Case NOT Closed

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Well, here we are, Brent. It's episode 36, the last episode of our first season of Sound, Light, and Frequency. I have known this day was coming since the day we started, and now that it's here, I'm not even sure I'm ready for it.
00:00:15
Speaker 2: I am definitely not ready for it. A lot has transpired in the last couple weeks, and it's been a marathon. 36 episodes, when we first talked about it, it said, oh, that'll be fun. About halfway through the season, I think we kind of looked at each other and went, wait, we're at 18. We have 18 more of these to go. And then here we are at 36. And on one hand, like you said, it feels like we're crossing the finish line. On the other hand, I feel like, but I don't want it to end yet.
00:00:43
Speaker 1: Yeah. And halfway through at 18, if I'm not mistaken, that was when Disclosure Day came out.
00:00:49
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: And we had to scramble to do that. I started to think about this last night as I was kind of, I tried to think through the next day as I'm falling asleep. So as I was falling asleep, I thought of something and I got up and wrote it down. And it was this. When we first started this endeavor, if you will, I thought the mission statement was to take the audience on a 36-hour journey. That's what was in my head. Okay, we're going to start with this party crasher and then we'll do this and we'll do that. And then we'll try to lay. Okay. That's what I thought. But what ended up happening for me, Brent, is that you and I went on a year long journey of our own. It wasn't the audience journey that happened, although that did happen, I'm sure. And some people have said that, but it was the journey that you and I were on because I ended up thinking radically differently about the relationship between Hollywood and UFOs and secrecy, even though that was the concept of the show. I got a little more militant about some of it, a little less militant about other things. And honestly, as I look at the whole thing, I just go, I'm not the same person I was when we.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: Started this a year ago. No, totally agreed. We have been on a journey and it's been a bit of a roller coaster ride at times. And not only am I not the same person I was, but I can genuinely say I'm a better person because if for nothing else, Watching all of those movies and TV shows, some of them for the first time, it opened my mind even further. It put new ideas out on the table for me. And what I thought I knew going in and had some certainty about, some of my beliefs have been shaken a bit and asked me to recalibrate, which I think is really what you're supposed to do. When you get into a position where all of your beliefs become calcified and they form your identity, then you're missing out on the opportunity to discover new things. And my one hope for the journey that we took our audience on is that we've opened their minds, that they've discovered new things. Absolutely. As we have been able to do.
00:02:59
Speaker 1: What was so interesting to me, just looking back on it, is that every week we had a layout of the season. Okay, it could go like this. And by the way, nothing stayed from that. If you look back at what we said we were going to do, it's Pretty different. But with every episode, we'd have an idea in mind. And then we would repair to our respective corners and start to do our own sort of independent research and read books and watch movies and TV shows around, usually gathered around a theme or whatever.
00:03:29
Speaker 2: I've pretty much ended every episode going, I forgot to talk about that thing or what about that other idea? But that's, I think, a great indication of that this is a rich vein to explore. And we've, in some cases, gone really deep and other places we've stayed on the surface. But I think we've taken a pretty good overview of Hollywood and the relationship between the government around UFOs. That was our kind of goal to go and investigate that with that being the unholy alliance between these two entities. And I feel like we've done a good job of that from beginning to end. Some of the episodes, like you said, we never even considered. Certain things arose. If you're looking back on it, the President's Day episode, because Trump and Obama got in a UFO spat. And we felt we had to cover that. Then Disclosure Day came out and we conformed the whole season to around that. And then we had the formula in Harrington. And we could never have anticipated where the journey would take us.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: A few years back, I was pitching some reality show, or I think I was, I can't even quite remember. But somebody said, the two words that the executives all like are active investigation. So I remember that. And so we actually started to use that at first, almost marketing, not quite, but a little bit of marketing. But then it really turned into an active investigation. It really did become those two words that, It was certainly active because every single week we had to come out with something new for 36 weeks. Just to put this in context for folks, I've produced a lot of television series. And back in the day on Broadcast Network, a season was 22 episodes. And that nearly killed you by the time you were done. And what happened with these 36, they weren't as complex production-wise as a television series. But each one felt like a little documentary. And I do agree with you if being more knowledgeable is being a better person, then I'm a better person because I certainly know a lot more. And interestingly enough, some of the things I thought would be more important became less important. One of the things I did, and I've got a collection of books back there, and there's been books that have been written talking about the whole concept of UFOs and how Hollywood has treated aliens and all that. And I thought I'd be relying more in that world. And even though there wasn't an episode that we did where we didn't talk about a film or a television series as a portal or whatever, they literally did take us into other places that kind of blew my mind from time to time. And when I say active investigation, what was so interesting is it's an argument against AI. If you use AI, you find out what AI thinks. You can say, what do you think about X? And then the AI will give you a bunch of stuff, right? But It's not going to make the connections that I started seeing happening, where I would be watching a television show while I was reading a book and making notes and talking to you and interviewing somebody, and then something would come together. And the best example I could use would be the My Favorite Martian thing, where I was just thinking, okay, I'm just going to watch an episode of My Favorite Martian because we're doing a show about comedy.
00:06:55
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: Right. And then I realized that the pilot is the most ufological thing I've seen in a long time. And that it was based on an X-15 flight that the pilot actually saw an anomalous phenomena. So AI would not have done that for me.
00:07:14
Speaker 2: No, I had a number of those interesting discoveries along the way as well. And I remember my example would be when we were researching the X-Files episode. And unbeknownst to both of us, we discovered that Richard Doty worked as an advisor, a consultant on the X-Files. In our active investigation, we're looking for any ways that Hollywood and the government happened to work together on the UFO narrative. That was not on my bingo card. No.
00:07:47
Speaker 1: And I so want to do more on that topic in a second season. I guess the thing that really impacted me most is I started my career as a journalist, all right? I was a TV reporter and anchorman and that kind of thing. And then I pivoted and went into the entertainment part of everything and started writing television episodes and movies and so forth. And that's, of course, how we met. But when you're writing fiction, you actually get to decide how the mystery ends, which is interesting. You are playing God there. They're your characters. You can make them do whatever you want. Whatever you think the mystery is, how it's going to resolve, fine. But this one really lit me up back to the old days of reporting because a lot of times I would start out thinking I knew what the answer was and then realizing I didn't know the answer when I set out to do it in the same way. And I found that to be just fascinating. And going back to the active investigation part of this whole thing, What was really interesting is I think at the beginning, you and I knew at the very least, we have a spine here. The spine is what happened to us on Dark Skies, right? And at the beginning, I had written the foreword for a book called Silver Screen Saucers a few years back, written by Robbie Graham. And so it was a great book about UFOs and the late Robbie Graham. And it was about UFOs and Hollywood and all that. And he had done a lot of research, and it turned up things about the 50s and 60s and He'd found a lot of things, but they were of the historical record, a lot of them. And then what happened to us is while we're busy trying to tell our story, we always went with the field of dreams theory. If we build it, they will come. If we build the show called Sound, Light, and Frequency about the relationship between Hollywood UFOs and.
00:09:44
Speaker 2: Secrecy, this was the working theory.
00:09:47
Speaker 1: If our situation was not completely unique, and there were other people out there, we would hear from them. And we did.
00:09:54
Speaker 2: Those are some of my favorite episodes where we got to hear about other people's experiences with brushes with the government and deals and all sorts of things. I think also looking back on it, the discovery that set the whole thing in motion really was the formula once that came back into our lives. And that was part of that spine you're talking about. And Getting to a place where we could share that with the audience was incredible. And then I think there's been then the thing that we never could have planned for, which was the whole John Harrington story that I was at the center of. So a lot has happened. Some planned, some unplanned. There were a lot of happy coincidences along the way. And so I guess before we go to break, do you want to tease the audience with what we're going to be talking about in this episode? That's what we do here. Tease the audience.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: But I also think we've delivered to the audience a certain amount. I realized when you were just mentioning the formula and Harrington that these were kind of things that were monkeys on my back for years that I didn't really know. I didn't really feel that way about it. And I feel liberated right now in a very real sense because we have finally been able to do what I think we both have wanted to do over the years, which is to say, let's actually grapple with these things. Right. Your story about Harrington. Let's find out where that goes if it becomes public and people talk about it. The formula, instead of it just being something that's in your safety deposit box and we don't talk about very often, let's first try to figure it out on our own. And then let's find out if when we share it with people, what they think about it, all of which has happened. So the tease, if you will, is this. We want to look back at what has been talked about in those last 36 episodes, of course. And that would involve taking a look at what we learned and what we thought was true, what didn't turn out to be true or whatever, but not in a nostalgic way, but in terms of really assessing what our investigation has taught us. What did we actually learn? And there's a couple of things that we each want to float as theories about how we see things shaking down. Brent, I know you've got one of your theories. I've got one. that we started Dark Skies as the grand unified theory of conspiracy. I've got a unified theory of a couple of things I want to float, but also one of the things that we want to do just because it seems fun is that we have challenged ourselves to each take a look at all the film product and all the television product about aliens and extraterrestrials and UFOs and the whole concept of all this stuff. We have each picked a potential film or television series that we feel best explains what we think is really going on.
