The Basement: Bryce Zabel | Disclosure Day, Dark Skies, and Hollywood UFO Deals

The Why Files releases video episodes on Spotify every Monday and Friday. And when you become a Spotify Premium subscriber, you get fewer ads – that means more story, less interruption. Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. The Basement: Bryce Zabel | Disclosure Day, Dark Skies, and Hollywood UFO Deals Bryce Zabel created five primetime TV series, ran the Emmys, and spent his life writing UFO fiction — until the people behind the curtain came knocking. A postcard at his home. A stranger at his party who'd read scripts that never left the building. A vial of moon gold and an invitation to a cemetery at midnight. Was it disclosure, disinformation, or a game built around him? He's still trying to find out. Welcome to the basement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:00AJ Gentile?

  Today, we're talking with Bryce Sable. He created five primetime TV series, ran the Emmys, and was a CNN correspondent before his Hollywood career.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  A CNN correspondent who switched to writing fiction? That's not a career change, that's a lateral move.

• 1:14AJ Gentile?

  In 1996, Bryce made an NBC show called Dark Skies. It was about a secret government cover-up of UFOs. I remember the show. And it's amazing how many things it got right 30 years ago. And while he was making it, the cover-up came to him. Men who said they were Navy intelligence showed up at his house and his office. They wanted to feed him real secrets to write into the show.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  When the government shows up at my door, all they want is back taxes.

• 1:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, join the club. Today, we're covering his career, his books, and his new podcast, which asks whether the government has been hiding the truth about UFOs inside our movies for 70 years. There's one more thing those men asked him to do: Meet a stranger at a cemetery at midnight. Wild story. After our talk, I'll come back for a quick analysis of our conversation. Let's go down to the basement.

• 2:12AJ Gentile?

  Hey, you can watch The Y Files on Spotify. New video episodes every Monday and Friday. And premium subscribers get fewer ads, which means fewer interruptions when things start getting weird. Bryce, welcome to the basement.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  Hey, it's great to get in the basement. I mean, this, I want to thank you so much for letting me into this special place to talk about all these things we're going to talk about. It's a great set, folks. I mean, this is really wonderful. It's really...

• 2:41AJ Gentile?

  I appreciate that.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  It's, it's great. And, you know, I know you're, you're just starting the basement, so I'm really happy to be in the, in the inaugural class of these people.

• 2:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you are. It's a very small fraternity.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  Yes, but growing.

• 2:54AJ Gentile?

  But, but growing, unless this is our last one, we'll see.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:58AJ Gentile?

  How are Patrick and Einstein doing? I was wondering.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  Ah, that's, whoa, there's a callback. Well, the truth of the matter is, those are my endangered desert tortoises that we have. And that's, I mean, this is amazing. I'm, I'm reeling from the, the thing because, um, uh, we don't have them anymore. One of them ran away.

• 3:20AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 3:21Speaker 04

  And, and one of them died, but they've been replaced by two other turtles, Wendy and Lilith. So, uh, the, the guys are gone and the women are in.

• 3:32AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  And, you know, it's, I'm, I don't think of myself as a responsible pet owner, per se. My son's excellent at it, for example, but not me. And, uh, my wife, Jackie and I, we say, endangered desert tortoises are good because half the year, you don't have to do anything but put them in a box, right?

• 3:49AJ Gentile?

  That's all you do to them?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, you just put them in the box and hibernate them. And then the other half of the year, just, you know, gets, give them some cut up zucchini and some lettuce and let them, let them party.

• 4:01AJ Gentile?

  How long do they live? Long time, right?

• 4:03Speaker 04

  So long that, um, it'll be my grandkids probably that end up, uh, having to deal with them.

• 4:10AJ Gentile?

  Wow, I'm sorry, one ran away.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  He, maybe he's happy. I mean, that's what we like to tell ourselves, you know, because they do, they can burrow, they can get under our fence. I think that's what our original fence, that one got away. And the other one, it's a sad story and I, I, I don't, I don't know why I would tell it here, but I will. Um, during the, um, the COVID pandemic...

• 4:34Speaker 04

  We had, I always used to put every year when they came out of hibernation, I would get some kind of coconut core kind of thing that you'd spread around. And it was all ground very nice. It was a cushy landing for them, right? I liked it. But during the pandemic, they said, we can't get that anymore. Here's our new supplier. And so I put that stuff out. It had larger pieces in it. And frankly, it got stuck in his throat.

• 5:00AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  It's terrible. It's just the worst thing in the world. And now that I've relived it, I don't know if I can recover during this broadcast here. That's, that's a tough one.

• 5:10AJ Gentile?

  Losing a pet is, is hard.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  It is hard.

• 5:12AJ Gentile?

  Sometimes harder than losing a person.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Yes. Especially if you think I should have been smarter about that. But you know what?

• 5:20AJ Gentile?

  I've been there too.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:21AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I had outdoor cats for a while until I had two fewer cats. And then it was no more outdoor cats. I was living in the Hollywood Hills at the time. And my neighbors were saying, you can't let your cats out here. I was like, ah, they've been outdoor cats for years. They lasted three, four weeks.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:38AJ Gentile?

  And that was it. No more outdoor cats.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Well, so we've clearly established and we're less than five minutes in that both of us should not be trusted with pets.

• 5:47AJ Gentile?

  Can't be trusted.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:48AJ Gentile?

  I can't be trusted with children either.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Okay, well, there you go.

• 5:50AJ Gentile?

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• 6:34AJ Gentile?

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• 7:13AJ Gentile?

  So, we've got broadcast journalism. How do you end up on TV as a movie critic?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Well, okay, I didn't start as a movie. I was a, I went to school at the University of Oregon. Go Ducks, very good football team, all in favor of them. And I went to journalism school. And at some point during journalism school, you have to sort of pick what, what's your thing? So I went with broadcasting. And I ended up getting a job at the, at the hippie radio station in Eugene, Oregon. And that was a good gig. I mean, that's the first time I ever talked about UFOs in public. I sort of covered the Travis Walton story from, from afar, if you will.

• 7:57AJ Gentile?

  Wow, so you were on air?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I was the morning guy and that thing. But then I got hired at the TV station. Okay, so I became an anchor reporter in Eugene. And I ended up also doing the weather there and the movies. Because the thing is, in a small market, it's like, you, you say to yourself, well, who does movie reviews here? And the answer is, well, nobody. You go, I'll do them.

• 8:22AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  And, you know, then you get to do them. I remember reviewing Alien was one of my first movies to review. But mostly, you know, anchor reporter kind of thing. And, and that was a, a great gig. And, and then, you know, I came to, I, I did a short tour of duty in, in Arizona and Tucson. And then came to LA as the first CNN correspondent there. And, and I got to tell you, as, as you well know, the news business is so interesting because if you're covering news, you are meeting thousands of people. Just one person after another, every day is just crowded with. Fast getting to know yous.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  And I found that a lot of times you were either meeting people on the best day of their life or the worst day of their life. Sometimes in the middle, but often on those extremes.

• 9:15AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  It really taught me a lot about drama, comedy, all the things that I use now in a Hollywood script that I might write.

• 9:24AJ Gentile?

  Right, I hadn't considered that, but that's true. So how do you get to sitting with Carl Sagan, talking about Voyager?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  That's a trippy, wonderful memory for me.

• 9:37AJ Gentile?

  Well, how did you get picked for that?

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Okay, here's the thing. I was the CNN correspondent and the way these things work, you know, you, jobs come and go because the person who hired you comes and goes.

• 9:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  So the News Bureau chief at CNN got fired and so I knew my days were numbered and they were. And I ended up at PBS in Los Angeles, working on an investigative news magazine called Newsbeat. And, and again, it was a sort of a nightly 30-minute, 60 minutes kind of, it was 30 minutes instead of 60 minutes kind of thing. And I would do one story a week. And I, I noticed that nobody was really, a lot of the people there were not thinking about space. And I always think about space. So I was like, who's your space person here? Well, nobody. Well, I'll do it.

• 10:30AJ Gentile?

  Like the movies.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:32AJ Gentile?

  I'll do it.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Just raise your hand and volunteer. So I did. And, and so I got to cover things like the early space shuttle stuff and also the Voyager. And Voyager, of course, was the first unmanned thing that we sent that went out of the solar system. But on its way out, it did a short tour of duty past Saturn. And I believe this is the Voyager 2 that I'm talking about at this point. I covered Voyager 1, I think, at CNN. But anyway, 2 was on its way out. And there was going to be a close encounter, if you will, with Saturn. And this is, and again, I'm just gonna have to date myself. I mean, I used to be the youngest guy in the room when I went to Hollywood. Now I'm probably the oldest guy in the room.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  But that's, that's life, right? Anyway, so the year before I started working there, Carl Sagan had basically owned the station at KCT in Los Angeles because he was doing Cosmos.

• 11:31AJ Gentile?

  Oh, he was doing it out of there?

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's where he recorded all of this.

• 11:35AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  So when I came to work there, it was like, oh, yes. You know, they didn't have plaques for Carl Sagan or anything, but everybody knew that he had put them on the map. It was a, it was a pretty big deal. So, uh, when they were about to have, uh, the, the, the encounter, uh, I pitched them that they should do something called Saturn and Beyond. It would be sort of covering the live flyby and then talking about the future of space and that kind of thing. And, uh, they said, well, that, that's good. And I said, and we'll ask Carl Sagan. And, cause I thought, the guy's got to owe KCET something for putting, you know, for putting him on the map like that. And so I just called him up and said, you want to, you want to do this thing?

• 12:19Speaker 04

  And he said, sure, I'll do it. So with that in mind, and, uh, he, he became part of that show, but here's the sort of the, my favorite year part of it. Um, I was an on-air reporter and a kind of a substitute anchor, but the main anchor was a guy named Clete Roberts. And Clete was sort of a mentor of mine, an early news mentor, right? And, uh, Clete was the most respected journalist in, in Los Angeles at the time. I mean, he'd, he'd done it all. And he was towards, toward the end of his career. And, and we would often sit on the set before we would go on and sort of, you know, just catch up and talk. And I was out there covering things and he was stuck behind the anchor desk in his opinion, right?

• 13:02Speaker 04

  He, he remembered the good old days and, and he was such a great guy and he goes, you know, you remind me of myself when I was your age, which is the most lovely compliment any famous mentor could ever say to you. You know, that was lovely. So I was producing Saturn and Beyond for Clete to star in. And, uh, I mean, to a host, not to star in, uh, but he was going to be the host. And about three days before we were due to go on, I mean, I wanted to anchor it, but whatever, I was the producer. Three days before I'm about to, you know, we're going to produce this thing, Clete ends up in a contract dispute with KCET and he says, I'm not going to host that thing. Uh, forget it. If we don't have a deal, I'm not doing it.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Let Bryce do it. And he wasn't in a real contract dispute.

• 13:53AJ Gentile?

  He just threw that to you.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  He threw it to me.

• 13:55AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  It's the greatest lovely thing. So, anyway, this story is kind of intriguing because we get through the show and, you know, you know what it's like. You're a, you're a host and by a host, not only are you hosting the show, but you're sort of hosting the event, right?

• 14:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  So, Sagan comes on, we, we talk live about the Saturn and the space program and exploration of the solar system and all this stuff. And then the show's over and it's like, well, thank you very much. He's a lovely guy. He shakes hands with the crew. It's all that. And I say, you know, I'll walk you to your, your car if, if you'd like, because I'm the host, right? I'm hosting it. And so, he had to get to JPL to do some kind of interview, I think for Nightline with Ted Koppel or something. So, we walk out there and, and we, as we're walking out there, I see his car. I'm, I'm driving a Datsun B210 at this point, right? Which is not the sexiest car around.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  This guy has some kind of foreign roadster convertible. I thought, wow, that's so cool. I would love that. And I don't know why I said this, but I just said, you know, Dr. Sagan, I have a question or two about the whole UFO subject.

• 15:14AJ Gentile?

  Uh-oh.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  And he suddenly looks at me and he goes, yes. You know, with that kind of.

• 15:20AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Please, go on. And I just said, well, listen, I just know that you've said many times that the universe is teeming with life. And yet, at the same time, you're not a believer so publicly in UFOs because you say the distances are too great that they couldn't possibly be here. But at the same time, you've talked about how an alien civilization could be so in advance of us that, you know, we'd look like primitives. So, how is it that you don't consider the fact that if the universe is teeming with life, some of them are a million years in advance of us technologically and they understand physics better than us or they have different lifespans? Why, why don't you consider that they might be here?

• 16:05AJ Gentile?

  The stone's on you. Wow.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Well, I was young. What's he, you know, whatever.

• 16:12AJ Gentile?

  Wow. I'm glad you had. What did he say?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Well, he, he just, um, he, well, I mean, he looked at me like, and your point is? I said, well, no, I mean, you know, I, I was trying to be nice and, and, and all that. And we had that back and forth, um, for about 15 minutes. And the, the specific answer to your question, what do you have to say? I wish I could remember the exact quotes, but he stuck with his point of view, which was, um, nobody's coming here. Uh, that's not how it works, was in essence. And I said, but that's an opinion, right? But, but you, you're saying that the UFO, UFO world doesn't make sense because they deal in opinions and not facts. Well, isn't that an opinion too? You know, I, I was a little, I, I was, I was probably crazy.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  But he took it well enough, right? I mean, we had a nice back and forth. And about 15 minutes in, he, he looks at his watch and he goes, well, I'm due at JPL. And he got in that lovely roadster of his and motored off. And I waved at him the last time I saw him. But listen, the guy was brilliant. Um, I think he was wrong about UFOs.

• 17:19AJ Gentile?

  Well, this is the eighties. When you asked him that question at the time, were you aware that he had a bit of an arc?

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:25AJ Gentile?

  That he had evolved.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  Yes. Uh, and, and I, I didn't know his, what you're referring to, that in, in his early career, he was well

• 17:34AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yes.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  aware of UFOs.

• 17:36AJ Gentile?

  Very open.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  And thought aliens might possibly have come here to explore or something. Absolutely. Great point. And, and while I was aware of that, I wasn't aware of it enough to sort of call him on it. Right?

• 17:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  That would have, because he certainly knew more about his career and life than I did at that point. Um, so I stuck with sort of the, the more esoteric part of it. But I did kind of get my revenge on that. Uh, you know, I did a TV series for NBC called Dark Skies. And it took place in the 1960s, uh, during an alien invasion. And, uh, we can talk more about that because that has something, other interesting things. But here's the Sagan angle.

• 18:16AJ Gentile?

  I want to save the good stuff.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 18:18AJ Gentile?

  But the Sagan angle.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  Here's the Sagan angle.

• 18:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  It had all these real characters in it. So toward the end of the season, when NBC had told us, well, you know, you're probably not getting picked up again. So, uh, just You know, do whatever you want. And Columbia TV, which was producing it, said, you know, do whatever you want, whatever you want, but don't spend a dime more than your budget. Okay. So my partner Brent Friedman and I said, okay, well, what do we want to do with this? And so in our final two episodes, we introduced Carl Sagan as a character. And we, our whole series took place at Majestic 12, the guys that were in charge of the cover up. And so we made Sagan the chief scientist of the Majestic 12 cover up in kind of an

• 19:05Speaker 04

  homage to Donald Menzel, who was the earlier debunker, right? Who, who everybody thought

• 19:12AJ Gentile?

  Put debunker in quotes.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Yes, because he ended up, his name's on the Majestic 12 documents.

• 19:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Right? So we made him a guy that got picked up by Majestic 12. And he's all pissed off because they've kidnapped him, basically. And they say to him, you know, you're in no danger. You're in no danger at all. But if you'd really like to know what's going on, we can tell you, in which case we'll keep driving and we'll, we'll bring you in and we'll show you what's going on. But if you need to get out right now, that's fine. We'll pull the car over. The choice is entirely yours, doctor. And so he, he made the deal with the devil. He said, all, if you'll tell me everything, I'll be your debunker. And that's what we said about it.

• 19:55AJ Gentile?

  And I think, think Sagan made that deal, too.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  I, I don't think we were wrong.

• 20:01AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  I think we were right. I think if you really track him, it sounds to me like you have. So if you track that career of his, you do say, there is some inconsistency between where he starts and where he ends.

• 20:15AJ Gentile?

  Right. And that shift, the timing coordinates with his rise in fame as well, which is very interesting.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:23AJ Gentile?

  Like his exposure increased. Um, dark skies, your, your books, especially AD, very prescient, like, almost like you have a crystal ball.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  It's like we picked the racehorse that came in.

• 20:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it certainly is. Um, last thing on, on journalism.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:45AJ Gentile?

  You were an award winning investigative journalist. You have a favorite story?

• 20:50Speaker 04

  Well, the one I won the awards for was, has nothing to do with UFOs or paranormal or any of that. Space was my beat, but I covered a lot of other things. And we did a story, it was called "The People Versus Dr. Manaya," I believe, is the one that we won the awards for. And that was just one where we found a doctor, an eye doctor, who patients would come in and he would tell them they had a cataract and charged them for it. And they'd already had cataracts. They've already had the surgery and stuff. He would just tell people whatever he had to tell them to get them to have the surgery and charge them for it, even if there was no need for surgery.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  And so that was a pretty good, that was one where I got to play the Mike Wallace role, where I was chasing Dr. Manaya down the sidewalk going, "Dr. Manaya, isn't it true?" That kind of thing. And so, yeah. But I will say this. Investigative reporting is such a valuable thing. And I'm, my hat is off to everybody who's doing it about the UFO topic for sure, but on everything. I mean, investigative reporting speaks truth to power. It holds people accountable. It's a really good thing. And certainly, the ability that people have to be a good investigative reporter is so valued right now.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  I mean, we could use more of them, and frankly, it's expensive. That's what was so brilliant about that year and a half where I got to work at Newsbeat. We were doing, it felt like doing the Lord's work, right? Because you got, instead of doing, at CNN, I would do three stories in a single day.

• 22:36AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  But at PBS, I did one story in a week. And so that allowed me to do all the great stuff that you do as an investiga-, what does an investigative reporter do? You pick up the phone, you call people, you talk to them, and after you, and you write it down. And then you look at it later and go, "Hmm, interesting." And then you call somebody else up and you say, "Can I come over and talk to you about something?" And then- When you're finally getting it all done, you put them on camera and then you cut it up and you give it to the people. So, yeah. I'll only say this about it. The things I learned working at that PBS show Newsbeat have been so valuable to me in terms of all the work that I've done since.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  And there's nothing I have done since that I didn't learn something that that benefited me from, which like even on creating a TV show, excuse me. One of the things you want to be able to do is make sure it sounds authentic. Well, how do you make something authentic? Do you make something authentic because you write a movie, say, about lawyers because you've seen a lawyer show? That's not authentic. Authentic is to go talk to lawyers or doctors or whatever. So what investigative reporting teaches you is, yeah, don't get your information off the net, off the internet these days as a primary source. Create your own primary sources first. That's why I respect some of the people that have done some work in this.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  My first need-to-know partner, Ross Colthart, has certainly done some excellent work on this. And George Knapp, you know, I think anyone who cares about this topic is just in awe of what George has done.

