April 23, 2026 • 51 mins
During prep for Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman are digging through old Dark Skies files when they stumble on two artifacts they’d almost forgotten existed—objects so specific, and so unsettling, that they instantly revive a feeling they thought they’d outgrown: paranoia. Not the famous envelope. Not the party-crasher story. Something else. Something that arrives at exactly the wrong moment in their lives—right as a network series is being born—and seems to speak in a voice that doesn’t feel like fandom at all. Thirty years later, rediscovered in a file drawer, it still lands like a cold hand on the neck.
To make sense of what they’ve found, Bryce and Brent take a sideways detour into the eerie Amazon cult favorite The Vast of Night, a film built out of sound, light, and frequency—and out of the creeping dread that comes when an ordinary channel suddenly carries an impossible message. If you’ve ever felt your brain “tune” itself toward the unknown—listening too closely, replaying a moment, wondering who else might be listening—this is the exact mood they’re living in again, right now.
And then the story turns: because whatever these artifacts are, there are two of them, they arrive days apart, and they don’t just unsettle Bryce and Brent—they seem to change the terms of the relationship, as if someone is watching from the edge of the frame and wants them to know it. Who sent them? Why? And what does it mean that the message waited thirty years to come back into their hands? Tune in to find out what Bryce and Brent uncovered—and why it still gets under their skin.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I had a friend come visit me, who I will
just say worked for one of the alphabet agencies. And
he came to our house and when my wife was
out of the room, he took me aside and he said, hey,
by the way, do you know that your phone is tapped?
And I thought, what do you mean? He said, yeah, no,
there's five or six different wiretaps on this I can tell.
This is what I do.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Think about that somebody's telling you your phone is tapped.
We haven't even shot anything. We're not on the air.
It's curious about the selection of those four words we
are watching you. It's not like I'm watching you. It's we,
which raises a lot of questions. Who is this we?
Who would that be? I'm Brice Sable. Have you ever
(00:59):
wondered if there's a secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
And I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to Sound, Light
and Frequency.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
While preparing for this podcast. I've been going through all
my old files and I've found something.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And what we have learned is that paranoia strikes deep
for a very good reason.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
The thing about doing this podcast Sound Light and Frequency
is that we've relied a lot on using our old
files and so forth to try to tell the story
of what happened during Dark Skies from ninety five to
ninety seven. Anybody who's worked a long time in Hollywood
certainly knows that you collect stuff. You collect scripts, you collect, transcripts,
(01:50):
show cuts, edits, everything, fan mail, photos, you name it,
You've got it. I've got boxes and boxes of it,
and I'm going through it, and have been going through
it since we started. I cannot compete with you, Bryce.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
You probably have exponentially more stuff than I have in
terms of what you've collected. I started practicing letting go
about five years ago, which.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Has been very liberating.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Unfortunately, like I said, I probably have much less than
you with regards to even Dark Sky's memorabilia.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I wish you hadn't let go of so many things,
because there's gold in them there file boxes, Brent, and
I'll tell you something. One of them was, I don't
know if you let go of it. I cannot imagine
you would have let go of your magic badge. Now
you said you did, did you like go of?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That was not a letting go, That was just a losing.
That was just a plain old incompetence I had that
for a long time. It used to be like hung
up on something in my office as just a reminder
of how fun those days were. And then it went missing,
like a number of things in my life, and I've
never found it. I should probably pay my daughter five
hundred dollars to go look for it, but honestly, I
(02:57):
cannot find it anywhere. And it's very upsetting because that
was the one memento from that party that I would
love to wear proudly.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And by magic badge, we mean m ajic is in Majestic,
MJ Magic twelve, that kind of thing, not magic, m
a g ic. We gave a badge, as we've said before,
to everybody at our Dark Sky's premiere party back in
ninety six, and the only guy that didn't have one
was JC except I also found out that I had
(03:27):
misplaced mine. It was driving me nuts, so I started
going through more boxes and Brent, I have an announcement
to make Oh no, now I feel I have my
magic badge. Yep now, and those of you, yeah, you
describe it For those of people who are listening to
us instead of watching this, I think let's start with
the headline, which is mullet and yeah, that is the
headline I had an Unfortunately, my kids have never stopped
(03:51):
teasing me about that, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, No, you look like an operative. You look like
you could have worked for Majestic in the day in
that photo.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
No, but it's super cool.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Actually looks like it could have been authentic, which I
think is the highest compliment.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I wish we could remember who exactly designed it, because
it's cool. Somebody in the art department, I'm sure, yeah,
and they did a great little job. And here's the thing.
On the back side. It's literally got a thumb print,
which would have been the way up to id yourself
back in the sixties when we were saying our series
took place. Although that is not my thumb print, it's
(04:25):
just a generic I'm sure it's on everybody's magic badge,
including yours. Anyway, these things were cool. I'm glad to
have it back. I actually have a digital copy of yours.
So our show today will actually have you and me
side by side brought together again. Butch and Sundi ence
at the Magic Corral, so that would be good. The
thing is, we have found something else. It's some physical evidence,
(04:48):
if you will or at least suggestive of evidence while
getting ready to do this podcast, and we want to
bring it to everyone's attention. The thing is, we want
to do a short amount of setting the timeframe for everybody,
because when we show you what we have found, it's
important to know when it came out and what it
was surrounded by, just to get that party started. Everyone
(05:10):
by now Brent knows about the Dark Sky's Party, but
that was September of nineteen ninety six, Okay, but we
need to roll back to ninety four is when you
and I met and started talking about Dark Skies. But
the first real year that we need to say belonged
to that show is nineteen ninety five, and it started
in January, on literally January, tewod with the Loan Guard Letter,
(05:34):
which we talked about in a previous episode, and things
picked up in intensity. I'm sure you remember all of that.
But after the Loan Guard Letter, we started doing those
notebooks for real, and the Loan Guard Letter was in it,
so was all that other stuff. We started building notebooks,
and as you said, we went to Kinko's all the time.
That was fun. The script we had included in that
(05:57):
notebook an outline of a two hour pilot, but we
had not written it. We were in March talking about
picking up Dark Skies to various production companies, and the
one we settled on was Columbia TV in March, and
we instantly had them order a script from us. So
we were working in March in May on the Dark
(06:19):
Sky's two hour pilot. I bet you remember those days.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I do, And I want to give a nod to
our patron saint at Sony, Jeff Sagansky, who I remember
he apparently bought the show as he stepped off the
concorde in Paris, he having just read the entire briefing
book on the flight across the Atlantic. If it weren't
for him, we wouldn't be telling these stories. And so
again a nod to Jeff Sagansky, who's been what was
(06:48):
central to getting this thing off the ground.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I love hearing that story, and I actually found some
notes recently about that time, and it talks about how
Jeff was very impressed by the notebook. I think he
loved a lot about it, but the notebook he just thought,
I think because Jeff is a pretty good marketer, and
I think he saw the same potential in it that
we saw, so anyway may happens. The script gets written,
(07:10):
that's where things get interesting. The script actually got turned
into Columbia TV on my birthday, which is May seventeenth,
and that's why I remember it so well, which allowed
me to turn it in and go away for the weekend,
which is a lovely thing to do, to have nothing
on your plate for an entire week, and that was great.
Then things got interesting because we started doing notes on it.
(07:31):
Jeff ordered more notebooks because we were going to get
ready to go pitch this. So at first we'd only
made a certain small smattering of notebooks, these classified briefing notebooks,
and then we got serious. We were doing notebooks by
the dozen, and we were oh man, those were the days. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
No, it was a full production that we went into
in terms of producing those notebooks, and I don't remember.
I think we made ten or twelve of them, or
maybe even twenty. But it was a huge undertaking, a
lot of fun to produce all of those. But I
think the main thing that I take away is that
we were so steeped in dark skies at that time.
(08:10):
Everything was dark skies, like twenty four to seven except
for that one weekend you took off. Because we were
getting the show off the ground. This was a dream
come true. And as we talked about before with the
Low and Guard letter, we were selling this show. And
you said Jeff Sigansky was a showman. We had some
showmanship in terms of all of the marketing, the collateral
(08:30):
marketing that we put together to get the show off
the ground, which is interesting in terms of where it
all leads with your story you're about to tell.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
My favorite memory of putting all those notebooks together for
Columbia TV was that they were paying for them for
a change. The first one we had to go shell
out of our own pocket, and everyone had a certain
cost to it. I don't remember what the unit cost was,
but it wasn't small, and so it was nice that
they did it. Anyway, those notebooks got made in June,
(08:58):
because the first week of July of ninety five is
when we went out and pitched this to three different
networks in the same day, got offers from CBS and
NBC and decided to go with NBC. So sometime in July,
NBC is getting involved in our life. And here's where
the rubber meets the road on this story, NBC picks
(09:21):
it up and says, listen, we need to see this pilot.
We're putting your pilot into production. So suddenly you and
I are in pre production for this two hour pilot
that although it wasn't written on spec, it wasn't written
for the network. It was written for Sagansky and his
executive team at Columbia TV. And I'm sure there were
(09:41):
some bruised feelings at some network level by people that said,
wait a minute, we don't even get to develop this thing.
You just bought it. But that's what happened. So this
thing goes into pre production at the same time that
it's going into pre production, though NBC had ordered six
backup scripts, and to explain what that means is just
NBC wanted to make sure that if they shot this pilot,
(10:04):
we had a plan for where we were going. But
more than that, they didn't want to look at just
some little document you and I put together that said
this is our plan for the series. They wanted to
read scripts. So we had two things going on at
the same time in July, which was prepare for pre
production which would start soon, and also get these scripts
done and the reason we were preparing for pre production is,
(10:27):
as it turns out, we started shooting the Dark Skies
to hour pilot on November eighth of nineteen ninety five,
so that was looming as a deadline. Okay, what I'm
about to show you, folks, is something that it's not
like Brent and I forgot about it, but we saw
this when it happened, had definite feelings about it, and
then got involved in producing Dark Skies and to complete
(10:50):
that metaphor. What then ended up happening is that it
got put in one of my boxes and filed away
with everything else, and then life went on right. I
had three kids, and I had other shows that I
was working on afterwards, as did you, and Memory being
what it was, these things fell out of my mind
and then they fell back in recently, quite recently, while
(11:14):
working on Sound lad and Frequency. Here's what happened. It's
August and we're in the middle of all of this,
and I'll go to my mailbox one day and people
actually got mail back then. I don't know how many
people are actually getting mail. If you get mail anymore,
I get junk mail, I get junk mail, I get bills,
(11:35):
but back then sometimes you could get something that was
worth reading. Sometimes somebody would send you a letter or something,
so it's still worth going to the mailbox. I went
to the mailbox that day and I got a postcard.
