Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin Weillish, your host,
and we have a great guest tonight. Am really looking forward to this.
I do want to tell you a number of people have written me asking me
how Alejandro Rojas is. He's doing fine, just to let everyone know.
He's just been really busy, a lot of changes going on, but he
is doing absolutely fine. He was actually going to be on the show this
evening and he is traveling for Thanksgiving, and speaking of that, I want
to wish everyone out there happy Thanksgiving, and if you celebrate here in America,
it's a wonderful holiday. I think families get together, eat turkey,
and hopefully do not talk about politics and just have a really good visit with
each other. And our guest tonight. I'm real excited Bryce Zabel. We
had a brief interview with him out in Phoenix a few years ago. Tonight
we got him for the whole show, so I'm pretty excited about that.
And what a background he has. We'll talk about that, but in the
film industry he is incredible and incredible background and has written a lot of wonderful
things, and he has a lot of things on his plate at all times,
A very active guy and a lot of fun. Welcome to the show.
Bryce, It's great to be with you, Martin. Thanks for having
me on. Yeah, let's see you. Like I said, you have
so much going on all the time out there, and you're having fun.
I remember you and I had a conversation and you mentioned something along the lines
of your wife saying, hey, you know, you could do as a
good a job as someone else on this Why don't you see if you can
write a screenplay? Right? Isn't that how that how I got started it?
Yeah? Yeah, I thought you were going to say my wife said
you could do as good a job as that. Martin wanted you just do
a podcast, which I could not do. I could not do as good
a job as you, So forget that now. But that actually is what
happened years ago. When I first came to LA I was the CNN correspondent,
and as things go on, shows get canceled, the guy that hired
me got fired. I ended up having to look for work, and and
that's when I realized, well, you know, I could be like one
of these itinerant news guys, just blowing from town to town and who knows
what that life would have been like. But my wife said, well,
maybe you should try writing a screenplay. And I'd never written a screenplay before.
I said, I don't even know what it looks like. It wasn't
like there was an internet to look at it on. This is how long
ago it was. But I got a hold of one on Hollywood Boulevard,
looked at it. Thought, doesn't have a lot of adjectives and adverbs in
it, kind of like TV news probably can do that. That's what I
did. Ah wow, Wow, someone just said I look haggard. I
need a vacation. That was a nice message to get. I don't know
were they talking, because somebody else I saw the first commented think was something
about did the guy have facial surgery? Or is that photoshop? I presumed
they're talking about me, and it is an older photo, so there is
that. Well, there is a reason I do a podcast. That's audio.
Listen. I'm happy to be here, and in fact, I was
thrilled. I'm trying a new little light on and my light over there seems
to be shining properly. All is good with the world. Let's talk.
That's right. That's right, and you're out in Uh, you're out in
fire country out there, How I am. How's that been this year?
Well, I sort of sell, Well, to back up last year,
it wasn't good at all. Last year I was evacuated, remember that the
fires were blowing through my town on the way and down to Malibu. Um,
many of my friends were affected. It was a terrible and horrible situation.
This year, i'd actually gone to Phoenix for a couple of days to
visit my daughter, and while I was there that we started getting all these
fire warnings. So I just stayed another week, so I call it a
self evacuation. As it turns out, the fires didn't burn through here,
but they could. And you know, it's just not a Southern California problem
though anymore. Now we're having fires everywhere. In a few weeks, I'm
going to be doing some traveling and I'll be going to Australia among other places.
And you know Australia is on fire right right, so serious this kind
of stuff happens. I'm I'm happy to hear that our weather forecast says it's
going to rain for Thanksgiving. And that's not usually something that you get excited
about, but down here it is right, right, Yeah, yeah,
I know it's it's doesn't seem like it's going to be getting any better anytime
soon. Uh. You know, I moved out of California in twenty ten
or twenty and eleven in northern California. But still they're even you know,
they're they're threatened up. That's that's where paradise happened last you know, and
that was horrible. I mean, uh no, it's gonna be with us
for a while, but we have to change. Uh certainly, we have
changed some of our habits. I'll tell you one of the things we did
just right immediately after we were evacuated last year, my wife and I each
bought a top level scanner that could scan photos fast and uh documents, and
we just started scanning our office and our lives up because that the most horrible
thing about the evacuation last year was we hadn't done any of that. We
didn't know where anything was, and you know, you get five minutes to
get out, and there's not really time to grab a photo album or two.
And I just didn't want this year. If I lost my house,
I didn't want to lose my memories. So we scanned up a bunch of
stuff and we're better. Also, you have a suitcase ready to go when
the time comes. You have your cars full of gas in case you need
to go. So, you know, we start to do that. But
a lot of us here where I'm living, you know, we have multiple
things to worry about. We have the earthquake to worry about. We have
fires to worry about. We have floods to worry about when it rains after
the fires, and yet it's still and yet sometimes it feels like paradise here.
