schmidt and his
partner Randall were writing this thing, and Paul David's, who
I mentioned, option this thing and set it up at HBO.
So yeah, kind of behind the scenes kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, on the topic of it being a hoax, there
were a couple things that jumped out at me as
related to eufology that I really appreciated in the movie
because I knew a lot of the story at the
high level, but there were some specific details that I
didn't know. One was I didn't remember, or maybe I
didn't even know that the Army, when they were trying
to spin the whole thing as a cover up, said oh, no,
(25:25):
the bodies that were found were monkeys. They were test monkeys.
And someone in the movie has the line, well, the
government didn't launch monkeys into space until fifty two, which
is five whole years later, so I didn't know that
they were trying to pass them off as monkeys. And again,
you have an intelligence officer, you have a bunch of
like very smart people, capable people that are mistaking monkeys
(25:47):
for aliens. It's very strange. Another thing that I really
liked was how they represented the Rashamon effect, and that
was when they had several people trying to remember what
the UFO looked like and they couldn't agree on it.
They were like, oh, it was cylindrical, No it was domed,
and no it was it had you know, a weird
(26:08):
it was metal. No, it was more like a human
skin or like a reptile skin. And so I think,
as I've said before in various episodes, there's a subjectivity
to all of these experiences, and I think that plays
a big part in it. And that's one of the
things that made that it feel real to me when
I saw the characters not agreeing on exactly what they saw.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Kind of like you and me trying to describe what
kind of pants Jacon exactly. It's a great example where
we both had the same experience. There are things that
people don't agree on. Listen a couple of very quick factoids,
But I would be remiss if I didn't throw these
onto the fire here at this point because they're so interesting. First,
you are right, it is such a great film. It
was nominated for Best TV Movie by the Golden Globes
(26:53):
and by the way, Don Schmid was such an active investigator.
He didn't go to the Golden Globes. You know where
he was. He was in the Marriott Hotel in Albuquerque
because he was interviewing witnesses. So he saw it in
the lobby of the Marriott. This one will kind of
blow your mind. Kyle McLaughlin got the actual role. Christopher
Reeve wanted to play it. Really, Christopher Reeve wanted to
(27:15):
play it. He had read the book. And HBO did
not consider him an A or a B actor. They
considered him a C level actor. Wow. Hard to believe.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No, I don't believe it. I thought he was a
great actor.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
And Showtime when they took it to Showtime, they were
originally pushing for Don Johnson or Ted Danson. Wow. Okay,
well you can just imagine you've just seen this movie.
Those are slightly different movies. Okay. And here's one that's
really important. There is an autopsy scene in the film,
and you get to see the gray that they're working on,
(27:51):
and I believe there's a living one that wakes up
during the autopsy. I talked to Don Schmid about this
just less than a week ago. This astonished me. I
had to write it down because I was like, what
are you kidding me? He said, when it came to
rendering the Grays, we were very strict that we did
not want an accurate portrayal. Really why now, Everything else
(28:12):
I've ever heard dancay about this movie is, oh, you know,
we're trying to get you know, they did a great job.
As you said, they time period, why the Grays, And
the reason was they didn't want to make it so
real that people would watch it and then claim that
they were witnesses or Dad told me he had done this.
They wanted something that wasn't quite right about the Grays
(28:34):
in that film, so that they could weed out people
that were bullshitting them. Interesting, really interesting. This leads me
to the one that I just have been waiting to
talk to you about, because here's what happens in the movie, folks.