This is the postcard, all right. As you look at
this thing, you see it's got a book cover on it.
The book is actually called The Flying Eyes. It was
(11:58):
published in nineteen six two by the author J. Hunter Holly,
and it basically is a I don't know, it's flying eyes. Okay,
it's flying eyes. It's strange. It caught my attention.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
But it's an alien invasion with flying eyes essentially, right.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Which as I understand it, I have not read it.
But these levitating eyes could hypnotize people on moss and
they were bizarrely resilient. You could shoot them, as I
understand it, and they would reconstitute themselves. But basically it's
the surveillance thing. These eyes basically are looking down on
people from the sky. Now, if that sounds familiar to
(12:37):
the UFO issue, congratulations, we'll send you a prize. What happened, though,
is I read the back of it and I was
shocked because there were four words and they are not
written across like a normal sentence. They are stacked. They
are stacked one word another word, and they're all typed
in curier front. They're all capitalized, and it's obvious clear
(13:01):
that a very full ribbon has been used. And they
shocked me, they freaked me out. And this is what
they said, we are watching you bring back some memories.
It does not good memories either. Although I will say
that there was the initial this is just a joke, right,
And I think you assumed I did it. I don't
(13:23):
think I actually thought you had done it to yourself.
That's a double backslip of reality even I can't pull
right off.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, so I think once we got past the did
you do it?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Did you do it? Did you do it?
Speaker 1 (13:34):
And it was clear that neither one of us did
it to each other, then the creepiness started settling in. Because,
of course, let's not forget you gave a great set
the table of context of what was going on at
the time. But even go back a little bit further.
We were doing a show in which I had taken
information given to me by John Harrington, the man in
(13:55):
the Reagan administration who disclosed to me, and we had
woven some of those ideas into our show, and so
for someone to be watching us sent a shiver down
my spine. And this was even before JC.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
My spine didn't get completely shivered until we talked. I
got this, and I thought this is quite odd. And
I thought it was odd enough that my wife reminds
me she didn't learn about these things till much later. Right.
I must have been somewhat freaked out a little bit
by the postcard that I didn't show it to her.
I did take it to the office right away. And
(14:31):
this postcard, by the way, is August nineteenth, nineteen ninety five.
I took it to the office and showed it to you,
and you're correct. My first take that I wanted to
rule out was that somehow, because of our notebooks and
the whole idea of surveillance and us being in the
middle of it, that you had just found this postcard
(14:52):
and thought this will be a fun thing. I'll pull
one over on Bryce. So I showed it to you,
and it was very clear that you had not done that.
Not only did you say you hadn't done it, but
you were clearly surprised enough by it that you were thinking,
this is not good. This is very strange, and I
want to just remind the audience. This is August of
ninety five, which is thirteen entire months before that Dark
(15:16):
Sky's premiere party, when the actual show would air on
NBC and JC would come to my house and offer
a cooperation deal with the Office of Naval Intelligence. So
this was something that was troubling. I thought it was
very troubling because first of all, somebody had gone to
the trouble to find a postcard that is literally eyes
(15:38):
in the sky watching you, and then they'd boiled it
down to the basic surveillance motif we are watching you.
It's troubling, yeah, it is.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Once we got past the obvious, it raised the question
of who could have sent this, and that's a whole
rabbit hole we can go down, and we will, but
I want to just rewind because I was already on edge,
as I said, by doing Dark Skuys in the first place,
so when this happened, it took all of my paranoia
up a notch and adding more fuel to that flame.
(16:08):
Right around this same time, I remember that I had
a friend come visit me, who I will just say
worked for one of the Alphabet agencies. And he came
to our house, and when my wife was out of
the room, he took me aside and he said, hey,
by the way, do you know that your phone is tapped?
And I thought, what do you mean? He said, yeah, no,
there's five or six different wiretaps on this. I can
(16:29):
tell this is what I do. And I thought, I
don't understand. Why would my phone be tapped. He goes,
when you put a show like Dark Sky's on the air,
there's probably people want to know what you're talking about
behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And I'm like, can you get rid of it?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
And he goes, that's is way above my pay grade.
So I had this whole other layer now where you're
getting postcards talking to both of us that were being
surveilled or watched with a flying Eyes message on there.
That's not too subtle. And meanwhile I'm finding out that
my phone is tapped at home. And I think the
title we used, or we were going to use for
(17:03):
one of our scripts was Paranoia Strikes Deep, and that
was from the exit music for our pilot, the Buffalo
Springfield song for what It's Worth. That was one of
the lines. And I got to tell you at this
time paranoia had struck deep in me, and I was
really worried. And like you said, we hadn't even shot
the pilot yet, and I was already on edge.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Think about that, somebody's telling you your phone is tapped.
We haven't even shot anything. We're not on the air.
It's curious about the selection of those four words. We
are watching you. It's not like I'm watching you, it's we,
which raises a lot of questions. Who is this we?
Who would that be? Just a couple of things to
unpack from what you just said the phone tap kind
(17:45):
of idea. No one ever told me my phone was
tapped that I remember you telling me that story, and
all I remember was this. I had for a couple
of months of feeling, Well, here's the thing. When I
was a kid growing up in the six people had
party lines, which meant that you shared a line with
somebody else. I've heard like you'd be having a call
(18:07):
with somebody and you'd hear this technical click kind of thing,
and you'd know that somebody on the other party line
was listening to your phone call. And so people would
have conversations like, hey, I'm on the phone here, and
the party line person would say, yeah, but I got
to make a phone call. It's important. I have to
call my doctor, and you'd say, I'm wrapping up, give
(18:27):
me a five minutes. You'd have conversations with people you
did not know. Right, it's so strange to say to
that to anybody today, But party lines were a thing anyway.
You did hear clicks and things because of that, and
then for many years I never heard anything like that.
But when we started doing dark skies, I did hear
these sort of technical things, and I haven't thought too
(18:50):
much of it. I thought we got a shitty phone line,
to be honest, it was my first thing. I thought,
because that happened, you'd have marginal phone service. That would happen.
But when you told me that, I thought, that's interesting
because I've heard two or three different sounds. They weren't
always the same sound.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
No, it sounded like, ironically like some of the clicking
sounds that you hear in the Disclosure Day trailer. It
was like little popping and clicking, and I guess that
was people tapping in and out of the line.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
What I want to say further to everyone is to
stay with us. Because there was a second postcard and
it came four days later. But I don't want to
talk about that postcard just yet because in preparing for
this show, we've done a little background research and one
of the things that we realized and I'm holding up
a book right now for those of you listening. It's
(19:41):
from Stanton Friedman as the author, and it's called Top
Secret Magic again m Ajiic. And this book came out
in I believe ninety seven, and actually I optioned it.
This was after Dark Shyes, I optioned it because I
thought maybe I can turn this into a movie or something.
In reading through it, though, Stanton tells a story in
(20:02):
this book. And again this came out after our postcards. Well,
even though it has been.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
I just want to interrupt for a second, because, first
of all, you were friends with Stanton Friedman. But for
those who don't know who Stanton Friedman is, he was
someone pretty important in neufology.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Stanton Friedman was the wizard of euthology. He was a
nuclear physicist who basically quit his job in the I
think the late fifties and then became the voice of
UFO research in the sixties. Fascinating guy really walked the walk.
The guy was a tremendous researcher and gave his life
(20:38):
and abilities to it. But one of the things that
I realized in there, and by the way, if any
of you owned this book, it's on page eighty nine
in both the hardcover and the soft cover, which I
don't know how that happened, but that's the truth. Stanton
had been working with two other UFO researchers in the
late eighties, and they were Heimi Shandera and Bill Moore,
(20:59):
and Sandra had received a role of undeveloped film in
the mail and they had developed the film, and the
film was a document. And that document been formed not
only ufology for a while and became incredibly controversial, but
it was something you and I embraced for dark skies,
and it was basically what we now have come to
(21:21):
know the Eisenhower Briefing document, and that is a document
that was supposedly created on November eighteenth, nineteen fifty two,
for Dwight Eisenhower, who had just been elected president, who
was getting briefed before he would take office the next
early the next year, and it basically said braswell was
real that we had bodies there rather crashes. It's a
(21:43):
profound document, and one of the things in it is
that it also said that there was a memo called
the Cutler Twining Memo that said MJ twelve is real
because it basically is a memo from Ike's chief of
staff asking for a meeting for some thing called m
J twelve. After they developed this film and saw the
(22:05):
Majestic twelve documents, it's pretty fascinating, Brent, and it's laid
out in Stan's book. They claimed they had received some
postcards in the mail and that these postcards had some
specific information on them. One of the things that they
did is they talked about Suitland, they talked about Reese's Pieces,
(22:27):
and they talked about Box one eighty nine, and they
were mailed from Believe, Ethiopia. That's where they said they
were from. Here's the thing. Reese's Pieces refers to a
guy named Ed Reese who ran the National Archives, and
Suitland refers to Suitland, Maryland, which is where the archives
were located. And when Shandera and Moore went to those
(22:51):
archives and spent days going through stuff, they literally ended
up in Box one eighty nine where they found that
Cutler Twining memo from nineteen fifty four from Ike and
it was just in the middle of the files. So
I guess what I'm saying is there is precedent for
(23:12):
what you and I went through that somebody was using postcards.
Now it might have been disinformation, it might have been
just somebody trying to have fun with UFO researchers. That's possible,
and we can get into more of that later, but
it was pretty real to them at the time.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
I have two thoughts on this. The first is I'm jealous.
They get a postcard that sounds or postcards. It sounds
like it's an alternate reality game or an escape room.
They get to go on a treasure hunt and find
something cool. We just get a threat. If I could
do it all over again, I'd prefer the fun game
that we can go on our treasure hunt. Secondarily, if
I'm not mistaken, William Moore had quite an interesting presence
(23:58):
in ufology, and so I'm curious on your.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Opinion of that.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Maybe you can give us a little background on him,
but also does that undercut or undermine the credibility of
this twining memo?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Ah fascinating. First of all, Twining is invoked twice in ufology,
in nineteen forty seven, Nathan Twining, who was Lieutenant General
Nathan Twining of the Army Air Forces, had written a
memo that he was told to write. This is a
real memo. It was released under Freedom of Information Act.