00:12:51
Speaker 2: I would only add, as I'm thinking about my own choice, maybe literally, but definitely figuratively.
00:12:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, good. Now that's a tease, my friend. All right, everybody, we'll see you on the other side of this and we'll get started.
00:13:23
Speaker 2: I'm Brent Friedman. Years ago, a family friend who became a cabinet member in the Reagan administration disclosed to me that aliens are real, they're here, and he'd seen them.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: I'm Bryce Zabel. Later, when we were producing Dark Skies, an NBC TV series about an alien invasion, we were approached by men who said they were from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and they wanted to give us inside information in exchange for access to our show.
00:13:50
Speaker 2: We didn't take that deal. but we have never stopped thinking about it.
00:13:54
Speaker 1: That's why we do this podcast. We're working out ideas in real time about how Hollywood has portrayed aliens and why.
00:14:02
Speaker 2: Every episode is different because there are so many questions.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: We're looking for answers. It's an active investigation. Let's do this together.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: All right, we're back, and we are going to take you right into an assessment of our active investigation. This whole thing began with what we were bringing to the table, right, which was our account. We were the first witnesses to take the stand, as it were. when we told our story about JC. And that whole story was even possible simply because you and I had come together over a personal story of mine regarding John Harrington, as everyone calls him, the man who cried himself to sleep. And he had disclosed to me when I was 18, I tell you the story, Dark Skies is born, we're on the air, and JC comes to our premiere party, crashes it in order to give us the all important message that sound, light, and frequency is the secrets of the universe.
00:15:20
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:15:20
Speaker 2: And here's your little party memento in the formula.
00:15:23
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:15:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:15:24
Speaker 1: But the active investigation wasn't just about what was going on in Hollywood writ large. We actively investigated our own story and found things in our own story that surprised us. Among one of the great investigative tools for us is I kept most of the dark sky stuff. And I guess you kept some stuff, too, in our respective stories. organizational methods. I had, over the years, every time I ran across something, thrown it into an area of my office because I couldn't bear to give it away or get rid of it or shred it or anything. It turned out to be incredibly useful because I found production memos and things of all manner that sort of put things into a different order. In some cases, I had remembered something going on in one way and thought that preceded something else and it was the other way around. So what we ended up figuring out is that we had these two separate stories we both had lived. And over the course of time, they feel like a single story in a way. Now, not to take anything away from your own individual story of John Harrington or my own individual stories, but they did merge. And for example, what we ended up telling people over the course of the season is how this whole strangeness at Dark Skies happened. But the things that we started to think were the story, the guy coming to the party, that comes toward the end of it. We discovered this whole other thing. For example, when you and I had met, all right, I had done a movie called Official Denial that was very ufological. And I had been contacted myself by a guy who called in while I was at Lois and Clark. I'd forgotten all about this guy. And he asked me to give him a name. And I had a project at the time where I had a name, John Longar. And I said, your name's John Longar. So I forgot that. I had literally forgotten all that. And the very day that you and I met at Caudel Sol, the Italian restaurant, where you told me the John Harrington story and blew my mind, I had just sent a treatment to my agent called Majestic for a TV series. But then you tell me about John Harrington, and he's a Navy guy. And so suddenly we end up making the head of Majestic Navy, which may have been the trigger to get this JC guy to show up at the party because he said he was from the Office of Naval Intelligence. We created this whole concept of the cover of fiction. We had these briefing books and how we sold the thing. All of that cover of fiction stuff is what came back boomeranging on us with JC. And we never saw it quite that way at the time. Then, of course, we sold the thing and something that was the first thing that blew my mind because they were super important when it happened and I'd forgotten them. And those were the postcards while we were not quite shooting dark skies where somebody sent a postcard to me at my house and it said, we are watching you. And by the way, folks, all of that precedes JC showing up at the party here. And after those anonymous postcards, we get picked up. We think we're on a fast track to success. And what happens? The men in black people try to kill our show.
00:18:49
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker 1: And in one context, that always looked like just a Hollywood power play. But in the context of UFOs and cover-ups and that, who knows? It raised questions, right? And now we catch up to the party crasher, right? So the very things... didn't lay out quite the way that we thought. And so anyway, so there was that. And I always thought that was super important because suddenly I started seeing relationships between the stories. And I don't know if you felt that way, but I felt like every episode we did, I know some people would say, stop talking about dark skies. We know you did a show a lot. But the thing is, it was our revelation to ourselves about what we'd been involved in. And so we use that as the metaphor to talk about the larger story.
00:19:41
Speaker 2: Absolutely agree with everything you just said. And I will add, too, that when I started to research our first couple episodes and look back and look at the things that I have saved, there was a lot of pattern recognition. There was a lot of things that made sense years later that I was able to interpret with some objectivity. And I think the whole JC thing and trying to understand the formula why he gave it to us, why he gave us this suggestion to put it away for 10 to 15 years in a safety deposit box. And ultimately, the fact that this led to a second meeting where we were offered a deal with more concrete terms, only to be then told that if we wanted to really close the deal, we had to go to a cemetery at midnight. All of that, as we've talked about before, was all just kind of the wash. It was all part of that blur of having a TV show on the air. And now going back and looking at it, you start to realize, well, there was some really interesting things that happened and they all start to make sense on a level, especially when you compare them to some of the other stories that we uncovered. And I'm talking specifically about Brett Leonard and Dan Tibbetts and even to a degree, Todd Masters. And so I think that was Part of our active investigation was we wanted to look at our own story. We wanted to look at our own lives. We wanted to look at movies and TV shows. But we also wanted to hopefully find other people that could tell their stories and look at their stories in relationship to our stories. And that's when you started to really have that pattern recognition. Totally.
00:21:25
Speaker 1: Just not to be defensive, but just to point out a fact, about 80% of what we ever talked about, Dark Skies, was about what happened off camera, that wasn't on the air. We spent very little time actually talking about what the series is. So for people that wanted to know about it, they have to go research that on their own. A couple of things, as I look at this season, there were three high points in the investigation that on one level kind of look like marketing bumps, but in fact, they're really investigative bumps. The first was, as we mentioned earlier, our middle section of of the season was Disclosure Day, Spielberg's film. And that kind of gave us a way to talk about the very thing that happened to us, but did it happen to other people? So we were able to look into Spielberg as a person that might have made his own deal. And we had a source, Toby Hooper, the director of Dark Skies, who actually said that's what had happened. And most recently, we turned up the fact that Spielberg's father and his uncle worked at Wright-Patterson, right? Right. Where Blue Book was born, Disclosure Day, Spielberg's film demonstrated really how directly mainstream entertainment was engaging with government UFO secrecy. He put it on the screen and it was about that.
00:22:45
Speaker 2: And not only that, it was something that was happening in real time as our podcast was unfolding, right? Well, also in the background, the administration is disclosing actual tranches of UFO evidence. So we're on the air talking about Steven Spielberg maybe having a deal. He's releasing a film called Disclosure Day. Well, the government is disclosing. And more importantly, he did something unprecedented. Part of the marketing campaign was Steven Spielberg went on trailers of the film basically saying, I'm getting the truth out there.
00:23:21
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:23:21
Speaker 2: So the whole thing was unprecedented. We hadn't seen that kind of that connection between A story being told online, something happening in real time in the movies, and the government actually echoing that with their own disclosure. That was a high watermark, I think, for the season. Sure was.
00:23:42
Speaker 1: I have memories from that time, how quickly we turned that around. That was really a spectacular thing to see that happen. But I also remember I saw it twice in a week, once with George Knapp, of all people, in Las Vegas, and once with Jesse Michaels in Austin. I'll never forget that week. It was just so you've got the Spielberg film coming out and all this and to hear other people's points of view and to have people discussing the whole thing of Disclosure Day. So it wasn't marketing. It was disclosure. It was like people really trying to grapple with two other major turning points in our sort of active investigation. One of them was the release of the formula, which we did take some heat over the course of the season where people were saying, why don't you guys just put it out already? And what we said all along is we want to look at it first, then we'll put it out and let the public do what they will. And we picked a date. We said we're going to put it out on September 17th. We said that nearly from the beginning, even though I'm not sure everybody heard us say it, but we did say that and we did it. And So I feel good about that. But what it did is it proved our point, which is, okay, there's a lot of ways to get at the truth of this thing. And one of them is to bring the audience in as researchers. And what we have demonstrated with the formula is there are a lot of different ways to study something. The internet world we live in is very different in 2026 than the world we lived in in 1996 when it came to us. Things that we would never be expected to find in 1996 because the research was very difficult at that point are easier with the internet. And then, of course, your story breaking just two weeks ago on Jesse Michaels.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: Yes, the John Harrington denial. That was, again, something we couldn't really have planned. The disclosure day was a happy coincidence that it was unfolding while we were recording. We obviously controlled the formula narrative. We were both blindsided by the John Harrington story. So three very different examples, right? And each one of them we incorporated into our season. The John Harrington story is still unfolding to some degree. People are drawing sides or lines in the sand and picking team Brent, team John. At this point, who knows where it's all going to go? I think the hope for me always was that the somehow John would become a whistleblower. And that's the era that we are in. That's obviously not what has happened, but you never know. I don't think that storyline is completely finished.