Cale McLachlan playing Jesse Marcel is talking to the people
at his reunion and he's asking them to come forward,
(28:55):
and some of them don't want to. He's sort of
an investigator, as he's portrayed in the who's trying to
get straight on what really happened toward the end of
his life. And there are a lot of flashbacks to
his experience back in July of nineteen forty seven, and
while he's at this thing, Martin Sheen is one of
the leads in this movie, and you keep seeing Martin
Sheen with sunglasses on or without him, but he's always
(29:18):
at a distance. He's watching him. And at one point,
Martin Sheen takes Kyle McLaughlin into an airplane hangar and
lays it out for it. What'd you think when you
saw that scene?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
You know what? Honestly, it felt like a scene we
would have written in Dark Skies. I loved it. I
thought it was great. Well, first of all, Martin Sheen's
a great actor, Kyle McLaughlin's a great actors, So seeing
the two of them in this huge, enormous space having
this incredible conversation felt like the climax of the movie.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
By the way, I think Paul David's is responsible for
this scene, which is interesting because he doesn't get credit
for it. He gets one third of the story credit
and doesn't share regular credit, but he's the guy that
came up with all this stuff. And what's so incredible.
Martin Sheen plays a guy named Townshend. I believe, and
it just comes pouring out of him. He lays this
(30:04):
all out. He says, these aliens have been observing humanity
for centuries. They've influenced human history, and there's a quote
in Critical and Startling Ways. He says they'd been genetically
altering human DNA from our very beginnings, and he even
says they inspired humanity's greatest spiritual leaders. I mean, it's
(30:26):
just an avalanche, as you said, of ufology. But here's
the part that is so dark Skiesian to me, okay,
because we went with this kind of thing so often.
Marcel reacts and he says, oh my god, you're telling
me that the missing link could be the result of
alien genetics, and townshend answers, I believe this information is correct,
but who can really say for certain? Yes? And it
(30:48):
reminded me of that scene you and I wrote with
Loanguard talking to Bach who's running Majestic twelve. Loanguard says,
I'm pretty close to the truth, and Buck says, well,
the truth is overrated. Nothing is all true, John. Anyway,
there's only one thing for us to put a bow
on this thing with. We've complained that it's been hard
to watch Dark skies. We talk about it and people
I'd like to watch it, you can't. The DVD took
(31:10):
fourteen years to get made, got made in twenty eleven,
and just last year they don't make it anymore. You
can't watch the DVD. You can't buy the DVD. It's
not streaming anywhere. Guess what other film has that problem?
Roswell it was released once, then it went away as
a VHS. I believe it's been released as a DVD.
You can't get the DVD right now. It's not streaming anywhere.
(31:32):
The only place you and I were able to watch it,
I believe, was on YouTube. Is that true for you?
And according to Don Schmidt, again who knows what he's
talking about, he said that at one time it was
the highest viewed movie at military bases all around the world. Wow,
that's for a period time. And guess what. Then it
went away and now you can't get it.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
So the truth is overrated and sometimes the truth is suppressed.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yeah, listen, nobody wants to be the guy that's claiming
they're suppressing my pride, you know, listen. I mean there's
a lot of reasons why a lot of things are
not available in Hollywood, right, there's distribution issues and all that.
I don't want to wrap myself in victimhood here, but
it is curious because both projects, which came out in
the mid to late nineties, you can't watch right now,
(32:18):
and in particular, Roswell is one that's, you know, really
specific about what happened. It does a really good job.
So I say, I don't care how you have to
watch it. If you could watch it, yeah, I do
recommend it as well. And by the way, I think
that this is a conspiracy episode, so for today anyway,
we can believe that our show was suppressed, just like
(32:40):
the Roswell movie. Let's move on now to the other
big conspiracy theory of the twentieth century, JFK, and how
it connects to Roswell potentially. Boy, what is your take
at this point when you think about what we said?
First of all, I guess we have to say it
though we said in that film that John Loan Guard,
our main character, got a piece of the Roswell crash,
(33:03):
got it to Bobby Kennedy, who got it to JFK,
who got a message to him that said he was
going to tell the story in his second term and
The final scene in Dark Skies is Kennedy being killed
and it being on television and Loan Guard watching it.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
With the implication being that he was silenced because he
was going to go public about Roswell and the larger
truth about UFOs. So, yes, that's what we posited in
our pilot, and I think that if I look it
back on it today, there's a couple things that get
me thinking, are we already mentioned it once? When jac
said you got a lot right, was he talking about
(33:41):
that connection between JFK and UFOs. I think, as we
talked about in a previous episode, there's a really weird
factor where we put out something that we thought was
fiction and now there's these little trace pieces of evidence
and a lot of people connecting dots saying that they're
there's truth behind what we thought was fiction.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
There was no Internet for us during Dark Guys. I
remember in promotion you and I had to get in
a car and drive to NBC where somebody allowed us
to have a chat with.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Little chat room.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
That's all I'm saying. There's no anybody leaked anything to us.