It's the real thing. The government admits it's real. It's
(24:32):
a memo from Nathan Twining where he stated that the
objects seen by military personnel were not whether astronomical or
other phenomenon, but rather objects that warranted further investigation. And
this is the memo people might have heard about. In
that memo, it says, quote, the phenomenon reported is something
real and not visionary or fictitious. That's about as clean
(24:55):
a statement the US government has ever made, ever, ever amazing.
And again, that is the Twining memo. Now, the Cutler
Twining memo is the one that showed up in the
Majestic twelve documents, and that was the one that was
used to say MJ twelve is real because here's a
memo from Ike and all that. But of course, if
(25:18):
you don't believe the Majestic twelve documents are real, then
you might not believe that document is real. And I
know this sounds arcane, but the date of the Twining
Memo where he said the phenomenon is real is September
twenty three, nineteen forty seven. But what's pretty interesting is
that the Eisenhower briefing document, the memo it has the
(25:38):
Truman Forestall Memo inside. That briefing document is dated September
twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven, the day after the so
called Twining Memo, and in that one it says, quote,
as per our recent conversation on the matter, you are
hereby authorized, and by the way, this is from Harry Truman.
You are hereby authorized. Proceed with all due speed and
(26:01):
caution upon your undertaking hereafter this matter shall be referred
to only as Operation Majestic twelve. So let me put
it this way. If that memo is fake, as many
people try to allege, then at least whoever wrote it
and put it inside the Eyesenow rebriefing Memo knew about
the Twining Memo and managed to put these dates together.
(26:24):
So the whole thing is this arcane but fascinating thing,
and somehow we're in the middle of that thing. That
freaks me out too.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, I'm fascinated by this concept that this was a
form of communication between the people in the shadows and
people like you and I out trying to make a
TV show or investigate something. You're getting postcards in the
mail from somewhere out in the world, in this case Ethiopia.
Even looking back on ours, we got ours from Santa Clarita,
(26:52):
which was way outside of La but it was very
close to the area we ended up shooting later, our
crop circle sequence. We didn't know anyone that lived out
in Santa Clarita, and I'm sure these two gentlemen didn't
know anyone in Ethiopia. You get something in the mail
from an unknown source, and in their case it led
to supposedly a document that became foundational in ufology. And
(27:15):
for us, again it was a threat. It was, or
at least a vague threat. And I have to believe
that in both cases these were done intentionally. The question
as comes up a lot, was it done to help
us to lead us down a path, to send us
a signal, or was it done to disinform us to
throw us off the scent. That's the most frustrating thing
(27:36):
is that we can't discern the intention here.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
I want to talk more about that, but let's take
a little sidebar, because one of the things you mentioned,
Brent was that Paranoia Strikes Deep, which is a line
from the song for what It's Worth, written by Buffalo's
Springfield and performed by Buffalo Springfield, and that's the one
where it says there's a man with a gun over
there telling me, I gotta beware. Paranoia strikes deep into
(27:59):
your heart. It will creep. And we love that song.
We did, in fact use it in our Dark Sky's pilot,
and in fact, one of those backup scripts that you
and I were writing was called Paranoia Strikes Deep, and
we did in fact write that script and it never
got shot. It's the lost episode of Dark Skies, along
with some of those others that other writers have done
(28:20):
as well. But Paranoia Strikes Deep reminds me of a
movie that I have seen recently and you just saw recently.
I think we should take a little detour.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah, yeah, let's do that, because I think this movie
is a great example of how you can tell a
really compelling UAP alien story without a big budget and
big special effects. And it captured that sense of kind
of escalating paranoia incredibly well, which makes it very relevant
to discussion we're having listen.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
The movie we're talking about, of course, is The vast
of Night. Okay, it was released in twenty nineteen. I
think it came out and was winning awards. Yeah, it
was produced in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think it was in a few film festivals. But
then it premiered on Amazon in twenty twenty, and.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I remember seeing it. That was during the lockdown, the
COVID lockdown, and at the time, my daughter and her
best friend were living at my house, and so we
all watched it together, and my daughter's friend said, that's
the best film I've ever seen. But I'll tell you
what's interesting about it. We always try to do the
log line. The log line for Vastia Night is I'm
(29:27):
just to complete what it is. It's a micro budget
it's a kind of an inventive UFO mystery, and it
takes place in one night in nineteen fifties New Mexico
in a small town, and it's really two main characters,
a switchboard operator and a radio DJ, who are chasing
down a mysterious audio frequency that's happening when strange lights
(29:51):
are in town and if anybody has missed that that
would be sound an audio recording that has shown up
and light str range, dancing lights on the edge of town,
and frequency because it's coming out over a radio transmission.
I don't know. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.
Maybe I knew we were going to do this podcast
(30:12):
a good six years ago, Brent, and now I'm finally
catching up to that. Maybe we're influence.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
We have so far focused on some of the big
formative movies in science fiction with regards to UAP and aliens.
We've done a lot of big movies, but I think
this is one of the things we also wanted to do.
Was there's going to be certain movies that are out
there like this one, which I highly recommend, that just
evaded everyone's radar. I had never heard of it before
(30:38):
until Bryce brought it up for me. And this is
the kind of thing that we'd also like the show
to do, is encourage you to go back and watch this.
We've talked about some movies on the show that I
wouldn't encourage that this one I would. The thing I
found fascinating when I dug into it a little bit
is that it's loosely based on two actual events from history.
(30:59):
One of them was the Kesburg Ufo incident, which happened
in Pennsylvania in nineteen sixty five. What happened was a
bunch of citizens and even some pilots at the time
reported this huge fireball going across the sky and the
people saw it. It hit somewhere in the vicinity and
it apparently it was dropping like a bunch of hot
(31:22):
metal debris as it went across the sky. And then
where it hit, that whole area was immediately sealed off
by army and state police. Now, ultimately the official explanation
was it was a meteor. That was what everyone the
news tried to push out there. But then NASA came
forward later and claimed that it was a Soviet satellite. However, interestingly,
(31:45):
in nineteen eighty seven, a few years later, NASA claimed, oh,
all the evidence for that Soviet satellite that's been lost.
As the kids like to say, vary sus. That incident,
interestingly has been nicknamed Pennsylvania's ros Well.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
And that one is unsolved to this day. Correct and
based on witnesses, it probably was solved. Listen. First of all,
I like this movie. It may not be for everybody.
It's interesting that critics love this movie, but people that
watch it are a little more at sea about it.
Some of them think it's too slow or whatever. And
the reason they think it's too slow is that the
(32:22):
director Andrew Patterson, who did a really nice job with it.
But the director has chosen to go with these extremely
long scenes, and there's many of them. I think there's
like half the number of cuts in this film that
would be in a normal film, as I understand it.
But what I love about it is that there are
two scenes where someone just basically talks and it's creepy
(32:48):
and interesting and I just recommend it. And here's the thing.
The guy's running a radio broadcast and everyone's at the
basketball game that night, so he's all alone. He's taken
calls and people are reporting these dancing lights and things
in the sky, and he's asking for information, and a
guy named Billy calls in, and Billy says he has
(33:10):
served in the military. He was taken to a secret
desert site where personnel built a large underground structure to
house a mysterious object, and they were told if they
talked about it, it would endanger America. Now, this is
a long scene and it's so great, but the idea
of the mystery building that sounds like the one that's
(33:30):
rumored that Coultart first started talking about a couple of
years ago, which I don't think I'm violating anybody's suspicions
to say that. People talk about it being in South Korea.
Nobody has confirmed that or anything. That's just what people
say on the internet. In any case, what I really
found fascinating about this guy and this story is that
he says a couple of things. He says it was
(33:53):
bigger than an airplane, but no one was allowed to
see it, which again fits in with the large thing
that Coultart was talking about. He said they had to
dig a hole to put this enormous thing in it,
and it was covered with a tarp, and it's just
so creepy the way he talks about it. And he
said that he was picked to do it because he
was black and people that were on the crew were
(34:14):
largely black and Mexican, to make sure that their testimony
wouldn't be taken as seriously, which frankly sounds realistic and
for that era, yeah, for sure. And then there's this
second interview where they that's when they're on the air
the first one. The second one, they go to somebody's house.
A woman has called in and said, I know all
about this. Come over. And they come over to this
woman's house. Her name is Mabel, and she says basically,
(34:38):
they've come here before, and she calls them the people
in the sky and she says, they took my son,
and no one has ever believed me. So the whole
thing is about mystery, but it doesn't really draw a
road map. And I guess the reason I'm comparing it
to this postcard thing is it was something that you
could relate to. They had a sort of a sound
(34:59):
we had postcard and instead of answering questions, it raises questions. Yeah,
at least that's how it hit me.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, I had all the same feels. What I loved
about it was this idea that it took a little
bit of contact, which was this idea of the whole
inciting incident being this mysterious sound that they're hearing, that
people are hearing. And then it combined it with Close
Encounters of the third kind, so two of my favorite
movies in the space, and the way it brought in
the Close Encounters thing was this sound was something that people.
(35:30):
It manipulated them, they became obsessed about it. And part
of what the theory was is that you were trying
to follow the source of this sound and it led
people away from the town out into isolation where they
could be abducted. So that's a really fascinating idea. And
again it connects back for me and how Richard Dreyfuss
(35:52):
and the other characters and Close Encounters got this image
in their head of the Devil's Tower and they became
obsessed with it, and they followed the trail of that
all the way to this encounter with a close Encounter
of the third trind So combining those two elements in
a really original way with a micro budget. By the way,
yes it's a micro budget, but it looks good. It's stylish.
(36:12):
It does not look like a cheap film. It's just
there's a lot of long takes to sign.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Up money, monk takes, and people that like things to
be very well lit will probably be disappointed because a
lot of it is not that well lit. But that's
part of its charm and mystery and all that. Anyway,
it's a good film. But the reason I bring it
up is if you see the vast of night. Then
you will understand what we mean when we say paranoia
strikes deep, because it gets inside you and you go,
(36:39):
I'm disturbed by this. That is exactly what you and
I both felt when we saw the postcards. Or at
least I'm speaking for myself at this point, but I'm
thinking you must have felt something similar to that.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
I felt the exact same things, and I think it's
time to now visit the second postcard.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
It's funny, I just wrote a note to myself that
says second postcard. So here we go. All right, we
told you about postcard number one, the Flying Eyes, where
again it says we are watching you, all right. That
happened on August nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, and you and
I pretty well thought, okay, somebody has sent us a
message that's disconcerting. The show must go on. At least
(37:26):
I think that is what we were doing, because we
didn't have time to sit around and think to ourselves.