• 24:14AJ Gentile?

  He's the best to ever do it.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  He's phenomenal. And so I think those guys have really helped take us. Well, look, Ross gets his own accolades for whatever. Let's focus on George for a second because George goes back and right here in Las Vegas where we're recording. George didn't take no for an answer. He has an incredible memory, but he also asks people questions. He listens to the answers. I've been on coast to coast with him a few times over the years. And first of all, he's a great interviewer, but he also listens to everything everybody says. So it's not like you say something and then he goes, "Okay, now our next..." He doesn't do that.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  He's listening to what you're saying and he wants to know more about it because why? A good reporter is insatiably curious and won't take no for an answer and doesn't tolerate bullshit very well. And that describes that man. That's why he's a friend of mine and I'm also, I couldn't hold a candle to him as a reporter. He's just the best.

• 25:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, and always has been. And... Even when he's talking to, I don't want to use the word crazy, but the more out there stories, he's always respectful, he's asking good questions. You know, his famous John Lear interview is fascinating. With some of the stuff John says is like, wow, but George just kind of leans in and asks the right questions. Fascinating.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Nothing wrong with letting people tell you their story. The only thing wrong is believing it, if you don't have-

• 25:52AJ Gentile?

  A hundred percent.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Right? So, yeah, of course you gotta listen to this. But what I think, another thing that makes, let's call it the Knapp style, because he's not the only one practicing that this day. There are other great people who are doing journalism on this topic. And the thing is, doesn't matter how outrageous something is or isn't, you still have to, you have to still say to yourself, well, is there a way for me to validate this? You know, is, you don't take anything at face value. You have to say, there's more to this story than what this person just told me. Because that's the other thing you learn doing journalism. You go, there are a lot of different points of view about things.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  And one of the things that I found so frustrating about, you know, network journalism, or just mainstream journalism in broadcasting, is that because the time is so short, and this applies not just to long form, but it certainly applies to regular reporting. And this is my criticism, and it's been particularly strong about UFOs, which is, the basic way to cover a controversial story in broadcasting is to find somebody who says yes, somebody who says no, interview them both, and then do a stand-up where you say, some say yes, some say no, I say maybe. That's what qualifies as a journalistically balanced report. But

• 27:18Speaker 04

  sometimes, a story isn't balanced. Sometimes there's actually some facts that support saying yes or no.

• 27:25AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  And we don't see that that often.

• 27:28AJ Gentile?

  No, we don't.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Certainly not in local markets, you really don't.

• 27:31AJ Gentile?

  No, you don't. I guess one of my idols or heroes is Art Bell.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 27:36AJ Gentile?

  Because not only would he be respectful of the person telling the story, he just had such an instinct for spotting the story and knowing, alright, I've got a beginning, middle, and end, here's how we're gonna tease it out. He just, he saw it, you know-

• 27:49Speaker 04

  Here's an interesting thing about Art Bell. By the way, I know Art Bell or knew Art Bell, and I was on his show, I'm thinking 96, I was on Art Bell's show, and I put him on Dark Skies. I made Art Bell a member of Majestic 12. I forgot about that. He was a member, he played William S. Paley. That's right. The head of CBS. He talked about it forever. Now I remember that. Wow. And listen, I don't think Art would take exception to what I'm about to say. The difference between Art and, you know, George Knapp, is Art was an entertainer. Yes. With a show. George is a journalist who sometimes is on a show. Right.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  And Art would let things stand just because, well, I mean, that's what they say, right? So on the show that I was doing with Art Bell, I was on to talk about, this is one of my first interviews ever on the UFO topic. I wasn't interviewing him, he was interviewing me because of Dark Skies. But as the show started, somebody had called in saying, "I'm seeing some lights up in Monterey or something." I don't even remember the location, but it's the California coast. And Art just said, "Well, we're going to be following this story very carefully tonight." And so every time we'd go to a commercial break, he'd say, "And now the lights seem to be down." I mean, we just, and it was, it was, it was a show. Did it,

• 29:14Speaker 04

  is it listed in any books as a great UFO sighting today? I don't think so. Probably not. No. But, listen, he, classic radio guy. Yes. Really good at what he did. Great voice. Just everything. And, and, you know, he, he stood his ground and he did, he was, look, good guy. I mean, he wrote a book, I think The Quickening. I mean, he, he, he was a great guy. Quickening is a scary book. And, and, I mean, loved art. And, and by the way, putting him on Majestic 12, I, I remember when my partner Brent and I thought we would do that, and I went, "Well," he's

• 29:53Speaker 04

  like, "Well, why, why would Art Bell do that?" I said, "It's, it's ironic. It's subversive. Let me call him." And I, I called him up, and there was this kind of long pause, and then he, and then he says, I think the first thing he said is, "Do I get to keep the mustache?"

• 30:14AJ Gentile?

  Of course he did.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  He didn't. We made him shave it.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  I don't think that was the thing. But anyway, it was fun. He and he saw that he saw the joke. I mean, which is a lovely thing for someone to not take themselves so seriously. They can't do something like that. I think it gave him fun. He and his wife of the time came to the set and we hung out all day and he had a great time. Yeah. And, and, and to be honest with you, did a very good performance.

• 30:41AJ Gentile?

  Sure, because he was a performer.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  He's a performer.

• 30:43AJ Gentile?

  And what a, what a great nod to the audience who spotted him. They had to just go nuts for it.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Well, you know, that's the kind of thing where 90% of that audience had no knowledge of anything. Just another actor, you know, in a scene. But for the 10% who were sort of UFO curious, they knew and they thought it was pretty wild.

• 31:05AJ Gentile?

  I love it. You know, I put those jokes in my shows all the time that nobody gets except for that one sliver, but it's so special to them.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Because you know, good stuff can just work on a couple of levels. And as long as one of the levels hits most of the people, you're okay.

• 31:19AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. So how did you become the, uh, what got you interested in space and that sort of thing? Does this go back to dad and the, and the Apollo?

• 31:30Speaker 04

  That's a good, yes, yes. I'm, uh, there's two stories here. One is space, one is UFOs.

• 31:39AJ Gentile?

  Let's hear it.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Let's talk space first.

• 31:41AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  When I was, um, I, I grew up in Hillsboro, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland. And when I was 15 years old, I was living large. I had started working as a fry cook at the Arctic Circle drive-in. And I started at a dollar 10 an hour and I had worked my way up to a dollar 35.

• 32:01AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Right? Pretty cool. And I got to be a fry cook, eat all the burgers and fries you wanted. It was sweet work, right? But I was interested in space because during the sixties, it was our article of faith for my family. You know, I was just a little kid, but we would get up at four in the morning on Mercury flights and Gemini flights, and everybody would watch the TV together. So I sort of had this burned in. My father was a history teacher. So I had this idea burned in. Well, okay.

• 32:33AJ Gentile?

  So Dad wanted to get up?

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 32:36AJ Gentile?

  And get everybody up?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  He got everybody up. It's like he would come in at like four thirty or something. Okay, they're they're gonna launch in half an hour or whatever it was, right? And so we would all watch it. All right. Flash forward to nineteen sixty-nine, when again Bryce is living large, making big bucks, you know, clearing almost ten dollars a day.

• 32:54AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Think about that. Yeah, not bad for a fifteen-year-old. So, uh, I was working, the manager at the Arctic Circle was a Basque separatist named Mariano Bilbo. Okay? And Mariano was a tough, he's the best kind of hard-working immigrant you'd want.

• 33:11AJ Gentile?

  What's a Basque separatist?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  He wanted the Basque region of Spain to separate from Spain.

• 33:17AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I thought they all want that.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Don't, do they? I don't know. At the time, I...

• 33:21AJ Gentile?

  No, they're the descendants of Atlantis. They want to be their own thing, man.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  All right. Well, then, then I withdraw the character. He was just a Spanish immigrant, we'll call it.

• 33:33AJ Gentile?

  No, he was Basque.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  He was Basque. Hard-working guy, though. All right? And, um, so he put up the schedule, and on July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, yours truly was on the schedule doing the main cooking at the Arctic Circle. And I went to Mariano and said, hey, uh, you know, the moon landing, can I get the night off? And he said, no, the schedule, no, no, you can't have the night off. Why? Well, I want to see the moon. You can't get out of this to watch TV. And I said, okay, could we put a TV in the Arctic Circle? Put a TV in a restaurant? No. And I said, well, what about, what about a radio? Radio, stop talking.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Right? He was done. And I, so I resigned myself. I was not gonna see it. Okay? So I report to work on July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine. And it's about thirty-five, forty minutes before Armstrong and Aldrin are gonna be on the moon's surface. And I just can't handle it, man. I just cannot handle it. And I call up my dad, and the thing you have to understand is my dad was one of those tough guys. Imagine the guy from Wonder Years. You know, that was my dad kinda guy. So this was a hail mary of the highest order that I was about to parlay here. But I called him up and I said, "Dad, I just really wanna see the moon landing. Can you come and get me?"

• 34:58Speaker 04

  And then I take the phone, and I'm holding it out here, cuz I know he's gonna be screaming. He's gonna be saying, "You made a deal, you have to be responsible," etc., etc., right? And then he says, um, how does he say? He always says, "You know, you'll be fired." And I said, "Yeah, I know." And long pause, and he goes, "I'll be right down." So dad comes down, picks me up, takes me back home. We sit around the TV, we watch the moon landing. About thirty-five minutes into the moon landing, he turns to me and he goes, "I think it's time for you to go face the music." Mm-hmm. Puts me back in the car, drives me down to the Arctic Circle.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  I get out. By this point, Mariano Bilbao was there, cuz he's been called in that Bryce has abandoned his post. Sure. Right? And he does as expected. He fires me on the spot. And my father, God bless him, I mean, cuz he never, this was not his style, he goes to Mariano and he goes, "You know, you are making a very big mistake, because this is going to go down as the defining moment of our times, and you are always going to regret what you did tonight." Then he turns to me and goes, "Son, get in the car." And he drove me home, and of course, I never worked at the Arctic Circle again. Wow, and your dad was right. He was right.

• 36:22AJ Gentile?

  Instinct for how important it was.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:24AJ Gentile?

  That it's more important than being a fry cook.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 36:26AJ Gentile?

  We need, we need to, we need.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Now, I have to say, I mean, that was a tough one, though, because, you know, I kid about the salary and all that. But, you know, there were lessons being learned.

• 36:35AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Having a job at a young age and, and all that.

• 36:38AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  So, you know, um, but these things happen. These things happen.

• 36:43AJ Gentile?

  They do. So let's take a quick break and we'll come back. We'll talk about how Hollywood enters the picture.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  I love it. Let's do that.

• 36:49AJ Gentile?

  Before we get to Hollywood, we want to talk about your basement experience.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Well, listen, I was thrilled to go to the basement to talk to you because the, the way I came to actually first really appreciate the UFO topic involves a basement. Okay?

• 37:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Um, I think when I was like 12 or 13, um, my family didn't have a lot of money or anything. So, and there were no video games. So there weren't a lot of things for me and my friends to do, but ride bikes and, you know, that kind of stuff. But we came up with a way to have some fun. We would go down to my parents' basement because, I don't know, nobody has basements in Southern California where I live now, but they had basements back then. So we went into the basement and my parents had kept every issue of Look and, uh, Life magazines. Okay. In, in the basement and they were just moldering away in the basement. Not, nothing really happening to them. When my friends and I came up with a reuse purpose, we would take a, a, you know, these are extended format magazines.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  And we would take them and we would roll them tight. Right? And they would become like lightsabers and we would have magazine fights in the basement where you would hit each other's magazines. And then the guy who's mag, and they, paper would be flying and everything. And the guy won who disabled his opponent's magazine. Now, I admit, but at least it was environmentally friendly.

• 38:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  You gotta at least say that. Okay. So we're down there having a basement battle and I'm, you know, I pick a magazine up and I start to roll it up. And then I realize there's this kind of cute French actress on the front cover. Okay? And her name was Cecile Aubrey and it was a Life magazine from June 26, 1950. I was not alive during that, of course, but these are old, old magazines.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  And so I I stop because I'm 13, you know, and I'm just starting to be interested in women.

• 38:47AJ Gentile?

  Of course you stop.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm like, oh, this is interesting. So um, I'm I find her, you know, I open it up and I'm looking to see this Cecile Aubry, who I think is like some kind of, uh, she's being promoted as this French ingenue kind of thing, right? And I find the the article, and there's all these pictures of Cecile Aubry.

• 39:07AJ Gentile?

  Does it open this way?

• 39:07Speaker 04

  No, it did not. I wish it had. That would come later, but that's a story we don't need to cover here in this. And I wrote down this quote because it's so interesting. They described her as frisky, pert, sugar and spice bundle of adolescents.

• 39:23AJ Gentile?

  Love it.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. How could you beat that, right? I mean, so, you know, my friends, I were looking at that. And then I'm, you know, we're going to get back on to the, you know, after the battlefield. And as I'm closing up the magazine to roll it up, something catches my eye. And in that magazine is a picture of the McMinnville UFO photos. Remember those?

• 39:46AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  1950, there's two of them. And the Trents from McMinnville, Oregon, um, actually took these pictures on a, on a camera that the guy had. His name was Trent, and the article is called Farmer Trent's Flying Saucer.

• 40:01AJ Gentile?

  Are these the one where you see the the telephone poles in front of it?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:05AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  And in fact, I'm I'm sure probably on the video version of this, you'll probably show people what they look like. They're pretty great photos. Anyway, my friends and I stopped and we're like, what is this? Because the thing, the thing that's so great about those photos, and I'm kind of obsessed by them, uh, over the years, um, is that they're either true or they're not. They're either a hubcap suspended, or they're actually a flying saucer that's better than anything the government's been releasing right now. Where you're actually looking at it. And there aren't a lot of ways to fake those flying saucers in those photos. And they have stood the test of time.

• 40:41AJ Gentile?

  They have.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  They have been reviewed by, uh, commissions. Um, Bruce McAbey did a whole study on them. I mean, they stand the test of time. But what's interesting and gathered the attention of me and my friends is that we lived just 20 miles from McMinnville, 20, 30 miles from McMinnville. This was local. So we're looking at this, these two pictures of UFOs and going. Damn, these are, this is almost more interesting than Aubrey.

• 41:09AJ Gentile?

  Almost.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  You know, almost, not quite, then we're 13.

• 41:11AJ Gentile?

  Right, it's up there.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  But, but it was.

• 41:13AJ Gentile?

  It was right here.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, we, that's what we thought and we'd go, and every time my parents and I would drive to the Oregon coast to, you know, go to the beach or whatever, you drove through McMinnville. They have a big UFO festival there right now. And so, that's where I started to first say.

• 41:31Speaker 05

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• 42:00Speaker 04

  What is this? You know, what's going on?

• 42:04AJ Gentile?

  How did life cover that story?

• 42:06Speaker 04

  Respectfully.

• 42:07AJ Gentile?

  They did.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  It was only a single page. I think it has both, has one big blow up of one of them and a smaller of another, and has a picture of Farmer Trent with his camera, right? The thing is, I literally went to high school with people that in their later lives, you know, provided healthcare for, for the Trents. And everybody always said about the Trents, these people, you know, are pretty well salt of the earth. They ain't, they ain't making stuff up. But more than that, if, this blows my mind because today, of course, we all have phones, we take a zillion photos, right? But, he comes out there, he's got a camera with a, a fresh roll of film in it, right? I mean, he may have taken a few pictures on

• 42:50Speaker 04

  it, and he takes these two photos. What does he do? He doesn't run to the local pharmacy with the developing thing and get them developed, no. He holds on to them for a few months because he's a frugal man. And, and he doesn't develop them until he's used up the entire

• 43:06AJ Gentile?

  The whole roll, right.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  But those photos became the, you know, the biggest things. And to this day, to this day, I think they stand the test of time. I urge anyone to look at them and say, what's the deal with that? Because here's the thing, they're not orbs.

• 43:22AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  They're nuts and bolts.

• 43:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Something is flying in McMinnville, Oregon, in, in, uh, May of 1950. That is anomalous.

• 43:32AJ Gentile?

  Yep. So this is less than three years from Kenneth Arnold and Roswell. So the propaganda machine is not in full effect yet.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Correct. And, and, uh, you know, again, uh, I'm sure people had their own interpretations as, as they always would. But, but life at that time was not into debunking or, or anything. They, I mean, it, it, I think they portrayed it like, like People Magazine might have portrayed it later. You know, it was like, here's an interesting story, right?

• 44:00AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  But, and, and they, and they, they put it in there because they thought that it was a really good photo. But I, I just want to give you one example of how, of the problem we face in ufology for trying to get to the truth of certain things. So years later, uh, I, I have been not to that many UFO conferences. I was selected as a speaker to one at the IUFOC, I think, in, uh, in Phoenix. And so I put together a PowerPoint. And what I made for that PowerPoint, I was trying to make the point that the media never covers, covers these stories accurately or appropriately, right? They always either make fun or whatever. And I was trying to make a point of this is what should have happened.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  So I made a Time and Newsweek magazine with the, with the McMinnville photos in them, right? And I put that up for the audience and said, remember these magazines? And everybody's like, yeah, yeah. And I said, no, you don't. They're fake. I made them, right? Just to show people, ask questions, don't always believe things. Okay. If you go to the McMinnville UFO Conference website under their history section, they have my magazine.

• 45:12AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  And they list, they are showing it as the real thing. And I have written them letters. I have, uh, social media posted about it. I've told friends to talk to them about it and they won't take it down.

• 45:24AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no. Yeah, accidentally became part of the problem.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:29AJ Gentile?

  I absolutely believe it.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  I mean, and so you'd, I say that only, you know, I'm not trying to be alarmist or I'm just saying you gotta ask questions and, and honestly, I wish the people there would just take it down. They should take it down.

• 45:45AJ Gentile?

  They should. I mean, it's yours.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I don't even care about that. You know, I think to a certain amount, when I see people that take a picture of something and then they put copyright in the corner. Listen, if we're trying for transparency and to prove that the UFO UAP, she was honest and, and needs to be taken seriously as an anomaly, I'm not interested in copyrighting everybody's little, you know, UFO photo. I think, I think you should give the, they should have the narrative of how that photo or video came to be, but they should release it to the world. You're, you're not trying to hold on to it to, you know, to make money off it. You're trying to help us reach a decision about what, what is going on. Anyway,

• 46:29Speaker 04

  so that's how I became interested in UFOs.