00:26:25
Speaker 1: Harrington is not finished. And by the way, at the same time, Harrington was coming out as a story through Jesse Michaels, but then amplified on our own show. In other words, we dropped everything. We're about to record another show when Jesse Michaels dropped that interview. We dropped everything we were doing. and went into a response. And we're still doing that in a way. But what I thought was so fascinating is to show you the world that we live in right now. At the same time, the Harrington story is breaking. David Grush has, so that's a media story, right? That's American alchemy. David Grush has gone on Joe Rogan and started talking about reptilians and NHI on NHI violence and undersea bases and Greek God-looking aliens. So that was happening. And then right on the heels of your Harrington story, we have Jay Stratton out there talking to Fox News about his new book and going on a book tour. Things are just going faster and faster. Now, one of the things about the research and the whole active investigation part, there's three parts to it as I see it. There were the receipts, which people always are, show me the receipts. We've done the best we can to show receipts when we can. They included, in this case, the original Dark Skies materials, the dated postcard, which you can see on our website right now, soundlightfrequency.com. You can see it, or you can see these past episodes, hollywoodufos.com. So it's transparent. The receipts are there to the extent that we have them. And if we find more receipts, we'll put those up there. With the Harrington case, receipts included you having a couple of pictures to give lie to his claim. I knew the guy when he was a baby. So there's that.
00:28:12
Speaker 2: So receipts are important.
00:28:14
Speaker 1: Not everybody has them for everything, but sometimes you have something and it's good to share.
00:28:20
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:28:21
Speaker 1: It's good to make it clear. We're trying to do that. Then there's recollections, Brent. And those included not only my account, but your account and accounts of these other people. And We found people, for example, as we began to think about it, there are people who were witnesses to J.C. at the party. Brad Markowitz brought him to me. And so he's a witness. Your wife was a witness. And Todd Masters, who you mentioned earlier, who did effects for us and built our grays, Todd Masters saw J.C. and the captain at the Dark Skies offices. So these are recollections, witness recollections that helped our investigation. And then that allows us to have theories. Now, a theory that doesn't have anything behind it is just entertainment. But a theory based on recollections from witnesses and receipts is something different. And we've attempted to do that. By the way, one other witness to the whole thing was Adam Siegel, who was your assistant, if I'm not mistaken.
00:29:23
Speaker 2: Yes, he was my assistant. He saw these people too. So it's good. It was good that we were able to do that.
00:29:28
Speaker 1: The thing that makes me most intrigued because it holds out the hope for a second season where we would dial into this a little bit more would be how we found some people that the witnesses amplified our story yes that's fine I appreciate that I appreciate those people and I hope the audience appreciates them too but that's different than what we found by building it so that they could come we found.
00:29:56
Speaker 2: Other stories yes And starting with a friend of mine, a perfect example, and this was like, we couldn't have written it better. When the first couple episodes came out of Sound, Light, and Frequency, I was in contact with a friend I hadn't talked to in a number of years. And one night he said to me, hey, dude, I just heard the first episode. Something like that happened to me. That was our big hope, right? That people would hear us. Us putting our story out there, putting ourselves out there to some degree and want to come and join in and share their experiences. He was our first kind of witness for the prosecution who came forward and told his story. And I think the big takeaway for me was when he told us about the dossier. Yes.
00:30:46
Speaker 1: That.
00:30:47
Speaker 2: I think it was, was it the NSA?
00:30:49
Speaker 1: I don't remember.
00:30:49
Speaker 2: I'm getting it all conflated.
00:30:51
Speaker 1: I think he said it was DIA. DIA, okay. Defense Intelligence Agency.
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:30:58
Speaker 2: And he met with somebody who took a little bit of amusement in showing him this huge dossier on Brett up to that point. And I think Brett at that time was maybe 30-ish or something. And I remember one specific detail, him saying that it listed every movie he had ever rented.
00:31:15
Speaker 1: He showed me My dossier, your intelligence dossier was this thick.
00:31:24
Speaker 3: Whoa.
00:31:25
Speaker 1: And every movie I had ever rented was listed.
00:31:29
Speaker 2: And I just thought, whoa, that is exposed. And so he was a perfect example of he didn't have the exact same experience that we did, but his experience was equally strange and unsettling to him.
00:31:44
Speaker 1: We were never shown a dossier on ourselves the way he was. But once he told that story, I thought that doesn't the fact that they didn't show it to us doesn't mean that they didn't have one on us. So that was somebody that you brought in. Somebody that we both knew was Todd Masters. Todd Masters provided two things to us. First, we both knew him because we'd worked with him on Dark Skies. You knew him prior to Dark Skies. But Todd Masters provided two pretty incredible things. The first was he basically validated the Toby Hooper story.
00:32:19
Speaker 3: I don't think Toby has any reason to lie. The way I heard it from him was that he and Stephen had been buddies for so long and Stephen had just brought it up casually that there was some sort of arrangement for close encounters, I think it was.
00:32:38
Speaker 2: Yes, he'd heard it independently. He had worked with Toby on a couple projects before Dark Skies when we all were working together, and Toby had told him that story too. That is some independent validation, and I know that that is dependent upon people believing Todd and Toby. I can only vouch for them, as we've done a couple times for various guests. They have both of those men, Toby when he was with us and Todd still, have enormous integrity. They're not liars. So read into it what you want. But we did get some independent validation on the Steven Spielberg story.
00:33:15
Speaker 1: He also gave us the validation about JC and the captain being at the Dark Skies offices. He saw them. But again, so did Brad Markowitz. So did Adam Siegel. So did a lot of other people witness those guys. Because I don't know if this was shrewd or fearful or But we made sure that when we talked to those guys, we put them in a conference room that had a big glass window so everyone walking by could see them. Because we were like, I don't know who these guys are. Okay, so you brought in Brett Leonard. We had Todd Masters between us. And then a friend of mine came out of the woodwork too, Daniel Tibbetts, who most recently told a mind-blowing story, to be honest with you. about how a guy he was working with around the same time as the outreach that came at us, and he met at Television City, which is where CBS is located, in the early morning hours, like one o'clock to four o'clock in the morning, with a couple of guys who said they were Black Ops people, and they showed him implants. They actually showed him actual physical implants that had structure to them and writing, and they put them up on an opaque projector and projected. They would not give their name. They would not give their agency.
00:34:33
Speaker 2: They simply said, we work in a black ops operation, and I'm here to make sure nothing happens, that nothing leaves this room, that everything's fine.
00:34:43
Speaker 1: The whole story is great. It's called Midnight in Television City. I hope people can watch that. But these are three quite different people. Yes. And then you take in our experience, you've got four different people. Then you've got, again, as you said, those are just our first person accounts. But then as you start to dig through this, you turned up the account of Richard Doty, who's considered one of the greatest disinformational liars in UFO history for all the things he's done. And if you, whether instead of us going into it, just look up Richard Doty, folks, Google Richard Doty, and you'll see. But the fact that he claims that he had this relationship with X-Files- pretty fascinating stuff.
00:35:25
Speaker 2: Absolutely. And we talked earlier about pattern recognition, looking across our story with these three other guests that we had. And let me just say that having known Todd a long time, Todd could have disclosed more things and chose not to, right? And I think that happens sometimes. But the fact of the matter is, we can still look across these stories and say, what were the commonalities? And the commonalities were Unlike, as we talked about recently in our music episode, where Tom DeLonge went looking for a deal, none of us were looking for a deal, right? It was just offered to us under very strange circumstances with very kind of strange people who would only give a first name or wouldn't really tell you much about their background. And you just had to kind of trust them. Meeting in strange circumstances, they seemed to know much more about us than we knew about them. But it was all about... we're going to give you information so that you can be part of this disclosure program. And so it does for me, when I look back on all of that, I see, okay, it's all very similar, but the details are very strange and very different. But now that I've heard everyone's story and I've thought about this, it really, when we talk about how have we changed our point of view over the course of the season, I, at the beginning of the season, I really thought JC was legitimate. I thought that he was from the, I just took everything he said at face value. And now I, part of me still does believe that I do have to say that looking at all of this, it just feels weird. It feels like it might have been a PSYOP, but the catch being is that the PSYOP was some version of what John Harrington said was, There's going to be truth out there and then there's going to be lies. And that's all part of how disinformation works.
00:37:23
Speaker 1: Remember, though, one of the things we always said about Dark Skies, we loved the song For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield. And one of the lines in it is paranoia strikes deep. And in fact, an episode of Dark Skies that never got filmed because it was a backup script was called Paranoia Strikes Deep. And an example of that was these people that came forward. They didn't have to come forward. They did what we think is a heroic thing. They came to bear witness. They said, there's a big mystery out there. We'll tell our piece of it like you guys have. And I hope more people will be able to do that in coming episodes and seasons. But on the Todd Masters thing, let's just recall, there's always a story behind the story, folks. You and I were set to record with Todd and somebody else. Yes. And that somebody else had their own crazy story. Okay. And they were going to shed light on a number of things, but one of them was the alien autopsy that was on Fox in the nineties. And that person bailed out at the last possible second, which may have led to Todd feeling like maybe I shouldn't be out on this limb. But that's because honestly, you have to ask yourself at some points, is this safe? What I'm doing? if this is a trillion dollar coverup for all these years and it's still holding after 80 years, maybe these people don't want me talking about certain things. Right. And so that's not crazy to do. So, okay.