Should we look into this. Let's hire a private eye.
Let's do you know there's no internet to search on it.
We couldn't even get the books at that time, right,
Maybe you would have got the books, but it didn't
really look like they were sending a message with the
book cover. It just felt like somebody found a target
(37:47):
of opportunity, bought this postcard, typed in this message. Who
they were, we don't know. Okay. That was where we
were until four days later, on August twenty third, nineteen
ninety five, when we received this postcard, which is Operation Interstellar,
and it is let's see, it's written by George O. Smith. Listen,
(38:08):
I don't know exactly the whole thing about what it's about.
I haven't read it, but it's something about a main
character who believes that real time communication across interstellar distances
is impossible. No, that's the theory that people are saying.
But the main character is a guy named Paul Grayson
who believes in that technology that can have instant communications
(38:31):
across space time. So it is an interesting little secret,
if true. People talk about that right now. But that's
not what got weird about this one for us, because
at that point it was just a book cover, all right.
The back of it is in the same typeface, so
it looks like a courier. It's in all caps, and honestly,
(38:52):
I could send it out to be looked at, but
it's pretty clear to me it's either a matching typewriter
or the same typewriter, and not with a very dark
ribbon like the first one. It's a little lighter ribbon,
which I guess if you were typing a lot four
days later might sit. So this is August twenty third,
and here it comes. This one again is stacked, but
(39:14):
it's more than four words. So it's got phrases that
are stacked. But it says we admire you and are
very impressed by your work. We even take pride in
your accomplishments. There it goes. You can see that there.
Now one of these is a threat, but the other
seems to be something entirely different. It's the push pull.
(39:36):
It's the good cop bad copy. Yeah. I don't have
any good theories on that, other than maybe somebody sent
we are watching you, and somebody in charge of that
person said, that's a ridiculous. Don't freak these guys out,
tell them that we like them, or something that could
have happened. But that second one, four days later, I
should point out before we get into any analysis of it,
(39:58):
is that we never got another one. The best of
my knowledge, I've never seen another one. I never got
another one. You never got another one. But again I
point out August twenty third, Brent, is exactly one month
and one year until JC shows up at our house.
And I was just wondering, did you ever think in retrospect?
(40:18):
You know, at the time we only had our one reaction, right,
but now we have a reaction from thirty years later?
Are you thinking, JC? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (40:27):
So, before I give you my present day theory, my
thought at the time was that it was a friend.
That it wasn't you and I didn't do it, then
it had to be someone in our inner circle who
was doing it as a prank. As you said, maybe
their conscience was what changed them. Maybe they were close
enough to us at the time that they saw that
(40:47):
we were freaked out by the first postcard, that we
are watching you, and so they pulled back and they said,
oh no, we're we admire you, We're proud of your accomplishments.
So that was part of my thinking at the time.
But again, as you said, we didn't have JC as
a suspect at that moment, so I think we just
wrote it off as somebody in our inner circle was
(41:08):
messing with us. Post JC coming into your backyard and
making us a deal. Any paranoia that we had about
the postcards was now living and breathing. It wasn't just
a postcard. It was a person, and it's in my
mind it's hard to believe that wasn't JC sending those postcards,
(41:29):
or at least the office that JC said he worked for,
the Office of Naval Intelligence, because, as we talked about,
it wasn't I'm watching you, I admire, it's we are
watching you, we admire. So you start to look at
all of the circumstantial evidence. The message that JC came
to us with is we've been watching you. We've read
everything that you have written, and we like what you've done.
(41:52):
You got a lot, right, So it felt like those
postcards were announcing his arrival before he even came. However,
he said nothing about that when he talked to us.
There was no hey, did you get my postcards? Or
there was no kind of wink wink reference to we've
been watching you. So if he did go to that trouble,
(42:13):
why didn't he take credit for it? I can't answer
that question, But to this moment, I still contend my
number one suspect is JC.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
It's a good theory. That's what we're left with. This
theory is here, But I have a couple of things
that we have done to track things down and cast
a wider net about what these things might have meant.
It's very clear in looking at these two postcards with
our thirty years experience now to look back at them
in a different way. And one of the things you
could say is the postcards fit the style of that
(42:44):
MJ twelve mystery postcard thing that happened to Shandera and More. Okay, yep,
but I fought Shandera and More. I have never seen
the postcards they claimed were sent to them. So at
least we're showing these postcards and we're putting them on
our website which is sound like frequency dot com, and
we're putting him in this video and we're talking about
(43:05):
him openly. I wish they had because then we would
have the ability to say, wow, that's pretty similar to
our postcard. As it is, we just have their word
for it. Our postcards do fit that mystery postcard tradition.
But what they don't do that the more Chandera postcard
or postcards they said there were multiples, they don't behave
(43:25):
like the breadcrumb trail. They're not saying, they're not giving
us little clues. As you pointed out that you go,
oh great, now let's go investigate this. In fact, one
of them is just saying we're watching you, and the
other is saying, basically, we think you're doing a good job.
But it's like it raises the question, who are you
to tell us we're doing it? I don't even know
(43:45):
who you guys are. So there's that. The other thing
that we've looked into is that postmark. The postmark is
Santa Clarita. And just so people understand, even back in
nineteen ninety five, Santa Clarita was already a major high
volume filming zone in the LA area. It's where they
had movie ranches and infrastructure, and there were a lot
(44:07):
of people there. And I did a little bit of investigating,
and it seems at that time of things that might
have been shooting there, Mighty morphin Power Rangers was one
of them. Star Trek Productions was I think doing some
voyager filming out there. I don't know what that proves
or doesn't prove, because if I was somebody trying to
(44:27):
put out disinformation, I might very well mail it to
our contact who was observing the Hollywood community in Santa
Clarita and have them mail it. I don't really know.
I'm just saying, Santa Clarita. The reason we suspected one
of our people might have done it is because it
was a filming community. And if I'm not mistaken, during
the production of The Dark Sky's Pilot, you were out
(44:49):
in that area. I didn't go to the Crop Circle shoot,
but you did. And wasn't that near there.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
That's right near Santa Clarita. Yes, But for Santa Clarita
to mean something when someone sent a postcard in ninety five,
we weren't shooting that crop Circle sequence, I believe, until ninety.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
Six, So how could they have known. I think we
did shoot that in ninety five because it was in
our pilot.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
But we hadn't gotten the postcard yet, had we.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
No. We had postcard comes out in August, and we
shot Dark Skies starting November eighth in Washington, DC for
four days. Then we came back in November of ninety
five and shot through December or something like eighteenth, right
before Christmas, the week before Christmas, So you were out
there in the immediate backwash of that postcard.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Okay, so yeah, yeah, It's just all these little coincidences
start to add up and raise the question was this
just a random joke or a prank, or was someone
sending us a message or several messages.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Let's talk theories. It's easy for us to say it
could have been JC, all right, but there are other theories,
and we should at least put them on the board.
Any rational look at these two postcards, you'd have to say, Okay,
it could have been a prank. The fact that it
wasn't you, and it wasn't somebody on our production doesn't
mean somebody else didn't pranks. Because, as we've said, we
made a bunch of these notebooks. They were out on
(46:16):
the town in the same way that when JC came
to the Dark Sky's party, the actual show itself had
been put on tape and was passing around the town.
People could have seen it that way. So somebody could
have seen our notebook and said, I'm going to prank
these guys. It could have been somebody from the UFO
subculture basically, and it was like cosplay or something. Right,
(46:37):
I'm going to pretend that I'm this deep intelligence insider.
It could have just been somebody who was adjacent to
the business, But then the other theories would have to
be it could have been what it looked like, somebody
from the intelligence community. Look, this one is the least likely,
but it could have been the phenomenon people keep reporting
(46:58):
is a jokester sometimes, so maybe that was a joke
that the phenomenon thought they'd play on us. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I think anytime we're getting into fans or cosplay or
anything like that, we have to remember that the show
hadn't come out yet, and that the script wasn't available publicly.
So it's hard to imagine that somebody just out in
the general public knew enough about what we were doing
that they could have pranked us.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
I will say too, that the saving.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Grace in all of this for me was that they
came to your house and not mine, So I had
the wire taps.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
That was my burden. Yew come you have strange postcards
coming to your place. I'm getting postcards. I got guys
crashing my party. Listen, Here's how I would put it.
I had my thoughts about this when it happened, and
you and I shared those, and we didn't share them
widely with other people because I think we didn't quite
know what to make of it, and we didn't have
a lot of time. People just need to understand if
(47:51):
you've got six scripts to write at the same time
that you're supposed to be producing a two hour film,
you don't have a lot of time to mole things.
You just have to accept them and move on. But
here are my observations with thirty years. First, we created
a fictional letter from our hero John Lownguard, and then
(48:13):
the mailbox acted like it had read it. That's the
part that's so strange to me. And the first card
really didn't leave room for interpretation. It wasn't Hello, it
was we see you, So it wasn't you didn't have
to moul what exactly it was getting at We see you.
Don't think we're not aware of what you're up to.
And the prank thing, Brent, I got to tell you,
(48:34):
if that was a prank, then somebody showing up with
an airhorn at your house at three am in the
morning is just a prankster, because that's how it felt
to me. It just felt like, I'm not happy that
whoever did this did it. And then I guess my
ultimate conclusion is we were making a show about a
shadow government, and then somebody out there mailed us a shadow.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
Oh Well said, look, I think another thing to consider
here is we're talking about this some thirty years later,
and if it was a prank of any kind, no
one ever came forward, no one ever got the satisfaction
of saying, Hey, I got you, guys, I tricked you.
And so I think, as we come to the end
of the episode, I want to use this moment, this
(49:17):
platform to say to anyone out there, whether you were
a friend, whether you were part of the inner circle
and executive at the network or the studio, or part of.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
The crew, maybe you were just a fan.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Maybe you were, like Bryce said, a couseplayer, somebody that
knew a little bit about what was going on in
inside Hollywood and you wanted to punk us. Please come
forward and claim this prank. Tell us that you sent
the postcards, and if you can prove it, because we
would love to close this case. This was just this
is yet another enigma that's hanging over us, and this
(49:50):
is one in which, as Bryce said, we didn't even
remember that there was any significance to this until we
decided to do the podcast and now so I'm starting
to wonder what else are we going to find that's
going to dredge up all of these other memories and
create another wave of paranoia connections happen.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
I'll just close with this thought. One card is a threat,
two cards is a relationship, Right if they came from
the same person. Somebody was saying we see you and
you don't see us, and they're also saying we approve
of what you're doing. Which what were we doing. We
were telling a story about the UFO cover up and
that we're proud of you for doing that. I didn't
(50:28):
ask for anybody's pride, so I don't know about that. Listen.