• 46:32AJ Gentile?

  Those fakes though, they muddy the waters. They make it so difficult.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  They do, and I feel it's so weird. I mean, I never for a million, I don't even know how they got it. I, I never in a million years though, thought that this was just meant to be kind of shock value for an audience. As an entertainer, I was just saying, there they are, but that's what happened.

• 46:52AJ Gentile?

  Well, how did you make the shift into screenwriting? Didn't you have the first sci-fi original?

• 46:57Speaker 04

  I did. I, I, and it was about UFOs. Here's how, it's, it's interesting. Okay, so here's the thing. If you're a TV news guy and you're an anchorman or a reporter, you're going to get fired.

• 47:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Either your boss is going to get fired, or your show is going to be canceled, or you're going to be fired because somebody different looking is coming. You are going to be fired. And so at a certain point, when

• 47:28Speaker 04

  Uh, various jobs were ending. I had started dating my, my wife Jackie and uh, I sort of realized I was gonna have to, if, if I was gonna stay in the news business, the two of us were gonna have this terrible pulling apart, you know, because we both have to be looking, I, I met her in the mayor's office. She was a radio reporter. I was a CNN correspondent, right? But we were each, if you're gonna pursue that career, that broadcasting career, you're gonna end up in a different city.

• 47:58AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  You're gonna have these problems. And, and Jackie said, you know, have you uh, ever considered writing a screenplay?

• 48:07AJ Gentile?

  That's your, that's your fallback?

• 48:09Speaker 04

  I, I had never seen a screenplay.

• 48:11AJ Gentile?

  (laughing)

• 48:12Speaker 04

  This was before the internet. And I said, no, I don't. And you know what we did? AJ, this is so weird. We, we got in the car, we drove down to Hollywood Boulevard, found some guy on the street of Hollywood Boulevard who was selling screenplays of movies that had been made. We bought a couple of them and I read them and I thought, hmm, this looks pretty simple. Um, there's not a lot of adjectives. It's pretty straightforward.

• 48:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  And uh, so I wrote, they say write what you know, right? So, um, well, the first thing I wrote was about something else that I gave it up halfway through because I said, it's been good therapy. It's not a great script. Then I wrote a, a script called E N G, which stands for electronic news gathering and uh, because that's what I knew. I knew the world of TV news and that got me an agent. Uh, it got sold. They made a hundred and two episodes of it up in Canada and, and, and so.

• 49:05AJ Gentile?

  Did you know how unlikely that was?

• 49:07Speaker 04

  Not at the time.

• 49:07AJ Gentile?

  You were like, this is easy.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Well, that's what I thought. And then the very, the second script I wrote also became a TV series here in the US. And so I thought, I thought, I, I, at that point, I was starting to realize this was pretty luck. I mean, and, and it's luck plus skill, but you have to be in the right place.

• 49:24AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  Whatever. Um, and I just thought, well, you know what? Uh, as long as people keep paying me to do this, I'm gonna keep doing this. And so I just uh, stopped being a, a, a broadcast journalist, even though in a heart and by training, I still feel that I am that person. Uh, certainly podcasting gives you the ability to do those things these days without act, having to work for NBC or somebody. Um, But I just turned my attention to drama. And I found, as I said earlier, one of the greatest pieces of training anybody can have to be a screenwriter is to have been in news. Because you you experience so much real life in such a

• 50:09Speaker 04

  condensed space of time, right? And so, being a journalist was the greatest thing absolutely in the world. And I do think if I have a superpower as a writer, it's simply that I've experienced a lot of things, not because I saw a lot of movies. Now I've seen a lot of movies, but at the time I had more experience than movies.

• 50:32AJ Gentile?

  Do you remember where you were when you saw your first thing on TV that you wrote? Who was with you? What was that like?

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. It was a CBS drama series called K O'Brien, which was about a female surgeon in New York City. It was like Grey's Anatomy without the sex. It might still be on the air if we put the sex in it. Could be a big mistake. But anyway, CBS put it on at 10 o'clock at night. And of course, I'd already seen it by this point a thousand times in the edit rooms or whatever. But we had a little party for some friends. Everybody wore surgical scrubs and everything. And we had a few TVs. And I just remember watching that and thinking, oh, my. I mean, oh, my.

• 51:17AJ Gentile?

  What a moment.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  It was. It was a beautiful moment in a way that never that exceeds. You know, I had seen myself on the air on taped reports as a reporter. So that's very personal, but you don't say, now that's art. You just go, well, that's today. I wonder what I'll do tomorrow. But when you see something you wrote, oh, goodness, that gets to you. And you know what? It is a thrill that never reduces.

• 51:48AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 51:48Speaker 04

  If I had something on tomorrow night and you and I were watching it, I'd still be giddy. I'd still be, there'd be tingling in my fingers. You know, I'd just be, oh, my gosh, here it comes. Because and what's so interesting about that, I think, is that

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Again, you've seen it so many times. You wrote it, you shot it, you were in the edit room, you've seen it posted, you've, you know, so many times, so many, many times, and it's never the same when you watch it on the air.

• 52:22AJ Gentile?

  No, that's special.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Just like you and I are having an experience right now. Okay, now, I don't know if you watch all your shows.

• 52:28AJ Gentile?

  Never.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Okay, but I will be watching this one, and I guarantee you that when I watch it, I'll get that tingle because I'll say, wow, that's how it looked. I didn't, you know, because you, you have one experience from where you are, and then you have another experience where you're interacting with the finished product.

• 52:46AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  And that's what I think, um, I mean, listen, there are a lot of knocks on Hollywood. It is not a perfect world. Uh, trust me. I mean, I've been kicked and abused and

• 52:56AJ Gentile?

  I was there, man.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  lied to, and you, you name it, and you've had it too. You know, so it's not perfect, but it is exciting. And you know what's interesting about Hollywood? If you're, like, say you're a bank manager, okay? You, you're gonna have a good chance to still be a bank manager tomorrow, right? In Hollywood, you could be fired tomorrow. On the other hand, in Hollywood, the phone could ring and somebody goes, hey, are you represented by anybody? Uh, well, uh, yeah. Okay, who, who can I call? And then suddenly you're working on something.

• 53:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  And, and it's, it's cool. I, you know, like, um, I worked on Taken with Steven Spielberg. That's a thrill.

• 53:37AJ Gentile?

  I bet it is.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  How do you, how do you replicate that? I mean, that was beautiful.

• 53:43AJ Gentile?

  Uh, I want to talk about Take It a little bit later.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:45AJ Gentile?

  So, take me through Dark Skies.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:51AJ Gentile?

  Was, did the network ask you to do that, or did you pitch it?

• 53:57Speaker 04

  We just came up with it. Uh, Dark Skies is, I, I, I understand it's an old show, uh, but it is an important show for sort of the whole idea of how is disclosure being managed?

• 54:10AJ Gentile?

  Oh, people should still watch it because, because it's, it's tracking with what's

• 54:14Speaker 04

  Well, thank you.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  But what's interesting about Dark Skies, in addition to the show itself, which I believe one of the critics when it came out called it "the most subversive show on television", which I still bask in that one.

• 54:26AJ Gentile?

  It was. I'm surprised it made it on the air.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  As was I at the time. But what's, you know, AJ, what's so interesting is that the thing that happened outside of the show while making the show was potentially even stranger than the show. And that, I think, is the takeaway from it for me because what happened in a, this is a short version of a big story, but what happened is, and this goes back to what we were just talking about, watching something live that you've done. My partner Brent Friedman and I had created Dark Skies. And we'd come up with briefing books that didn't look dissimilar to this thing, right?

• 55:14Speaker 04

  We had these briefing books that were classified briefing books. And they had all these fake documents and timelines and stuff in there. And the premise of the notebooks was, we put a little gold foil seal on them, so you had to break it. And they said they were top secret on the outside. And they said that if you violated the terms of looking at them, you'd be up for trees. And, I mean, they were great. And then they were wrapped in brown paper wrapper and with twine around them. So when we took these to the networks...

• 55:48AJ Gentile?

  Oh, so that was the pitch?

• 55:49Speaker 04

  That was the pitch.

• 55:50AJ Gentile?

  Brilliant.

• 55:51Speaker 04

  So we took that to the network and we left them with these things. And we just had this, we got two out of, two offers in the same day. But when we left them, we just had to smile because they were so interactive for the time. This is before the internet. It meant that some executive... Was looking at this thing saying they could be up for treason if they didn't treat it properly. And so

• 56:13AJ Gentile?

  You gotta open it.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  They had to cut the twine, they had to take off the paper, they had to break the gold foil seal. And then what it said in there is you have been chosen basically to help get out the truth about UFOs. And it has to be done under the cover of fiction. So now you are part of the conspiracy to tell this disclosure.

• 56:35AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  Right?

• 56:37AJ Gentile?

  Brilliant pitch.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  So it was bold. It was, in fact, some, there's some group that called it one of the 12 best pilots pitches ever in Hollywood. Bibles. It was a Bible and a pitch. Okay. So suddenly my friend Brent Friedman and I are on the fast track. And a series of things started happening, which I could either tell you about them from the biggest to the littlest or in chronology. I'm kind of at sea, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with chronology for a moment here, just to show you how. So we're cruising along. I've already created TV shows. I know what this is like and I know how gifted we were. You know, this was great.

• 57:21Speaker 04

  They're gonna, and NBC buys it and they order it to pilot. So while we're shooting the pilot, the first weird thing happens. I get a postcard. I'm, we're shooting. This is in production. And while we're shooting, I get a postcard in the mail. And on the one side of it, and I will give this postcard to you guys if you want to put it in the show. On one side is the cover of a science fiction book. All right. Called Flying Eyes. All right. But on the other side, it's been typed in a real typewriter with a dark black ribbon. It's all caps and it is not written as a sentence.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  It's written one word, one word, one word, one word. And it says, "We are watching you."

• 58:15AJ Gentile?

  No kidding.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  Now.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  Sure, that could have-

• 58:20AJ Gentile?

  But it was sent to your home?

• 58:22Speaker 04

  It was sent to my home, my home address. We are watching you. Okay, so that happened during the pilot, and the truth is, I went to my partner the next day and said, "Did you send this to me?" And he's like, "What? What are you talking-" And so, obviously, he didn't.

• 58:36AJ Gentile?

  Did Brett get one too?

• 58:38Speaker 04

  No, just me.

• 58:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Just me. And, um, oh, well, to backfill, it's not like I wouldn't have been on somebody's radar, because you did mention it. The first film I ever had made was called Official Denial, and it was the first film on the Sci-Fi Channel, okay? And it was about somebody who was being abducted, right? And the government believed him. My inspiration was Whitley Strieber. If the government thought Whitley Strieber was actually being abducted, I thought, "What if they wire up his house when he's not there? So the next time he's abducted, they can be told about it instantly, and try to shoot down a UFO."

• 59:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  Operation Forced Encounter.

• 59:18AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  So, that's what that movie's about. So, anyway, now, jumping head to dark skies and you get this card. The pilot gets produced.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  NBC likes it.

• 59:31AJ Gentile?

  I think it gets a WGA Award.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  It does. It, it, well, it got nominated for a WGA Award. Yes, it did. And the, um, the main titles of the series won the Emmys.

• 59:40AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  Uh, it won the Emmy. So, now we're fast-forwarding. Now, we're picked up. NBC says, "We're ordering 13 hours of this thing." You know, "Get to work on the scripts." "We're going into production on the series." And, uh, all of that happens. In the fall, when the show is coming out, we're having a party at my house. All right? It's a premiere party. 200 people are in the backyard of this party, at the, at my, the house I live in today. These are people I know. These are people that include studio executives and network executives, all the actors, all the crew, everybody, and I know them all, because I'm the producer of the show.

• 1:00:26AJ Gentile?

  Is this your majestic 12 party?

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:00:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  And everybody has a little badge, that we made, that, that we are actually using in the series, so we thought, "Well, that's a party favor nobody will get rid of."

• 1:00:37AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  So, we made everybody a majestic 12 badge. In the middle of this, and we got TVs outside, we got TVs inside. In the middle of this- Some guy comes, one of my producers says, there's this guy that's looking to talk to you, you better talk to him. And this guy introduces himself, and I don't know who he is. He's the only guy in a party of 200 people, I don't know who he is. And he doesn't have a badge, right? And he says, he's about 30 years old, nice enough looking guy, jacket, collared shirt, not dissimilar to what I'm wearing right now. And he says, listen, the people I work for have sent me here to tell you that you've done a really great job. You

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  know, we're just really impressed by what you have been able to do. And what do you, what do you mean by that? I'm, I'm asking the guy. And he says, oh, well, you know, you got a lot of things right.

• 1:01:36AJ Gentile?

  In the pilot?

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37AJ Gentile?

  Which has aired yet?

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  No. It has not aired. It's airing that night. And so, me being the wise ass I am at the time, I'm, I'm thinking the guy is full of nonsense. So I go, oh yeah, you've seen the pilot?

• 1:01:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  He goes, well, yeah. And, and he said, and we've read your other scripts.

• 1:01:55AJ Gentile?

  We?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56AJ Gentile?

  Okay. And we've read the other scripts?

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, the ones that we're working on. They've, they've had access. So I'm like, okay, you've seen the pilot? What happens after the crop circle? You know, I'm full of swagger. And he goes, oh yeah, that's a great scene. And then afterwards, they take the guy back to the Majestic 12 headquarters and they do that operation to, to pull the ganglion out of his head and, and all that. And I had to go, uh, yeah, that's exactly what happens. Right? So he had seen the pilot.

• 1:02:24AJ Gentile?

  Did he tell you who he worked for?

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

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• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  But what's interesting is I threw him out of the party. I said, you know, I don't know who you are. I've got 200 people here. I got a party to run. You need to leave. So I told him to leave. About an hour later, I'm going into the kitchen, probably to check on hors d'oeuvres. I don't know what. I'm just going to the kitchen and I see this guy talking to my partner, Brent Friedman.

• 1:03:16AJ Gentile?

  In the kitchen?

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  No, in by the barbecue, right outside. So I go over there and the guy has started chatting up Brent and he says he's from the Office of Naval Intelligence.

• 1:03:28AJ Gentile?

  O and I.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  He says his name is J C. To call him J C. He didn't say his name was. He says, call me J C.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  And they basically are saying, look, we'd like to, you know, we're all about trying to encourage slow drip disclosure. And we would like to, you know, strike some kind of arrangement, some kind of deal with you guys. Okay, what do you mean? Well, we would help give you some information that might be useful to you. And you would try to accommodate that into some of your future scripts. Right? Now, at that point, to be honest with you, I don't know if I'm coming or going. I mean, I got a lot on my mind.

• 1:04:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  It's hard to produce a show.

• 1:04:09AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  And it's hard to have a party in your backyard.

• 1:04:11AJ Gentile?

  And this is a surreal conversation.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  Totally surreal. Totally surreal.

• 1:04:15AJ Gentile?

  But there's something about him that you believe him.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Well, he was a credible, nice, nice enough guy. I mean, to be honest.

• 1:04:23AJ Gentile?

  He knew the scene.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  He knew the scene. He'd obviously had some access. No, it's not like the Dark Skies pilot was locked up at Fort Knox and no one could ever have seen it.

• 1:04:34AJ Gentile?

  Right, but you're not sending screeners to DC.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  We're not sending them to O and I for sure. I don't know.

• 1:04:40AJ Gentile?

  But the actual paper scripts, though.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  Yes. He said, yes. Yeah.

• 1:04:47AJ Gentile?

  This is NBC?

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Yes. So here's the part that gets very strange.

• 1:04:52AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  I threw him out a second time.

• 1:04:55AJ Gentile?

  This time I mean it.

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  I said, look, this is all fascinating and everything, but I don't have time to deal with this right now. And I, you know, it's really time for you to go. And he goes, got it? Understand? And then he looks at me. I'm standing there with Brent and Brent's wife. And he says, anybody have a piece of paper and a pen? And I don't, Brent doesn't, but his wife says, "Ah," and she gets something out of her purse. She's got a bank deposit envelope. She rips off the back part of the envelope and hands it to him with a pen. And the guy turns away from us and goes, "Now, this happens in about 30 seconds, right? 30 seconds." But, and he's very purposeful and he's writing something.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  And then he folds it in half and he hands it to us and he goes, "You know, you may want to put this in a safety deposit box or something. Maybe if we don't make a deal 10 or 15 years from now, maybe you'll look it up and you'll see we were on the level." And Brent says, "Can we look at it?" And he goes, "Oh, sure." So, we look at it and the only way I can describe it right this second is it kind of looked like an equation with symbols in it and I didn't immediately understand everything about it, but it was clearly his intention to write it. I mean, he didn't make this up. Will you share this picture with us? I can't share it with you right now because we're doing it on our Sound, Light and Frequency podcast later.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  I, but I will come back on and talk to you about it sometime or whatever. I feel bad even saying that. No, no, no, that's okay. But you'll understand why. So, uh, we say to him, "What is it?" And the guy goes, "Secrets of the universe. Sound, light and frequency." Which is where the title of the current podcast comes from. Now, the reason I'm not sharing it right now is, but what Brent and I, it had been lost for a number of years for, and, and we, we got our hands back on it just recently in advance of this. And so, we've decided to try to investigate it a little bit so that we can, sort of, we're

• 1:07:08Speaker 04

  going to present our findings and put, release it to the public on the same day. That's all. That's the only reason we're sitting on the actual thing right now. And it had been lost because Brent had been living in Hollywood and then he moved to the San Juan Islands and they got a different safety deposit box. And his wife, it was smaller and his wife moved the stuff into his, his office. And about tw- about two years ago, this is so funny how things happen. Cause people say, well, why didn't you hold on to that? Well, I was busy with raising three kids and making TV and movies and stuff. I had other things to do. So I, I started to write a book about this, which I never have finished.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  And I wrote, I called Brent up and I go, I, you know, you've had this thing for a quarter of a century, man.

• 1:07:57AJ Gentile?

  It's your turn.

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  It's my turn.

• 1:07:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  And he said, okay, fine. And he looks for it, he couldn't, he couldn't find it. And I said, that's just not, I mean, you know, Brent and I are fast friends, but this was a problem. I mean, so I said, hey, it's not okay. You know, I mean, I trusted you with this thing and it's a key part of this story and I need to see it. And he goes, I, I can't find it. And I said, when's your daughter coming home from college? And he goes, she's gonna be here this weekend. I said, tell her I'll give her $500 if she can find it. And she found it. And what had happened is the glue from the envelope or whatever had stuck inside a couple of pages.

• 1:08:37AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  And as she went through every book and every folder, she found this thing again. So we've only recently sort of refound it and our, and, but it's clearly the one. I mean, I, it's clearly the, the thing. So we're looking into it.