We just made it up. We said, let's take JFK,
let's take UFOs Adam kllider Boom. However, now that we've
done that and time has passed, I have done a
little looking into that, and there is something that's very
true that we should say that we did not know then.
And that was on November twelfth of nineteen sixty three,
(34:37):
which let's do the math, ten days before JFK dies
National Security Action Memorandum two seven to one. So that's
referred to as NSAM two seven to one. It's JFK
pushing space cooperation with the Russians, with the Soviets in
order to avoid starting World War three for an unidentified threat. Now,
(35:03):
he never comes out and says UFOs in this memorandum,
and you can go look it up again NSAM two
seven to one, and it's real. Nobody's doubting that. So
he was concerned ten days before his death about this.
Now he was motivated by fear that these misidentified objects
in orbit would trigger some sort of catastrophic misunderstanding. And
(35:24):
well he should be. I mean, we're still worried about
that today. Right now. There's two other documents. They are
a lot more dicey. There's a second one that's the
same date November twelfth, nineteen sixty three, and it's far
more controversial. This is an alleged memo that JFK wrote
to CI director John McCone requesting UFO intelligence. All right,
(35:47):
and again people debate this heartily, Brent, They talk about
it all the time. Its authenticity is very unproven, but
there are more people willing to say this might have
been the thing. And then there's a third one called
the Burn Memo, which is another highly disputed document suggesting
concern with intelligence circles about Kennedy's inquiries on this. And
(36:09):
so you got these three memos, one of which is
for sure real but isn't specific to UFOs, the second
of which is ify but is about UFOs, and the third,
which is even more iffy but is very specific about
people within the intelligence community worried about JFK. And then
I'll end with this. And then there's Marilyn Monroe. What well.
(36:32):
The other unconfirmed part of the whole JFK UFO thing
is people persistently believe that JFK shared something about UFO
reality with Marilyn Monroe and that she was going to
go public with it, and then she got killed in
nineteen sixty two, I didn't even want to take that
one on, Brent. That's too big for that's above my
pay grade. But that is what people say from time
(36:54):
to time. There's a lot to chew on. There.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
One other thing that I'd love to try and connect
some dots here between Roswell and JFK is a character
from history, not a fictional character, James Forrestall. Oh, yeah,
he appears in the Roswell movie. But why don't you
give us a quick overview on who he was in
relationship to JFK. Potentially?
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Okay, JFK, as many people know, was in the Navy,
and he went into the Navy in late forty one.
I think between October of forty one and I believe
something like February of forty two, he was actually being
looked at by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Does that
ring a bell?
Speaker 2 (37:39):
I've heard that somewhere.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Yeah. And then he ended up being the famous guy
that was the skipper of Pt. One oh nine and
that historic rescue and all of that. But there was
this short window where Oh and I had their hooks
in him for three months or so, and then the
other part of it, to go to your forestall thing
is James Forstall, which I'm going to let you do that.
But James Forestall was someone who was a family friend
(38:04):
of Joseph Kennedy and actually knew the Kennedy kids from
an early age. So in the same way that Harrington
was someone in your neighborhood or in your viewpoint who
you knew, who was a lot older and was obviously
a lot more wired into things.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Okay, So the interesting thing about Forestall is, as I said,
he was a character in the movie and he was
appointed the i think Undersecretary of the Navy, as you mentioned,
he was that from forty four to forty seven. He's
also been linked though to Majestic twelve. According to the
official version of history, though, Forestall was admitted to the
(38:45):
Bethesden Naval Hospital in nineteen forty nine after experiencing a
bit of a mental breakdown from exhaustion and some other stuff.