So oh yeah, yeah, that's the good. Yeah. When the
weather is beautiful out there, you just can't beat it. It's just it's
just nothing like it. But anyway, um, I want you to you
did a series. We talked about it in the last time briefly, but
Dark Skies that was that was a real interesting one. Can you tell how
you get involved in that? Well, you know, it's it's funny.
Um. I look, it was the greatest u rative experience of my career.
I really really enjoyed it. It was obviously the most important UFO project
that I've done. Although I've talked about it a lot over the years,
but my partner on that Brent Freedman and I literally at the time we created
that, which now is over two decades in the past, so it's not
like a contemporary credit, but it sort of has like a good wine.
It's even improved with age, because it was prescient about a few things that
needed to be talked about. But what Brent and I thought at the time,
because I was just really starting to bring my game up on the topic
of UFO, so I knew enough to be dangerous, but I also knew
a lot about the Kennedy assassination, and we thought, well, these are
the two great conspiracy theories of our time. What if we put him in
an atom collider and let him go boom and see what happens. So we
made a television series that in essence is all about John Kennedy being killed because
he was going to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term, which
is one of the craziest things to get on television on a broadcast network back
then, And yet we did it. And at the time that we did
it, we thought it was pretty much an original idea. Now you read
more and more about it, partly because we encouraged it into the zeitgeist.
But I think there were other I think Behold a Pale Horse that book mentioned
it. I didn't know it at the time, but I've since seen it.
Anyway, So apropos of some of the things we might want to talk
about today, because I think it's really an important way to look at the
UFO question. What we decided to ask ourselves is, Okay, let's go
back to nineteen forty seven. We know that Kenneth Arnold pretty much saw what
he saw but could have been anything. Do we believe Roswell? Do we
believe that Roswell was an event that included the crash of something that was not
made by the United States or the Soviet Union, And we thought, we
do believe that. So then we we sort of jumped ahead and said,
if that was true and we believe it is, then the fact that we
weren't talking about it in the fifties or the sixties, or the seventies or
the eighties means that somebody else was talking about it. And we thought,
let's shine the light on the people who would be talking about that in the
nineteen sixties. So we built a series around Majestic twelve, and you know,
with Roswell as the source that informed it all and that's kind of the
birth of Dark Skies. Yeah, wow, that's great. Well you think
about it. You know, no one really talked about Roswell, you know,
shortly after it happened, and then all the way up until you know,
Stan Freeman kind of cracked it open again when he spoke with Um,
Jesse Marcel Ye Jesse Marcel Well in fact, you know, um uh.
First of all, Um, shout out to Stan Friedman, who's left us
this year a tremendous influence and uphology. Great guy. Um. I literally
optioned Stan's book back during Dark Skies, his top secret magic book, and
I wasn't able to set it up at the time, but I revisited it
a few years back and reoptioned it plus his life rights, plus h John
Schmidt's life rights plus John Schmidt's book Witnessed to Roswell and sort of did the
old Adam Clyder thing again and put them into an Adam Clyder and to tell
a story about the race to break the Roswell's story. And I got to
know Stanton quite well, and here you know he uh. For those people
who have heard him speak on the circuit. After a while, you sort
of, you know, you got the stand stories down. But what was
great for me is I was able to sit him in a chair and like
pin him down for over thirty hours of talks where he'd start to tell me
one of the stories that you might hear in the lecture and I'd go,
yeah, I know that story, but and then I would take him back
to something else, and I really got to know him on a personal level,
and also some of his professional thoughts that didn't as often get widely shared.