• 1:08:52AJ Gentile?

  So it's just symbols?

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's like, it's more like an equation. It's not really an equation. It's a drawing, it's a, it's a drawing with stuff in it that you'll see. I wish I could be more specific.

• 1:09:08AJ Gentile?

  I mean, I want you to speculate on it, but we need, you need to save that reveal.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  I, I think so. I mean, I think with the, I, as, as, the more I've looked into it and the more I talk to people about it.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  People are like, "Well, that's not bullshit. That's something." And is it, is it the secrets of the universe? I don't know, but if you think about sound, light, and frequency, many people do say those three things are pretty primal in terms of understanding our reality.

• 1:09:40AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  And in fact, Tesla is widely reputed to have said, "If you want to understand the secrets of the universe, think about energy, vibration, and frequency," or something along those lines, right? So, maybe this guy was an acolyte of Tesla, but the story doesn't end there.

• 1:10:00AJ Gentile?

  No?

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:10:01AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  Because he leaves. And, you know, the next week at the office, you know, Brent and I look at this thing and I go, "You know what? I don't have time to think about this. Put it in your safe deposit. We'll worry about it later." This guy calls and says, "Bryce seems to be a bit of a problem." He's talking to Brent. I'm not sure he really understands what we're talking about.

• 1:10:25AJ Gentile?

  This is JC?

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he says, "Maybe he needs to meet my superior."

• 1:10:32Speaker 04

  And so JC and his so-called "superior" arranged to come to our office at Dark Skies to talk to us about a deal. Okay? So, you know, I was very busy, but that's pretty tantalizing. One does kind of want to hear what they have to say, right?

• 1:10:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  So, we said, "Okay." But I told the security guys, "We're going to talk in the conference room that has glass partition, so everyone can see you in the conference room, in case anything untoward is happening." And I said, "I want you guys to stand outside the conference room and look tough." Look like you're not to be messed with.

• 1:11:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  So they did. And JC showed up. He was kind of the good cop. He brings a guy, maybe 10, 15 years older than him, who I believe... Brent and I have always called him the captain. We didn't call him anything in the meeting, but we believe he was introduced as a captain.

• 1:11:26AJ Gentile?

  No credentials shown?

• 1:11:28Speaker 04

  We asked for them. I didn't ask him at the party, because, to be honest with you, people say, "Well, why didn't you?" It's because, "I'm sorry, I'm in the middle of..."

• 1:11:37AJ Gentile?

  No, I get it. And who knows? He could be a wacky guy. You don't know.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so I thought, "I don't have time to vet the guy at a party. I'm not going to worry about..." So, yeah, we did when they came, and...

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  The guy, the so-called captain guy, he came dressed in a bomber jacket with a lot of insignias and patches and stuff, jeans, boots, he looked like a Navy SEAL. This is how I always looked at him. If you, if the, if the JC character looked like he had an intelligence background, the, the guy he brought looked more military. Really felt tough Navy SEAL. And he didn't look like he was happy to be there. He was very condescending to, to me and Brad. He, he, he sort of felt like, seriously, I gotta go talk to these Hollywood guys, right? He was very tough. He was not, not there to win over our, us for friends or anything.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  And, um, you know, uh, again, I've talked about these things for an hour, well, I'm sorry, an hour in a podcast or whatever. I don't, I don't want to waste your hour here.

• 1:12:44AJ Gentile?

  No, you're not wasting it.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  But we had a, a-

• 1:12:46AJ Gentile?

  I want to know what the deal, what the offer was.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had an out, well, the offer was made a little more specific. Um, oh, but to go back to the identification, yeah, I did say, well, who are you? You know, but, you know, you say you're from O and I, prove it or whatever. He goes, that's not the way it works. That was a favorite line of his because, um, he said, um, you know, if we're gonna make a deal, then that information will be available to you. And he said, and by the way, you know, we've already done a preliminary investigation on you guys. If we make a deal, we'll, we'll do a more detailed one. I mean, how weird is that? So a guy is gonna investigate, they've already done a preliminary investigation on me, but I don't get to know who they are.

• 1:13:30AJ Gentile?

  It sounds like a threat a little bit.

• 1:13:32Speaker 04

  It's very threatening, like that postcard.

• 1:13:34AJ Gentile?

  Was there a dollar figure?

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  No, no. Uh, because, um, well, the, I mean, okay, here's what went down. He, his whole thing was-

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  There's so much complexity in all this. I, you know, there's no way I'll say it perfect or anything.

• 1:13:53AJ Gentile?

  Take your time.

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  But you recall in the 1980s, there was that special UFO live or something. And it was on, I don't know where it was, but they purported, they had a bunch of people in shadowy interviews and they were talking about an alien and strawberry ice cream and things like that. And remember, that was Richard Doty and they called themselves the Aviary.

• 1:14:15AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  And it was the Air Force.

• 1:14:17AJ Gentile?

  That's right. Doty was the Falcon.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  Exactly. And of course, the Air Force has been a lot less forthcoming over the years than the Navy.

• 1:14:25AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Even recently.

• 1:14:27AJ Gentile?

  Less forthcoming and much more destructive.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  Yes. And that, you know, the Navy, while not perfect, seems to be on the front lines of a lot of this stuff right now. These guys said, and this will just probably make you laugh, and again, I'm not vouching for everybody. I'm just trying to be a good pragmatic relayer of what happened.

• 1:14:50AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  Right? As opposed to saying, this is, this is what I believe. I just can tell you what was said. What he said was, he either said, "We are the aquarium," or "Think of us as the aquarium."

• 1:15:04AJ Gentile?

  Aviary or aquarium?

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  Aquarium.

• 1:15:06AJ Gentile?

  Aquarium.

• 1:15:07Speaker 04

  Because they were the Navy. Right?

• 1:15:09AJ Gentile?

  I gotta write this down. There's an episode to be made there.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  Hecklefish will have things to say about that.

• 1:15:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he will. The aquarium.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  All right. Now, over the years, I've told that to people who are in the UFO UAP.

• 1:15:22AJ Gentile?

  Well, hold on. Keep us in the room.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25AJ Gentile?

  You say, "No."

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27AJ Gentile?

  You say, "I'm not interested."

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  To the, to, oh, no, we did not say, "We're not interested."

• 1:15:33AJ Gentile?

  You didn't say, "No."

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  No. Well, in the room, this goes on about an hour and a half. And it got kind of contentious. Whereas, the good cop, JC, was always trying to say, "Well, I think we can agree," you know, "But this guy," I felt like, okay, you want to ask us for this deal? And the deal was simply going to be some version of, "We will..." Brief you on certain key things that you should know and you will find ways to incorporate them into your series. You know, no, nothing beyond that at this point. Which is, you know, kind of a weird thing for somebody to be in your office telling you about.

• 1:16:17AJ Gentile?

  Why does it take over an hour?

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  Because I said to the guy, so, well, because I thought, maybe this is real. And even if it's not real, if it's disinformation, I know about Richard Doty and that shit.

• 1:16:30AJ Gentile?

  You did know?

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm thinking, I'd like to hear what they have to say. So I said things like, well, okay, you know, that's all well and, oh, I know what, the first thing I should tell you though, is what they did say, you got a lot of things right, but the captain was there to say what we got wrong. And what he said we got wrong is we had these biological ganglions that infested a human's brain and if you could get it out of them, you know, you could bring them back from the brink and all that. And he was disgusted by the ganglions, this guy. And he said, and this is, this, I've never forgotten this phrase, he said, that's not the way it worked, that's not the way it's done.

• 1:17:16Speaker 04

  That's not the way it's done. To which I said, well, how is it done?

• 1:17:20AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Now, we only did the ganglion, not because we believe ganglions are the real thing. This was a TV series. We were looking for a little horror effect.

• 1:17:27AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  Right? And he said, it's, I don't know if he used the word implant, but that's what he was talking about. It's implants. They're technological, they're biological, fusion, whatever, but it's an implant. You don't need, you don't need all that stuff.

• 1:17:44AJ Gentile?

  Did they, did JC tell you what you got right?

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47AJ Gentile?

  Specifically?

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  I think that they were saying certain things like, you know, the fact that we had Betty and Barney Hill in the pilot, that was right. The fact that we said JFK was killed over Roswell, possibly they implied might be right. They definitely said Roswell was right.

• 1:18:05AJ Gentile?

  I mean, connecting JFK to UFO. That's canon now.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  Yes, but it wasn't when we did it.

• 1:18:11AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  We just made it up. Our idea then was, what is the, let's take the unified field theory of conspiracy is what was our grand idea. We said, let's take the two biggest conspiracies of all time, UFOs and Kennedy. Let's put them in an atom collider and see what happens. And that became our series. Okay.

• 1:18:31AJ Gentile?

  I mean, we've traced the Kennedy assassination all the way through the Maori, Maori Island.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:18:36AJ Gentile?

  Incident and Fred Christmas.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:18:39AJ Gentile?

  Guy Bannister. It all goes back to JFK.

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  Yes. And.

• 1:18:42AJ Gentile?

  And then the Lester memo comes out a few years ago and confirms a lot of that.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  I, it always feels like I'm involved in the Mandela effect or something.

• 1:18:49AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  When Brent and I wrote all this, there was no internet for us to get this from. We'd never read any book that said anything like this. We just made it up. Only now, like you said, it's almost canon. So.

• 1:19:02AJ Gentile?

  Well, Jacques Vallée would say that this is, you're creating the myth and the myth is creating.

• 1:19:08Speaker 04

  I think, I think that's possible.

• 1:19:10AJ Gentile?

  Cause I mean, you cover Majestic 12 on the series.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  They said that was, we got that right.

• 1:19:15AJ Gentile?

  And you got that right.

• 1:19:16Speaker 04

  I mean, here's the thing. I started saying to this guy, I started asking him questions, right? To see what they were gonna tell us.

• 1:19:24AJ Gentile?

  Did you know about the Majestic 12, Jamie Shandare, no more issue, all of that?

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  Well, that's what we based the show on. We, we just said, if, if Roswell was real, then Majestic was real. And, and if JFK was in office 14 years after Roswell, then whether he knew about it or was trying to know about it or didn't know about it, Roswell and Majestic infected the undercurrent of Washington DC in the 60s. So that was our point of view on the whole thing.

• 1:19:57AJ Gentile?

  I think that's what Stanton Friedman felt about, wasn't it?

• 1:20:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, he, I, Stanton was a friend of mine and, and I, I once optioned his book, Top Secret Magic, about his quest to validate the Majestic 12 documents. Now, we could, we could do a whole show arguing Majestic 12 documents. I think they're real. I don't think all of them are real, but I think I, I subscribe to the Eisenhower briefing document being authentic.

• 1:20:23AJ Gentile?

  You do?

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  Now, not everybody does by any means. Stanton did.

• 1:20:27AJ Gentile?

  He did. He got a couple of things wrong.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  He did.

• 1:20:30AJ Gentile?

  But he got some things right.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  But nobody was more willing to go to a research facility and, you know, he was like iron pants, man. He would just sit himself down and go through boxes after boxes and find stuff.

• 1:20:43AJ Gentile?

  I don't know about the Majestic 12 documents. There's some, some things about them that I just don't like.

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  Well, you're right to be skeptical, you know, I mean.

• 1:20:50AJ Gentile?

  That doesn't, but I still believe there's a group.

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, there has to be a group. I, I guess that's really, I think we agree.

• 1:20:56AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  My, my take was there has to be somebody in charge after Roswell. You wouldn't have Roswell and, excuse me, and leave nobody in charge. So for our purposes of the show, we said, for our, because remember we're making these briefing books, we said, well, at least we can Xerox the Majestic 12 documents and put them in and we don't have to write them.

• 1:21:20AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  So we just, and, and also every television series, if you think about it, needs a base. If it's a hospital show, it's the ER. Now, if it's a legal show, it's the law office. If it's a police station, I mean, police show, it's the police station.

• 1:21:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  So what was ours? It was Majestic 12.

• 1:21:36AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  Okay. So that's really why we got between it. And, and I, again, I, I respect your thought about Majestic 12. It, it's going to be debated until it's not debated. At some point in this disclosure process, either we're going to see the documentation that proves how they were all done, or we're going to see the documentation that proves that some of them were real.

• 1:22:00AJ Gentile?

  Cause Doty's in that mess again.

• 1:22:01Speaker 04

  Yes, he is. And that's what I think Brent and I thought was going on when these guys came to the office, right? And, uh, the, the only thing, and again.

• 1:22:20Speaker 05

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• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  This story gets so strange, and I'm not vouching for the credibility of what the other person said. I'm only vouching for the fact that I was there and saw it happen. That's fair. So, at a certain point, I was asking the guy questions, and you probably know this, but just a few years ago, David Grush told his story for the first time in my house to Ross Goldheart. I didn't know that. There's your house. Yeah, the same place where this party happened. And many of the things that Dave, and that's the story we can talk about later possibly, but many of the things Grush has said, crash retrievals and reverse engineering and biologics

• 1:23:24Speaker 04

  and that kind of stuff, these guys were implying, if not stating outright. So, that felt very familiar to me that they were saying this. But as I got more detailed, the guy just put up a, he goes, "That's not why we're here." Right? He just, he wasn't going to talk about it. And finally, he got so upset with me. I mean, I really was not rubbing the guy the right way. He goes, "Fine." And he reaches in his pocket, and he pulls out this little vial. Okay? It's a little glass vial with a black screw top. And he puts it on the table and he goes, "There. That's what this is all about." And we're like, "What? What?" And I think Brent picked it up first, and it had little flakes in it, little gold flakes

• 1:24:09Speaker 04

  in it. Um... Which I presume might have been gold or whatever. I don't really know.

• 1:24:18AJ Gentile?

  Shot of gold schlag.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And but there's no liquid in it. But Brent said it kind of looked like a snow globe to him, that they were kind of floating around in there. I didn't see that. When I picked it up, it was just half full with these little gold flakes. But what the guy was saying is there's mining going on on the moon. And that this is a big part of it. Now, I can't tell you that I found evidence of mining on the moon or whatever, but that's what he said. Okay?

• 1:24:48AJ Gentile?

  How do we know what's misinformation? How do we know David's not part of a program?

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  Well, he seems way, way, way more authentic as a witness, because you can know a lot about him. Which is not to say that the story I'm telling might not be 100% true, but it could also be 100% false. I'm not being false. Neither is Brent. We're just sort of telling it. But here's how it ended, because it takes it to a far stranger finale.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  I started, I said, I don't, I was running a TV show. And guys are telling me they want their world reflected in my scripts. That ain't the way I roll at this time. And so I'm saying, I don't really understand this. What are you proposing? Are you saying you want us to hire writers that you recommend? Are you saying you want to rewrite our scripts? What are you going to do there? And he goes, and I said, No, I want to know. I want to know. Because it doesn't work that way. I said, I got writers out here who depend on residuals to feed their families. And, you know, I want to know, are you planning at

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  some kind of impact with this writing thing? Are you trying? And he's like, we're not have, you know, and he got very upset, and they left. In a huff.

• 1:26:14AJ Gentile?

  Did they give you any examples of what they would want in the show?

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  No. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, yeah, they did, actually.

• 1:26:24AJ Gentile?

  Because they did have some good stuff.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  No, no, actually, they did have one. Here's a specific example. Which is what got me into the confrontation with him in the first place. He said, "Well, are you doing any shows? We haven't seen anything where you're doing shows that take place in the water." Because I, I think I had asked him the question that started that. I, I said, "If you're the Navy, why are you investigating UFOs, which, you know, are generally in the air? What do you have to do with it?" And, and, you know, obviously, well, a lot of them are seen in the water. That's when he brought up, "So, are you doing stories about that? Because you're gonna need to."

• 1:27:03AJ Gentile?

  We didn't really know about that back then.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  I mean, not a lot, not like we do today.

• 1:27:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  And so, but, you know, again, Brent and I had set Dark Skies. We, the leader of Majestic 12 and Dark Skies was from O and I. I mean, he was a Navy guy. He was a Navy captain, our guy. And so, that's one of the things they said we got right. That we, we, we had it in the, in the Navy. But here's where things just take such a bizarre, I mean, all I can tell you is life is weird. So Bryce hears this, and I'm a producer, and I go, "Oh, well, wait a second. You can't be shooting in water all the time. You gotta get tanks, and you got people in scuba gear, and you..." I'm, I'm dissecting this thing as a production problem.

• 1:27:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  And he's, I can just see the guy getting red, you know, he's just, and then, and then, when I started talking about it, "And what are you gonna do about these scripts? Because I'm a journalist, right?" So I'm grilling the guy. And he didn't like it.

• 1:28:04AJ Gentile?

  He doesn't like that.

• 1:28:05Speaker 04

  And they left, in a huff. Okay, so...

• 1:28:07AJ Gentile?

  You don't grill him. That's not the way it's done.

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  That's not the way it's done. So here's the craziest part, that will just, you'll, your, your, your audience will hear this and go, "I don't know what to make of this," because I still don't, but, all right. So a few more days go by. And again, they're not calling me, because I'm off doing show stuff. But they call Brent, and he doesn't take the calls. You know, three or four calls go by. I don't think he's taken them. Finally, he picks up, and it's Jay.

• 1:28:36AJ Gentile?

  The show on the air at this time?

• 1:28:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38AJ Gentile?

  How's it doing?

• 1:28:41AJ Gentile?

  Before you were banished to Saturday nights.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  Well, this is all happening right after the premiere.

• 1:28:46AJ Gentile?

  Because the premiere did well, didn't it?

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  It did, it did well enough. I mean, the numbers on a premiere in 1996 would be a hit show today.

• 1:28:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  But were just modest in those days, but well enough. It was selected by NBC to be the lead show in their Saturday night trilogy. They had hundreds of buses around LA with Dark Skies posters on them. They had sky riding planes with Dark Sky. I mean, they were putting a lot of money in promos and marketing into this thing.

• 1:29:17AJ Gentile?

  Was X-Files around?

• 1:29:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, it was. People always sort of felt like they had to choose between our show and their show. But I felt like X-Files is all about sort of the suspense of is it or isn't it? Our, we, we, first of all, I, we wrote this pilot, you know, before really even knowing much of all about X-Files. And we also wrote it to be not a tease. In the very first scene of Dark Skies, you see a UFO and it ain't manmade, right? So we're not teasing anybody. We're saying there's an alien problem here on Earth. Okay, so a few days go by after the captain and JC come out and it's gone badly.

• 1:30:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:30:02Speaker 04

  I always have to, you could either laugh about it or get concerned about it. Because you know, it is kind of scary that anybody would come out and be mad at you. Who, who looks as scary and tough as this guy. But you know, now that it's decades later, I, I'm probably safe. I'm probably out of the woods on that one. But anyway, they call, JC is apparently called Brent and got his assistant three or four times. And Brent's not taking the calls. And finally Brent takes the call. And JC says, "Well, that could have gone better," right? And, and, and he, basically, the conversation was, "Price really seems to not be hitting it off with my superior.