A few weeks later, he apparently committed suicide, or so
the official story goes. A bunch of people that spent
time with him around then, including his chauffeur and his
replacement for the as the Defense Secretary, found him acting
(39:08):
in good spirits, very normal, as did his nurse at
that time and his psychiatric doctor. For a guy who
was going to kill himself, he gave off no signs
at all that he was in distress, and in fact,
everyone said he seemed to be getting better. One of
the things that's interesting is that because it was a suicide,
there was never an autopsy'd done on him, so any
(39:29):
suspicious or murderous behavior was never going to come to
the surface because there was no reason to think anything
other than suicide. Now, one of the things that is
interesting about how he killed himself is he apparently took
a blanket or a sheet and jumped out his window
and tried to hang himself, but it didn't work and
he fell to his death. Several stories below, someone raised
(39:53):
the question, well, but as a navy veteran, he would
know how to tie a knot, and he wouldn't be
so incompetent be able to figure out how to hang himself.
But anyway, all of that being said, I guess the
question just comes up. Okay, if it wasn't suicide, why
would someone want him dead. It turns out he was
writing some memoirs at the.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Time, and that moment of him jumping out of the
window is taken on and they take the position obviously
that he wasn't suicidal, as you just mentioned. That's why,
by the way, a lot of people you see it
on X all the time, people will say, just so
(40:33):
you know, I'm not feeling suicidal. I love my life,
and if you hear anything other about me, you'll know
it's not the real deal. Because people have controversially died,
and Forrestall is the first one when that happened in
forty nine, and people think he was all over this
UFO issue after Roswell, that he was tied into Roswell,
(40:56):
and then later Kennedy was tied into him. Of course.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Now don't even get me started on the twelve scientists.
By the way, all of them are linked to classified
nuclear and aerospace projects who are all currently missing or dead,
some by suicide allegedly.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
There's just a lot of connections here. I don't think
we'll ever resolve it, Brent. That's the I think that's
the problem with some of these things. We talk about them,
and yeah, we can go back and forth on them,
but can we solve them Unless there's a smoking gun
memo that exists and that has been hidden successfully for
eighty years, we aren't going to know for sure.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, well, and I think the other thing we can't know,
which is frustrating, is going back to how we started
the episode. What was it about our pilot that had
JC say you got a lot right Now that we've
gone down the rabbit hole on both these conspiracies, it
seems to me that it must have had something to
do with the combination of those two. As we said,
(41:53):
that atom collider that we threw them both into, that
was totally unique. At that time.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Our take guarded with Roswell. We did say, let's take
these two conspiracy theories put them together. But we started
with Roswell and said, if you believe Roswell is a
true event, and both of us did. At that time,
we'd done the research and read some books and talked
to some people, and we're relatively sure that you could
make a strong case that Roswell was an anomalous event.
(42:21):
Our take, though, was Roswell's real. If Roswell was real
in nineteen forty seven, the national security state coming out
of World War two would have had to treat it
as a extremely important and be extremely worth keeping secret, to.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
The point that you would threaten the life of a
thirteen year old girl.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
And possibly a president of the United United States. And
so that's where we went with that whole thing. I've
wrestled with this, to be quite honest, I have wrestled
with this, as I'm sure you have for decades, where
I've asked myself, were we really onto something or was
it just coincidence and happenstance. Based on my lived experience
(43:02):
with JC and with what I know today, I think
we had a lot of things right besides just JFK
and Roswell. For example, one of the things was the
Navy's role in all of this, which it then goes
back to Forestall and all that I think it was
that That's what I think.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
I can't validate why JC said what he said. We
didn't think to ask him. But what I can do
is validate him in a really interesting way with regards
to the formula. So we've talked about basically the two
largest conspiracies from the twentieth century, and now let's move
into the twenty first century and to something called CERN.
(43:42):
And maybe before I get into the story, can you
give us a quick recap on what CERN is.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Oh God, I was afraid you'd ask me that, you know,
my friend, if you were going to bring up CERN,
then you have to do that, because I've run dry
so far. So okay.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
So CERN was the largest particle phys laboratory in the world,
located on what's called the Franco Swiss border near Geneva.