And I really enjoyed that relationship. That movie is still alive. We're
trying to find a way to get it. It's just, you know what,
it's just hard to make make anything. Even though there's more production going
on, it's hard. And the UFO topic has its own set of rules
here in Hollywood, just like you know, you'd imagine some people are able
from time to time to pierce that veil. I hope to be one of
them on some of these projects you mentioned, but it's not always easy and
it's not always a straight line. So what do you envisioned something with Stan
Freeman's information? What are you envisioning on creating is it something you said,
you put it in with Don Schmidt's work. Yeah, that here's what I
thought that was so intriguing. I sort of stumbled across this, Uh,
you know, during my travels, if you will, I've been reading all
the stuff that Stan and Don had published over the years, and what was
interesting to me. In the nineties these guys were in basically a shooting war
with each other. I mean Stan would publish an article and Don would snipe
at it, and then stand with snipe at Don's article, and people were
picking sides in everything, and I just thought, well, that's that's kind
of intriguing, because it's probably hard enough to prove that UFOs are real,
and then when you have to fight each other, that just is doubling down
on the difficulty factor, which I think is still true of you followed you
today. I mean absolutely the mirror talk. You know, bring up Tom
DeLong. You'll get pros and cons that kind of thing. So here's the
thing that just made me as a writer. They'll respond to it. It
turns out that and I don't know the exact year, I think it might
have been ninety four, but one of the funding sources that Stan and Don
had each gone to to help fund their research trips to Roswell to talk to
and interview witnesses. This funding group said, well, will fund another trip,
but you guys need to work together, and so Stan and Don took
this legendary trip to interview Roswell witnesses in the nineties, even when they were
busy in the public sphere attacking each other as ne'er do wells who didn't know
anything about anything. So I just thought it was very funny. It's like,
it's like I thought it was the spoonful of sugar way to tell the
Roswell story, to sort of deflect and let people focus on the charm of
the two characters having to share a motel when they basically are fighting, and
you know, and you know, Don always comes across as the guy with
the beautifully the nice suit, with this tie perfectly tied, and Stan looks
a little disheveled, right, so you can imagine in the hotel room what
that might have been like. So anyway, built that around that, and
that project, which has had to be retitled. It's now called the Crash,
and we are actively trying to get that made. So yeah, wow,
that's fascinating. That'll be exciting if you do that. Well, you
know, I almost Here's the thing. We talked about it before we went
on. It's part of me wants to tell everybody about these things that I'm
working on, because you know, I'm a writer, producer, and I
get excited and I want to talk about the things that excite me and the
things i'm working on, the things i'm writing about. But then the other
part is nothing ever happens. Right. This is Hollywood. It's it's hard
to raise money. Sure, it's hard to make a film about UFOs because
the people who I give you the money have their own way of looking at
it, and they may not look at it the same way you look at
it. So it gets really hard. And I don't like to go on
your show and talk about something. And then, you know, I always
get this because I'm sure it'll happen again today we're talking about it right now,
and somebody will write me an email saying, now, where what theaters
can I see your movie in? Right now? And uh, well,
basically the answer is you can't. The movie's not made. We're trying to
get it made, and believe me, when it is made, I'll probably
come to your house and tell you what theater you can watch it. Well,
there's a lot of moving parts of these type of things when it comes
to anything like that, as you know, and you know I've I've done
it several screen tests and have been involved in some pictures for you know,
in the antiques world, not in the in the UFO world, but for
different shows. And you know, they may even make a pilot, but
to actually get something launched and going, there's a that's a that's a long
process. And there's a few make it too. It's it's it's very true.
Although here's the interesting thing. I've been lucky. I've had five primetime
series that I created get on the air, and they all happened relatively fast
on top of each other, and I got to the place where I thought,
wow, this is great, so you just write a script and they
make a television series about it. But you know, that was just sort
of my early run of luck. And then you run into the real world
again, you know, and you know, you go, it's all percentages.
You know, many many writers have written dozens, if not a hundred,
pilots in their lives, you know, and never had any of them
made or they hadn't made it, but they didn't get ordered. It's a
series. Now. I also have kind of another life. I was the
chairman of the Television Academy, the people to give out the Emmy Awards for
a couple of years, notably during nine to eleven when we had to cancel
them. But the interesting thing is television is exploding exponentially. There were eleven
thousand members when I ran the organization, and it was at CEO back in
two thousand and three, and now there are twenty five thousand, all right,
So that's a pretty explosive growth. The amount of television series just that,
you know, not even quite a decade ago, was something like two
hundred plus and now it's like four hundred and seventy eight or some number like
that. So we're in an explosion of material that's being made. And yet
you would you would think that it would make it easy to get other new
material and other ideas in there, but it's actually not that way because they
the streaming services. There is no streaming service that wants to say, yeah,
bring us the stuff that Netflix wouldn't buy. You know, nobody feels
like that they're like, hey, we only want to hear from you if
you've got a top actor attached or something like that. So it's just as
hard as it ever was. But the difference is even more people are playing
in the game. So I don't know, I don't know what that is
for all of us, other than I'm trying to use the sheer numbers and
the fact I've been doing this for a few years to get a few UFO
themed projects, you know, out there, because I think the time,
I mean, we'll probably talk about this, but the time could never be
better to try to bring a few fact based alien pieces, because you know,
not everything has to be an alien invasion. Not everything has to be
an alien on board a spacecraft that's eating people one by one. Sometimes there
are great cases, like the Roswell case that should be explored properly. And
another thing I have under option is the Captured book, also by Stan Freedman,
but with Kathy Martin, which is about the Embarney Hill, which I
really think I hope to get lucky soon with that because I just think there's
just not a better case. It's all about the first. It's the first
people that claimed abduction here in the United States. It's the first people that
had missing time. It's the first people that got hypnotized. I mean,
it's a great case and all that. And they're dealing with racism and an
interracial marriage. So that's right. It's got another thing you mentioned just about
two and a half minutes. We have to go to break here. But
another thing you mentioned is, you know, the different ways to get things
out there, and there's so many ways to get something out there. You
look back, you know years ago when we you and I were both young,
there was like five channels, and then so many people watching those five
channels. And now it's spread out. I mean our populations higher, yes,
and all that, but everything is spread out. You have less viewership
with so much going on in so many ways to access. Let's cycle that
back to the Dark Sky's scenario. The numbers, the ratings that Dark Skies
had on a Saturday night where we basically got no promotion and we kept getting
pre emptied and things like that. Yet the numbers that we had there would
have made us a super hit on almost any streaming service. Right now.