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  Maybe we need to do something else, okay?" And they said, "We think maybe there's one more thing we can try before we have to just give up on this thing." And Brent...

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  Brent said, "Well, what would that be?" And they said, "There's a ship that's gonna be in Long Beach, coming up. And there's a guy on the ship," I think he said was an admiral, but I could have that wrong. "But there was a guy on the ship that we needed to meet. And we could not come on the ship, because you can't be logged onto a ship. You can't log on a couple of Hollywood screenwriters to talk about UFOs on a ship."

• 1:31:24AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:31:25Speaker 04

  That's a bad idea. Now, on the other hand, if you're a complete con job, it's also a good idea for you to say they can't come on the ship.

• 1:31:31AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:31:32Speaker 04

  Because you don't have to show the ship. But what they said is that this guy, the admiral, I call him, was going to take shore leave of some kind to visit and pay respects to a friend who had passed. And this is the part where I'm gonna tell you, you're just gonna probably laugh out loud, or hit your head on the table, I don't know which. But, "They wanted us to meet this guy at a cemetery at midnight."

• 1:32:04AJ Gentile?

  Come on!

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  See? That's what they said.

• 1:32:08AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  That's what I said. Now...

• 1:32:13AJ Gentile?

  We can't do a WeWork or something? Cemetery at midnight? What's that about?

• 1:32:17Speaker 04

  It's crazy and it's insane, okay? I'm not arguing that it makes any sense. But then, if the phenomenon is playing with you, sometimes it doesn't make sense.

• 1:32:27AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  So I don't know. Again, I'm relaying what they said. Now, Brent and I thought, my first thing was, "It's an initiation," right? They're testing us to see if we're either dumb enough, or gullible enough, or brave enough to go do it.

• 1:32:45AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:32:46Speaker 04

  Brent thought there might be something there that they were gonna show us. But then, as we talked about it, we said, "Yeah, we'll get there, there'll be two six-foot graves there, and we'll each get popped in the back of the head, and that'll be that to this little thing."

• 1:32:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  And my first reaction, of course, was, "Hey, I have three children, and I'm married, and I'm not meeting anybody at a cemetery at midnight, whether it's real or it's not real."

• 1:33:12AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:33:13Speaker 04

  Brent, who didn't have kids at the time, was almost willing to do it, but we had taken a vow that all for one, one for all. You know, we weren't going to do it unless we both did it. And ultimately, we decided not to do it, and we, we ended the relationship. They did call a few more times. We never took their calls again. And I, I completely agree. There are things that sound, sound light and frequency, secrets of the universe, this formula, the postcards, we are watching you, the, the guys coming. I mean, here's the, here's what I would say. I, I don't know whether to vouch for or against the authenticity

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  of this. I have, as a reporter, been lied to by experts. They did not strike me as lying to me. I'm just saying that. I'm just saying my, my, my impression was that these were serious people. But I would say this. You know, you've heard of the, the phrase an MM RPG, a multimedia role playing game?

• 1:34:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Right? It felt like Brent and I were in that, that somebody had constructed a game around us, and that we were unwitting players in the game. So even-

• 1:34:27AJ Gentile?

  That's kinda how you started the show.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30AJ Gentile?

  Is with an A, like an ARG?

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  They wanted us, if you think about it, our entire pitch for Selling Dark Skies was, we must use the cover of fiction to tell the truth. What happened to us? Just like you were talking about, maybe you create the thing with the JFK thing? Well, what happens? These guys show up at our, into our lives and say, we need you to use the cover of fiction to slow drip disclosure. So, our heads were reeling. You know, I mean, what's real, what's not real in this thing? And it felt like, well, let me put it this way. Somebody spent either a lot of time, or a lot of money, or probably, probably

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  both, to do this to us. Because if these guys were actors, they're pretty freaking authentic actors. If, if it was a scripted thing, then somebody spent some time scripting it.

• 1:35:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, but it's not easy to get your unaired pilot.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  It's not easy.

• 1:35:33AJ Gentile?

  As an actor.

• 1:35:35Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's definitely not easy.

• 1:35:37AJ Gentile?

  Did the network get involved in this? Did they-

• 1:35:40Speaker 04

  We never told the network. Yeah, that was not, we, see, my biggest concern, by the way, about even considering it as a deal was Sony, which was producing this, or Columbia TV at the time, and NBC, did not really care to hear that Bryce was getting his ideas from the government. That would not be something they would want to hear, and I didn't want to tell them that. And frankly, Brent and I felt that if we even really entertained the thing, aside from the cemetery at midnight bullshit, we felt if we actually entertained it and did it, we would be giving up agency over our own project, that we would, you know, I mean,

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  how would that have even worked, and how would we have been compromised? And, and what would people have thought about it if they found out about it? So we just said, we're out. I mean, we took it far enough, but things started to feel like they were coming in us, because think about it, you get the postcards, we are watching you. And then you get a guy that crashes your party, then he brings somebody to your office, and then they persist, and they're talking about a cemetery at midnight, and if you want to go there, I'll tell you another story that happened, and it involves Steven Spielberg.

• 1:37:00AJ Gentile?

  Let's hold that till after the break, but last, last question, because we have a lot of Spielberg to cover.

• 1:37:06Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. That's, there's your transition, I guess, yeah.

• 1:37:09AJ Gentile?

  It is, but before we go, are there any shows where you've spotted what you'd consider implanted information?

• 1:37:21Speaker 04

  I think that's impossible to know. I mean, one of the reasons Brent and I started to do Soundlight and Frequency as a podcast, we were less trying to create another podcast, but we wanted a form, a format that would become an active investigation, because we know what happened to us, and it doesn't make any sense to think that, hey, if Friedman and Zabel turn it down, that's it, let's walk away, let's never approach anybody in Hollywood ever again about this.

• 1:37:48AJ Gentile?

  That's not how it's done.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  That wouldn't make any sense, right? So, our feeling was by telling these stories, because, you know, listen, like I said, I used to be the youngest guy, now I'm probably the oldest guy. What do I gain by taking these stories and never telling them? So I feel like it's time to, I feel all of us who have been impacted in the phenomenon have an obligation to bear witness to our piece of it. And if enough of us bear witness to our pieces, we assemble a mosaic

• 1:38:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:38:15Speaker 04

  of contact and disclosure. So I'm only offering my piece of it to find, so that my part of the mosaic is in there. And I'm encouraging other people to come forward if they can and tell us their story in the same way that there are whistleblowers like David Grush and, you know, even what Lou Elizondo has done and all that. If there are other people coming forward in Hollywood, that tells us something. So by virtue of telling the story to you and for Brett and I to be telling it in our own words, what we're really saying to people is, hey, if you got a story like that, here's a safe place to tell it. And we've already had one person come forward, the director of Lawn Mower Man, a man named

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  Brett Leonard, has contacted us and we've done a show with him. And he basically said that at roughly the same time, he was contacted by someone who said he was with the Defense Intelligence Agency. And so we are, we're hearing, and we've heard, we're developing another case where somebody else said that they had been approached. So maybe it wasn't just us.

• 1:39:24AJ Gentile?

  It definitely wasn't.

• 1:39:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27AJ Gentile?

  All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about how Spielberg is an asset.

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:32AJ Gentile?

  I've heard you, I think, use a film metaphor about disclosure being hard cut versus a dissolve.

• 1:39:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:39:41AJ Gentile?

  And the hard cut, sounds like it would be difficult on society, talking about like the Robertson Panel or the

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:39:52AJ Gentile?

  the Berking's Report.

• 1:39:55AJ Gentile?

  Are we in the middle of a dissolve now?

• 1:39:57Speaker 04

  I, I, I mean, if we're talking about it that way, it's a great metaphor. In, in, in a movie, you can either do a slow dissolve from one scene to the other, or you can just cut to it, right? And so, in the disclosure world, the way that would be, a hard cut would be, you're not thinking anything is happening. The president, or the pope, or somebody walks out and says, "We're not alone, we have bodies, here's one of them right now," right? And, and everybody goes, "Oh, my God." I mean, that's the hard cut.

• 1:40:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  The slow dissolve is you slowly dip your toe in the water. You slowly leak this out, right? And when Richard Dolan and I wrote AD after disclosure, this was before the New York Times article of 2017. And so, we, we were like, you know, a hard cut seems more likely, because that, that would mean something happened. Like, a, a, a Phoenix Lights incident would happen today, and we'd have, we'd all have our cellphones, and we'd instantly talk about it on social media.

• 1:41:05AJ Gentile?

  So that's the president at the podium?

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's the hard cut. I think we are living in a slow dissolve right now. I mean, the evidence, to me, seems pretty strong. You've got, you've got that New York Times article that kicks things off, but what have we had since? We've had the Luella Zondos, the David Grushes. We've had, you know, every day seems to bring a new whistleblower, or a new book from somebody. And these are, you know, if you look at the Age of Disclosure documentary that was just out, there's like 30 people who have actual credentials who are talking about it. And yet, you can go talk to somebody on the street and go, "What do you think about this?" They're not completely aware yet. But they're closer to aware than they were.

• 1:41:50Speaker 04

  I think we're in slow drip disclosure, right now. I think it's a slow dissolve.

• 1:41:55AJ Gentile?

  And you, you believe they're telling us the complete truth?

• 1:41:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:41:59AJ Gentile?

  No?

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:42:00AJ Gentile?

  Do you think some of the information? Dripping is false?

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  That's a different question. I can't judge it. I don't see anything that I think that is dripping that is completely false. Instead, what I see are people like Hal Putoff, who say, you know, I've told you this much stuff, but in realities, there's that much stuff that I know. And there's a whole bunch of guys like him, almost all the guys in the age of disclosure thing. That doesn't mean anybody's lying. It just means they haven't been given the ollie ollie income free to talk. I saw one show that you did with James Fox, and he said exactly what I believe. And you guys were talking about it, which is, hey, if you want to resolve this thing, just absolve everybody

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  of their NDAs. Just let anybody come forward and testify. We'll get to the bottom of it.

• 1:42:50AJ Gentile?

  They kind of need to, because, you know, if your statement is cleared through the Pentagon, you still have your clearance, you're still on the payroll, you still have your pension. I'm skeptical of what you're telling me.

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Speaker 05

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• 1:43:33AJ Gentile?

  And because it's, you know, I've been at this a while, and it all goes back to Doty in the 80s and Bill Moore, and it's just been a mess ever since. I don't know who to believe.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  It is. You are not wrong. I mean, the frustration that you must feel and your listeners must feel is what I feel, which is it.

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  You don't have to tell me everything to tell me something. And so, we may even not need to use the word disclosure with a capital D. Because I don't believe anybody's walking out to a podium and saying to the media, "There's a 5 terabyte hard drive for each of you with all the world's secrets on it." That's not going to happen.

• 1:44:17AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:44:18Speaker 04

  I don't expect that to happen. But another word that would be good for me would be confirmation. I'd like to at least have somebody in authority confirm, "We're not alone." You know that Roswell thing? Yeah, that happened. We're looking into it. A lot of this is classified. We're not going to tell you everything, but, there you go. That would be better than nothing.

• 1:44:40AJ Gentile?

  It would. I mean, if you look at, Obama and Trump couldn't be more different people.

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:44:44AJ Gentile?

  And yet, they're both, kinda said aliens are real.

• 1:44:48Speaker 04

  They got in a fight about it.

• 1:44:49AJ Gentile?

  They got in a fight about it, a lot of stuff. But, those are two very different men.

• 1:44:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:44:55AJ Gentile?

  Saying the same thing.

• 1:44:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:56AJ Gentile?

  And Edgar Mitchell is a very, an astronaut says Roswell happened.

• 1:45:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:45:04AJ Gentile?

  So, it's very frustrating. You were talking earlier, before we came on, it was a nice story about how Elizondo said, "If you knew what I know, you'd be very somber."

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17AJ Gentile?

  Why would we be somber?

• 1:45:19Speaker 04

  Well, you'd almost have to, he's not amplified on that. But you'd be somber, I suppose. He is saying, "If you knew the things I knew, they're a little disturbing, and that would cause you to be somber about the whole thing." And by the way, I want to answer more of that, but there's a little quick sidebar here. My partner Brent Friedman on Dark Skies, when he was a young man, grew up next to the Secretary of Energy in the Reagan administration, fellow named John Harrington. And Brent was hired in 1981 to drive Harrington's cars across the country. Because he had just taken a job with the Reagan administration, in the Navy Department, right?

• 1:46:04Speaker 04

  And then he was later promoted. And John was one of Reagan's, John Harrington was one of Reagan's great friends. And, like I said, Brent, Brent didn't, like me, didn't have the world's friendliest dad, but John Harrington taught him how to throw a ball and all that. They were neighbors and friends. And Brent got to DC, and I'm really... Condensing, but Harrington, later that night after dinner, after the cars were delivered and everything, on the back porch with just Brent, told him that he had been briefed at an underground facility in West Virginia for several months and that he cried himself to sleep every night.

• 1:46:47AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  And Brent said many things, like, why are you telling me and, you know, whatever, but Brent said, why would you cry yourself to sleep? And Harrington said, because I have two daughters and this is the world they're going to grow up in.

• 1:47:03AJ Gentile?

  What did he mean by that?

• 1:47:05Speaker 04

  Well, he didn't give the specifics like none of these guys do. He just said that the reality that he was encountering was disturbing and, and he was shaken by it. And according to Brent, Harrington was a strict Calvinist, a very religious man. He said something else that was quite strange. He said, aliens was done on day three, but he was there for a couple of months. So what else was it? I mean, I'd like to know that. Also, though, in the, in, in times to come, Harrington has not commented on this, of

• 1:47:44Speaker 04

  course, but the idea that he told Brent that he had been briefed at a West Virginia underground facility, there were no known West Virginia underground facilities in 1981 when he told it to him.

• 1:47:57AJ Gentile?

  No, I've been racking my brain trying to think of one.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  But a decade later, they broke the story of Greenbrier.

• 1:48:01AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:48:02Speaker 04

  Hotel.

• 1:48:03AJ Gentile?

  The Greenbrier Hotel.

• 1:48:04Speaker 04

  Which was a large underground facility in West Virginia where they were going to evacuate Congress in a nuclear war.

• 1:48:10AJ Gentile?

  That's true, you guys, there's an episode on that.

• 1:48:12Speaker 04

  And when David Grush was at my house practicing his interview that he would do for News Nation with Ross Colthard, I asked him, do you know John Harrington? And, and Grush said, oh, I know John Harrington. And most recently, Grush has called Brent Friedman and said, do you think we can get, you know, can I get an audience with John Friedman, with John Harrington? Can you help me? So obviously, they're taking the Harrington story that Brent has told for years. This is the story, by the way, that when, when I first met Brent. He told me that story and that's why we became fast friends and decided to do Dark Skies together.

• 1:48:52AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:48:53Speaker 04

  And it turns out it's, in my view, a true story. You don't try to subpoena or otherwise get John Harrington to tell his story to the Congress. I mean, Rush works for the House Oversight Committee and he's asking Brent about John Harrington, that's pretty credible stuff.

• 1:49:10AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  Right? So, anyway, to your question about somber, I tell you that only because, yeah, if you're crying yourself to sleep at night, that's, something has made you somber at best, right? Now, I like to be an optimist about life, right? I have come down, look, I understand there are two points of view on disclosure. One is, the people have a right to know, and the other is, what Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men, in words written by Aaron Sorkin, which is, "You can't handle the truth." Okay? Now, I happen to think both are true.

• 1:49:46AJ Gentile?

  I agree.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  Okay? And that's what Dark Skies was about. We made it a soliloquy between these two guys.

• 1:49:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:49:52Speaker 04

  You can't handle the truth, people have a right to know. So, I do believe that, although I have come down strongly today, I feel like the clock has run out. You know, 80 years is plenty, the people do have a right to know, good, bad, or indifferent. So, I'm in favor of, tell me. You know, let me decide if I can handle it or not, I just feel like we have to know.

• 1:50:14AJ Gentile?

  Well, tell us about after disclosure, because you don't argue about UFOs or aliens in the book.

• 1:50:20Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:50:21AJ Gentile?

  It's, this is what happens after.

• 1:50:22Speaker 04

  Yes. But I think, Richard Dolan, and I became friends because I called him up after I read one of his earlier National Security State books, and we decided to write this book because we said, you know, there's been like 5,000 books trying to prove UFOs are real, let's not write that, let's not write that book right now. Let's assume other people have done that. Let's write the one book nobody has written. Let's write the book about what happens after we all agree they're real. To me, that's pretty interesting. What's the world gonna look like? And so, we, and you know Richard Dolan by, by reputation and all that.

• 1:51:03Speaker 04

  He's, he's a brilliant historian and thinker, and he knows more about what's happened historically in this topic than most people or anybody. And I feel very privileged that for an entire year, Rich and I sort of had this ongoing discussion with each other, where we would call each other up and go, you know, I was just thinking, what about this? And what about that? Trying to ask ourselves, what is really going to happen after disclosure? Now, I say that, and I always have to buy it back a little bit, because it does depend on what's disclosed. True. If you get a little disclosure, like a confirmation, eh, maybe people rock on.

• 1:51:45Speaker 04

  If you get full disclosure and somebody goes, and by the way, there are 17 different species here, some of them are interdimensional, some of them are time travel, or whatever, some crazy ass disclosure. We can't handle that. That's gonna freak some people out. Yep. So it depends. I just, I really don't know. But Rich and I were, were able to talk about that a lot. And the one thing that we sort of came to a conclusion about, that we tried to implement, which is, if you're trying to look for clues about the future, try to look a little bit in the past as well. So for example, 9/11 happens, what happens? We close the stock market for a few days. Mm-hmm. Right? That'll probably happen. The Great Depression happens, what happens then?

• 1:52:30Speaker 04

  We close the banks down so that people don't withdraw all of their money. That'll probably happen. Yep. There will probably be a time of great disturbance. How great? Can't say yet. But we'll probably get through it. We'll probably muddle through it. And...

• 1:52:48Speaker 04

  And that's, I think, where we come down on it. But I just think that the thing that we both discovered together, and it was such a, I would call it joyous, maybe it wasn't joyous to him, but it was to me. Because I thought, I'm really involved in thinking about something that people just, the only people I could think of that were thinking about the things I was thinking of at the time, were probably the gatekeepers, you know, the secret keepers, you know, who have to think about those things. But I wasn't seeing any evidence anybody else was thinking about it. Let's face it, if there's a disclosure that just starts with "we are not alone," and escalates to "and some of them are here now," whoo, that's a big piece of disclosure by itself,

• 1:53:33Speaker 04

  right? It's going to affect the economy, stock market, banks, etc. But it's going to affect law. What about aviation law? What about all the pilots that got fired because they said they saw a UFO? What about the military? What are we going to prepare for with the military? What about education? What are we going to tell our kids? And what about all these history books of the last 80 years? Are we going to rewrite all those? What about energy? These things are not flying around on gasoline. Nope. Right? So, just pick anything in the world. What about culture? What you and I are doing, right now, how will that change? Well, it'll change a lot. We'll have, we won't be speculating as much.