00:38:58
Speaker 2: All of that was interesting.
00:39:00
Speaker 1: The formula though, changed our investigation because it allowed us, I think to, well, for us, it was an emotional high point for me.
00:39:10
Speaker 2: It felt like, okay, you know what?
00:39:12
Speaker 1: I'm, I don't want to be yelled at anymore for not putting the formula out. I've had a chance to look at it. I've come to some conclusions on my own, but here it is. And so I felt like the formula was really an interesting part of the active investigation. And I don't, you know, I, I people who want to know the whole story that the first episode is called Secrets of the Universe, and the follow-up is called Wisdom of the Crowd. So rather than you and me go through the whole thing right now, what's interesting is Secret of the Universe laid out our attempt to say, here's what we know at this point. Here's what we are thinking. And then within a week, we had another episode we had to do, which was Wisdom of the Crowd, because the crowd was crowdsourcing the formula. Right. Yes.
00:40:03
Speaker 2: Which was fascinating.
00:40:04
Speaker 1: I think that is historically interesting in the whole UFO world to just drop something in there and say, what do you guys think? And people thought a lot of things.
00:40:20
Speaker 2: They thought a lot of things. They led us into new directions that we hadn't gone, which was, again, the hope. Specifically, the middle pillar was surfaced, a book from 1938 with a connection to Aleister Crowley and some being from 1918 called Lamb, an interdimensional being that happened to look like a gray. So again, really strange territory, and I hope people continue to explore it. And I say this because That investigation is not closed because as of yesterday, we got a very interesting offering from a listener. I'll just give you a little tease of it. There was a fan of the podcast whose name I don't have the permission to use, sent though a 38-page mathematical analysis of the formula, which I must say, even though I understand probably 5% of it, it's pretty mind-blowing. And I'm just going to read you one little excerpt from one of the overview pages. Red is an equation with the symbols taken in order. The drawing gives the fine structure constant. That is the number, about 1 over 137, that sets how strongly light and electricity hold on to matter. It is in every atom and every chemical bond. It has been measured to about one part in 10 billion, and nobody has known where it comes from. The analysis implies that number comes from the formula. Now, honestly, it's so far over my head, I certainly can't say whether it's true or not true. But the fact that somebody is still out there investigating the formula and finding new ways to interpret it, I think that's exactly what our best hope was for sharing.
00:42:10
Speaker 1: It with the world. Absolutely. A couple of thoughts.
00:42:14
Speaker 2: Please do ask that gentleman.
00:42:16
Speaker 1: If we can use his name and post his 38 pages, because on our soundlightfrequency.com site, we have a good eight different interpretations from people that they sent in to us posted, including a really great one that's very visual from your own daughter Flannery. But I think that we should post it. So hopefully he'll do that. The other thing I was just going to comment on is this is a great example. We were like in the hurricane of production for the last year, trying to knock out these 36. And people were kind enough to send us a lot of comments. We've tried to read all the comments, but responding to all the comments was impossible at the same time as trying to put on a show. So potentially, we're very appreciative of all of you who wrote us. And as we take a little bit of a break here after season one, we're probably going to sit down and read and respond. And there's some good stuff in there and we'll go through it all and we'll be smarter for having done it. So the formula, another big thing, as we pointed out, the Harrington question you mentioned already is still open. We're not done with it. Why are we not done with it? Let's just put a pin on that one. What are we going to learn?
00:43:28
Speaker 2: I don't know what we will learn, but I know why people haven't let it go yet. Because at the most basic level, it's he said, he said. I don't think either one of us has proved definitively our case yet. So we've each taken the stand and given our testimony. And now, like I said, the online community has drawn their own conclusions. My hope personally is that this all resolves behind closed doors and that someday John and I can put all of this behind us and become friends again.
00:44:07
Speaker 1: I'm a little less rooting for that because that means you have to go have a private conversation, which I'm listening. That would be a great healing moment for you too. Not putting that down, but I would like to know about it. So hopefully after you had your healing moment, he can become a whistleblower and actually tell his story in public, maybe under oath, and maybe that would be good. Now, when we went into this, Brent, I said we each had a couple of theories about different things. You have one about this, about Harrington's testimony being a little, well, obviously... suspicious. He was found in a couple of things where he wasn't consistent, right? Notably, how long he knew you and whether you drove his car across the country, things like that. And I do think, by the way, just in terms of active investigations and wisdom of the crowd, I'm just going to go out on a limb and say the Harrington question is still open. I'm going to continue to look into it. I think there are things in the public record that might lend credence to your story and take some shine off his denial. But I think also there are people out there doing that right now. And I believe that could be very interesting. But you had a theory about why he wasn't as good a witness for himself. You want to run that past us?
00:45:27
Speaker 2: The theory is just born mostly from my respect for him, if nothing else, as a lawyer. And I think what I was saying is that I am not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination. And I've watched, though, enough TV series and movies about legal storylines. And the number one thing is just answer the question. That's what they always tell you when you're being put up on the stand. Just answer the question. Don't embellish. Don't get emotional.
00:45:57
Speaker 1: Right.
00:45:58
Speaker 2: And so I can't reconcile why it wasn't enough to just say, eh, kid's got an active imagination.
00:46:07
Speaker 1: But what's your theory then? Why would he do more?
00:46:10
Speaker 2: So my theory is that maybe he had to say this. Maybe he had to deny it. Maybe it was getting enough attention through our podcast and Jesse Michaels and everything that he was compelled to come and put the genie back in the bottle. But in doing so, maybe because he was forced to do it, he didn't do it in the smartest way possible, possibly by design, so that The truth would be there if you looked close enough.
00:46:41
Speaker 1: Wow, that's an interesting one.
00:46:43
Speaker 2: Maybe there's some wish fulfillment in there that I hope that's what's going on. But as I said, it's just hard for me to imagine that a man as smart as John and his wife, by the way, who was a lawyer and a federal judge herself, they have some pretty powerful legal counsel there. I'm curious why after all this time he felt the need to come forward and why he did it in the manner he did. when there were probably much more expedient and effective ways to do, to say, no, it didn't happen.
00:47:16
Speaker 1: My hypothesis about that is that somebody said, John, you can't just keep letting this go. You got to just go deny it. And maybe they didn't discuss specifically how he would deny it. So what gives credit to your theory would be that he didn't do a great job of denial. This isn't just my theory. There's been thousands of comments posted in Reddit and YouTube and X and probably.
00:47:44
Speaker 2: Tens of thousands.
00:47:46
Speaker 1: But I would say they're running at least 95 to 5 in favor of him not being completely honest. And I think you're right. He strikes me as a very bright guy and probably could have figured out not to get tumbled up on his own story. So there is that.
00:48:05
Speaker 2: Speaking of all those comments, I do want to address a couple of comments that I saw, which I absolutely agree with. And several people pointed out, it should be no surprise to Brent. He's the one that dragged John's name into this, put it out in the public and forced this to happen. And to that, I say, absolutely. I take full responsibility and accountability for being the one who, after many years, brought his name out into the public and essentially created the inevitable situation in which at some point he was going to have to deny it. And so that's on me. And towards that end, I do hope that whatever the case is, whatever the truth is behind why it happened the way it did, maybe when the dust settles, there's an opportunity for he and I to sit down and work things out and talk about old times.
00:48:55
Speaker 1: God, I just, I'd like to, if you won't tell me about, I'll just have to write the screenplay about that. That's pretty interesting. If you're going to take accountability, I have to take some accountability then because you told me this story in 1994. And like a good soldier, I didn't pass it around until 2010 when I was writing After Disclosure with Richard Dolan. And we put an oblique reference to the story without a name in that book. Okay. We talk about the wisdom of the crowd. I was just reminded of that because Patrick Scott Armstrong from Vetted, who is, I would call him a skeptic, but that's okay. Free country. But he dug up something I didn't even know existed. I'd forgotten completely about it. He found a speech I gave at the International UFO Conference in 2018, where I told the story and mentioned his name. Now, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know how he got hold of it. I couldn't even find it. I'd forgotten it. But there it was. I can't deny that's me saying it. And then again, it reared its head when Coulthard pressed you on it in an interview in 22, I think. And I apologize to you publicly for having done that. I don't remember how it even happened. I just know I was in a hotel room. Then as I think about it the night before and went, I need something. I don't know. I don't know how it, I don't even remember it either. So I have a, you had a theory. I have a hypothesis theory to float here. And as we said, if you just float a theory and there's nothing at all to back it up, then it's just entertainment. This one, If I'd floated it at the beginning of the season, I think might have been just entertainment. But I'm going to float it now. And I'm not saying that this is what I absolutely believe. And I'm not saying that the evidence supports it. I'm just saying it's a theory that.
00:50:50
Speaker 2: Is worth exploring.
00:50:52
Speaker 1: And if we do another season, I will be looking into this with greater depth. This is the theory.
00:50:59
Speaker 2: I think it's possible.