We were we were no, I don't I can't remember if we won our
time slot. We did a few times, but the numbers that used to
exist in a three network universe were huge, And now you can have a
hit, you know, every most of your friends probably have heard of Breaking
Bad, but I guarantee you not everyone has. There's lots of people that
would go, yeah, I don't, I don't, I never heard.
Maybe I heard something about that. So we've lost the ability that we used
to have when there were three networks, where literally you go to work the
next day and everybody would say, did you see that Gulligan's Island Man?
Was that funny? Well, we don't have that anymore. Now you can
watch the funniest damp thing that was ever created in the history of television and
nobody will have seen unless they're talking about it on Reddite or you know what
I mean, something like that Rotten Tomatoes and you know, all that type
of thing. It all has, it all has a play in here,
of course. Yeah, I think I'm going to go to break early since
we're kind of pausing at this point, so um, we will be back
in a few minutes. Everyone so hanging there and we will be right back
right after these messages. I got a bad feeling about this race come back
to us, Earth to Race, Earth to Race, Please come in.
Okay, you know when I double viewed my mic, I need I need
to make sure I remember I do it. Okay, guys, we've got
three minutes of this break. Okay, excellent, So um, let's see
in the three minutes we'll talk about while we really um, you know,
we really are not staying on or going back to any topic that we were
talking about previously, but we'll in the three minute that we do have here,
let's let's talk about UFO sightings in your area. Do you are you
aware of any in particular current sightings? Are just in historical I mean,
how long have you lived there? Actually, I've lived out in southern California
for almost thirty years now, and and you know his historically Los Angeles,
Southern California has been has had more than its share of really intriguing sightings.
And you know, but I'll tell you something, Martin. What's really intrigued
me is because people know me as the UFO guy in my circle. Right,
So people know that if they talk to me about certain things, I
won't laugh at them, because how could I. I'm writing about these things
and all that so I've had people over the years tell me interesting stories.
Here's one that comes from my plumber. He was working on a sink and
he said, so, you're the guy that did that dark Sky show.
Said yeah, and he said, you know, when I was like ten
years old, twelve years old, he was going to school on Wilshire Elementary
School on Wilshire here in the middle of Los Angeles, and he said,
on a break over two hundred kids saw a metallic, cylindrical wingless craft,
you know, maybe five hundred feet up, hovering over the playground. The
teachers all saw it, the kids all saw it. He went home that
night and he told his parents and they said, well, that'll be great,
we'll read about it in the paper tomorrow. Then next morning came,
it wasn't in the paper. And you know what his parents told them,
They said, never talk to anybody about this. They'll think you're weird.
Right. So that's what happens with a lot of great cases, right.
And yet that was a story where I mean, I think if that happened
today, that it wouldn't be buried quite like that. I think it because
more people would be posting on social media about it. But here's a really
great sighting, a really thing. It's gone away. Answer the question,
though, I don't spend a lot of time keeping up on the latest particular
sightings because I'm not essentially a researcher, you know. I I have opinions,
but I don't do a lot of original research. I do a lot
of reading, a lot of thinking, a lot of writing, but you
know, not so much going out in the field and talking to anybody about
anything. I probably should, I'm sure it's fun. Well yeah, yeah,
I mean I don't. I don't do any of that myself either,
you know, to speak of. But I love to hear you talk about
your plumber. I love to hear stories from people like that, you know,
someone that is not involved in the UFO field A race? Are we
going back in? Should be fine, sir. We're ready to go whenever
you are. We are ready here. Well, I've got five seconds here
and then I can count you down. All right, sounds good? All
right, right, all right, here we go then five four three two,
all right, welcome back. My guest tonight is Bryce Zabel and we
are talking UFOs, etc. Films and all that, and uh we were
sort of a you know. Basically, towards the end of the conversation before
the break, we were talking about, you know how difficult it is to
you know, get something launched when it comes to filmmaking and all that.