• 1:54:16Speaker 04

  We'll be saying, geez, that's pretty outst- We'll be looking at some image over there and going, damn, I can't deny that's real. So, I do think it's a big deal. Anyone who minimizes it is probably wrong. On the other hand, there seems to be evidence with so much happening all the time. It is so disturbing, you know, the world seems more complex and strange than ever. So, probably, it might not be as bad, but it depends. You know, you always got to go, it depends.

• 1:54:53AJ Gentile?

  Didn't David Grush kind of get us part of the way there?

• 1:54:56Speaker 04

  He did.

• 1:54:57AJ Gentile?

  And nothing happened?

• 1:54:59Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:55:01AJ Gentile?

  And we've had a few hearings since then, and David Fravor and all these guys. Nothing's happened.

• 1:55:07Speaker 04

  I'm frustrated by that as well. Well, I'm curious, why do you think nothing happened?

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  You've talked to so many interesting people and spent so much time thinking about it.

• 1:55:21AJ Gentile?

  I think, I mean, we can only speculate, but I think there's a lot of water being muddied and Lockheed and Raytheon are very important.

• 1:55:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:33AJ Gentile?

  I think that's really who's driving the narrative.

• 1:55:39Speaker 04

  My old podcast partner, Ross Colthart, said on our last show together, he said, "I can now state categorically that the Tic Tac is made by Lockheed Martin. It's Lockheed Martin Technology," he said.

• 1:55:52AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:55:53Speaker 04

  "I don't believe that, but I don't know. Do you?"

• 1:55:56AJ Gentile?

  I do.

• 1:55:56Speaker 04

  You do?

• 1:55:57AJ Gentile?

  I do.

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  All right. Well, see, that's interesting.

• 1:56:00AJ Gentile?

  If you notice on those videos...

• 1:56:02Speaker 04

  So you think the Tic Tac that's zipping around and do... that we do that now? We have that?

• 1:56:09AJ Gentile?

  I think so.

• 1:56:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:56:12AJ Gentile?

  But notice the videos that are being released now from the Navy are cropped in so we can no longer see the angles and the speed.

• 1:56:18Speaker 04

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:56:19AJ Gentile?

  They're cropped, so you can't use trigonometry anymore.

• 1:56:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:22AJ Gentile?

  Where we've seen one video that definitely looks like a UFO, but when you do the trigonometry, it's a balloon going 40 miles an hour, but on the screen, it looks like it's crazy, but it's just parallax.

• 1:56:37AJ Gentile?

  So I think 99% of it could be explained. It's the 1% that, you know, that concerns me. And I just don't think full disclosure is ever going to be there. I mean, I think that the government probably has some type of anti-gravity research at least, if not technology.

• 1:56:54AJ Gentile?

  Cheap energy, free energy, but you can't let your adversaries know you have it.

• 1:56:58Speaker 04

  Let's, let's extend that argument, though, on full disclosure.

• 1:57:02AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:57:03Speaker 04

  It also depends on what full disclosure is, of course. I, I, the assumption, when Rich and I started writing our book, was, you know, we were in a top-down world. And we still are, to a certain extent, that the people who know things don't like to share and whatever. But a lot of the tools of observing the reality around us have devolved into the public sphere. Yes, the government and private enterprise probably have better versions of a lot of things. We have a lot of stuff now that allow us to see what the reality of the world we live in is. And I think one thing that's changed about disclosure is we may be living in a world that can also go bottom up.

• 1:57:46Speaker 04

  That more and more people can be involved in helping to solve this problem. And, and I have thought for years, uh, don't sit around and wait for the government to tell you what they know. That, that they, they will tell us probably kicking and screaming.

• 1:58:03AJ Gentile?

  Totally agree. Um, bottom up is the way I'd like to see it happen. I don't want to hear from any more senior military intelligence people. I'm done with that.

• 1:58:12Speaker 04

  I feel that. I feel you. Yeah.

• 1:58:13AJ Gentile?

  I want the guy who sweeps the floor, who grows, who smuggles out a piece of something.

• 1:58:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:19AJ Gentile?

  And risks his life and job and blows the whistle. That's the guy I want. The Babla Tsars.

• 1:58:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28AJ Gentile?

  You know, who I find the most credible. There's plenty of holes in his story and, um, it's been semi-consistent, but that type of story.

• 1:58:36Speaker 04

  Well, AJ, the frustration, I think, is that we, a lot of people, if you read the internet and Reddit and X, there's a lot of people going, "Yeah, just, you know, you people are all just grifting liars and show us the..." And I agree with that. I'm part of the "show me the saucer" crowd.

• 1:58:53AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:58:54Speaker 04

  I want to see it. But part of the problem with the current, uh, situation we have where people are, are fessing up from within government. Is nobody's allowing, nobody allowed Lou Elizondo to take a piece of the Roswell wreckage out of the Pentagon. I mean, that's not how it works. No. Right? I mean, if, if you do get to talk about this, that's all you get to do. You don't have the evidence. The people who have the evidence have it and they're not sharing it and they're not sharing their work. So it, it, there is a preponderance of evidence, if you will, that is given to us by people who claim to have seen and know things. And

• 1:59:36Speaker 04

  it, it's pretty extreme, but nothing is going to change the world and turn it upside down like authentic, real evidence. Right. Or another mass sighting potentially where everybody stops what they're doing and says, what is going on here? And by the way, um, just to tell you what I'm, I'm kind of working on, one of my latest projects, I'm doing it with Lionsgate. It's called Undeniable. And it's exactly that premise. The premise is, um, it's seen from the world of a television newscast. All right. Write what you know. Sure. And they, they actually hired me to write it as a, it's a seven part scripted podcast.

• 2:00:18Speaker 04

  We have, we start production next month. There's cast already, uh, that's been brought in because they want to create the IP to sell the TV series. Sure. Cause nobody wants to spend any money, uh, anymore. So that's fine. But the premise of it is exactly what we were just talking about, which is in the opening episode, there's a plane crash. Okay. It's a midair collision and the, the news people are covering the midair collision. But the thing is it's a midair collision with an anomalous object. And, uh, some kid on the plane has taken a video of the midair collision and has, uh, texted it out, uh, as they're crashing on the Indianapolis freeway system. So suddenly

• 2:00:59Speaker 04

  the news people start to cover a plane crash, but now they're covering an anomalous object. And so what I, I'm trying to do in that story is tell the story that takes you from day one, um, nobody knows anything to day seven. We're all agreed we're not alone, you know, the week that could change the world. And I bring that up only because I want to say the thing that is going to change our world is probably something you and I aren't thinking of right now.

• 2:01:26AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:01:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's just the way things are. There's something lurking like I didn't see the New York Times writing that article in 2017.

• 2:01:34AJ Gentile?

  Nobody saw that coming.

• 2:01:35Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, who who saw that? Right?

• 2:01:38AJ Gentile?

  I mean, the Air Force probably did.

• 2:01:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we knew, you know, it was great. Tom DeLonge, the year before it announced, do the Stars Academy. But, you know, things weren't happening in an intense way, and the pace has picked up, obviously. So, and and and I don't think everyone saw David Grush coming.

• 2:01:58AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:01:58Speaker 04

  But again, you're so right. I mean, David Grush, I believe, is telling the truth. He seems to have the proper credentials and all that, but I wish he had been able to get out with a piece of the craft or, you know, with a biological sample or something, because I want to see it.

• 2:02:18AJ Gentile?

  Well, since since his statements have to be cleared through the Pentagon. Why don't just the Pentagon give the statement?

• 2:02:26Speaker 04

  Because the president needs to tell them to do it. And so far, President Trump has not told them to do it. Now, you could, we could have a long conversation that would get us both attacked on the media for being both pro and anti. You can't even speak about Trump anymore in in an internet world. But, I mean, he has the power to do that. Now, what he's doing instead.

• 2:02:49AJ Gentile?

  And he promised to do it.

• 2:02:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I don't know. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. But that it would take something of that magnitude.

• 2:02:58AJ Gentile?

  It would. He promised to release lots of files on a lot of subjects that seemed to hit some.

• 2:03:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:03:02AJ Gentile?

  Hit some bumps.

• 2:03:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, they did.

• 2:03:07AJ Gentile?

  How long do you think Steven Spielberg has been an asset for the ICA?

• 2:03:09Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. First of all, of course, his movie Disclosure Day is certainly interestingly timed. I doubt that the people at Universal that are putting it out are doing anything that other than a victory dance in the office complex because how great to have people talking about UFO and UAP when files and videos are being released.

• 2:03:38AJ Gentile?

  The reviews on that are amazing.

• 2:03:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:42AJ Gentile?

  I haven't seen it yet.

• 2:03:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. I would say this about Spielberg. A couple of things. First, he has always denied being an asset of anybody. So I'm just...

• 2:03:52AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:03:52Speaker 04

  Of course. I'm just saying, let's...

• 2:03:54AJ Gentile?

  And I was half joking.

• 2:03:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:03:56AJ Gentile?

  But it feels like he knows something.

• 2:03:58Speaker 04

  Well, okay, so, let's just state for the record, he says no. You know, in his interviews that he's doing for his movie, he says, "You know, I've just been studying this a long time and these are the conclusions I've reached." And I think it's very clear that if you're Steven Spielberg, people do seek you out and tell you things if they know your interest. So he's had some great conversations, as have you and as have I. We've... Not everyone who said anything to you have you put on the air and vice versa. He knows some things. Now, I will give you a specific story, though. When we were shooting The Dark Skies, two specific stories. When we were shooting The Dark Skies pilot, we

• 2:04:41Speaker 04

  were creating a crop circle north of LA. And it was hard to create a crop circle. So these people that go, these guys with a board and two guys have created all the crop circles. I'm skeptical because we had like 14 people on it for two days and it still looked like crap, you know, compared to, you know, some of the real ones. But...

• 2:05:03AJ Gentile?

  There were a couple I could not debunk, and I tried to.

• 2:05:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, who knows? Anyway, what I do know is that our crew that was out scouting locations for the Crop Circle scene ended up taking a break that night. I was not on that location scout, but Brent was. And Brent was talking to our director, Toby Hooper. And you probably know Toby Hooper because he directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, and he knows Steven Spielberg very well. And Toby Hooper, who is a man, he's passed on, but I did shoot the pilot with him, and I know him to be a very, very direct and honest guy. I mean, he never pulled a punch

• 2:05:45Speaker 04

  about anything, ever. But he told Brent, when Brent said to him, "You know, you're finally going to get to do something Spielberg, you know, hasn't done. You're going to do something first. You're going to make a crop circle." Which, by the way, Spielberg is making a crop circle, or did make one for Disclosure Day, but this is a while ago. And Toby said, "Yeah, well, you know, yeah, but I'm never going to be ahead of Steven, because, you know, Steven knows a lot of things." And Brent's like, "Well, like what?" By the way, that was a very bad Toby Hooper impersonation. I won't do that anymore. But what Toby's

• 2:06:26Speaker 04

  told Brent is that Steven Spielberg had told him that he had been given direct information in a, what do I want to say, in a semi, in an unofficial capacity, that people had given him information for Close Encounters. He said that. Toby said that to Brent.

• 2:06:50AJ Gentile?

  Which, of course, he hired J. Allen Hynek as a consultant. He used Hynek's, Close Encounters, Hynek coined that phrase.

• 2:06:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:06:58AJ Gentile?

  And had a cameo in the film.

• 2:06:59Speaker 04

  True, but I think what Toby was saying to Brent is, "Yeah, of course he brought Hynek in, right? But Hynek, Hynek's last words, or one of his last words, according to Don Schmidt, the Roswell researcher who worked with him on Kufos, one of Hynek's last words were, 'Why won't they tell me even now?'"

• 2:07:18AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 2:07:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think we we know that Heineck knew a lot because he investigated a lot.

• 2:07:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Speaker 04

  But he didn't know a lot because the, you know, the guys, you know, came around, you know, and told him things like Heineck pressed the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who famously had a standing desk and he was in his office and challenged him, why, you know, I've worked loyally for you guys, I've done what you've asked me to do. And according to Heineck, who told this to Don Schmidt, Rumsfeld comes around, see, that's the problem, though, because it's three sources.

• 2:07:54AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:07:55Speaker 04

  Whatever, it's still a good story. Heineck watches as Rumsfeld comes around his standing desk and gets in his face and says, "Don't you ever ask me about that again."

• 2:08:07Speaker 05

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• 2:08:36Speaker 04

  So Heineck didn't know everything. What Toby was implying to Brent, or said to Brent, not implied, Spielberg's heard from real people, the people that know shit. They've talked to him. So, you know, I don't know what that means, but that was the allegation. Now, I, as we talked about, I did work with him on the Taken series. So I, we had some meetings talking about UFOs. And my take on hearing him talk about UFOs is he's like you and me, super interested guy who's read a bunch of books and talked to a lot of important people and has a lot of ideas and theories and everything. I didn't get from him that he knew things I didn't know.

• 2:09:19AJ Gentile?

  Well, Close Encounters... That's what, 1977?

• 2:09:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23AJ Gentile?

  He basically covered the Planet Serpo legend.

• 2:09:27Speaker 04

  He sure did, or started it, one or the other.

• 2:09:29AJ Gentile?

  Before anyone heard of that, which I thought was a Doty story.

• 2:09:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:34AJ Gentile?

  But what's, I think, interesting about Spielberg, who is, he is the UFO alien director for sure, is, now, I don't know what Disclosure Day, what the theme is gonna be, but it feels like his point of view has gotten a little darker over the years, where you go from Close Encounters with...

• 2:09:52Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:09:53AJ Gentile?

  It's a friendly exchange, and then you get The War of the Worlds.

• 2:09:56Speaker 04

  I think you make a great point, AJ. My take on Disclosure Day, what it means, is Steven Spielberg is 79 years old as we record this. He's gonna be 80 near Christmas this year, okay? Over the time, from Close Encounters, actually, scratch that, from when he was a kid in Phoenix, where his first movie as a kid was about UFOs.

• 2:10:19AJ Gentile?

  Was it?

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  Yes. Two hours and 30 minutes of UFO Spielberg kid movie.

• 2:10:25AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:10:26Speaker 04

  And then he made Close Encounters in 76, 77. Anyway, from that moment until Disclosure Day, he's had his name on as a writer, a director, or a producer on 30 alien projects.

• 2:10:39AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:10:40Speaker 04

  Okay. I believe that people should look at Disclosure Day, and I'm not gonna comment on the film one way or the other at this point. Let's let people have a, you know, a pleasurable experience, having it envelop them. But as you watch it, I would ask people to consider, this is likely to be Spielberg's closing argument about UFOs, okay? This is the one where he's put all the things that he thinks he knows into one basket, wrote up the story on his own, 55 pages, single-spaced, gave it to his writer, and expanded it into this film, and now he's directed it with love and care. When you see Disclosure Day, that's

• 2:11:25Speaker 04

  what he thinks is true, because he's been interviewed multiple times, and he keeps saying, "Ah, this is the true story." Well, why would you say it's the true story if it's only what you think you know because you've talked to a few people and read some books? You know? He's saying it's a true story because he believes... What he's saying, and, you know, without spoiling anything, it's very clear that what he's saying is there's a private cutout organization, whether, it's not Majestic 12, it's called something else in the movie, but there's something out there that's in charge of all this stuff.

• 2:12:03AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:12:04Speaker 04

  That there are abductions that have happened, they start in childhood, and that there are human-alien hybrids out there. That's what the movie is saying from the trailer and from the interviews everybody's been doing. So there's no spoiler for me saying that.

• 2:12:24AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:12:25Speaker 04

  But he must believe it.

• 2:12:26AJ Gentile?

  What would lead him to believe that? Because he knows things.

• 2:12:31Speaker 04

  Well, that's the question, isn't it? What would lead him to believe that? Well, he's either heard it from a trusted source. Listen, I'm not going to be the guy that's on a crusade to say he was read into any program or not, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. But I would be the person to say, he's thought about it probably as much as you and I have thought about it, and maybe more, right? And he's had a, I've been blessed in that I've been able to talk about UFOs to all kinds of great people. I've talked to UFOs, about UFOs to Buzz Aldrin, to Stan Lee, to Carl Sagan, as we said. It's a blessing, and I'm happy and grateful that it happened to me.

• 2:13:14Speaker 04

  And for Spielberg, it's probably two or three times that. He's probably talked to everybody about it. So it's not impossible that Steven Spielberg has come up with some pretty interesting thoughts on his own that he didn't need to be briefed in about. However, he is saying things that sure make him sound like he's confident of what he's saying.

• 2:13:36AJ Gentile?

  I mean, I picture that meeting with, uh... With JC and a 28-year-old Spielberg and they say, "Steven, you want to be the biggest director in the world?

• 2:13:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:43AJ Gentile?

  Here's what we need you to do.

• 2:13:45Speaker 04

  Well, you've hit my soft spot because I know that what happened to me felt very authentic.

• 2:13:52AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:13:52Speaker 04

  And at the same time, it's quite obvious that nobody only went to Friedman and Zabel on Dark Skies. If what happened to me was an authentic experience, I'm not the only guy that that's ever happened to. There were people it happened to before and people that happened to after. I don't know who all they are, of course, but so you'd have to at least put that on the table and say, "That's certainly a possibility."

• 2:14:19AJ Gentile?

  And you hear those rumors all the time, whether it's Close Encounters or ET or these other movies. There's always the rumor of there's some government man that says, "You got a lot of that right."

• 2:14:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's what they told me.

• 2:14:29AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:14:31Speaker 04

  But again, and you're very, very well-versed on this, as is your audience. You've also got the entire historical precedent of Richard Doty and his disinformation.

• 2:14:43AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:14:44Speaker 04

  And the fact that people have been disinforming. So, for example, my own story doesn't mean it's true, but it doesn't mean it's not official. It may very well have been an official approach to us for another reason. Either to feed us disinformation that we would put in the show or to find out what we would do if fed disinformation. During the middle of it, Brent and I felt like we didn't call it a multimedia role-playing game when we were in the middle of it. In the middle of it, we said, "I feel like we're in a movie. And I don't know how this movie ends. And I don't know if it's a thriller or a comedy." I mean, that's how we kind of looked at it.

• 2:15:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Speaker 04

  You know, and, and, yeah.