I'd love to keep chatting some more, but I got
to go out and check my mail, and you know what,
maybe good luck with that. Maybe we should just hold
off on that sound. Light and Frequency is an iHeart
podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick
(50:51):
Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was
written by Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthauser and your hosts
and executive producers are Bryce Sable, That's me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the Skies
Speaker 1 (51:09):
MHM,
I had a friend come visit me, who I will
just say worked for one of the alphabet agencies. And
he came to our house and when my wife was
out of the room, he took me aside and he said, hey,
by the way, do you know that your phone is tapped?
And I thought, what do you mean? He said, yeah, no,
there's five or six different wiretaps on this I can tell.
This is what I do.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Think about that somebody's telling you your phone is tapped.
We haven't even shot anything. We're not on the air.
It's curious about the selection of those four words we
are watching you. It's not like I'm watching you. It's we,
which raises a lot of questions. Who is this we?
Who would that be? I'm Brice Sable. Have you ever
(00:59):
wondered if there's a secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
And I'm Brent Friedman. You are listening to Sound, Light
and Frequency.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
While preparing for this podcast. I've been going through all
my old files and I've found something.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And what we have learned is that paranoia strikes deep
for a very good reason.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
The thing about doing this podcast Sound Light and Frequency
is that we've relied a lot on using our old
files and so forth to try to tell the story
of what happened during Dark Skies from ninety five to
ninety seven. Anybody who's worked a long time in Hollywood
certainly knows that you collect stuff. You collect scripts, you collect, transcripts,
(01:50):
show cuts, edits, everything, fan mail, photos, you name it,
You've got it. I've got boxes and boxes of it,
and I'm going through it, and have been going through
it since we started. I cannot compete with you, Bryce.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
You probably have exponentially more stuff than I have in
terms of what you've collected. I started practicing letting go
about five years ago, which.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Has been very liberating.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Unfortunately, like I said, I probably have much less than
you with regards to even Dark Sky's memorabilia.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I wish you hadn't let go of so many things,
because there's gold in them there file boxes, Brent, and
I'll tell you something. One of them was, I don't
know if you let go of it. I cannot imagine
you would have let go of your magic badge. Now
you said you did, did you like go of?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That was not a letting go, That was just a losing.
That was just a plain old incompetence I had that
for a long time. It used to be like hung
up on something in my office as just a reminder
of how fun those days were. And then it went missing,
like a number of things in my life, and I've
never found it. I should probably pay my daughter five
hundred dollars to go look for it, but honestly, I
(02:57):
cannot find it anywhere. And it's very upsetting because that
was the one memento from that party that I would
love to wear proudly.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And by magic badge, we mean m ajic is in Majestic,
MJ Magic twelve, that kind of thing, not magic, m
a g ic. We gave a badge, as we've said before,
to everybody at our Dark Sky's premiere party back in
ninety six, and the only guy that didn't have one
was JC except I also found out that I had
(03:27):
misplaced mine. It was driving me nuts, so I started
going through more boxes and Brent, I have an announcement
to make Oh no, now I feel I have my
magic badge. Yep now, and those of you, yeah, you
describe it For those of people who are listening to
us instead of watching this, I think let's start with
the headline, which is mullet and yeah, that is the
headline I had an Unfortunately, my kids have never stopped
(03:51):
teasing me about that, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, No, you look like an operative. You look like
you could have worked for Majestic in the day in
that photo.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
No, but it's super cool.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Actually looks like it could have been authentic, which I
think is the highest compliment.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I wish we could remember who exactly designed it, because
it's cool. Somebody in the art department, I'm sure, yeah,
and they did a great little job. And here's the thing.
On the back side. It's literally got a thumb print,
which would have been the way up to id yourself
back in the sixties when we were saying our series
took place. Although that is not my thumb print, it's
(04:25):
just a generic I'm sure it's on everybody's magic badge,
including yours. Anyway, these things were cool. I'm glad to
have it back. I actually have a digital copy of yours.
So our show today will actually have you and me
side by side brought together again. Butch and Sundi ence
at the Magic Corral, so that would be good. The
thing is, we have found something else. It's some physical evidence,
(04:48):
if you will or at least suggestive of evidence while
getting ready to do this podcast, and we want to
bring it to everyone's attention. The thing is, we want
to do a short amount of setting the timeframe for everybody,
because when we show you what we have found, it's
important to know when it came out and what it
was surrounded by, just to get that party started. Everyone
(05:10):
by now Brent knows about the Dark Sky's Party, but
that was September of nineteen ninety six, Okay, but we
need to roll back to ninety four is when you
and I met and started talking about Dark Skies. But
the first real year that we need to say belonged
to that show is nineteen ninety five, and it started
in January, on literally January, tewod with the Loan Guard Letter,
(05:34):
which we talked about in a previous episode, and things
picked up in intensity. I'm sure you remember all of that.
But after the Loan Guard Letter, we started doing those
notebooks for real, and the Loan Guard Letter was in it,
so was all that other stuff. We started building notebooks,
and as you said, we went to Kinko's all the time.
That was fun. The script we had included in that
(05:57):
notebook an outline of a two hour pilot, but we
had not written it. We were in March talking about
picking up Dark Skies to various production companies, and the
one we settled on was Columbia TV in March, and
we instantly had them order a script from us. So
we were working in March in May on the Dark
(06:19):
Sky's two hour pilot. I bet you remember those days.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I do, And I want to give a nod to
our patron saint at Sony, Jeff Sagansky, who I remember
he apparently bought the show as he stepped off the
concorde in Paris, he having just read the entire briefing
book on the flight across the Atlantic. If it weren't
for him, we wouldn't be telling these stories. And so
again a nod to Jeff Sagansky, who's been what was
(06:48):
central to getting this thing off the ground.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I love hearing that story, and I actually found some
notes recently about that time, and it talks about how
Jeff was very impressed by the notebook. I think he
loved a lot about it, but the notebook he just thought,
I think because Jeff is a pretty good marketer, and
I think he saw the same potential in it that
we saw, so anyway may happens. The script gets written,
(07:10):
that's where things get interesting. The script actually got turned
into Columbia TV on my birthday, which is May seventeenth,
and that's why I remember it so well, which allowed
me to turn it in and go away for the weekend,
which is a lovely thing to do, to have nothing
on your plate for an entire week, and that was great.
Then things got interesting because we started doing notes on it.
(07:31):
Jeff ordered more notebooks because we were going to get
ready to go pitch this. So at first we'd only
made a certain small smattering of notebooks, these classified briefing notebooks,
and then we got serious. We were doing notebooks by
the dozen, and we were oh man, those were the days. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
No, it was a full production that we went into
in terms of producing those notebooks, and I don't remember.
I think we made ten or twelve of them, or
maybe even twenty. But it was a huge undertaking, a
lot of fun to produce all of those. But I
think the main thing that I take away is that
we were so steeped in dark skies at that time.
(08:10):
Everything was dark skies, like twenty four to seven except
for that one weekend you took off. Because we were
getting the show off the ground. This was a dream
come true. And as we talked about before with the
Low and Guard letter, we were selling this show. And
you said Jeff Sigansky was a showman. We had some
showmanship in terms of all of the marketing, the collateral
(08:30):
marketing that we put together to get the show off
the ground, which is interesting in terms of where it
all leads with your story you're about to tell.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
My favorite memory of putting all those notebooks together for
Columbia TV was that they were paying for them for
a change. The first one we had to go shell
out of our own pocket, and everyone had a certain
cost to it. I don't remember what the unit cost was,
but it wasn't small, and so it was nice that
they did it. Anyway, those notebooks got made in June,
(08:58):
because the first week of July of ninety five is
when we went out and pitched this to three different
networks in the same day, got offers from CBS and
NBC and decided to go with NBC. So sometime in July,
NBC is getting involved in our life. And here's where
the rubber meets the road on this story, NBC picks
(09:21):
it up and says, listen, we need to see this pilot.
We're putting your pilot into production. So suddenly you and
I are in pre production for this two hour pilot
that although it wasn't written on spec, it wasn't written
for the network. It was written for Sagansky and his
executive team at Columbia TV. And I'm sure there were
(09:41):
some bruised feelings at some network level by people that said,
wait a minute, we don't even get to develop this thing.
You just bought it. But that's what happened. So this
thing goes into pre production at the same time that
it's going into pre production, though NBC had ordered six
backup scripts, and to explain what that means is just
NBC wanted to make sure that if they shot this pilot,
(10:04):
we had a plan for where we were going. But
more than that, they didn't want to look at just
some little document you and I put together that said
this is our plan for the series. They wanted to
read scripts. So we had two things going on at
the same time in July, which was prepare for pre
production which would start soon, and also get these scripts
done and the reason we were preparing for pre production is,
(10:27):
as it turns out, we started shooting the Dark Skies
to hour pilot on November eighth of nineteen ninety five,
so that was looming as a deadline. Okay, what I'm
about to show you, folks, is something that it's not
like Brent and I forgot about it, but we saw
this when it happened, had definite feelings about it, and
then got involved in producing Dark Skies and to complete
(10:50):
that metaphor. What then ended up happening is that it
got put in one of my boxes and filed away
with everything else, and then life went on right. I
had three kids, and I had other shows that I
was working on afterwards, as did you, and Memory being
what it was, these things fell out of my mind
and then they fell back in recently, quite recently, while
(11:14):
working on Sound lad and Frequency. Here's what happened. It's
August and we're in the middle of all of this,
and I'll go to my mailbox one day and people
actually got mail back then. I don't know how many
people are actually getting mail. If you get mail anymore,
I get junk mail, I get junk mail, I get bills,
(11:35):
but back then sometimes you could get something that was
worth reading. Sometimes somebody would send you a letter or something,
so it's still worth going to the mailbox. I went
to the mailbox that day and I got a postcard.
This is the postcard, all right. As you look at
this thing, you see it's got a book cover on it.
The book is actually called The Flying Eyes. It was
(11:58):
published in nineteen six two by the author J. Hunter Holly,
and it basically is a I don't know, it's flying eyes. Okay,
it's flying eyes. It's strange. It caught my attention.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
But it's an alien invasion with flying eyes essentially, right.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Which as I understand it, I have not read it.