It was established in nineteen fifty four. It uses advanced
particle accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider also called the LHC,
to study the fundamental constituents of matter and the universe's structure.
(44:19):
So big heady things they're doing there. The LHC and
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or the RHIC have been
the focus of multiple conspiracy theories because both colliders accelerate
particles to near light speed before letting them smash into
each other. These collisions create and show force interactions similar
(44:42):
to what the universe was like the instant after the
Big Bang. And if I'm not mistaken, are you saying
that this is why people have speculated, and I underline
and put in bold, speculate that somehow, when you turn
on CERN, you are creating parallel universes and portal to
different dimensions and all that absolutely, and there's people who believe,
(45:05):
for various reasons, that we are not just opening portals
to other dimensions, but that it's being used to summon demons,
possibly even the Antichrist. Now obviously these are all just
conspiracy theories, but this is out there, and I think
the real concern, and interestingly to me, how this even
(45:25):
connects back to Roswell and the nuclear bomb base, is
that going back even further to the Manhattan Project. The
Manhattan Project was essentially, as Don Schmidt implied, that whole
area as we were looking for and trying to unlock
our nuclear capabilities, was being visited by UFOs. It was
the most visited area on the planet. Similarly, now today
(45:49):
with the area of CERN, there's been tons of UFO reports.
So it seems that every time we start meddling with
the very fabric of nature, it brings UFOs. So this
is an interesting connection between these two places. So you say, okay, well,
wait a minute, how are you connecting CERN to the formula?
Let me explain something.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
I am saying that by the way, as you said that,
I'm saying, wait, how is he connecting CERN to the formula?
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So yes, okay, So if you remember, or if you
listen to our first episode, JC, at the end of
our meeting with him in the backyard of Bryce's house,
scribbled out something on the back of an ATM deposit
envelope and he folded it up and he handed it
to me and he said, put this in a safety
deposit box for about ten to fifteen years. Then if
(46:36):
we don't make a deal, you'll know that I was
for real. I did just that. I put it in
a safety deposit box. There's a whole Keystone Cops situation
about how it was moved from one box to another
and it was almost lost. But during this time, initially
I didn't realize it was lost. I thought I still
had it somewhere in my possession. As we talked about
the actual symbols on the envelope, what we call the formula,
(46:59):
are inscrutable. They don't make any sense at first glance,
and so I didn't really have anything to go off
in terms of trying to validate this message, this cryptic
message that he gave us. And as Brice said in
ninety six, the Internet wasn't much of a thing. But
as the Internet evolved over the next decade or so,
I started on a fairly regular basis googling or searching
(47:22):
at the time before Google even sound light and frequency,
and I would do that trick where you would put
those words in that order in quotations, so that the
only search results I would get were ones that had
those three words in that order. I didn't want something
I wanted at all, and up until twenty twelve, I
never got anything back. I never got any search results. Now,
(47:45):
to clarify something, there is a quote attributed to Tesla
that's similar, if you want to find the secrets of
the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
But there's actually no official confirmation that Tesla or said
that or wrote that, and it actually doesn't appear to
have surfaced as an Internet meme until around twenty ten. Anyway,
(48:08):
in twenty twelve, around fifteen years after The Dark Sky's
premiere party, just as JC had predicted, I finally got
a hit on my search for sound light and frequency
and Bryce. Do you know where those search results came up? No,
they came up with in reference to a white paper
(48:29):
on cern oh Boy and the discovery of what's known
then as the Higgs bosun or better known as the
God particle, which is a key piece of the quantum
puzzle in terms of understanding where all of matter comes from.
So that article, which unfortunately is no longer online, was
hosted on the cern CDs or the Official Document Server,
(48:52):
and I should have at the time, I didn't know
what would go away gotten a copy of it. But
it was about what was called the Soification of the
God particle. And just to explain that, that's basically where
when the particles are collided in this huge underground facility.
