Sound, Light & Frequency

A pounding on the door wakes Daniel Tibbets from a dead sleep. It’s around midnight, and a producer friend is standing outside telling him to get dressed—they have to go. Where they’re headed, who they’re meeting, and what those mysterious visitors say they have to show them will become one of the strangest nights of Tibbets’ life. After the reveal of the Formula and the extraordinary reaction that followed, Sound, Light & Frequency moves deeper into its active investigation. From the beginning, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman have wondered whether what happened to them during Dark Skies was unique—or whether other people in Hollywood had their own encounters with mysterious insiders, extraordinary claims, and purported physical evidence. Veteran television executive and producer Daniel Tibbets now comes forward with a story that rivals theirs for sheer strangeness and specificity, along with previously unaired material connected to his experience. It’s a story that pushes the investigation beyond Bryce and Brent’s own history and raises a larger question: how many other people in Hollywood have stories like this that have never been told? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A week after Sound, Light & Frequency released the mysterious drawing Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman have spent years calling “the Formula,” the reaction has been immediate, intense and far larger than they expected. The image—drawn for them in 1996 by the man who called himself J.C. and claimed to be from the Office of Naval Intelligence—has now escaped into the wild. Listeners, researchers, podcasters, skeptics and experiencers have begun comparing it to older systems of consciousness, tracing possible historical sources and raising new questions about what J.C. may actually have been trying to tell them. That was always the point of releasing it. Bryce and Brent have called Sound, Light & Frequency an active investigation from the beginning, and now the investigation has expanded beyond the two of them. In “Wisdom of the Crowd,” they open the file wider, bringing in the audience, fellow podcasters and outside researchers—not to declare the mystery solved, but to examine what has emerged since the Formula became public and to follow the new leads wherever they go. The reveal was not the end of the story. It may have been the beginning of a much larger one. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For thirty years, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman have held onto a mysterious artifact from the night Dark Skies premiered: a formula written on the back of a bank deposit envelope by a party crasher who said he was from the Office of Naval Intelligence. He called it “Sound, Light & Frequency” — the “Secrets of the Universe.” Now, for the first time, they are releasing the original Formula publicly. In this landmark episode, Bryce and Brent retrace how the Formula came into their possession, reveal it in full, and explain where their investigation has led them — what they believe the symbols may represent, why someone claiming to be from Naval Intelligence might have wanted them to see it, and whether understanding the Formula makes that extraordinary encounter seem more or less credible. Then the investigation changes hands. The Formula is now available for anyone to examine, analyze, challenge and interpret. After thirty years, the wait is over — and the larger conversation can begin. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when the creators of two UFO television series compare notes on how to turn the phenomenon into drama? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman welcome their friend David O’Leary, creator, writer and executive producer of History’s Project Blue Book, for a conversation about two shows that feel almost like secret-history bookends. Project Blue Book lives in the 1950s; Dark Skies begins in the 1960s. Both combine real people, authentic UFO cases and government secrecy with dramatic license—and, strangely enough, both produced exactly twenty hours of television. From J. Allen Hynek and Edward Ruppelt to Majestic-12, Roswell and the Washington UFO wave, three UFO TV creators finally get to talk shop. O’Leary also reveals just how personal his interest in the unexplained has always been. Long before creating Project Blue Book, he studied cognitive science at Vassar and conducted a sensory-deprivation telepathy experiment for his thesis. After selling the series, he had his own startling UFO sighting—a glowing green object moving through the trees above his Los Angeles neighborhood—and says strange synchronicities continued throughout production. He takes Bryce and Brent inside the making of the show: its balance between authenticity and accuracy, the decision to dramatize real cases without pretending to be a documentary, Robert Zemeckis’s involvement, Steven Spielberg’s notes on the Close Encounters episode, and the remarkable access O’Leary had to Hynek’s family and the last surviving director of the real Project Blue Book. Then the conversation moves from television history into the mystery itself. O’Leary discusses what he now believes the real Project Blue Book represented, why Roswell still convinces him, his views on Majestic-12, Foo Fighters and UFO interest in nuclear weapons, and why he suspects there may be several different intelligences or mechanisms behind the phenomenon—from extraterrestrials and artificial intelligence to interdimensional contact, time travel and consciousness itself. He also reveals where an unproduced third season would have gone: a global 1954 UFO wave, Stonehenge, Europe and the recovery of Michael Quinn after his extraordinary underwater encounter. It’s Project Blue Book and Dark Skiessharing the same table—and discovering just how much strange territory they have in common. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than thirty years, The X-Files has been one of the most influential television shows ever made about UFOs, alien abduction, government secrecy and the possibility that extraterrestrials are already here. In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman go back inside the mythology of Mulder and Scully to ask a deceptively simple question: what did The X-Files actually say was going on? The answer involves real aliens, a secret Syndicate, abductions, genetic experiments, alien-human hybrids, black oil, rival extraterrestrial factions, government infiltration—and a conspiracy so layered that even Mulder is constantly mistaking disclosure for disinformation. But the bigger question is the one Bryce and Brent have been asking all season: did Hollywood borrow the UFO story from UFOlogy, or did UFOlogy eventually start borrowing it back from Hollywood? Much of what The X-Filesdramatized—crash retrievals, MJ-12-style secrecy, alien bodies, implants, reverse engineering, government disinformation and abduction lore—was already circulating before the show premiered in 1993. Yet decades later, some of the same ideas are being discussed by whistleblowers, former intelligence officials and members of Congress. So was The X-Files simply a brilliant synthesis of existing UFO mythology, or did its enormous cultural impact help shape the way modern people now understand the phenomenon? Along the way, Bryce and Brent revisit the show's Emmy breakthrough, its influence on prestige science fiction, Chris Carter's relationship to the UFO subject, and the intriguing claims of former AFOSI officer Richard Doty about his own involvement with the series. They also compare The X-Files with Dark Skies, reflect on what each show did differently, and look ahead to Ryan Coogler's new incarnation of the franchise. In the end, one thing seems certain: with The X-Files, the truth may indeed be out there—but it has never been simple. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.