00:51:01
Speaker 1: And I underline possibility. possible, Brent, but I think it's possible that John Harrington and J.C., who Christ our party, know each other. It's possible that J.C.
00:51:14
Speaker 2: Worked for Harrington.
00:51:16
Speaker 1: Now, here's my thinking. There's a Navy connection to all this thing. We know that J.C. said he was from the Office of Naval Intelligence. We know John Harrington was a Marine who became an undersecretary of Of the Navy for hiring or something of that. And then went on and became the Secretary of Energy in Reagan's second term, which we know is associated with UAP. We know he would have left office officially in 89. But that doesn't mean if he was briefed into the UFO issue, as you state in your story, that he suddenly resigned from that.
00:51:59
Speaker 3: Right.
00:51:59
Speaker 2: That was all... Below ground, above ground, he was secretary of energy.
00:52:04
Speaker 1: But below ground in 1989, maybe he continued in that role.
00:52:09
Speaker 2: Everything we've heard is that if you are a charter member of the legacy program, that's for life.
00:52:16
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. So he's a charter member of the legacy program in 1989. And he knows in his own mind, I'm just filling in blanks about human behavior. He's got to know in his own mind, I wish I hadn't told that kid what I told him in 81. Shouldn't have had that third drink or whatever it was. And he probably didn't feel good about it because he probably either had to tell the people that he works with that he did it, or he had to keep it as a secret. Those are really the only two options. All right. And if he told somebody that he did it, then that would have put you on a watch list of some kind for somebody. And we know that Hollywood has been involved in watch lists and things like that. I had this big movie in 93 that was all about UFO cover up and Majestic 12 and crash retrievals and reverse engineering, which is not a big deal today. But back then was pretty shocking. All right. And then you and I. meet and create a TV series, all right? And that script is circulating around town. And what happens? I get a postcard that says, we are watching you. Because somehow Bryce and Brent are now, we're not threats to anybody, but suddenly we have a big TV series that may get on the air. So they're watching the TV series. Now, at a certain point, that TV series gets picked up. Now, if Harrington is still involved in things, because as you said, it's a job you can't quit. It's like being in the mafia. You're there forever. And he's part of the Navy portion of this. He probably had somebody monitoring the project.
00:54:08
Speaker 2: And I know that he was aware of the project because I've spoken about it before and I'm frustrated that I haven't found it in all my boxes, but The week that we were launching, I got a buck slip mailed to me from John Harrington. It's up from the desk of John Harrington. Hey, Brent, congratulations on finally getting your story out there.
00:54:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:54:30
Speaker 2: So he was aware of the show. And just to cap this off, don't forget that when JC walked out of the bushes and said to me, congratulations, you got a lot right. Obviously, you talked to someone.
00:54:44
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:54:46
Speaker 2: So- How would he know that, right? Maybe he thought they have put things in their show, but he also, as to your point, could have known because someone told him that I was talked to.
00:54:58
Speaker 1: I don't have a problem imagining that it came down from on high that this lower level guy, JC, should go talk to us because that would solve his problem. I've got this guy out there, Friedman, who I shouldn't have talked to, but I did. And now he's got this TV series, which is, who knows what's going to happen with that? What if it becomes the next X-Files? Why don't I see if we can make a deal with him and this partner of his so that we can control them rather than they can be... I don't have a problem seeing that. That strikes me as it's possible. And so I just put that out there. I do know the intriguing possibility for me is that neither of us Individually was of great interest, potentially, but that somehow when we came together and whether we got lucky or smart or whatever we were, but we got a network television series when network TV meant something. And it was about how history is a lie, which was our catch line, tagline. I don't know. I would say that suddenly we're of way more interest. And again, I go back to Harrington knew he probably shouldn't have told you what he told you. And it would be better to have you on the inside than the outside.
00:56:26
Speaker 2: There's a lot of logic in that theory.
00:56:28
Speaker 1: OK, so that's my theory. I'm sticking with it.
00:56:31
Speaker 3: Don't know.
00:56:31
Speaker 1: I can't prove it, folks. Don't hold me accountable. But again, if there was anyone who knew about that or if there's any way for me to actually prove Put a little more meat on that bone. I'll be doing that in the future. However, we promised everybody enough of the review. Let's have a little fun here because this is what we do at Sound, Light, and Frequency. We said that we gave ourselves, I guess, the challenge of all the movies and TV series that are out there. What one do we each think might become the best expression of what we think is really going on? Okay. Yes. I'm going to let you go first. Wow. Okay. Here we go.
00:57:18
Speaker 2: So before I tell you what the movie is, I'm going to read you a couple of quotes from it. Not just you, but the audience. And you can play a game with yourself to figure out by hearing these quotes, do you already jump to, oh, I know what it is. First quote is, They have taken the hearts and minds of the rich and powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth. Obviously, they, as you can probably imagine, is the alien presence.
00:57:50
Speaker 1: Next quote.
00:57:51
Speaker 2: They are perched on top of us from birth to death. They own us. They control us. They are our masters. Wake up. They're all around you.
00:58:02
Speaker 1: Wow. Let's just let that sink in for a second, because- God forbid that is true. Many people think it is. That's a sobering thing. But you're saying it's floated in a movie or a TV series. Correct.
00:58:18
Speaker 2: I haven't told you yet which.
00:58:20
Speaker 1: But I do.
00:58:20
Speaker 2: So the thing that I want to come back to and why this resonates with me personally, because this is just to be clear, Bryce and I really did pick our own choices. And because I think these represent, as you said, where we are now.
00:58:34
Speaker 1: Right.
00:58:34
Speaker 2: At the end of season one, I probably would have picked a different movie or TV series, honestly, at the beginning of the season. But certain things have changed my mind. And one of them is just with those quotes in mind. Remember that one of the things John Harrington said to me was aliens are real. They're here and I've seen them. Now, there's a lot of ways to interpret that. But this was also the man who cried himself to sleep. So if I just connect those two dots right there and I go back and I read those two passages again, I think to quote Lou Elizondo, it's solemn. It is solemn. Which is an understatement.
00:59:16
Speaker 1: I mean, if those two quotes are right, I'd cry myself to sleep tonight, but go ahead.
00:59:22
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:59:22
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:59:23
Speaker 2: So the movie is They Live.
00:59:26
Speaker 1: Oh, my God. Yes.
00:59:28
Speaker 2: Is that John? John Carpenter. Yeah.
00:59:31
Speaker 3: 1988.
00:59:31
Speaker 2: It was Roddy Piper, the wrestler, played Nada. Keith David played his buddy Frank. And Meg Foster was also in it as a character named Holly. Basically, the film suggests that humanity has been infiltrated by beings who manipulate our perceptions. They control mass media and maintain an elaborate system of hidden power. Just let that sink in for a moment. It's particularly relevant because the machinery of public persuasion is integral to the plot. Hollywood is part of the metaphor. And this is where it gets interesting to me. Carpenter explicitly designed They Live in 88 as a direct satire and reaction to Reaganomics, right? And if you remember, that was the whole yuppie culture. and the unrestrained 1980s capitalism with the high point being Gordon Gekko in 1987 in the movie Wall Street said.
01:00:28
Speaker 1: Greed is good. Greed is good.
01:00:32
Speaker 2: When we look back on the 80s, that defines that. But why is that relevant? Because many of those same economic benchmarks are present today, along with the prevailing sense of government corruption. If anything, the economic realities today are worse than the 1980s. Yeah. So we're in a very interesting time. And some of the key ideas that Carpenter was trying to get across was that the aliens are running Earth like a third world country is being developed. They were completely above it all. They'd made deals with the elites. And they were coming in to just expand their empire to another planet and to do it subversively. And to do that, they were using... hidden messaging through literally the manipulation of signals and frequencies that were being broadcast to the public with hidden messages so that you look at a billboard and a beautiful new car, but what you're really seeing is the word consume. And so this very subversive way of seeing the world, which was absolutely a great manifestation by Carpenter of paranoia, of pure paranoia, And the whole thing was facilitated by these sunglasses that had been made to filter out all of the noise that was being used to deceive us and just see the pure signal, in which case you would see aliens were all amongst us and they were the ruling class. They were the people who were pulling the strings and in charge of everything.
01:02:10
Speaker 1: What did the aliens look like in They Live?
01:02:13
Speaker 2: So without the sunglasses, they looked absolutely like humans. There was no way to differentiate them other than maybe their attitude. But if you put on the sunglasses, you saw this weird kind of almost like skeletor meets a reptilian face. And they looked weird and dead and scary. And I don't know, literally, it was like. A corpse meets a reptilian is how they look. Now, there was a book that was actually written called, or I'm sorry, a short story called Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson. It was written in 1963. That was the inspiration for this. And in the book, they were literally called out as reptilians. And they were this kind of like hideous lizard-like aliens that were called fascinators. And they had the ability to literally manipulate through the use of frequencies your perception and change what you saw. So they could live amongst us, right? Aliens are here. They're real. But we can't perceive them, right? Unless we can somehow change our frequency. That's a good choice.
01:03:24
Speaker 1: By the way, we should mention, what did Grush just say to Rogan? Yes. Reptilians are out there. We have come a long way that we still can't acknowledge that we're not alone, but we do have whistleblowers talking about reptilians. So that's where we are.