If you're interested in this, please go and do a
(49:13):
deep dive on it. It's fascinating. Basically, it's this huge
atom collider. The particles collide and every once in a
while they create a new particle, and they finally created
something called the Higgs bosson and it was of course
being measured in every way you can imagine. And they
captured the audio of that collision and they did a
(49:35):
study of it and what was called the Soonification, and
they took all of the raw data from that collision
which revealed this key piece of the universe and it
actually has a melodic pattern to it. So what we're
talking about is essentially the soundtrack of Creation.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
So I say, this soundtrack on y Apple music or anything.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
It's online, you can find it. I think we could
play a little sample of right here.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Oh this is exciting. Okay, I'm ready. Excuse me, Brent,
but WT Yeah, what am I listening to? Well, it's
(50:21):
obviously a musicians interpretation of that raw data. So it
was all of the sound frequency that came through had
corresponding data to it, and when played as a musical scale,
this is what it sounds like. So this wasn't actually
what it sounded like, but this is what it looked
like and how it was interpreted by musicians. What I
(50:44):
find fascinating is that people have always said, you know,
mathematics is the language of the universe, but music is mathematics,
and so the idea that it's all tied together is
just fascinating. You could say, well, oh, it's just a
coincidence that this happened to make music notes, But when
you think about it, the creation of a particle that
(51:04):
seems to be a key element in understanding reality has
its own musical signature. It implies a lot. I don't
know how to explain it exactly, but it seems fantastic.
The only thing that would be stranger is if it
sounded like the five notes of Close Encounters.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
I was going to say, it isn't exactly on the
level of John Williams, but if maybe if you give
it to him and you let him turn it into something.
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Has cern been turned on? Have we made a black hole?
And are we all doomed?
Speaker 2 (51:34):
What is your thought of Well, similarly to the Manhattan Project,
there were fears that they were going to kill us
all right, trying to make a nuclear bomb. That didn't happen. Similarly,
as far as we know, we are still all alive
and living in reality, unless we're in an episode of
Lost somehow. So I think that the real interesting thing
(51:54):
to me is, let's go back to JC. Yeah, he
gives us this piece of paper, tells us to put
it away for ten to fifteen years, right in case
we don't make a deal. Right, he wants to prove
that he's for real. Wow, what a long tail on validation. Right,
So what I have to ask, and I'm going to
ask you, and I'm going to ask our listeners, how
(52:16):
could JC in nineteen ninety six have given us a
piece of paper with a phrase sound, light and frequency
told us to put it away and that at that time,
around fifteen years, we would have proof that he was
for real. Does that How do you explain that he
connected the dots somehow in ninety six to the discovery
(52:38):
of the God particle, which proves basically the foundation of
quantum physics. Is that just a coincidence? Maybe my head
just exploded over that. I think it's still exploding. I
don't have a good answer to that question right now, Brent,
But I do have an answer to another question. People
are asking if I can diverge long enough to talk
(52:59):
about the formula, which I sometimes call the envelope because
it was written on an envelope. People say, why don't
you guys just put it out on the internet right
now and we'll all take a look at it. And
I think the answer is we're still investigating it, we're
sharing it with people. We're trying to get our own
act together about what we think it is. We're not
hiding it. We're going to put it out there. Our plan, folks,
(53:22):
is to do what we just did with those postcards,
which if you go to our website you can look
at them right now. They were out when the episode
came out, and if you want to put something on
your calendar, our plan right now is that on September seventeenth,
we're going to do an episode of Sound Light and
Frequency about the formula slash envelope. We're going to put
it in that episode, we're going to put it on
(53:43):
our website, and we're going to let everybody else take
a crack at it. That sound about right, yes, and
we're going to share the analysis we've collected from a
number of people. And just in the intervening episodes, I
want to say, as with this chapter in the subplot
of the formula, there are ever more chapters to tell
and I'm embracing you now. They get weirder. You're in
(54:05):
for a wild ride.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel, That's Me and Brent Friedman. Watch the
Skies
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