Sound, Light & Frequency

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.

What happens when ET walks into a bar—and everybody laughs? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman set out to explore the history of aliens as comedy, only to make an unexpected discovery: some of the funniest extraterrestrials in television and movies have been carrying surprisingly serious UFO ideas with them for more than sixty years. It begins with the 1963 sitcom My Favorite Martian, whose pilot contains an Air Force aerospace test, an anomalous radar encounter, official suppression, a crashed spacecraft, a living non-human occupant, telepathy and an alien hiding in plain sight. Even stranger, Bryce discovers that the fictional X-15 encounter followed only months after a real X-15 pilot reported seeing something unexplained at nearly 60 miles altitude. From there, Bryce and Brent follow the alien comedy trail through Mork & Mindy, ALF, the Coneheads, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Men in Black, Paul, People of Earth, Resident Alien and SNL’s hilarious alien-abduction sketches. Along the way, a pattern emerges. Early alien comedy made extraterrestrials safe by turning them into eccentric houseguests and cultural anthropologists. Later stories became increasingly comfortable with the real language of the Phenomenon: abductions, missing time, Grays, government investigators, crash retrievals, memory suppression, secret programs and entire taxonomies of non-human beings. So was Hollywood merely reflecting a growing UFO mythology—or helping create the vocabulary through which we now understand it? From My Favorite Martian giving America permission to laugh at aliens during the era of Betty and Barney Hill, to Men in Black turning secret-keepers into heroes, to Paul literally joking that an alien has been feeding UFO lore to Hollywood for decades, this episode asks whether comedy may be the perfect delivery system for extraordinary ideas: the truth, wrapped in a joke. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bryce is fighting laryngitis, but Brent comes to the rescue as Sound, Light & Frequency returns to the woo. After “All About the Woo,” the hosts go even deeper into the possibility that aliens, the paranormal, and the afterlife may not be separate mysteries at all, but different faces of the same phenomenon connected through energy, consciousness, sound, light, and frequency. Using John Keel’s Our Haunted Planet as the launch point, they explore Keel’s idea of “ultraterrestrials” — hidden intelligences that may not simply visit Earth, but haunt, manipulate, monitor, and interact with us through UFOs, Men in Black, missing time, trickster events, tulpas, angels, demigods, and every other kind of high strangeness. Brent brings three new personal stories that push the conversation into stranger territory. First, he recalls working with Alien and Total Recall writer Dan O’Bannon, who took H.P. Lovecraft’s worldview seriously enough to live inside a lead-lined house surrounded by the recorded sounds of amniotic fluid. Then, after a discussion of Twin Peaks and its haunted woods, owls, electricity, evil, alternate realities, and atomic-age rupture, Brent tells of a daylight encounter with translucent, Predator-like entities in the woods near his Washington home — an experience that seemed to answer him with falling leaves, then with a $100 WGA residual check that arrived days later. The episode then turns to History’s The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, where investigators try to measure orbs, portals, radiation spikes, electromagnetic anomalies, buried mysteries, and the terrifying hitchhiker effect. Bryce and Brent compare Skinwalker and Twin Peaks as two versions of the same idea: a place that becomes a portal, where the observer may become part of the experiment. Finally, Brent reveals his most astonishing story of the episode — being shown a secret, mobile archive of UFO media, including footage of a saucer over Mexico City that transformed into a black helicopter, an orange orb moving through a snowy forest, and a recurring farm visitation. The episode ends with Bryce’s most unsettling question: what if consciousness is not simply how we perceive the phenomenon, but the medium through which the phenomenon actually operates? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens after first contact—when the ships have landed, the shooting has stopped, and the aliens aren’t going anywhere? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman explore the surprisingly complicated futures Hollywood has imagined for humanity once extraterrestrials become conquerors, occupiers, refugees, neighbors, employers, enemies—or even romantic partners. And they confront the question every one of us would eventually have to answer: would you join the resistance, collaborate with the new regime, try to play both sides—or just keep your head down and hope the lights stay on? From the guerrilla warfare of Falling Skies and the fascist occupation of V to the surveillance state of Captive State and Colony, the stories keep returning to the same uncomfortable truth: alien invasion movies are usually talking about us. Alien Nation turns extraterrestrials into immigrants. District 9 makes them refugees trapped in an apartheid system. Defiance imagines multiple species attempting to build a society together, while Pluribus offers perhaps the strangest possibility of all—a peaceful hive mind that promises to eliminate fear, loneliness, and conflict by eliminating individuality along with them. But beneath all the science fiction is a question that feels increasingly relevant to Sound, Light & Frequency: if contact is already taking place in some form, what might come next? Bryce and Brent consider whether decades of movies and television are simply exploiting one of humanity’s oldest fears—or whether, intentionally or otherwise, Hollywood has been rehearsing the possibilities for us. Because first contact may be an event. Life after contact is a civilization. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.