There's U and it's hard to sell too. I mean you have to almost,
don't. You almost have to even if you get um, you know,
producers that'll back you, don't, you have to almost have to have
something pre sold or an idea which how are you going to market it eventually
or to just go you know what. My experience is just there's a thousand
ways to sell something, right, and so I would never tell anyone there's
a right way or a wrong way to do it. I will say that,
like like a lot of businesses where there's a lot of money on the
line, people are risk averse, right. So the less money you spend
on the project, the more they're willing to probably let you freelance a little
bit. The more money that gets spent on the project, then people want
to know, is this going to work? Am I going to get some
of my money back? Right? So that does cause people to look at
a project through different eyes. In other words, I don't think there's too
many people running around Hollywood that know like you do, and I do,
and your your audience does, about what's really going on in the in the
ufology situation right now, they don't really know about the Only thing they know
about Tom DeLong is he is Blink one eighty two that you know, they've
heard basically maybe there was, maybe they heard Tucker Carlson talk about it or
whatever, but they're they're not really dialed into it, right. And so
what I in anytime I'm in somebody's office talking about UFOs, the first hurdle
I have to always get over is somebody will just go, so you really
believe in this UFO stuff, Well, that's a hell of a beginning,
because what it means is I'm not only there to pitch this story, but
I have to overcome their objection to even thinking that it's because they think it's
just a science fiction piece. So from their point of view, you know,
you could pitch, and this has happened. You could pitch I don't
know. I mean you could pitch as we talked about the Roswell story or
Betty and Barney and get a note from somebody saying, well, does Barney
have to be Black. Well, yeah, I mean, because he was
right. So you just have people that look at it like just a story
that's a malleable story. Right where we know and your audience knows, this
is the real deal. Something has been going on probably for thousands of years,
all right, but for sure with some relative intensity since the forties,
and for reasons that are still a little obscure, it's managed to be covered
up or deflected from the public sphere of discussion all these years. And so
now we sit in this nether world where if you really pay a lot of
attention to the topic, you know, damn well, something's going on.
Yeah, I mean, something is going on period. All right, we
know this, But if you go outside and go talk to the people you
know at your local grocery store, they probably don't really think about it like
you do here. It is the most transformational thing that could ever enter in
your brain and blow your mind, and we don't talk about it. It's
unbelievable. Lots of people are going to go to Thanksgiving dinner from the time
that we're talking right now in a couple of days, and you know what,
it won't even come up for most people, all right, I mean,
for most discussion, nobody will discuss the fact that we're not alone,
and the evidence is they're not out there, but they're here interacting with us
right now. But we don't talk about that. Now. How crazy is
that? And if you dare to talk about it at your Thanksgiving dinner this
year, I guarantee you your chances are at least sixty percent you will be
treated like the drunk uncle at a wedding, you know, the guy that's
had that extra too many glasses of champagne and needs to sit down. And
I find this to be the craziest thing that I've ever encountered in my life.
And I think as I get older, I get more frustrated by it
because I would like to believe that we at least are going to publicly own
up to this in my lifetime. I don't think that's too much to ask,
you know. I think that the idea that we could all sort of
acknowledge that it's real and then start talking about what to do about it.
I don't know why that's so radical. That seems like a pretty pragmatic thing
to do. I guess you could argue, well, the truth may be
so freaking unbelievable and so disturbing that we don't dare talk to people about it.
But I reject that. I mean, the truth is if the truth
is got a little blackness over it, it's still the truth. Yeah.
So, you know, we don't really have the option, I think of
waiting any longer. The planet is in disarray politically, the climate is changing
in a way that's very problematic for our own survival even and if, if,
indeed there are other intelligences interacting with us, I think we better get
on with that one too. Yeah. Last week I had doctor Jeffrey Bennett,
astrophysicists on and a good part of his talk was about climate change and
the reason I'm just springing that up you just mentioned it. But I have
to tell you, I don't believe that has ever been a time where I've
gotten more email about that topic than, uh, than I have about you
know, UFOs, and mostly you know, people are I hate to say
about there's a lot of people that are that don't want to look at it.
I'll just put it that way. You know what you're talking about climate
change right now? Well, you know there are there are similarities between climate
change and UFOs tell me about that because someone asked me about that. Well,
I mean, I mean, you know, and again I don't.
I don't wish to incite public political violence on your show or anything. But
let's just let's just make it as basic as we can. You take climate
change, you take UFOs. The similarity between these two issues is that they
the evidence appears to say that they exist. Okay, yet there is trouble
in the public sphere discussing them. So we watch these things get more complicated
and unsolvable and we don't address them. So I do think one of the
things that would certainly be be good is if out of whatever's going on in
our world right now, that the the idea that we want to embrace what's
really happening, what truth is, would be a good thing. You know,
we if it's clear, we can argue what causes climate change, But
I think is not the debate already settled that it's happening. I mean,
I didn't used to have to evacuate my house every year or get ready every
year, and now I do. So something's happening. And the same with
UFOs. If you pay attention, I mean, what more do you need?