01:03:43
Speaker 2: So just a couple last little things on this as to why I chose this is, again, the movie itself was admittedly a low budget kind of horror sci-fi film. Really well directed. I'm a big fan of John Carpenter. But it was meant to be a B movie. And so it's hard to take it literally. But I think the bigger idea here is that instead of it being an Independence Day-style invasion where they come down from the skies and wage a war on us and we lose, they have, as some of the shows that we have talked about over the course of our season and some of the movies, they have subversively come in, made deals with the elite ruling class– who sold us out, the ordinary citizens, and they have assimilated in and taken control of everything. And we are just cattle. We are just part of the landscape. They're going to be taking over our planet in time. And you think, oh, that's a crazy, big, delusional storyline. Except that when you listen to what the aliens' goals were in the movie, tell me if this doesn't sound familiar. Keep us asleep. Keep us selfish. Keep us sedated. bring about the annihilation of consciousness. Their thing was they live, we sleep. So I put it out there. This is, it's a crazy and honestly a much darker vision of what may be going on than I held at the beginning of the season. But after everything that has happened to us, after everything that we've seen, after everything I've experienced, I'm willing to actually consider now that things might be darker than everyone wants to believe. And it all comes back to John Harrington telling me that he cried himself to sleep.
01:05:39
Speaker 1: Are you then saying, Brent, that you, because the challenge was a film that represents what you think is actually going on, do you think there have been deals made between governments or our businesses and an NHI or multiple NHIs?
01:06:01
Speaker 2: Let me just ask you this in the form of a question. Do you think that humans wouldn't make deals? Do you think that people with power and influence wouldn't be making deals? exclusively, that's what humans do.
01:06:17
Speaker 1: We would cut a deal. And by the way, that's clearly the X-Files had to be one of your things that you were thinking about, because that's all about cutting a deal with aliens.
01:06:25
Speaker 2: Absolutely. As I said, there's been a number of movies and shows that have used that exact storyline. And again, while it felt too extreme to me, there's just a lot of things now that I look at all of the evidence on the table and I think it is something that's a little darker and more subversive than we're all thinking. I'm not saying that I think this is going to end badly. And in fact, I actually think it can end quite positively because I do believe that one of the messages of the formula is that we all have a much greater capacity as individuals than we believe. And as long as kind of any of these other forces might be working against us, I think if we individually and certainly collectively wake up and stop being deceived and take control of our own destiny and upgrade our consciousness, I think we win.
01:07:19
Speaker 1: God, I hope you're right. So do I. The alternative of they live is very depressing for sure.
01:07:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
01:07:27
Speaker 1: Look, I remember when I first started getting into the whole UFO thing and I started learning everything about it. The question that I kept asking myself is, How can all this be reconciled? I could never. And remember, that's what we talked about when we were doing Dark Skies, trying to unify everything. How do crop circles, what do they have to do with consciousness? What do they have to do with crashes? What do they have to do with Majestic 12?
01:07:53
Speaker 2: There's just a lot.
01:07:54
Speaker 1: Animal mutilations. There's just too much stuff going on. So it is intriguing. I did not see that film when it came out. I saw it actually about five years ago. For the first time? Yeah, for the first time. And I enjoyed it. I thought it was crazy fun, really interesting. That's a good choice. Congratulations. Wow. Okay. You're up. I'm up. Here's the thing. This was a lot harder than I expected it to be because I came to the conclusion there was no single movie or TV series that covers all the bases that I actually think are in play. And just to throw that out there, which would be, extraterrestrials, multiple species of NHI. So some of them might be dimensional and some of them might be other things. The idea that there are actually humans elsewhere in the universe. These are things I believe. I believe there's multiple NHI. Some of them are extraterrestrial. There are humans elsewhere in the universe or other dimensions or realities. AI is a big deal. because AI may very well be our AI. What worries me, what I lose sleep about, what would make me cry myself to sleep is if I learned that our AI is talking to their AI and that they're bypassing humans, even life after death. There's just a lot of stuff at play. So when I kept trying to come up with one, and I went, I'm going to give you a couple of possibilities that I rejected. Okay. One of them that actually met most of those things was Stargate SG-1. Oh. It literally did have multiple alien civilizations and there were humans scattered throughout the galaxy and ancient gods revealed as extraterrestrial beings and secret government contact, which I believe, and conspiracy and... All of that artificial intelligence, parallel realities type, they had everything. And I tend to think, actually, that when the truth is out, and one of the reasons Harrington was crying is like, this is just too weird that there's a lot of everything out there. But then I started trying to watch Stargate SG-1. And I don't want to alienate all Stargate people. And by the way, they're rebooting Stargate. I just didn't like the series as much watching it. Hmm. This time, as I did, as I remembered it. So I thought, I need to come up with something that's really great. So then I kind of went to Midnight Special. I don't know if you know that film. It's very compelling. And it's about this parallel reality existing on top of ours. But it didn't have all the other stuff. So I had to reject that. One of them that actually met Stargate SG-1, which I think is fantastic, is Battlestar Galactica. That's got the AI and that's got the humans throughout the galaxy. But it doesn't have aliens.
01:10:48
Speaker 3: Right.
01:10:48
Speaker 1: And it doesn't really. So, no. I thought the Abyss was a good contender for a while.
01:10:54
Speaker 2: That is a strong choice.
01:10:54
Speaker 1: Because everybody's saying, including Grush and everybody else, they're in the oceans, folks. You and I did an episode about it called Staring into the Abyss. But then the Abyss doesn't take into account all the other stuff. So, I'm not even going to go on. But there's X-Files and Fringe and Taken and Twin Peaks and all that stuff. And I thought about it. And I know this isn't that super original, but it's 2001, A Space Odyssey.
01:11:20
Speaker 3: Oh.
01:11:21
Speaker 1: The more I thought about it, I thought that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke managed to get a lot of key concepts into that 1968 film. Because think about it. It begins with an advanced non-human intelligence that is interacting with our ancestors before they're fully human. That seems to me to feel pretty real right now.
01:11:42
Speaker 3: Yep.
01:11:43
Speaker 1: Then there's the HAL 9000, which is the artificial intelligence, which, boy, this film was made in 1968. And it predicts exactly what we're freaking out. Yeah. So I thought, that's good because here's another form of intelligence out there. And then at the end, there's so many other things in it. I'm just, we're long. I'm just consolidating. But Bowman, the astronaut, does go through the Stargate, basically. That's right. Yeah. Where- Space and time and identity and consciousness are all fused together. And it's really, that's more about consciousness than extraterrestrials, even, if you think about it. And clearly the formula has taught me that there is that consciousness aspect that some people are focused on. Because I will tell you this, in the aftermath of that formula going out, someone very important in government work very high level, who, again, I hate it when they do this, but what are you going to do? They say, I'll talk to you, but you can't use my name. This is on background. So sadly, this is one of those cases. But then again, I'm not trying to break a story. I'm talking about a movie. But he basically said, I think your formula's got a lot going for it. I think that may be the thing. Then that's about consciousness. So I just think 2001, if you've got the sort of scary side of it, I think 2001 is the more optimistic side of it. That maybe if we're lucky, it's not about they walk among us and they're plotting our demise. Although you and I have certainly done that with Dark Skies. That's what we did. But maybe if we're lucky, we are interacting with other intelligence. And we've even created another intelligence with AI. But that ultimately where we're all going is the same place. A cosmic consciousness. So I tip my hat today to 2001, A Space Odyssey. And if you've never seen it, shame on you. You must see that film. But I got to tell you, I've seen it 20 times. I never get tired of it. Oh, and the other thing it's got in it, by the way, Brent, that feels very real is, okay, you and I had JC and the captain come to our offices and start talking about the moon.
01:14:06
Speaker 2: The moon, yes.
01:14:07
Speaker 1: The moon is the big thing of 2001. They're mining on the moon. which is what the captain said was what it was all about, is what he said. And they find something on the moon that is a piece of technology, which, by the way, is also something that's being talked about by Grush and others, that there's things on the moon right now that we're not supposed to know about. And what do they do with that information? They send a guy up to the moon colony with a cover story, That there's some kind of disease going around and they have to clamp down on it. And they come up with a cover story because they're not going to disclose this to anybody. Yeah.
01:14:46
Speaker 2: So I just thought it had a lot going. I love that choice. Honestly, it is one of my favorite movies. And I will just add that if you haven't seen the movie, I absolutely agree. You must, if possible, go see it on a big screen. It's really just a breathtaking work of art. Looking at your choice versus my choice, I think my choice is wake up. There's some level of enslavement going on. But I'm also caveating that. But I believe that the formula and the thinking behind the formula offers the antidote to that. Meaning we have the ability to break out of this kind of prison we might be in, this karmic, psychic, technological prison. Your story, on the other hand, while it covers some of those other elements that you just mentioned, is about transcendence. And I think that's a really, that is what I hope is going on. That is the aspirational view of our interaction with alien species. That they are ultimately benevolent. That when we figure things out and we come together, we can ascend to a position like they have. of not maybe all knowing, but more knowing. And so I think that's a great choice.