But these levitating eyes could hypnotize people on moss and
they were bizarrely resilient. You could shoot them, as I
understand it, and they would reconstitute themselves. But basically it's
the surveillance thing. These eyes basically are looking down on
people from the sky. Now, if that sounds familiar to
(12:37):
the UFO issue, congratulations, we'll send you a prize. What happened, though,
is I read the back of it and I was
shocked because there were four words and they are not
written across like a normal sentence. They are stacked. They
are stacked one word another word, and they're all typed
in curier front. They're all capitalized, and it's obvious clear
(13:01):
that a very full ribbon has been used. And they
shocked me, they freaked me out. And this is what
they said, we are watching you bring back some memories.
It does not good memories either. Although I will say
that there was the initial this is just a joke, right,
And I think you assumed I did it. I don't
(13:23):
think I actually thought you had done it to yourself.
That's a double backslip of reality even I can't pull
right off.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, so I think once we got past the did
you do it?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Did you do it? Did you do it?
Speaker 1 (13:34):
And it was clear that neither one of us did
it to each other, then the creepiness started settling in. Because,
of course, let's not forget you gave a great set
the table of context of what was going on at
the time. But even go back a little bit further.
We were doing a show in which I had taken
information given to me by John Harrington, the man in
(13:55):
the Reagan administration who disclosed to me, and we had
woven some of those ideas into our show, and so
for someone to be watching us sent a shiver down
my spine. And this was even before JC.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
My spine didn't get completely shivered until we talked. I
got this, and I thought this is quite odd. And
I thought it was odd enough that my wife reminds
me she didn't learn about these things till much later. Right.
I must have been somewhat freaked out a little bit
by the postcard that I didn't show it to her.
I did take it to the office right away. And
(14:31):
this postcard, by the way, is August nineteenth, nineteen ninety five.
I took it to the office and showed it to you,
and you're correct. My first take that I wanted to
rule out was that somehow, because of our notebooks and
the whole idea of surveillance and us being in the
middle of it, that you had just found this postcard
(14:52):
and thought this will be a fun thing. I'll pull
one over on Bryce. So I showed it to you,
and it was very clear that you had not done that.
Not only did you say you hadn't done it, but
you were clearly surprised enough by it that you were thinking,
this is not good. This is very strange, and I
want to just remind the audience. This is August of
ninety five, which is thirteen entire months before that Dark
(15:16):
Sky's premiere party, when the actual show would air on
NBC and JC would come to my house and offer
a cooperation deal with the Office of Naval Intelligence. So
this was something that was troubling. I thought it was
very troubling because first of all, somebody had gone to
the trouble to find a postcard that is literally eyes
(15:38):
in the sky watching you, and then they'd boiled it
down to the basic surveillance motif we are watching you.
It's troubling, yeah, it is.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Once we got past the obvious, it raised the question
of who could have sent this, and that's a whole
rabbit hole we can go down, and we will, but
I want to just rewind because I was already on edge,
as I said, by doing Dark Skuys in the first place,
so when this happened, it took all of my paranoia
up a notch and adding more fuel to that flame.
(16:08):
Right around this same time, I remember that I had
a friend come visit me, who I will just say
worked for one of the Alphabet agencies. And he came
to our house, and when my wife was out of
the room, he took me aside and he said, hey,
by the way, do you know that your phone is tapped?
And I thought, what do you mean? He said, yeah, no,
there's five or six different wiretaps on this. I can
(16:29):
tell this is what I do. And I thought, I
don't understand. Why would my phone be tapped. He goes,
when you put a show like Dark Sky's on the air,
there's probably people want to know what you're talking about
behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And I'm like, can you get rid of it?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
And he goes, that's is way above my pay grade.
So I had this whole other layer now where you're
getting postcards talking to both of us that were being
surveilled or watched with a flying Eyes message on there.
That's not too subtle. And meanwhile I'm finding out that
my phone is tapped at home. And I think the
title we used, or we were going to use for
(17:03):
one of our scripts was Paranoia Strikes Deep, and that
was from the exit music for our pilot, the Buffalo
Springfield song for what It's Worth. That was one of
the lines. And I got to tell you at this
time paranoia had struck deep in me, and I was
really worried. And like you said, we hadn't even shot
the pilot yet, and I was already on edge.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Think about that, somebody's telling you your phone is tapped.
We haven't even shot anything. We're not on the air.
It's curious about the selection of those four words. We
are watching you. It's not like I'm watching you, it's we,
which raises a lot of questions. Who is this we?
Who would that be? Just a couple of things to
unpack from what you just said the phone tap kind
(17:45):
of idea. No one ever told me my phone was
tapped that I remember you telling me that story, and
all I remember was this. I had for a couple
of months of feeling, Well, here's the thing. When I
was a kid growing up in the six people had
party lines, which meant that you shared a line with
somebody else. I've heard like you'd be having a call
(18:07):
with somebody and you'd hear this technical click kind of thing,
and you'd know that somebody on the other party line
was listening to your phone call. And so people would
have conversations like, hey, I'm on the phone here, and
the party line person would say, yeah, but I got
to make a phone call. It's important. I have to
call my doctor, and you'd say, I'm wrapping up, give
(18:27):
me a five minutes. You'd have conversations with people you
did not know. Right, it's so strange to say to
that to anybody today, But party lines were a thing anyway.
You did hear clicks and things because of that, and
then for many years I never heard anything like that.
But when we started doing dark skies, I did hear
these sort of technical things, and I haven't thought too
(18:50):
much of it. I thought we got a shitty phone line,
to be honest, it was my first thing. I thought,
because that happened, you'd have marginal phone service. That would happen.
But when you told me that, I thought, that's interesting
because I've heard two or three different sounds. They weren't
always the same sound.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
No, it sounded like, ironically like some of the clicking
sounds that you hear in the Disclosure Day trailer. It
was like little popping and clicking, and I guess that
was people tapping in and out of the line.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
What I want to say further to everyone is to
stay with us. Because there was a second postcard and
it came four days later. But I don't want to
talk about that postcard just yet because in preparing for
this show, we've done a little background research and one
of the things that we realized and I'm holding up
a book right now for those of you listening. It's
(19:41):
from Stanton Friedman as the author, and it's called Top
Secret Magic again m Ajiic. And this book came out
in I believe ninety seven, and actually I optioned it.
This was after Dark Shyes, I optioned it because I
thought maybe I can turn this into a movie or something.
In reading through it, though, Stanton tells a story in
(20:02):
this book. And again this came out after our postcards. Well,
even though it has been.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
I just want to interrupt for a second, because, first
of all, you were friends with Stanton Friedman. But for
those who don't know who Stanton Friedman is, he was
someone pretty important in neufology.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Stanton Friedman was the wizard of euthology. He was a
nuclear physicist who basically quit his job in the I
think the late fifties and then became the voice of
UFO research in the sixties. Fascinating guy really walked the walk.
The guy was a tremendous researcher and gave his life
(20:38):
and abilities to it. But one of the things that
I realized in there, and by the way, if any
of you owned this book, it's on page eighty nine
in both the hardcover and the soft cover, which I
don't know how that happened, but that's the truth. Stanton
had been working with two other UFO researchers in the
late eighties, and they were Heimi Shandera and Bill Moore,
(20:59):
and Sandra had received a role of undeveloped film in
the mail and they had developed the film, and the
film was a document. And that document been formed not
only ufology for a while and became incredibly controversial, but
it was something you and I embraced for dark skies,
and it was basically what we now have come to
(21:21):
know the Eisenhower Briefing document, and that is a document
that was supposedly created on November eighteenth, nineteen fifty two,
for Dwight Eisenhower, who had just been elected president, who
was getting briefed before he would take office the next
early the next year, and it basically said braswell was
real that we had bodies there rather crashes. It's a
(21:43):
profound document, and one of the things in it is
that it also said that there was a memo called
the Cutler Twining Memo that said MJ twelve is real
because it basically is a memo from Ike's chief of
staff asking for a meeting for some thing called m
J twelve. After they developed this film and saw the
(22:05):
Majestic twelve documents, it's pretty fascinating, Brent, and it's laid
out in Stan's book. They claimed they had received some
postcards in the mail and that these postcards had some
specific information on them. One of the things that they
did is they talked about Suitland, they talked about Reese's Pieces,
(22:27):
and they talked about Box one eighty nine, and they
were mailed from Believe, Ethiopia. That's where they said they
were from. Here's the thing. Reese's Pieces refers to a
guy named Ed Reese who ran the National Archives, and
Suitland refers to Suitland, Maryland, which is where the archives
were located. And when Shandera and Moore went to those
(22:51):
archives and spent days going through stuff, they literally ended
up in Box one eighty nine where they found that
Cutler Twining memo from nineteen fifty four from Ike and
it was just in the middle of the files. So
I guess what I'm saying is there is precedent for
(23:12):
what you and I went through that somebody was using postcards.
Now it might have been disinformation, it might have been
just somebody trying to have fun with UFO researchers. That's possible,
and we can get into more of that later, but
it was pretty real to them at the time.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
I have two thoughts on this. The first is I'm jealous.
They get a postcard that sounds or postcards. It sounds
like it's an alternate reality game or an escape room.
They get to go on a treasure hunt and find
something cool. We just get a threat. If I could
do it all over again, I'd prefer the fun game
that we can go on our treasure hunt. Secondarily, if
I'm not mistaken, William Moore had quite an interesting presence
(23:58):
in ufology, and so I'm curious on your.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Opinion of that.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Maybe you can give us a little background on him,
but also does that undercut or undermine the credibility of
this twining memo?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Ah fascinating. First of all, Twining is invoked twice in ufology,
in nineteen forty seven, Nathan Twining, who was Lieutenant General
Nathan Twining of the Army Air Forces, had written a
memo that he was told to write. This is a
real memo. It was released under Freedom of Information Act.
It's the real thing. The government admits it's real. It's
(24:32):
a memo from Nathan Twining where he stated that the
objects seen by military personnel were not whether astronomical or
other phenomenon, but rather objects that warranted further investigation. And
this is the memo people might have heard about. In
that memo, it says, quote, the phenomenon reported is something
real and not visionary or fictitious. That's about as clean
(24:55):
a statement the US government has ever made, ever, ever amazing.