The US Navy says they're real. What more? What more do we
need? The only thing that I like about that, by the way,
is that when I do start talking about it on Thanksgiving, I may not
be treated like the drunk uncle at the wedding, because some of these people
will say, oh, yeah, so yeah, I read something about that.
What's going on? Okay? Now that's where I think it's great,
because then I get to say, well, are you were you? Now
let's go back to the twenty seventeen Did you read that New York Times article?
Now I didn't, Well, let me tell you what that's about.
Another thing that I do, by the way, for people is I maintain
a pretty large library of UFO books, and I have duplicates of a number
that I think are really good, and I'll loan them out to people.
So if somebody asked me on Thanksgiving about it, I'm going to run upstairs
to my collection and grab a copy of something and run it downstairs and give
it to them and say, why don't you read this? And then call
me and let's discuss it. Because I think we have got to get this
into the public sphere one way or the other, and the change tends to
be not top down. It isn't going to be probably the head of the
Pentagon announcing it. We're going to have to from the ground up change the
situation on the ground so that the people up above feel like if we do
talk about this openly, we will not screw everything up. I mean,
yeah, that's all I look, Yeah, I had. I mentioned this
briefly on our show. A while ago. I spoke with someone in my
professional world and through antiques, actually in art. He was having me look
at some things that he wanted to sell, and he said that he was
with the in the Navy for thirty years, recently retired, and he used
to the last job for many years. He was out in California at some
base southern in southern California and had something to do with flight control or something
like that. And so I mentioned to him, you know, just to
see the reaction, I say, hey, did you see the you know,
Navy announced you know that they're going to be looking into UFOs or can
report UFOs. And he said, well, you know, I used to
see used to see these things on radar that would appear and disappear and do
all these unusual maneuvers. But he says, but I just thought they were
experimental aircraft from the local or he mentioned some base. They may have come,
right, But that's all that's you know, that's all he just assumed.
That's but you know what, and you know what I would say to
that person, I'd say, well, you know, that's probably a pretty
good assumption when you see the things flying around right now that exceed our ability
to comprehend how they do that, because we don't have aircraft to do those
things. You still might say, well, it might be secret technology that
we've got or the Russians or the Chinese. But then you say, do
you think anybody had it back in nineteen forty seven when they were doing the
same thing. Do you think when these things were flying around Washington, DC
in nineteen fifty two that somebody had that ability back then? I don't think.
So, you know, we we we just have to keep keep moving
ahead. I'll tell you, my are we about to go to a break?
Here's just something that is something that I'm kind of intrigued that we haven't
done more of, which is we're in the middle of a presidential campaign.
More candidates than ever before are out running around Iowa and New Hampshire and South
Carolina and Nevada, and they're all holding town halls and they all accept questions
from the audience. So for all these millions of people who actually think of
themselves as UFO knowledgeable or UFO activists, why aren't they going to some of
these town halls and asking questions that are respectful questions, saying, are you
aware that the US Navy has released these three videos and that the US Navy
now confirms that unidentified aerial phenomenon are something they're looking into and they're working on
reporting procedures. So, mister or missus candidate, my question to you is,
will you support congressional hearings on this topic and will you dedicate yourself to
government transparency on the topic. Why do we have somebody? Why has not
one person asked that in any of these town halls? And why are we
not writing these reporters who are asking questions at debates? Why aren't they asking
about this? Why is the fact that there are things flying around that interfere
with nuclear weapons? Why is that not something that should be discussed in a
presidential debate or at a town hall. I don't get it, and I'll
tell you something. I have a my own little Twitter presence or whatever,
and I've noticed that when I tweet about you know, can't wait for the
truth to come out on you know, reality, and I put a nice
picture with it, I get a lot of likes and you know, and
I get a lot of comments and all that. But when I say,
why doesn't somebody go to a town hall and ask a candidate about UFOs,
No, I'm again hardly anything. So I just go, like, what
I think needs to be happening right now is that UFO reality, UAP reality
has to switch and start taking in some of those public activist tactics that have
existed for various social issues. Whether it's women's suffrage or the civil rights movement
or anti war or whatever. These are political social movements. Where are we
with this UFO thing? We should be We should be pushing forward the relatable
storylines and asking our representatives why they won't investigate it. And you could say,
well, they'll never to get it because no one will. But that's
not the point, is it. The point is not that the candidates will
get it, and not that the congressional people will understand it immediately it's that
will force people to talk about it, and it'll get into the national dialogue
and the international dialogue, and slowly but surely, this will become something that
people can talk about in open public forums. That's what I look for.
Yeah, really interesting. Now. I remember Hillary Clinton was actually in New
Hampshire for the sixteen she was campaigning there and was I don't know if you
heard, but she was asked by a reporter the very thing you're talking about.