01:16:05
Speaker 1: So we've got soup to nuts here. We've given you a spectrum, which kind of leads me to the sort of the closing arguments here. Our work is not done. We have probably raised more questions in season one than answers, but I don't know that's bad because we still don't know exactly what's happening to us. We have to speculate about it. We have to question it. And, I think we should talk about briefly what our plans might be if we come back for a second season. What do you think we should do in a second season? What's your dream vision here?
01:16:40
Speaker 2: A second season for me is I think that we need to probably become more aggressive in finding witnesses, finding people to bear witness. I think it's time that we try and see if we can get Steven Spielberg to come on our show. That we try to get Chris Carter, that we try to get the Tom DeLongs, that we make a more concerted effort rather than just talking about it on our show. And I think there's a bigger point I want to make here. In the last episode we did, we, for the first time, we deviated from TV and movies and we explored the music industry.
01:17:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:17:19
Speaker 2: And we made some really interesting discoveries in doing so. And I think part of the discoveries is when you just look at sound, light, and frequency... Right. That is a part of the music industry. And furthermore, I think in a second season, we should be looking deeper into the music industry. I think we should also go into an adjacent part of the entertainment industry, the games industry.
01:17:42
Speaker 1: And you would be the man to lead us there.
01:17:45
Speaker 2: And so I think all of those are part of the media apparatus. They are how our hearts and minds are being shaped and whether that's just being done incidentally. Or as we tend to believe that there is influence from other forces. I think exploring those areas and finding new stories, finding new people to come forward would expand our active investigation. And I think expand everyone's awareness of not just looking at the entertainment industry, but media in general. What influence does it have on our lives and where is all this going?
01:18:24
Speaker 1: Yes. Amen.
01:18:29
Speaker 2: We would like that to happen.
01:18:30
Speaker 1: I think our theory on the first season was we've got to prove who we are. We have to create an identity for the show and we have to show that it has an audience and that we're established before some of these people that you mentioned will actually come on. And I look forward in the second season. to and I'm not just dropping names. I'm saying these are people I would really like to get on the show. Tom DeLonge is for me very high up there because, as you said, he went and looked for a deal. And I literally have an approach from a mutual friend, as I think I've said before. we might be able to get him on, but I guess we would have a, it's a dream to get Spielberg on, but I honestly, why not? He's got a lot that he must want to talk about. And, and, I know Chris Carter turned us down. I think we did ask him when we were doing our X-Files thing, but maybe he'll reconsider. And here's why, folks. The phrase I use is bear witness, okay? This is a big, complicated, unknowable thing right now. And we can all throw up our hands and say, I don't know, we'll never figure this thing out. Or we can say, all right, just because I don't have all the answers doesn't mean I don't have something to contribute. And if you look at what disclosure or the secrets of the universe really are, it's a mosaic. It's all these different pieces. It's a giant jigsaw puzzle. So maybe you don't have the whole picture, but maybe you have a piece of that, right? One of the things we want people to do is to, our example is we felt like we should bear witness to what happened to us. We've done that. There are other people who came forward, as we pointed out, who bear witness to There are other people besides Spielberg, DeLong, and Carter who could come forward, many others, and hopefully we'll bring some of those in another season. One of the things that we call this episode, The Right Side of History, and I just want to point out, that sounds a little highfalutin here, but what I really mean by it is, look, we're at a pivotal point in human history. If indeed what is happening is what it looks like is happening, is we are edging closer and closer to every freaking day toward a time when we go, okay, folks, yes, it's true. We're not alone. Then that means we all have to get on the right side of this. There's not a lot of time to just, we've been on the wrong side of this for 80 years. It's time to get on the right side. So I hope people will come forward. So that's my little speech about that. Yeah.
01:21:18
Speaker 2: Well, and one thing I'll say, this is my closing thought, and then you can take us across the finish line. My final thought is the underlying motive for sound line frequency was really to help bring about disclosure. That was it. And that was by exposing the connection between Hollywood UAP and the government. That was our mandate going in. And we set up an active investigation to accomplish that goal. And while our podcast was playing out, we did not know this going in, the Trump administration was performing slow drip disclosure with these periodic kind of evidence drops. And yet, I ask you, Bryce and everyone, does anyone really feel tangibly closer to understanding the big picture at this moment, the truth about aliens, UAP, and even humanity's origins and That, I would contend, all feels like it's still being kept from us, right? So for all the advancements, podcasts just like ours that are out there beating the bush and doing good work and bringing up evidence and witnesses, Spielberg's Disclosure Day, What the Trumpet, I still feel like everyone is in the dark. And so based on the experiences that I've had, and I've shared many of them, you've listened to them patiently. I believe that real disclosure is not going to come from the powers that be. I think if we believe that, if we sit around and wait for someone to drip feed us the truth, we're all going to be sorely disappointed. Yes, I think we will continually get little peeks behind the veil, little tantalizing tidbits here and there. But the larger truths that we're seeking, I think they require a personal investigation. And with the full understanding that our field of study, kind of the real world out there, is littered with misinformation, right? And in some cases, deliberate disinformation. Right now, at this point in history, I believe we are all at the point where discernment is all important. And learning to trust our instincts on what is real or fake, we must each move our understanding from I think to I believe. and ultimately to I know. And knowing comes only really from firsthand experience. So speaking from my own firsthand experience, I would say that before you start opening doors and diving into rabbit holes, the most important thing to do is to know yourself. That's a piece of wisdom going back to ancient Greece and the Oracle at Delphi. And why is this important? Because the formula implies the key to everything is consciousness. So your consciousness is is your interface with reality. It's how you're going to navigate that field of study and ideally generate your own epiphanous, I've always wanted to say that word, experiences for yourself, right? All the things I've talked about, all the things I've experienced, those are things that I believe are available to everyone. And I think there's some amazing things that can happen. So hopefully one of the things that you will do now as our faithful audience is you will take everything that you've learned. You will take this idea that your mind has been opened to some degree. You have a lot of questions, start investigating them, start doing your own research, your own active investigation and see where it takes you. Because I feel that At the end of the day, each individual has a greater chance to learn more and to gain certainty about what is really going on in the universe than waiting for the government and even to some degree just listening to us.
01:25:09
Speaker 1: That is such a beautiful sentiment that it makes me realize how incredibly important inappropriate what I'm about to talk about is going to be. But listen, first of all, I agree with that. There's so much truth in what you just said, and I agree with it. But I'm going to move on anyway, because here's the thing. In a season two, we're going to talk a lot less about dark skies. It's just not going to be the thing that it was, because we'll have told much of that story. But there's one story. You've told some great stories, and yours are experiencer stories. Mine tend to be, I don't know, celebrity encounters or weird production stories. But I got one that I wanted to tell all season, never found the right time to tell it. And I think we have to tell it now. Okay, let's go. All right. So everybody who has any knowledge of Dark Skies knows that it takes place at Majestic 12. And the guy in charge of Majestic 12 is a guy from the Office of Naval Intelligence, who is Captain Frank Bach. And Frank Bach is played by the actor J.T. Walsh. Now, we're going to get someplace with this. J.T. Walsh always played such a, sometimes a villain, but definitely a difficult individual. And we thought he would be the perfect guy to play the guy in charge of Majestic 12. And at first, we were afraid to even suggest it to anybody. But then we said, screw it. What about J.T. Walsh? And we thought they were would be able to get a JT Walsh type.
01:26:47
Speaker 2: Yes, a type.
01:26:47
Speaker 1: Right? Exactly. But they actually got JT Walsh. And the guy is a tough customer. And the truth of the matter, he's deceased now. He passed away right after Dark Skies. The summer after Dark Skies was canceled, he passed away and hasn't been with us. The thing is, the secret that we have kept out of the public is he wasn't a very nice guy to us on the set. He was a difficult actor. right? And part of it had to do with the idea, Brent, that I believe he was under the impression that working on TV series would give him a nice paycheck and he wouldn't have to work too hard. And then he found out I have to be, I have to get up and be there at six in the morning, more days than not. And I would rather not do that. And he started being incredibly rude to me personally. I don't think he was quite as rude to you, but I think he thought that I was the guy that could control his fate.
01:27:46
Speaker 2: Maybe you ducked that one.
01:27:48
Speaker 1: And he was mean. He said mean things to me in front of my own child. He used the F word on me in front of my own child, who was 10 at the time.
01:27:56
Speaker 2: It was just difficult.
01:27:57
Speaker 1: Okay. So I'm going to tell you the story now, folks, about the last day of shooting of the Dark Skies series. And by this point, we have been told by NBC, whatever you do, Don't go over budget. No, Sony told us that. Yes, exactly. You can do whatever you want. And so you and I wrote one hell of a action-packed final episode full of craziness. And nobody cared. And nobody gave us notes. It was just don't go one dime over budget. All right. As we get to that final day of shooting, you and I had decided, Brent, on JT or Frank Bach's fate. Do you remember what his fate was going to be?
01:28:45
Speaker 2: He was not going to survive. I remember that.