And again, that is the Twining memo. Now, the Cutler
Twining memo is the one that showed up in the
Majestic twelve documents, and that was the one that was
used to say MJ twelve is real because here's a
memo from Ike and all that. But of course, if
(25:18):
you don't believe the Majestic twelve documents are real, then
you might not believe that document is real. And I
know this sounds arcane, but the date of the Twining
Memo where he said the phenomenon is real is September
twenty three, nineteen forty seven. But what's pretty interesting is
that the Eisenhower briefing document, the memo it has the
(25:38):
Truman Forestall Memo inside. That briefing document is dated September
twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven, the day after the so
called Twining Memo, and in that one it says, quote,
as per our recent conversation on the matter, you are
hereby authorized, and by the way, this is from Harry Truman.
You are hereby authorized. Proceed with all due speed and
(26:01):
caution upon your undertaking hereafter this matter shall be referred
to only as Operation Majestic twelve. So let me put
it this way. If that memo is fake, as many
people try to allege, then at least whoever wrote it
and put it inside the Eyesenow rebriefing Memo knew about
the Twining Memo and managed to put these dates together.
(26:24):
So the whole thing is this arcane but fascinating thing,
and somehow we're in the middle of that thing. That
freaks me out too.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, I'm fascinated by this concept that this was a
form of communication between the people in the shadows and
people like you and I out trying to make a
TV show or investigate something. You're getting postcards in the
mail from somewhere out in the world, in this case Ethiopia.
Even looking back on ours, we got ours from Santa Clarita,
(26:52):
which was way outside of La but it was very
close to the area we ended up shooting later, our
crop circle sequence. We didn't know anyone that lived out
in Santa Clarita, and I'm sure these two gentlemen didn't
know anyone in Ethiopia. You get something in the mail
from an unknown source, and in their case it led
to supposedly a document that became foundational in ufology. And
(27:15):
for us, again it was a threat. It was, or
at least a vague threat. And I have to believe
that in both cases these were done intentionally. The question
as comes up a lot, was it done to help
us to lead us down a path, to send us
a signal, or was it done to disinform us to
throw us off the scent. That's the most frustrating thing
(27:36):
is that we can't discern the intention here.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
I want to talk more about that, but let's take
a little sidebar, because one of the things you mentioned,
Brent was that Paranoia Strikes Deep, which is a line
from the song for what It's Worth, written by Buffalo's
Springfield and performed by Buffalo Springfield, and that's the one
where it says there's a man with a gun over
there telling me, I gotta beware. Paranoia strikes deep into
(27:59):
your heart. It will creep. And we love that song.
We did, in fact use it in our Dark Sky's pilot,
and in fact, one of those backup scripts that you
and I were writing was called Paranoia Strikes Deep, and
we did in fact write that script and it never
got shot. It's the lost episode of Dark Skies, along
with some of those others that other writers have done
(28:20):
as well. But Paranoia Strikes Deep reminds me of a
movie that I have seen recently and you just saw recently.
I think we should take a little detour.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah, yeah, let's do that, because I think this movie
is a great example of how you can tell a
really compelling UAP alien story without a big budget and
big special effects. And it captured that sense of kind
of escalating paranoia incredibly well, which makes it very relevant
to discussion we're having listen.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
The movie we're talking about, of course, is The vast
of Night. Okay, it was released in twenty nineteen. I
think it came out and was winning awards. Yeah, it
was produced in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think it was in a few film festivals. But
then it premiered on Amazon in twenty twenty, and.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I remember seeing it. That was during the lockdown, the
COVID lockdown, and at the time, my daughter and her
best friend were living at my house, and so we
all watched it together, and my daughter's friend said, that's
the best film I've ever seen. But I'll tell you
what's interesting about it. We always try to do the
log line. The log line for Vastia Night is I'm
(29:27):
just to complete what it is. It's a micro budget
it's a kind of an inventive UFO mystery, and it
takes place in one night in nineteen fifties New Mexico
in a small town, and it's really two main characters,
a switchboard operator and a radio DJ, who are chasing
down a mysterious audio frequency that's happening when strange lights
(29:51):
are in town and if anybody has missed that that
would be sound an audio recording that has shown up
and light str range, dancing lights on the edge of town,
and frequency because it's coming out over a radio transmission.
I don't know. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.
Maybe I knew we were going to do this podcast
(30:12):
a good six years ago, Brent, and now I'm finally
catching up to that. Maybe we're influence.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
We have so far focused on some of the big
formative movies in science fiction with regards to UAP and aliens.
We've done a lot of big movies, but I think
this is one of the things we also wanted to do.
Was there's going to be certain movies that are out
there like this one, which I highly recommend, that just
evaded everyone's radar. I had never heard of it before
(30:38):
until Bryce brought it up for me. And this is
the kind of thing that we'd also like the show
to do, is encourage you to go back and watch this.
We've talked about some movies on the show that I
wouldn't encourage that this one I would. The thing I
found fascinating when I dug into it a little bit
is that it's loosely based on two actual events from history.
(30:59):
One of them was the Kesburg Ufo incident, which happened
in Pennsylvania in nineteen sixty five. What happened was a
bunch of citizens and even some pilots at the time
reported this huge fireball going across the sky and the
people saw it. It hit somewhere in the vicinity and
it apparently it was dropping like a bunch of hot
(31:22):
metal debris as it went across the sky. And then
where it hit, that whole area was immediately sealed off
by army and state police. Now, ultimately the official explanation
was it was a meteor. That was what everyone the
news tried to push out there. But then NASA came
forward later and claimed that it was a Soviet satellite. However, interestingly,
(31:45):
in nineteen eighty seven, a few years later, NASA claimed, oh,
all the evidence for that Soviet satellite that's been lost.
As the kids like to say, vary sus. That incident,
interestingly has been nicknamed Pennsylvania's ros Well.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
And that one is unsolved to this day. Correct and
based on witnesses, it probably was solved. Listen. First of all,
I like this movie. It may not be for everybody.
It's interesting that critics love this movie, but people that
watch it are a little more at sea about it.
Some of them think it's too slow or whatever. And
the reason they think it's too slow is that the
(32:22):
director Andrew Patterson, who did a really nice job with it.
But the director has chosen to go with these extremely
long scenes, and there's many of them. I think there's
like half the number of cuts in this film that
would be in a normal film, as I understand it.
But what I love about it is that there are
two scenes where someone just basically talks and it's creepy
(32:48):
and interesting and I just recommend it. And here's the thing.
The guy's running a radio broadcast and everyone's at the
basketball game that night, so he's all alone. He's taken
calls and people are reporting these dancing lights and things
in the sky, and he's asking for information, and a
guy named Billy calls in, and Billy says he has
(33:10):
served in the military. He was taken to a secret
desert site where personnel built a large underground structure to
house a mysterious object, and they were told if they
talked about it, it would endanger America. Now, this is
a long scene and it's so great, but the idea
of the mystery building that sounds like the one that's
(33:30):
rumored that Coultart first started talking about a couple of
years ago, which I don't think I'm violating anybody's suspicions
to say that. People talk about it being in South Korea.
Nobody has confirmed that or anything. That's just what people
say on the internet. In any case, what I really
found fascinating about this guy and this story is that
he says a couple of things. He says it was
(33:53):
bigger than an airplane, but no one was allowed to
see it, which again fits in with the large thing
that Coultart was talking about. He said they had to
dig a hole to put this enormous thing in it,
and it was covered with a tarp, and it's just
so creepy the way he talks about it. And he
said that he was picked to do it because he
was black and people that were on the crew were
(34:14):
largely black and Mexican, to make sure that their testimony
wouldn't be taken as seriously, which frankly sounds realistic and
for that era, yeah, for sure. And then there's this
second interview where they that's when they're on the air
the first one. The second one, they go to somebody's house.
A woman has called in and said, I know all
about this. Come over. And they come over to this
woman's house. Her name is Mabel, and she says basically,
(34:38):
they've come here before, and she calls them the people
in the sky and she says, they took my son,
and no one has ever believed me. So the whole
thing is about mystery, but it doesn't really draw a
road map. And I guess the reason I'm comparing it
to this postcard thing is it was something that you
could relate to. They had a sort of a sound
(34:59):
we had postcard and instead of answering questions, it raises questions. Yeah,
at least that's how it hit me.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, I had all the same feels. What I loved
about it was this idea that it took a little
bit of contact, which was this idea of the whole
inciting incident being this mysterious sound that they're hearing, that
people are hearing. And then it combined it with Close
Encounters of the third kind, so two of my favorite
movies in the space, and the way it brought in
the Close Encounters thing was this sound was something that people.
(35:30):
It manipulated them, they became obsessed about it. And part
of what the theory was is that you were trying
to follow the source of this sound and it led
people away from the town out into isolation where they
could be abducted. So that's a really fascinating idea. And
again it connects back for me and how Richard Dreyfuss
(35:52):
and the other characters and Close Encounters got this image
in their head of the Devil's Tower and they became
obsessed with it, and they followed the trail of that
all the way to this encounter with a close Encounter
of the third trind So combining those two elements in
a really original way with a micro budget. By the way,
yes it's a micro budget, but it looks good. It's stylish.
(36:12):
It does not look like a cheap film. It's just
there's a lot of long takes to sign.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Up money, monk takes, and people that like things to
be very well lit will probably be disappointed because a
lot of it is not that well lit. But that's
part of its charm and mystery and all that. Anyway,
it's a good film. But the reason I bring it
up is if you see the vast of night. Then
you will understand what we mean when we say paranoia
strikes deep, because it gets inside you and you go,
(36:39):
I'm disturbed by this. That is exactly what you and
I both felt when we saw the postcards. Or at
least I'm speaking for myself at this point, but I'm
thinking you must have felt something similar to that.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
I felt the exact same things, and I think it's
time to now visit the second postcard.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
It's funny, I just wrote a note to myself that
says second postcard. So here we go. All right, we
told you about postcard number one, the Flying Eyes, where
again it says we are watching you, all right. That
happened on August nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, and you and
I pretty well thought, okay, somebody has sent us a
message that's disconcerting. The show must go on. At least
(37:26):
I think that is what we were doing, because we
didn't have time to sit around and think to ourselves.
Should we look into this. Let's hire a private eye.
Let's do you know there's no internet to search on it.
We couldn't even get the books at that time, right,
Maybe you would have got the books, but it didn't
really look like they were sending a message with the
book cover. It just felt like somebody found a target
(37:47):
of opportunity, bought this postcard, typed in this message. Who
they were, we don't know. Okay. That was where we
were until four days later, on August twenty third, nineteen
ninety five, when we received this postcard, which is Operation Interstellar,
and it is let's see, it's written by George O. Smith. Listen,
(38:08):
I don't know exactly the whole thing about what it's about.