Oh, absolutely, yeah, And I actually had him on the show
briefly right after that. But yeah, the twenty sixteen campaign was vastly better
for UAP reality disclosure issues because you had Hillary Clinton saying I'll talk about it,
Podesta. And this has been a disappointing year when there's more going on
than ever, more things to discuss, and you know, the Democratic debates
are plowing the territory of medicare for all ad nauseam. And I'm not saying
that's not an important issue. It certainly is an important issue what healthcare people
are going to have. But I would also think if we're worried about safety
and security and healthcare, I think if somebody can turn off a nuclear weapon
at will that's a safety issue. I don't know why we're not looking into
it. So just ads off to any of those like Mark Walker, I
guess, a Republican congressman has been active in trying to push for those kind
of things. I think it's it's smart, we need to do that.
Yeah, well there's also you know, think of O'Hare or any of the
possible you know, encounters when commercial or you know planes are involved, and
there's you know, sky safety, you know for one and coughing, why
that's not taken more seriously? You know, right, there's But see,
I think though that that's that's the essence of it. The way in to
the barn, The way to get your head into that barn is through air
safety and nuclear weapons security. Those are the issues that you can ask about
in a public forum and say are you you know I'm not and you can
literally you can say, look, I'm not saying they're from another planet,
but I'm saying that the US Navy says they're not ours. So, mister
or MISSUS presidential candidate, what do you think about it? I mean,
and you know, to this date, you know, we at least had
Hillary Clinton in twenty sixteen talking about it. This year, to the best
of my knowledge, we have Andrew Yang saying something casual at a refrigerator in
a New Hampshire newspaper office, and maybe somebody else and I can't remember who
that was, and just casual comments, so I don't know. So there
that's my soapbox. But again it's boring, apparently because nobody thinks we should
do those things, but I do. I think it's a political issue now.
I think we are moving rapidly into what Richard Dolan and I wrote about
in our book A d After Disclosure, where we said it's you know,
it's it's not going to be a clean line. It's going to have ups
and downs and starts and stops, and it's going to be a little bit
messy, but we need to get on with it. I always quote Doctor
Strangelove where the General says about he's talking about nuclear war, but I always
think it applies to disclosure. It's General Buck Turgutson and he's talking about nuclear
war and he says, I ain't saying we're not going to get our hair
must okay, And that's I mean, I think that's the true statement we
can make about what disclosure is going to look like. But it does us
no good to wait. Waiting serves nobody at this point. I do think
it's a little dicey that Donald Trump might become the disclosure president, because he's
just very unpredictable, obviously, And I'm not trying to get in a political
debate with anybody about anything, just saying that'll be a dicey thing when that
happens. But it really I think the issue is so large that it transcends
the political occupants of the White House. It's just one we have to get
on with the world has to get on with it. And frankly, if
the US can't get its act together to start talking about this openly, then
I'm all in favor of France or Brazil or Russia or China getting the ball
rolling, you know, let the Pope come out and start it. I
don't care. Somebody needs to get this thing going. It seems like the
snowball effect too with something like this, and I was thinking we're on that
role, you know, ever since the New York Times article came out back
in twenty seventeen, and you know, the videos, as you mentioned earlier,
and it just seemed like we were on a roll. Things were happening
fast, and it's still like it. Little bits and pieces are happening.
Like you know we talked about earlier than Navy, you know, looking for
waste to have the pilot's report, you know, encounters and things like that.
Um, so there is some type of momentum. Um you know that
is happening, but I don't. I don't know where it's going to go.
And and you mentioned earlier that you're hoping in your lifetime, UM,
I do as well. I hope that, you know, we'll know more.
I don't know if we'll ever though clearly know exactly what it is or
who they are. You know that part of it maybe really Uh It's it's
like that famous quote, the universe is not only stranger than we amage,
it is stranger than we can imagine. Right, So whatever, whatever is
the truth is going to be kind of mind blowing. But I would say
this, and we said this back when I was running the TV Academy.
We had this phrase that we used which was all of us together are smarter
than any one of us. Okay, now let's think about this issue where
you're saying we don't know exactly what's going on, and that's probably true.
It's probably true that even people who are quote in the know aren't as in
the know as they'd like to be, all right, But the way we've
organized the world right now, we have very small, compartmented groups of people
probably talking about this and not talking in a global way to each other,
but talking on very specific things. What we need is to energize the scientific,
cultural, political community that humanity represents and get everybody talking to each other
at once. And I wouldn't be surprised if we can come up with some
pretty good theories about what's going on. And some of them may be disturbing,
but but I think if we get started, it's better than not getting
started, certainly better for you and I living to see this through. Wow.
You know, I just had a listener just text me and say that
there was supposed to be supposedly a UFO sighting over the White House today.