01:28:48
Speaker 1: Yes. We were going to kill Bach because we knew he didn't want to come back. Oh, by the way, the reason he was so rude to me, somebody, I was like, why does he hate me so much? And according to Brad, he threw a script at him on set. He was high strung in that regard. I said, why does he hate me so much? And somebody said, don't you get it? He wants you to fire him. If he quits, he doesn't get paid. But if you fire him, we have to buy him out. And so it became this test of wills between me and JT that he thought that I would fire him and then he could collect. But we didn't do that. Instead, we'd limped to the final episode and we killed him in the final episode. Bach, it turns out is being voted on by the majestic 12 organization to decide if he gets to carry on.
01:29:38
Speaker 2: Right.
01:29:39
Speaker 1: And then ultimately he he loses the vote and then he gets murdered. Yes. All right. So that script comes out that has Bach being killed and JT comes into my office. And I'm looking around and going, I don't even have an escape route here.
01:29:56
Speaker 2: What's he going to do?
01:29:57
Speaker 1: He throws the script on my desk and he goes, can I use the F word here? He goes, you better put so fucking many bullets in me that I can't possibly survive. What a great line. I know. See, he had a certain style. And I said, don't worry, we will. Now, here's where it gets funny. Because As the studio was saying, don't spend a dime more. Our whole plan was to shoot him multiple times. And that required what they call squibs, whereas his uniform that he was wearing would explode with blood and all that. And so therefore the uniform would be destroyed, but we would see him being shot to death. And we were told that the last minute we can't afford to use squibs because we can't afford a new uniform. And we have to give that one back to wardrobe or whatever. So we had the guy shoot him seven different times, I believe. You see him point the gun and then shoots seven times. You don't see JT actually getting shot. And the final shot in the series for JT's storyline is he always was a great smoker. The guy could smoke like nobody's business. He would take those metal lighters and flick them. and light a cigarette, man, the guy could smoke. He was a great smoker. And so the final shot is Bach dies and his hand falls down and the cigarette is still between his fingers and you see the smoke curling up. That was his death scene. Okay. And, and by the way, one other, sorry to go on, but I'm just getting a cleansing breath of JT on that same thing during the vote, he was supposed to call the vote. He was the head of majestic 12 and there was a motion that from Robert Kennedy, I believe, to remove him as Majestic 12's leader. And so he was calling the roll. And because he was so mad at us, he wanted to give us nothing. So he would look down at the thing and he'd go, Robert Kennedy.
01:32:03
Speaker 2: And nobody could hear him.
01:32:04
Speaker 1: The director comes to me, Perry Lang, and says, you got to come to the set. What's he doing? He's destroying the scene. And so we went up. I believe you were with me. Weren't you with me? Didn't we go together? And we said, JT, what's going on here? Can't you just read these a little louder? And he looks at us and says, this is my performance. And apparently that's code for saying you can't tell an actor. I don't even understand it. But if he says that's my performance, you have to respect the performance. Yes. So there was this guy on set who looked like Hubert Humphrey and played Hubert Humphrey, Don Moss. He was an attorney. And so we went up to Don Moss and said, we just had this creative thought. It doesn't make any sense for Frank Bach to call his own vote. That doesn't make any sense because it's about him. It should be somebody else. So we go up to Don Moss and go, Don, I know it's a lot to ask of you. Remember, he doesn't have any, he has a couple of lines. It's a lot to ask of you, Don. And I know it's coming late, but do you think that you could read Frank Bach's lines? And Don swells up and goes, why, yes, I could. And so Don Moss got to read the Bach thing. Okay. Why did I tell you all this? Because, A, it's cheaper than therapy to tell you about this. Here's the thing, though. I tell you this because it was the last day. And those two scenes that I just described were the final scenes that we shot. And what was so shocking to me as we get toward the end of our season is as soon as we called cut on the last scene and it was the last take, the place got swarmed by carpenters tearing down the Majestic 12 set. Yes, yes.
01:33:59
Speaker 2: Do you remember that? Do you remember how you felt? Yes, a range of emotions. But yeah, it just it felt like this incredible kind of almost dreamlike experience we had. It felt like waking up.
01:34:14
Speaker 1: Right.
01:34:14
Speaker 2: And wanting the dream to continue.
01:34:17
Speaker 1: I was so sad because I'd made all these great friendships and you and I had certainly been through the war together. But there were other people we made friends with. And it's called striking the set. by the way, and striking the set is it's unemotional. It's like, I said, can't you guys wait a few minutes? And they go, no, we got to be done by six o'clock or whatever it was. And they just started hammering it down, knocking it down, carrying out the stuff. The point is it's never easy to strike a set, but I have another angle on it. And that is this to this day, you and I remain good friends who are still doing this. Both of us are friends with Jim period, who was the other executive producer on the show. We remain friends with Eric Close and Megan Ward and Jerry Ryan, who were the leads on the show. Even the NBC executives, Warren Littlefield and David Nevins and John Landgraf, have all gone on and done other things that are fantastic. And we're still in contact with them. So the thing is, even in endings, life doesn't end. There's a beginning. And so I just wanted to, besides the therapy of telling you about J.T. Walsh, I just wanted to say to everybody that while this season is over, Brent and I have formed a relationship with you, and you've formed a relationship with this show, and it's not over. It's just not over. One way or another, we'll figure out how to continue to tell these stories, and life will go on.
01:35:48
Speaker 2: Yes, and I'm looking forward to all sorts of new chapters. I know there's a lot of Movies and TV shows that we wanted to cover that we didn't get to, there's been some tremendous response and suggestions from the audience of places they want us to go. With this kind of opening of the aperture across the entire media industry, I think there's probably two, three, four, five more seasons of sound, light, and frequency that we can envision. The thing I'm most excited about is the stuff we aren't going to plan, the stuff we won't predict. the people that come forward out of the shadows, the discoveries that the audience makes and starts putting two and two together. That's where I think disclosure is going to come. That is the act of investigation that we're not only going to continue, but that we have enlisted the internet with, the audience, the public. And so where that journey takes us, I can only imagine. It's been amazing to get here. Through Dark Skies, through all of those years in between, this journey that I just took with you, this crazy 36-episode journey of Sound, Light, and Frequency, has been a high point. And I'm really excited to see where we go from here.
01:37:03
Speaker 1: Me too. And by the way, I want to try an idea for you. Here's what I want for the first episode. Have you given any thought to a first episode? No. Okay. I know I'm just dreaming. But on the first episode, I want JC to come and tell his story.
01:37:22
Speaker 3: Oh.
01:37:24
Speaker 1: Now, my take is, I don't know anything about where he is now.
01:37:28
Speaker 2: He could be dead.
01:37:29
Speaker 1: But he was about 30, I would say, when we met him. So he's 60 plus. So he's probably around. And if I was JC and had an entire podcast talking about me all the time, I probably would have listened or watched. And it's possible that he's listening or watching right now. And so, Brent, on behalf of the two of us, I'm looking at you, JC, and saying, you should come on this show. You should tell us what in the world led to you coming to that party and crashing it. What you actually meant by giving us that formula. Were you planning to do it? Did it just happen? And what have you been doing for the last 30 plus years? Are you still involved with ONI? Are you involved with the UFO issue? I just think one of the greatest interview gets in my journalism career would be JC. I hope he'll think about coming in.
01:38:31
Speaker 2: I think if we could somehow land JC, we would, as they like to say, break the internet. I would freaking love it.
01:38:41
Speaker 1: Okay. So there's that final thought. I want to thank everybody in our team who has really helped make this show. At the top of that list has got to be Nick Johnson, who is our producer and has just done an incredible job of listening to us for 36 episodes, which is not easy sometimes because we go off on tangents. And then he has to edit this thing and make it sound better. And he's always done that. He's always made us sound better than we are. So God bless you, Nick. Thank you very much. And also to other people who have worked with us, Tyler Stevens, Heidi Duran, Brad Markowitz. And over at iHeart, the two people we work with most, Anna Stumpf and Dylan Fagan. And my wife has been involved in helping me produce this for Stellar Productions. So it's been a blast. Really helpful, all these people were. And I thank them all. And I'm sure you probably do too.
01:39:35
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
01:39:36
Speaker 1: Yes.
01:39:36
Speaker 2: Thank you from me as well. And it's true when I say we couldn't have done it without you.
01:39:43
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay.
01:39:44
Speaker 2: We're almost out of here.
01:39:45
Speaker 1: We've ended many shows, Brent, by saying Watch the Skies, which we always thought that's a double because Watch the Skies was the original title of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But when we say Watch the Skies, we could be saying Watch Dark Skies, which is interesting. And so we always like to do that. But I have something even better to end our first season. Oh, good.
01:40:05
Speaker 2: This is going to be a surprise for me, too.
01:40:06
Speaker 1: Let's hear it. Okay. It's a three-parter, though. It's not as simple as Watch the Skies, but I think you'll get it when you realize we're doing a show called Sound, Light, and Frequency. And that is, hear the stories, see the connections, stay tuned.
01:40:23
Speaker 2: I like it.
01:40:24
Speaker 1: That's season one, folks. We'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for Stellar, Jackie Zabel. Our show's music was written by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser. And your hosts and executive producers are Bryce Zabel, that's me, and Brent Friedman. Watch the skies.
01:41:30
Speaker 2: Thank you.