I haven't read it, but it's something about a main
character who believes that real time communication across interstellar distances
is impossible. No, that's the theory that people are saying.
But the main character is a guy named Paul Grayson
who believes in that technology that can have instant communications
(38:31):
across space time. So it is an interesting little secret,
if true. People talk about that right now. But that's
not what got weird about this one for us, because
at that point it was just a book cover, all right.
The back of it is in the same typeface, so
it looks like a courier. It's in all caps, and honestly,
(38:52):
I could send it out to be looked at, but
it's pretty clear to me it's either a matching typewriter
or the same typewriter, and not with a very dark
ribbon like the first one. It's a little lighter ribbon,
which I guess if you were typing a lot four
days later might sit. So this is August twenty third,
and here it comes. This one again is stacked, but
(39:14):
it's more than four words. So it's got phrases that
are stacked. But it says we admire you and are
very impressed by your work. We even take pride in
your accomplishments. There it goes. You can see that there.
Now one of these is a threat, but the other
seems to be something entirely different. It's the push pull.
(39:36):
It's the good cop bad copy. Yeah. I don't have
any good theories on that, other than maybe somebody sent
we are watching you, and somebody in charge of that
person said, that's a ridiculous. Don't freak these guys out,
tell them that we like them, or something that could
have happened. But that second one, four days later, I
should point out before we get into any analysis of it,
(39:58):
is that we never got another one. The best of
my knowledge, I've never seen another one. I never got
another one. You never got another one. But again I
point out August twenty third, Brent, is exactly one month
and one year until JC shows up at our house.
And I was just wondering, did you ever think in retrospect?
(40:18):
You know, at the time we only had our one reaction, right,
but now we have a reaction from thirty years later?
Are you thinking, JC? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (40:27):
So, before I give you my present day theory, my
thought at the time was that it was a friend.
That it wasn't you and I didn't do it, then
it had to be someone in our inner circle who
was doing it as a prank. As you said, maybe
their conscience was what changed them. Maybe they were close
enough to us at the time that they saw that
(40:47):
we were freaked out by the first postcard, that we
are watching you, and so they pulled back and they said,
oh no, we're we admire you, We're proud of your accomplishments.
So that was part of my thinking at the time.
But again, as you said, we didn't have JC as
a suspect at that moment, so I think we just
wrote it off as somebody in our inner circle was
(41:08):
messing with us. Post JC coming into your backyard and
making us a deal. Any paranoia that we had about
the postcards was now living and breathing. It wasn't just
a postcard. It was a person, and it's in my
mind it's hard to believe that wasn't JC sending those postcards,
(41:29):
or at least the office that JC said he worked for,
the Office of Naval Intelligence, because, as we talked about,
it wasn't I'm watching you, I admire, it's we are
watching you, we admire. So you start to look at
all of the circumstantial evidence. The message that JC came
to us with is we've been watching you. We've read
everything that you have written, and we like what you've done.
(41:52):
You got a lot, right, So it felt like those
postcards were announcing his arrival before he even came. However,
he said nothing about that when he talked to us.
There was no hey, did you get my postcards? Or
there was no kind of wink wink reference to we've
been watching you. So if he did go to that trouble,
(42:13):
why didn't he take credit for it? I can't answer
that question, But to this moment, I still contend my
number one suspect is JC.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
It's a good theory. That's what we're left with. This
theory is here, But I have a couple of things
that we have done to track things down and cast
a wider net about what these things might have meant.
It's very clear in looking at these two postcards with
our thirty years experience now to look back at them
in a different way. And one of the things you
could say is the postcards fit the style of that
(42:44):
MJ twelve mystery postcard thing that happened to Shandera and More. Okay, yep,
but I fought Shandera and More. I have never seen
the postcards they claimed were sent to them. So at
least we're showing these postcards and we're putting them on
our website which is sound like frequency dot com, and
we're putting him in this video and we're talking about
(43:05):
him openly. I wish they had because then we would
have the ability to say, wow, that's pretty similar to
our postcard. As it is, we just have their word
for it. Our postcards do fit that mystery postcard tradition.
But what they don't do that the more Chandera postcard
or postcards they said there were multiples, they don't behave
(43:25):
like the breadcrumb trail. They're not saying, they're not giving
us little clues. As you pointed out that you go,
oh great, now let's go investigate this. In fact, one
of them is just saying we're watching you, and the
other is saying, basically, we think you're doing a good job.
But it's like it raises the question, who are you
to tell us we're doing it? I don't even know
(43:45):
who you guys are. So there's that. The other thing
that we've looked into is that postmark. The postmark is
Santa Clarita. And just so people understand, even back in
nineteen ninety five, Santa Clarita was already a major high
volume filming zone in the LA area. It's where they
had movie ranches and infrastructure, and there were a lot
(44:07):
of people there. And I did a little bit of investigating,
and it seems at that time of things that might
have been shooting there, Mighty morphin Power Rangers was one
of them. Star Trek Productions was I think doing some
voyager filming out there. I don't know what that proves
or doesn't prove, because if I was somebody trying to
(44:27):
put out disinformation, I might very well mail it to
our contact who was observing the Hollywood community in Santa
Clarita and have them mail it. I don't really know.
I'm just saying, Santa Clarita. The reason we suspected one
of our people might have done it is because it
was a filming community. And if I'm not mistaken, during
the production of The Dark Sky's Pilot, you were out
(44:49):
in that area. I didn't go to the Crop Circle shoot,
but you did. And wasn't that near there.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
That's right near Santa Clarita. Yes, But for Santa Clarita
to mean something when someone sent a postcard in ninety five,
we weren't shooting that crop Circle sequence, I believe, until ninety.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
Six, So how could they have known. I think we
did shoot that in ninety five because it was in
our pilot.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
But we hadn't gotten the postcard yet, had we.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
No. We had postcard comes out in August, and we
shot Dark Skies starting November eighth in Washington, DC for
four days. Then we came back in November of ninety
five and shot through December or something like eighteenth, right
before Christmas, the week before Christmas, So you were out
there in the immediate backwash of that postcard.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Okay, so yeah, yeah, It's just all these little coincidences
start to add up and raise the question was this
just a random joke or a prank, or was someone
sending us a message or several messages.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Let's talk theories. It's easy for us to say it
could have been JC, all right, but there are other theories,
and we should at least put them on the board.
Any rational look at these two postcards, you'd have to say, Okay,
it could have been a prank. The fact that it
wasn't you, and it wasn't somebody on our production doesn't
mean somebody else didn't pranks. Because, as we've said, we
made a bunch of these notebooks. They were out on
(46:16):
the town in the same way that when JC came
to the Dark Sky's party, the actual show itself had
been put on tape and was passing around the town.
People could have seen it that way. So somebody could
have seen our notebook and said, I'm going to prank
these guys. It could have been somebody from the UFO
subculture basically, and it was like cosplay or something. Right,
(46:37):
I'm going to pretend that I'm this deep intelligence insider.
It could have just been somebody who was adjacent to
the business, But then the other theories would have to
be it could have been what it looked like, somebody
from the intelligence community. Look, this one is the least likely,
but it could have been the phenomenon people keep reporting
(46:58):
is a jokester sometimes, so maybe that was a joke
that the phenomenon thought they'd play on us. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I think anytime we're getting into fans or cosplay or
anything like that, we have to remember that the show
hadn't come out yet, and that the script wasn't available publicly.
So it's hard to imagine that somebody just out in
the general public knew enough about what we were doing
that they could have pranked us.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
I will say too, that the saving.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Grace in all of this for me was that they
came to your house and not mine, So I had
the wire taps.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
That was my burden. Yew come you have strange postcards
coming to your place. I'm getting postcards. I got guys
crashing my party. Listen, Here's how I would put it.
I had my thoughts about this when it happened, and
you and I shared those, and we didn't share them
widely with other people because I think we didn't quite
know what to make of it, and we didn't have
a lot of time. People just need to understand if
(47:51):
you've got six scripts to write at the same time
that you're supposed to be producing a two hour film,
you don't have a lot of time to mole things.
You just have to accept them and move on. But
here are my observations with thirty years. First, we created
a fictional letter from our hero John Lownguard, and then
(48:13):
the mailbox acted like it had read it. That's the
part that's so strange to me. And the first card
really didn't leave room for interpretation. It wasn't Hello, it
was we see you, So it wasn't you didn't have
to moul what exactly it was getting at We see you.
Don't think we're not aware of what you're up to.
And the prank thing, Brent, I got to tell you,
(48:34):
if that was a prank, then somebody showing up with
an airhorn at your house at three am in the
morning is just a prankster, because that's how it felt
to me. It just felt like, I'm not happy that
whoever did this did it. And then I guess my
ultimate conclusion is we were making a show about a
shadow government, and then somebody out there mailed us a shadow.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
Oh Well said, look, I think another thing to consider
here is we're talking about this some thirty years later,
and if it was a prank of any kind, no
one ever came forward, no one ever got the satisfaction
of saying, Hey, I got you, guys, I tricked you.
And so I think, as we come to the end
of the episode, I want to use this moment, this
(49:17):
platform to say to anyone out there, whether you were
a friend, whether you were part of the inner circle
and executive at the network or the studio, or part of.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
The crew, maybe you were just a fan.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Maybe you were, like Bryce said, a couseplayer, somebody that
knew a little bit about what was going on in
inside Hollywood and you wanted to punk us. Please come
forward and claim this prank. Tell us that you sent
the postcards, and if you can prove it, because we
would love to close this case. This was just this
is yet another enigma that's hanging over us, and this
(49:50):
is one in which, as Bryce said, we didn't even
remember that there was any significance to this until we
decided to do the podcast and now so I'm starting
to wonder what else are we going to find that's
going to dredge up all of these other memories and
create another wave of paranoia connections happen.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
I'll just close with this thought. One card is a threat,
two cards is a relationship, Right if they came from
the same person. Somebody was saying we see you and
you don't see us, and they're also saying we approve
of what you're doing. Which what were we doing. We
were telling a story about the UFO cover up and
that we're proud of you for doing that. I didn't
(50:28):
ask for anybody's pride, so I don't know about that. Listen.
I'd love to keep chatting some more, but I got
to go out and check my mail, and you know what,
maybe good luck with that. Maybe we should just hold
off on that sound. Light and Frequency is an iHeart
podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick
(50:51):
Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was
written by Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthauser and your hosts
and executive producers are Bryce Sable, That's me and Brent Friedman.
Watch the Skies
Speaker 1 (51:09):
MHM,
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