• 2:15:32AJ Gentile?

  Well, the cemetery twist is crazy. That's the craziest part of that story.

• 2:15:35Speaker 04

  It's crazy. Oh, I'm gonna give you the short version of this. There's one other weird thing that happened in Dark Skies. In the summer before, well, no. While shooting the pilot, all right, I did get those postcards. That to me, let's put a pin in that, those postcards, we are watching you. There were two of them. Put a pin in that. Well, I was on the set one day. I get a call from the Columbia TV executive. And he says, hey, listen, there's another project shooting here on the lot. And you gotta get your guys out of the black suits right now. And I said, what are you talking about? Because we had men in black in their black suits.

• 2:16:20Speaker 04

  They were the agents of Majestic 12 in our script. And he said, well, there's a movie. It's a comedy. It's Men in Black. And they don't want you in the, in black suits. You know, your guys in black suits. I proceeded to say, well, you know, this goes back to the 50s, you know? And I started talking about Gray Barker and, you know, and Maury Island.

• 2:16:44AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:16:44Speaker 04

  All the stuff you were talking about. And I'm, and you know, I was pretty well versed on this at the time. And I'm citing chapter and verse. And he cuts me off and he goes, Bryce, let me put this in words that you can understand. Which, by the way, is one of the most condescending things anybody could ever say to you. But, you know, I'm from Hollywood. It's not the, it's not the most condescending thing that's ever been said to me. But he, he says, let me put this in words that you can understand. And I'm, this is an exact quote. I am not mincing one word. This is the exact quote. He said, get your actors out of the black suits today or we will shut down your production and burn the negative.

• 2:17:26AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:17:29Speaker 04

  So there was no room for debate.

• 2:17:33AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 2:17:34Speaker 04

  They were the bigger, you know, this was being produced by Amblin. And, and Barry Sonnenfeld was the director. And, and again, I'm not, I'm not pointing a finger at Spielberg or Barry Sonnenfeld. I'm talking about what executives told me and what lawyers told them and whatever, and whatever. So we, we had to accommodate them.

• 2:17:56AJ Gentile?

  Because that wasn't an empty threat. They would have shut you down.

• 2:17:58Speaker 04

  Yes, they would. Yeah. And so we felt very powerless. And remember, at the time they're doing this, we've just been picked up. I mean, we're shooting a pilot. I mean, we're going to shut down, we're going to burn your negative.

• 2:18:11AJ Gentile?

  Mulder's in a black Suit every week.

• 2:18:13Speaker 04

  I know it. It's crazy, but it gets crazier. So we said, okay, so we shut down production briefly and started putting everybody in blue and green and brown suits.

• 2:18:27AJ Gentile?

  It's not the same.

• 2:18:28Speaker 04

  And we started looking into, and we couldn't call them Men in Black. We were told, under no circumstances can you call them Men in Black. So we had to change the name, do a find replacement in all of our script to call them Cloakers is what we called them.

• 2:18:43AJ Gentile?

  Cloakers.

• 2:18:43Speaker 04

  Cloakers. So when you see Cloakers in a Dark Skies episode, that's why. So we did that. And we, we thought, well, this is over. Okay, we did what we needed to do. Flash forward one year. Now it's the summer of 96. We are on the schedule. We are the lead show on NBC Saturday night. It's a home run. Okay? Couldn't be better. And we're going to produce 13 hours. It's already been purchased for that. Okay, by NBC to Sony slash Columbia TV. And we received a call from the same executive who says, I have to come over and talk to you.

• 2:19:28Speaker 04

  And he comes over and he says, listen, I've just come from a room full of lawyers and we have a problem. And the problem was, they, things had escalated. Well, Brent and I thought we were home free. Things had escalated. Lawyers were talking to lawyers. And again, I don't know, I don't know how this drives back to the creative team of Men in Black, but lawyers were talking to lawyers who were talking to executives who were talking to us finally. And we were presented a list of 19 non-negotiable demands for what had to happen in our pilot. We had to, they wanted us to reshoot our pilot.

• 2:20:07AJ Gentile?

  19?

• 2:20:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09AJ Gentile?

  Like what?

• 2:20:10Speaker 04

  No elevators is an example. Men in Black had an elevator.

• 2:20:14AJ Gentile?

  No elevators?

• 2:20:15Speaker 04

  I couldn't have an elevator.

• 2:20:16AJ Gentile?

  Because you had one going to a secret?

• 2:20:18Speaker 04

  Yes, no secret, uh, no secret organizations in Washington DC. Couldn't have that.

• 2:20:25Speaker 04

  And here's a good one. No autopsy. No alien autopsy. Now, I'd already put an alien autopsy in official denial in my sci-fi film. We had an autopsy in Dark Skies, but what was The X-Files but an autopsy every few weeks?

• 2:20:41AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:20:41Speaker 04

  With Mulder and Scully doing them, right? I mean, nobody owns autopsies, but we were told you cannot have an autopsy. You can't have a farmer. I was told there can be no farmer in Dark Skies because we have a farmer in Men in Black. And it was pretty frightening.

• 2:21:03Speaker 04

  And, and what happened is they told us, uh, we had to do these things. And so Dark Skies was scheduled to have 11 days of reshooting. 11 days on a pilot that NBC had already bought and produced and had delivered to them. Now we're having 11 days of reshoots. And

• 2:21:24AJ Gentile?

  So the aired pilot was that?

• 2:21:26Speaker 04

  It hadn't aired yet. It was going to air in a couple of months.

• 2:21:29AJ Gentile?

  But I mean, the one that we saw was, was all the reshoots?

• 2:21:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:33AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 2:21:34Speaker 04

  Oh, if you want an ultimate irony, by the way, though, when they finally put the DVD out for Dark Skies, the people who put it out, Shout Factory, called me up and said, so, uh, we're putting your DVD together. There's two versions of the pilot here. What are they?

• 2:21:49Speaker 04

  Interestingly enough, Sony, without knowing that they did it, had sent the original version of our pilot out internationally. And, and then there's the NBC version that finally got aired. And if you, if you get the Dark Skies DVD set, it's like going to film school. You see these two different

• 2:22:06AJ Gentile?

  They're both on there?

• 2:22:07Speaker 04

  They're both on it.

• 2:22:08AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's brilliant.

• 2:22:09Speaker 04

  And

• 2:22:10AJ Gentile?

  Which do you prefer?

• 2:22:12Speaker 04

  Well, it's funny. Um, okay. It, it, it was bad to have this done.

• 2:22:19Speaker 04

  And before I answer, which I prefer, you need to understand something. In the middle of this, while Brent and I were sort of pushing back going, what's going on here? We were called into the Columbia TV office and said, you guys better lawyer up. Because this is getting serious. Because, you know, there are accusations that you've stolen your script. Wow. And of course, nothing could be further Of course. ... from the truth. And there was a moment, you know how you and I are sitting across the table from each other? There was a moment when Brent and I are in the Dark Skies offices at 2:00 in the morning, sitting across from each other. And I remember the conversation, it was like, so what are you going to do when we can't work

• 2:23:02Speaker 04

  in Hollywood anymore? And I said, well, maybe I'll go back into journalism. And he said, who's going to hire you to be a journalist if you've just been fired from your show? And the thing that they were going to do, they wanted Sony to give the money back to NBC and not produce the show at all.

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• 2:24:02Speaker 04

  And there's a nice twist in it, in that, remember, we had 19 non-negotiable demands? Don Olmeyer bought the show for NBC. He used to run it, he's passed on. And Don Olmeyer, when he heard about this, well, it's very interesting, I got sent to NBC where I was supposed to sell the 11 Days of Reshooting. And I was like, why would I do that? Right. But they made me go there and say, it's going to be better, which I'll get to in a minute. But Olmeyer, during all this, basically said, so...

• 2:24:38Speaker 04

  I bought this thing. I've got it in the office here. We're gonna air it. Screw them. I didn't make any deal to get rid of it. We're gonna air this thing. I love this guy. I know. I didn't know this until just very recently. It's a new discovery. I didn't understand why the non-negotiable demands became, alright, you can still do your show. And Brent and I, by the way, came up with another notebook about this big, explaining, you know, the creation of Dark Skies and all that, because our lawyer told us to. And so between that notebook, sort of explaining things, and Olmeyer saying, "I'm gonna air it anyway. Screw you guys." It now became, alright, well, we're still gonna do a reshoot. You know, we're gonna try to accommodate all parties.

• 2:25:23Speaker 04

  Alright? And so what Brent and I decided to do in the aftermath of that is, we said to ourselves, okay, we could pout, we could hold our breath till we turn blue, because we have every right to. We are being abused big time right now, but if we're gonna reshoot for 11 days, let's go reshoot. And some of those scenes they're gonna reshoot are just to replace black suits with green and blue and brown suits. Let's go read those scenes over and ask ourselves, could we make them any better? So we sucked it up and did some judicious rewriting, and so, this is a long way to answer your question, but which version do I prefer?

• 2:26:04Speaker 04

  It's hard for me to tell, because we said, "Right, you gotta love your firstborn," right? So that one's great, but we did fix a few things. Sure. In the second one, we mourned the idea, like Majestic 12, originally, you got on an elevator in the Capitol Building and went down below, and that's where Majestic was. So I loved that most in the original, but in the revision that they made us shoot, Majestic, you had to drive out of town into Virginia and clear a gate and drive your car in, you know, which wasn't nearly as good. No. But on the other hand, certain things didn't get touched, like the Betty and Barney Hill scene we had in, it's the same in both versions.

• 2:26:48Speaker 04

  The autopsy got some rewriting because they made us make a few changes.

• 2:26:55AJ Gentile?

  This feels overly aggressive.

• 2:26:57Speaker 04

  Very.

• 2:26:57AJ Gentile?

  For another production company.

• 2:26:58Speaker 04

  The only reason it happened, if Dark Skies had been at one company and Men in Black had been at a completely different company, both companies would have said to the other, "F you." We're not doing anything about it.

• 2:27:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:27:14Speaker 04

  But they were at the same company.

• 2:27:15AJ Gentile?

  Same company.

• 2:27:16Speaker 04

  And so because they were at the same company, suddenly there was somebody besides, there was somebody to appeal it to. And, you know, let's face it, Dark Skies, I love it, thank God they gave us 40 million to make these episodes and I, not me, they gave 40 million to produce it. And I'm proud of it, I'm extremely proud of it, but I understand that Men in Black, at the time, was a huge film. You know, you had Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.

• 2:27:48AJ Gentile?

  I don't buy it.

• 2:27:49Speaker 04

  But...

• 2:27:49AJ Gentile?

  You're an unaired pilot.

• 2:27:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:27:51AJ Gentile?

  And that's a guaranteed blockbuster. What do you care what they're doing over here?

• 2:27:55Speaker 04

  The only reason I tell you the story is, you know, as I said, we all have to sort of, we have to sort of just tell our story, right? And so I don't think you can analyze the Dark Skies story with the JC and the Captain and the cemetery at midnight and the "we are watching you" postcard without also saying that in the middle, two months before the show actually aired on NBC, this happened. You know, you can draw your own conclusions. Are they related? I don't know. They could be, they might not be. I just know, living it, Brent and I felt like we are, we're done. Our careers are ruined, we're out of here.

• 2:28:38AJ Gentile?

  As we're recording this, two of the hottest movies in theaters right now are created by YouTubers.

• 2:28:43Speaker 04

  Ah, there you go.

• 2:28:45AJ Gentile?

  So this is, this is, our time has come, which...

• 2:28:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:28:49AJ Gentile?

  Means...

• 2:28:52AJ Gentile?

  Dark Skies could come back?

• 2:28:54Speaker 04

  It could. I'd be... Again, I don't own it, even though I created it. Sony owns it. I would love a phone call. You know, I said, "One of the great things about Hollywood is the phone can ring." I'd love the phone to ring and somebody go, "Hey, you guys want to reboot Dark Skies?" I'd love it, but they could do whatever they want.

• 2:29:12AJ Gentile?

  Sony's actually listening right now. They're listening. They're fans. They're fans.

• 2:29:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, please, bring it on. But, you know, you never know.

• 2:29:21AJ Gentile?

  And I went in on that project, Sony.

• 2:29:23Speaker 04

  Yes, you should be. You need to be a consultant.

• 2:29:26AJ Gentile?

  Did, um... Did they move you to Saturday night?

• 2:29:30Speaker 04

  No, we started on Saturday night.

• 2:29:33AJ Gentile?

  Was that a good slot then?

• 2:29:34Speaker 04

  No, no, no, because there were no DVRs. It was a death slot.

• 2:29:37AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:38Speaker 04

  First of all, they made us be at 8 o'clock. We were very violent, so we shouldn't have been on at 8 o'clock. That's family hour. We should have been the 10 o'clock show.

• 2:29:47Speaker 04

  And before DVRs, let me just ask you, on most Saturday nights when you're a young person, are you trying to stay home on Saturday night?

• 2:29:56AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:29:56Speaker 04

  No. And so what happened is you immediately, you know, we appealed to a lot of people. I mean, people were like really intrigued by it, but then they'd miss an episode or whatever because they had a life. Well, they didn't get to re-watch that episode. They couldn't watch it on YouTube. They couldn't DVR it. They couldn't... There's nothing. So they just... So it's not a good way to make a habit. So it was bad. But it wasn't for lack of trying. I give... I mean, NBC is the hero in this thing. Not only did Old Meyer save us, but NBC put, you know, believed in the show enough to, you know, do everything possible to make it succeed. And I loved that. I thought that was great.

• 2:30:39Speaker 04

  You know, it is interesting. You say, "Maybe they'll call you about a remake." You know what I keep hearing is I tell this story to people, and you'll probably hear it yourself. People would go, "You know, I don't know about this Dark Skies thing, but you should make a movie about what happened to those guys, because that's kind of what it feels like sometimes."

• 2:30:55AJ Gentile?

  That's a good movie too.

• 2:30:56Speaker 04

  Right? And the only thing I always say when people ask me, say something like that to me, I go, "Yeah, well, we'd have to do a slight rewrite. The movie would be Bryce and Brent Take the Deal."

• 2:31:09AJ Gentile?

  I'm curious about the deal because you know if they want you to put certain storylines in that's different to me than force you to take things out.

• 2:31:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:31:21AJ Gentile?

  Like those 19 items, that bothers me.

• 2:31:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:24AJ Gentile?

  But if you have a connection in intelligence that says, here's a storyline that might work for you.

• 2:31:29Speaker 04

  I couldn't agree with you more.

• 2:31:30AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, let's roll with it.

• 2:31:31Speaker 04

  But you know, the part of the problem, not part of the problem, but a reality is, I didn't need those guys.

• 2:31:37AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:31:38Speaker 04

  I was well read on this topic. I had many conversations with people at the time. And you mentioned John Lear earlier, just to continue and finish the dark skies thing. After we sent the guys packing over the cemetery at midnight thing, the next week, I'm in my office working and somebody comes in and says, there's a guy named John Lear in the lobby.

• 2:32:05AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 2:32:06Speaker 04

  And Brent and I are like, what? John Lear's in the lobby? And you know, I don't know if your audience is aware of who John Lear is.

• 2:32:14AJ Gentile?

  They are.

• 2:32:14Speaker 04

  Okay, so and I, you know, Brent and I were aware of John Lear because he had sort of, I think he issued his Lear statement or whatever about reverse engineering and all this stuff. And he also had a lot to say about the moon.

• 2:32:27AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he did.

• 2:32:28Speaker 04

  If you remember. So we were very busy and, and again, I sort of paint myself as the difficult person in this thing, but I wasn't trying to be difficult. I was trying to put a show on. And so when somebody said, John Lear has showed up in your lobby without any foreknowledge. He didn't call and say, I'm coming by. I just said, well, you know, I'm in the middle of a meeting here and I can't talk to him right now. So Brent and I made John Lear sit in the lobby for two hours.

• 2:32:57AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 2:32:58Speaker 04

  And when he, but we finally sit down with him and he comes in, he was, he was nice enough, you know, he told us the things he, he came to tell us things. I don't know that he's related to the JC captain thing. I don't know, but it happened right on the heels of it, right? And.

• 2:33:17Speaker 04

  And I think he felt dissed by, you know, me making him wait in the lobby. He sent me a letter, which I'm still looking for. I'm trying to find it. It was a pretty nasty letter afterwards.

• 2:33:28AJ Gentile?

  I bet.

• 2:33:28Speaker 04

  Where he just basically said, "Well, I can see your little TV series is so much more important than finding out what the truth really is."

• 2:33:36AJ Gentile?

  It sounds like him.

• 2:33:37Speaker 04

  But...

• 2:33:38AJ Gentile?

  He's a strange guy because a lot of it sounds crazy, but he got a few things right.

• 2:33:43Speaker 04

  He sure did. He sure did. And, and he, you know, uh, it was just a weird time for me because I thought to myself, "I've just put up with these two guys who say they're from O and I, and now I got John Lear sitting in my lobby, and I got a show to run." Because, you know, the thing about doing a television show, and I'm not sure everyone understands this, but you're not focused on one thing at a time. At any given moment, you have a script that's in, that's being broken in a writer's room. You have a script that just came out that's waiting for notes. You have a production draft that's going into pre-production. You have a show that's shooting. You have dailies that are coming in.

• 2:34:24Speaker 04

  You have the first assembly of, of, uh, a future episode that needs to be looked at and notes done. You have another episode that you're trying to lock for the network. Then you have another show that's going in to be scored. And you gotta meet with the musician or something like that. There's so much going on.

• 2:34:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:34:42Speaker 04

  You, you would just, you'd become hysterical, uh, at times. And, um, and at the same time, like I said, I had three kids that were little kids, so that was a tough. You know, I, I'm not sure John felt my pain, uh, but, but yeah.

• 2:34:58AJ Gentile?

  Shift gears for a quick second.

• 2:34:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:00AJ Gentile?

  Because I love, uh, alternative history, and you wrote two books, award-winning.

• 2:35:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:35:04AJ Gentile?

  Right?

• 2:35:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:05AJ Gentile?

  So, just one that fascinates me. In your book, what happens...

• 2:35:13AJ Gentile?

  With JFK.

• 2:35:14Speaker 04

  Ah, okay. I just, you know, if you think about it, dark skies in one respect is alternative history.

• 2:35:22AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is.

• 2:35:23Speaker 04

  And like I said, my father was a history teacher who wasn't alive when I wrote these two books. He probably was rolling over in his grave over these two. But I wrote two books. The first one was called Surrounded by Enemies: What If Kennedy Survived Dallas? And the second one was called Once There Was a Way: What If the Beatles Stayed Together? These two great mythological things. So what happened in the Kennedy one is I just thought, okay, I don't think it's a great way to look at it to say, oh, if Kennedy didn't die in Dallas, he'd have stopped the Vietnam War and everything would have been wonderful and blah, blah, blah. I just thought that's not practical, particularly if, particularly if Kennedy survived but had

• 2:36:08Speaker 04

  been shot at, two things would have happened. The public would have known, somebody tried to kill the president in broad daylight, and Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy would have become the first conspiracy theorists, because they would have known it wasn't a matter of who tried to kill Kennedy, but like, who didn't want Kennedy killed?