Did you WHOA, I haven't finally on the White House loan. No,
I haven't done damn it. Here we are talking about this, and we
could have been, oh my god, well you know what, maybe it's
going to take that, maybe it will take that. Yeah, I'll check
out the news after the show. But no, I have not. I've
not heard that. Unfortunately, Alejandro wasn't in earlier. He may have had
some information about that, but I have not looked into that. Been pretty
preoccupied here up in Maine. Wow, this is this is great. One
of the things, though, I do want to tell you that I think
is kind of funny. And I mentioned this a while back as I was
watching in nineteen fifties or sixties documentary about uf I was and there was a
guy in black and white and he was probably in his fifties at the time,
and he's saying, I just wanted, you know, disclosure to happen
in my lifetime. He didn't say disclosure, but something else, right,
And of course, and he just thought, I mean, right now,
I feel like something's really close. He felt like back then, something's really
close. You know. See, if you know, I told you I
have a good UFO library, And one of the things I've done is I've
collected them over the years. And I started doing this pre Dark Skies.
But when we got into Dark Skies and we wanted to get the timeline together
so that the show would have this internal consistency. I started putting the dates
on the edges of the books so and then arranging them on my shelf in
the date in the order of their publishing. So over the course of time,
as I've read through these books, you do see a trend where people
going back to the fifties, going back to Donald Kehoe when he's writing his
books and he's talking about disclosure is eminent. He doesn't call it disclosure.
He calls it the silence group that will break their silence. But people have
been hoping for this change, and that's why I say we've got to also
start thinking of it. Now that we have a little more scientific information and
we can start to disclose it to ourselves. We need to move ahead scientifically
and politically at the same time, because simply just dumping on the world,
by the way, you know, yeah, some of those things, they're
real. It's going to cause our hair getting must a little bit, right,
So we need to have a political plan how we're going to integrate this
into our society. This very high degree of uncertainty it's going to bring,
and very little It's very interesting because when Dolan and I were writing a d
after disclosure. We would sit around and we we'd toss these ideas out to
each other, and we would say to ourselves quite often, I sure as
hell hope somebody else who actually knows some of the details about this is doing
what we're doing right now, because if they're not, I'm worried. I
mean, we need There's no evidence currently that anybody in the know on the
inside has actually been thinking about how society is going to shift and twist and
turn when this all starts to come out. And I do think I think
there's a fifty fifty chance right now that you and I will see a by
disclosure. Again, I'm not saying the president goes out and lays it all
out and hands out, you know, terriby or you know, fifty gigabytes
of photos to every reporter. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
But by disclosure, I mean that general sense that all of us have
that something is real, we can it's okay to talk about it now,
it's okay to study it, and that we should have transparent relations between government
and science and academia and all that and try to get to the bottom of
it. And I think we are getting closer to that. That's the only
hope that I can hold onto, right, right, we go to break
in about two minutes here. You know, as far as the government,
you know, I've always thought that it's possible that they may you know,
well, I think it's kind of obvious that probably know more than we do
because of the you know, the many cases where film was confiscated and you
know, situations like that. But I've always you know, I've said this
on the show a number of times. I've always felt that they probably don't
really know any more than we do of what it is, just that it
is, you know, when you know, were on that well the two
minute version is that I don't think it's it's effective to say what they know
in the government because I don't think there's a universal government that knows something about
UFOs that's keeping that from us. I think some people know more than others.
I think some people in government don't know a damn thing about it.
I think it's a really mixed bag. And obviously the people that know the
most have the biggest decision to make right now. They have to make a
decision for the world. They have to decide whether they're going to be on
the side of transparency or whether they're not. You know, you've got to
pick a side at this point and start to come clean about what you do
know, which is why, you know, I think all of us who
have had either seen something or had something happen to us have a greater risk
sponsibility than ever to step forward and start to talk about it. So just
as a tease for what we might talk later. You know, one of
the things I've been talking about more these days is what happened to us at
Dark Skies, where we were approached by people who said they were from the
Office of Naval Intelligence, not the Air Force. Also, my partner was
friends with a member of the Reagan cabinet who told them some hair raising stories
about about aliens and UFOs, and just the sense that those of us who
have heard things, we don't have to vouch for their truth or not truth.
We just have to vouch for what happened to us or what we know
or what we believe because we have to somehow get this topic off. The
podcast dedicated two UFOs Right, nothing wrong with your podcast. Don't get me
wrong, love your podcasts, but we cannot gheto wise the topic into these
narrow places where it's okay to talk about it. We have to do more
and more of what has made us, I think all very happy in the
last two years, since December of twenty seventeen, where we've seen more and
more people who just don't talk about UFOs start to talk about it. That's
right, and that is really great stuff. It is excellent. Well,
all right, everyone, we're ready to go and break. We'll be right
back right after these messages hanging there. All right, everyone, that's it
for the free part of the show. Thank you so much for listening next
week. We'll be back with Chris Lambright. Anyone can listen to the full
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it for now. Thanks so much for listening, and remember to keep your
eyes to the sky,