• 2:36:28AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:36:29Speaker 04

  There were a lot of suspects at that time.

• 2:36:30AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:36:31Speaker 04

  And Bobby Kennedy, being fiercely protective of his brother, would have said, well, John, it's not going to look pretty, but we are going to protect you. We are not going to let these mofo's take you down, right?

• 2:36:42AJ Gentile?

  Did they, they bring Dulles out of retirement in that story? Probably not.

• 2:36:46Speaker 04

  No, no, you want to stay afar. In fact, he's one of the suspects, of course.

• 2:36:51AJ Gentile?

  Of course he is.

• 2:36:52Speaker 04

  And in fact, if you think about it, JFK and Bobby would have been the conspiracy theorists. What would they have done? They just sat down, as they do in the book, that very night, JFK comes back from Dallas, and they sit down in a darkened Oval Office and go over all the suspects and who they think was behind it and what they're going to do about it. And I don't think it's a terrible spoiler, but to say, once you start investigating an attempted murder of the president... It doesn't stop neatly. You don't get to control the investigation, right? And so what happens in the book is that they start looking into JFK to find out who killed them.

• 2:37:34Speaker 04

  And that means you're turning over a lot of rocks and some of those rocks have women under them.

• 2:37:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they do.

• 2:37:40Speaker 04

  And that would have been a painful thing because remember, people love JFK. I love JFK. I mean, what a, what a great leader and what a charismatic person.

• 2:37:50AJ Gentile?

  Terrible loss.

• 2:37:50Speaker 04

  At the same time, though, people loved his wife.

• 2:37:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:53Speaker 04

  They thought Jackie was pretty cool. And if they found out that JFK was cheating on Jackie with more than a few women, I don't know that that would have been a good look for him. That would have been a pretty bad optic and could have changed the public view. But even, even as the public view was changing, you'd have also had people looking into, okay, well, if you think they did it, what did JFK do to them and what? And so, you know, there's just a lot of things that could come out. And so in my book, JFK doesn't get killed by a bullet, but he gets killed by an investigation. And not killed, his, his reputation and his career.

• 2:38:36AJ Gentile?

  Destroyed.

• 2:38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, gets destroyed.

• 2:38:37AJ Gentile?

  Does he finish out his term?

• 2:38:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:38:38AJ Gentile?

  He does not. He, he resigns.

• 2:38:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41AJ Gentile?

  I need to check out this book.

• 2:38:43Speaker 04

  It's sort of, it, it's one of those where Bobby has to go to him and say, you know, Jack, the votes aren't there for you.

• 2:38:51AJ Gentile?

  Well, some would say they weren't there in the first place.

• 2:38:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, that's true.

• 2:38:57AJ Gentile?

  But I mean, if he survives and gets reelected 68.

• 2:38:59Speaker 04

  You know what's so great about it, though?

• 2:39:01AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 2:39:01Speaker 04

  I had the greatest time writing both of these books because instead of writing them as a novel, I wrote them as an anniversary edition of like Rolling Stone. So it was Rolling Stone writing the story of JFK's survival in Dallas. And it was Rolling Stone writing the story of the Beatles figuring out how to stay together instead of breaking up. And I just had the greatest time. And, you know, one of the things that's so wonderful when you're writing and things are working, things just start clicking, right? So particularly with the Beatles, I, I, I found myself saying, well, okay, I gotta, I gotta write John, Paul, George and Ringo. Well, we all know who they are, right?

• 2:39:45Speaker 04

  So that's the number one thing a writer needs. You sort of need to know. You can describe the same event, right? But if you have four distinct people looking at it differently, they're all gonna talk about it differently. And you know who turned into the character I love to write the most? I mean Lennon was great. He's easy to write. And you know George, he's got that spiritual thing, but he's also got an ironic sense of humor, I guess. And Paul, of course, is the commercial guy. But I loved writing Ringo. Because what was so great about Ringo, it's true in life, but it's also in my book, where everybody else is talking and Ringo is always just kinda sitting there, as he did many times. He'd listen and then he'd be the guy that pitches in the thing that ties it all together

• 2:40:29Speaker 04

  in this self-deprecating, wonderful way that he had. And I'm not sure people even remember it, but you know, he should've got credit on certain songs.

• 2:40:37AJ Gentile?

  Absolutely.

• 2:40:37Speaker 04

  I mean, he's the guy that said, "You know, mate, it's like I'm working eight days a week."

• 2:40:42AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 2:40:43Speaker 04

  Yep. And it's like, "How you feeling, Ringo?" "Well, it's been a hard day's night." I mean, he came up with those. So, yeah.

• 2:40:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, the Peter Jackson documentary is worth it, which is amazing.

• 2:40:53Speaker 04

  So great. You know what's the greatest thing of Peter Jackson documentary is?

• 2:40:56AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 2:40:57Speaker 04

  We think John and Paul really just hated each other at the end, right?

• 2:41:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:41:01Speaker 04

  And there were moments, but there is a moment where George Harrison is the one that storms off.

• 2:41:07AJ Gentile?

  Sure. I think this is the first episode.

• 2:41:09Speaker 04

  And what happens? John and Paul go into another room to talk about it and there was a microphone there.

• 2:41:17Speaker 04

  What? That's like the greatest find in Beatle history. And you've got John and Paul talking on a microphone about George and they're not talking like guys that don't get along. They're talking like two guys that wanna save the band. And I believe it's John that's saying, "Yeah, well, we can get Clapton in here, don't worry about it." Right? But they're not mad at each other.

• 2:41:38AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:41:39Speaker 04

  They're on the same team, even at this time where the original Let It Be documentary is written and if you watched it back then, you went, "Oh, boy, these guys. Phew. You know, this is a train wreck."

• 2:41:51AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:41:51Speaker 04

  But the Peter Jackson thing goes to show you a little more information changes perspective.

• 2:41:57AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 2:41:58Speaker 04

  It also applies to our UFO thing. The more information you have, the bigger the lens, the more you see the accuracy of what's going on.

• 2:42:05AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:42:07Speaker 04

  Fascinating.

• 2:42:09AJ Gentile?

  So what are you working on now? Are you still doing your podcast with Dolan?

• 2:42:14Speaker 04

  Yes, it's called Need to Know. Did it with Coldheart for three years, doing it with Dolan. But mostly, I'm concentrating right now on telling the Soundlight and Frequency story, because I really feel it's one where, you know, there are a lot of people doing, I guess, solo UFO podcasts. And, you know, I know how to do that, but I feel like the one contribution I can make right now is to try to burrow in on the Hollywood thing.

• 2:42:40AJ Gentile?

  Well, I love your approach, how you kind of take one piece of media per episode.

• 2:42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:48AJ Gentile?

  Before we take off.

• 2:42:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:50AJ Gentile?

  Maybe just can tell us how that podcast works, the format. It's very unique.

• 2:42:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, we like to, we're not reviewing movies, but we, we are sort of telling the story of dark skies, not as the primary story, it's just woven in. And at the same time, what we're trying to do is to take alien and UFO movies that people have seen, and instead of reviewing them like, "Well, the camera work could be better here," and that kind of thing, we're actually asking ourselves, "What does this movie say about alien life? What does this movie say about UFOs? You know, what, what can we learn?" And then ask ourselves, "Is, did Hollywood add something to ufology?" Because that's, it's the chicken and egg argument, right?

• 2:43:37AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:43:38Speaker 04

  Did Hollywood say something first, and then we think it's true, and we refer to it in ufology? Or did something go on in ufology that Hollywood got wind of and say? And I think if you want to know the truth, it's both. I mean, it works both ways.

• 2:43:54AJ Gentile?

  Carl Jung said this.

• 2:43:55Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, he did.

• 2:43:56AJ Gentile?

  He didn't believe in UFOs, but he said, "If the myth survives, it'll find a way one way or the other."

• 2:44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So, I've just been really, you know, listen.

• 2:44:07Speaker 04

  It's good to like your work, right? And I'm really enjoying sort of rolling up my sleeves and trying to learn more. And I hope I've done justice to some of it in talking today about sort of what happened at Dark Skies.

• 2:44:23Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 2:44:53Speaker 04

  Not that I think a 30-year-old show, you know, opens up the world in any way, but it is reflective. Just like some of these older movies, you think about The Day the Earth Stood Still. What does that tell us? What ideas did it put out there? What was the first movie ever made about flying saucers? It was called The Flying Saucer in 1950. Right. And, you know, who were the writers of some of these films? Some of them came from the, you know, the US Army Signal Corps and intelligence and things like that. Did that impact what they wrote about? And coming across things which I know you and your audience is aware of, the Robertson

• 2:45:35Speaker 04

  Panel, which the CIA convened in 1953. Okay, and that could be a need to know, that could be a Why Files, okay? But what makes it a sound light and frequency is that one of the things that Robertson Panel in 1953 recommends is that they should try to marginalize this whole UFO thing and get people's minds off it, and maybe they should reach out to Hollywood. And in specific, they say, what about Walt Disney? And then, and so Brendan and I then go, well, if you're going to reach out to Walt Disney, what do we know about Disney today? The Disney company is the number one purveyor of alien content on the planet. They have, uh, they own the X-Files. They own the Alien franchise. That's right.

• 2:46:19Speaker 04

  They have the Marvel franchise. Uh, they have, they have so much alien content. Is it related? I don't know. That would be speculation. Who knows? But, um, the whole thing's been fascinating. Thank you for bringing it up because it's, it's been fun and, uh, and we're sort of halfway through it and I'm, I'm hopeful that as we get to the end, A, we're going to show off that formula. And by the way, the day that we're doing that, I'm mailing it to you. All right? Look forward to that. And you can put it up wherever you want. Um, but the other thing is it's just given us a chance to sort of, um, at the end, to try to say to people, okay, we don't know exactly what's happening maybe, but here's what we've learned. You've been on the ride with us.

• 2:47:04Speaker 04

  This is what we learned. You could do this on your own show, of course, because you're, you're taking everyone who listens to the Y-Files on a large investigation and, and they're learning with you and conclusions are being made and debated and, and that's healthy. So I, I think that's really terrific. And, uh, so yeah, I'm enjoying that. And the other thing, by the way, though, and I'm sure you feel the same way. UFOs can marginalize people. We've seen it happen, right? And for years I sort of fought against being just the UFO. I don't want to be the UFO guy. I want to be a writer producer, right? Not just a UFO guy, even though it's taken on a big part of my life.

• 2:47:49Speaker 04

  Uh, but one of the things, uh, is that my wife and I are producing a film called The Last Battle, uh, in the fall, quite likely in Europe. And it's about the last battle of World War II in Europe and it's a true story. And it is, uh, and it's cast, it's got cast now, which I can't talk about the cast because they haven't put the press release out, but it's a hell of a story. I can't wait to see that. And it's true. It's so good. Um, can I give you the 32nd version of it? Sure. Okay. Last week of World War II in Europe. What do we know? We know that Hitler kills himself on April 30th. Well. Or, or, yeah, okay. You really are a conspiracy show. Good for you. Okay. Let me rephrase. Okay. The world believes Hitler killed himself. There you go. On April 30th and on May 8th, uh, Germany surrenders. Yes. Okay.

• 2:48:35Speaker 04

  Well, what we know, and it's a true story, and it's from a book by Stephen Harding, the author, that I've adapted into the screenplay. What happens is, there are some Americans, in the middle of that week, who, you know, they just really want to end the war, they don't want to be the last guy to die in Europe, they want to go home and marry their girls and have babies, right? They just want to be done, they want to get normalcy. But, these guys get sent up to a castle in Austria.

• 2:49:06AJ Gentile?

  Oh, right.

• 2:49:07Speaker 04

  Okay? And they're told, "Listen, take your tank and go up to this castle litter in Austria, because the Nazis are holding a bunch of high-value French prisoners of war there."

• 2:49:21AJ Gentile?

  I know, this story is a great one.

• 2:49:22Speaker 04

  It's fantastic, the generals, the premiers, all the people who actually hate each other, because they all blame each other for losing the war, right? But they're all cooped up together as POWs, high-value POWs. So the Americans do what they're supposed to do. They go up there, they fight their way in, they manage to prevail, they take the French out of the cells, and they put the German guards in the cells. And the French do what French do, they get out the best wine, and everybody starts celebrating, right? And it's like fantastic. And in the middle of the night, they start getting shelled.

• 2:49:57AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:49:58Speaker 04

  Why? Because Himmler has sent 200 angry, liquored-up, pissed-off Waffen-essess officers to surround this castle and kill everybody involved, so they don't testify at war crimes trials.

• 2:50:12AJ Gentile?

  Kill everybody, including the Nazis?

• 2:50:15Speaker 04

  Yes, and so...

• 2:50:16AJ Gentile?

  So then...

• 2:50:17Speaker 04

  Yes, that's the twist.

• 2:50:18AJ Gentile?

  Go ahead.

• 2:50:19Speaker 04

  So the Americans have to go to the Germans they just locked up and say, "You know, let me ask you a hypothetical. If we give you your guns back, who are you gonna shoot? Us or them?" And the German guards, led by a German gongel, who, there's no good Germans in this thing, but he's not a bad, bad German, in that he's the guy that says, "The war is over. You know, it's over. We're gonna fight for peace. So, yeah, we'll fight with you." And so what happens is, you have this mythic battle in a castle, where you've got Americans, Germans, and French. The French are these old French guys, you know, and the Germans are these...

• 2:51:03Speaker 04

  Older, young, German Guards, and the Americans were outnumbered 20 to 1. There were like 10 of them and 200 off an SS. So these guys are in a castle, holding them off. And it's just so full of interesting things. For example, they run out of ammo, both sides.

• 2:51:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep, you can't write this.

• 2:51:21Speaker 04

  You can't. I mean, I did write it. But I, and so literally, it comes into the castle keep, where people are fighting with knives and maces and all this stuff.

• 2:51:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:32Speaker 04

  And it really happened.

• 2:51:33AJ Gentile?

  It's like a Lord of the Rings scene.

• 2:51:35Speaker 04

  It's so wonderful.

• 2:51:36AJ Gentile?

  It's amazing. I'm looking forward to that.

• 2:51:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you for letting me even tell that, because...

• 2:51:40AJ Gentile?

  I can't wait to see it.

• 2:51:41Speaker 04

  You know, what's funny, though, it's a Hollywood story, though, because, yes, he wrote the book, but the way it happened is, I was standing in my sister-in-law's kitchen, years ago, and I end up standing next to this guy. I don't know him, he doesn't know me. I tell him I work in Hollywood. He says he's the editor of World War II magazine. And we're talking, and he goes, you know, I've heard about a story. I don't know if it's any good. He tells me the story, and I go, if that's not a movie, I don't know what is. Can I option it for him? He says, fine. So I write a treatment about this thing, and I show it to him. And this is Stephen Harding, and Harding reads the treatment. You know, I'm gonna take it out and sell a movie. And he reads the treatment, and he goes, this is great, do you mind if I write the article first?

• 2:52:24Speaker 04

  And I said, yeah, sure, because I want to option it. So he writes a major article for World War II magazine. I option it. And I'm so excited about the article, that I say, I'm gonna spec the script out. So now I write the screenplay. So I take six months and I write the screenplay. And I show it to Harding, because now I'm gonna take the script out. And he goes, oh, wow, this is really good. Do you mind if I write the book?

• 2:52:50Speaker 04

  So he takes a year and a half to write the book. I put the script in a drawer, he writes the book. The book becomes a big hit. It's on the New York Times Bestseller list. We take the script and the book out, and now we're making a movie.

• 2:53:03AJ Gentile?

  Oh, God bless, I can't, I can't wait for it. It's a great story.

• 2:53:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is, it's fun.

• 2:53:09AJ Gentile?

  Sound, Light and Frequency, highly recommend. You haven't heard anything like it. If you're into UFOs, this is the podcast. This should be a huge show. It's amazing. Bryce Abel, thank you so much.

• 2:53:19Speaker 04

  It's been great. Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed it.

• 2:53:22AJ Gentile?

  Me too. Bye, everybody. That was Bryce Abel, one of the best storytellers I've had down here. We covered his years in news, the dark sky saga, Steven Spielberg, and his book about what happens after we admit we're not alone. So let's untangle some of this. Dark skies is real. NBC put it out on the air in 1996, and its opening title sequence won an Emmy. McMinnville photos Bryce talks about are real, too, shot on the Trent Farm in Oregon in 1950 and printed in Life magazine that June. Optical physicist Bruce McPease studied the negatives and found a real, solid object in the sky. Skeptics still call it a hoax, but the photos are good.

• 2:54:03AJ Gentile?

  Now, the bigger idea, that the government has quietly steered UFO stories through Hollywood. That part isn't fantasy. In 1953, a CIA group called the Robertson Panel recommended using mass media to take the mystery out of UFOs. The records show Walt Disney's name came up. Government touching Hollywood on this subject is on the books. The men who came to Bryce's house and called themselves Navy Intelligence? That I can't prove, and neither can he, but he told it straight. It could be real, it could be disinformation. Whichever it is, I believe him. I think someone showed up, and I kind of tend to believe it was Navy Intelligence. The thing that got me is the West Virginia story.

• 2:54:44AJ Gentile?

  In 1981, a man named John Harrington told Bryce's partner he'd been briefed inside an underground facility in West Virginia. At the time, no such place was public. Eleven years later, The Washington Post exposed the Greenbrier, a secret bunker built to hide Congress in a nuclear war in West Virginia. Harrington named it a decade early, and I've covered the Greenbrier Hotel. It's a fascinating place, and it has been expanded. Now, what I respect about Bryce is he never asks you to believe him. He lays it out on the table and lets you decide. His new podcast is called Sound, Light and Frequency. And it's not really a UFO show. It's an investigation into whether our movies have been doing the government's work for 70 years. And spoiler alert, they have.

• 2:55:29AJ Gentile?

  His book with Richard Dolan is A D After Disclosure. It's on Amazon. And check out his podcast where he analyzes movies and TV shows looking for hints of disclosure. We pulled on the Men in Black, JFK, and Maury Island thread in this episode, and Majestic 12 in another. They're both linked down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 2:57:41Speaker 06

  I'm

• 2:57:49Speaker 06

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate and what the Dark Watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The Black Knight satellite told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time for me all through the night.

• 2:58:30Speaker 06

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more time for me all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time for me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more time for me all through the night.

• 2:59:45Speaker 01

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