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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when an alien comes to Earth alone—with no invasion fleet, no backup, and no easy way home? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace the evolution of the solitary extraterrestrial, from Superman, My Favorite Martian and The Cat from Outer Space to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Bryce recalls seeing E.T. at an early screening in 1982, while Brent explores the film’s darker origins in Spielberg’s abandoned Night Skies project—and the provocative claim that E.T. may have been inspired by more than imagination. The journey continues with two very different stranded visitors released in 1984. In Starman, Jeff Bridges becomes the image of a widow’s dead husband and races across America to reach his ride home, discovering that human beings may be at their best when circumstances are at their worst. In John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet, Joe Morton plays a silent extraterrestrial fugitive whose experience in Harlem becomes a story about race, immigration, slavery and belonging. Bryce also shares personal connections to both Morton and Karen Allen, while the conversation expands to K-PAX, Sugar, Under the Skin and Resident Alien—stories in which outsiders observe us, imitate us and sometimes become more human than the humans pursuing them. These films and series turn the stranded alien into science fiction’s cleanest moral experiment: when there is only one of them and billions of us, who poses the greater danger? Bryce and Brent consider why lonely visitors so often repair broken families, develop compassion or curiosity, and force humanity to see itself through unfamiliar eyes. They also confront a deeper question beneath the entertainment: are these solitary beings simply extraterrestrials—or modern versions of angels, demons and messengers shaped by our changing beliefs about the universe? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it take to make an alien feel real? Bryce and Brent welcome Emmy-winning creature-effects legend Todd Masters, founder of MASTERSFX and the artist who helped bring the Dark Skies Grays to life. Todd traces his extraordinary career from calling Ray Harryhausen as a kid and working on The Empire Strikes Back at thirteen to creating hundreds of monsters and extraterrestrials. He reveals how the expanding Dark Skies aliens combined translucent materials, animatronics and early digital effects, then explains how he later reinvented the Skitters and helped transform Doug Jones into Cochise for Steven Spielberg’s Falling Skies. He also shares the unforgettable story of fake body parts escaping down a raging river—and being reeled in by some very startled teenagers. The conversation soon moves beyond Hollywood craftsmanship into far stranger territory. Todd describes real-world disguise assignments that went well outside conventional filmmaking, corroborates Brent’s memory that director Tobe Hooper spoke of a government arrangement involving Spielberg, and recalls unusual visitors to the Dark Skies production offices. He also opens up about a near-death experience and considers whether consciousness and alternate realities may be connected to the larger phenomenon. Finally, the man who knows how easily reality can be manufactured explains why even experts are increasingly fooled by AI—and asks the unsettling question at the heart of “Making and Faking Aliens”: if genuine proof of non-human intelligence finally appears, will any of us still be able to recognize it? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when two civilizations meet—and one possesses technology, power, and knowledge the other can barely comprehend? Bryce and Brent begin with The Twilight Zone’s unforgettable “To Serve Man” and Stephen Hawking’s warning that alien contact might resemble Columbus arriving in the Americas: not because the visitors are necessarily evil, but because encounters between unequal civilizations rarely end well for the less advanced society. Using Apocalypto, The New World, Arrival, and Apple TV+’s Chief of War as portals, they examine the curiosity, fear, mistranslation, trade, dependency, and conflict that can turn first contact into the ultimate culture clash. The episode also features two extraordinary personal stories about how easily identity and intention can be misunderstood across cultural divides. Bryce recalls traveling deep into Borneo to scout locations among former headhunters, where a tribal chief proposed trading a night with his daughter for Bryce’s Indiana Jones-style hat—a situation that began as a funny travel anecdote but became one of the most frightening experiences of his life. Brent recounts researching a Chuck Norris movie in Israel, where he joined an unarmed vice cop on a drug bust, was mistaken by Bedouin elders for Chuck Norris himself, and nearly overdosed on ceremonial coffee intended to last an entire day. At the center of the discussion is Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s haunting story of a linguist attempting to communicate with visitors whose language transforms the human understanding of time. Bryce and Brent ask whether humanity’s first response to nonhuman intelligence will be curiosity or fear, diplomacy or military action—and whether we have learned anything from our own history of conquest and colonization. If contact is already unfolding, have decades of secrecy deprived humanity of the time it needs to understand what is happening, and can we prepare now for an encounter that may transform civilization forever? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fresh from taping an appearance with Dr. Phil and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Chris Mellon, Bryce brings Brent the behind-the-scenes story of the latest government UFO document release—officially known as “Tranche 4,” but perhaps better described as another UFO dump. Dr. Phil received an early look at the material, along with a handwritten message from President Trump telling him to “have some fun with this.” That unexpected detail raises a larger question: Is Dr. Phil being positioned as a trusted public voice who can help introduce Disclosure to a mainstream audience? Bryce and Brent debate what a true global ambassador for Disclosure would need to be: credible, reassuring, internationally recognized, and somehow above today’s polarized politics. They consider politicians, journalists, filmmakers, and celebrities before arriving at one surprising choice—someone with the stature, warmth, and worldwide appeal to guide humanity through ontological shock. Listen to find out who they nominate. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this follow-up to “Missing Time It Was,” Bryce and Brent welcome documentary producer and filmmaker Dean Alioto, a longtime friend from Bryce’s UFO lunch club and a guest who lives at the exact intersection of Hollywood, UFOs, and experiencer testimony. Dean is the director of the new documentary The Experiencers: Full Disclosure, which takes the UAP conversation beyond lights in the sky and into the more difficult territory of abductions, contact, hybridization, screen memories, and the people who say the phenomenon has entered their lives directly. The conversation asks why the official world can now talk seriously about craft, pilots, and national security — but still struggles to face the human beings who say they have been taken, changed, warned, or contacted. The episode’s centerpiece is an exclusive, never-before-aired excerpt from Dean’s interview with Travis Walton, the Arizona logger whose 1975 abduction case became one of the most famous in UFO history and inspired Fire in the Sky. In this clip, Walton reveals that he had an encounter as a child, long before his famous disappearance, raising a startling new question: was Travis a one-time abductee, or a lifelong experiencer whose 1975 ordeal was only the most public chapter of a much longer story? Bryce, who first reported on the Walton case as a young radio newsman, and Brent, who brings his own experiencer perspective, unpack what this revelation does to one of the most argued-over cases in ufology. In the second half, the conversation turns to Alioto’s own strange place in UFO movie history as the creator of The McPherson Tape, the 1989 alien-abduction film that helped pioneer the found-footage genre before The Blair Witch Project made the form famous. Dean explains how his low-budget “War of the Worlds on videotape” became a cult object, how stripped-down versions were circulated as possible real evidence, and why he eventually had to publicly debunk his own movie. From there, the episode becomes pure Sound, Light & Frequency: does Hollywood borrow from the phenomenon, does the phenomenon borrow from Hollywood, or are both caught in the same uncanny feedback loop where fiction and testimony keep reshaping each other? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Man Who Fell to Earth has always been more than a cult science-fiction story. Walter Tevis first imagined Thomas Jerome Newton in his 1963 novel as an alien who comes to Earth to save his dying world, only to become trapped and broken by ours. Nicolas Roeg’s haunting 1976 film, starring David Bowie, transformed that idea into one of the great screen portraits of alienation — a visitor with superior knowledge who still cannot survive capitalism, addiction, surveillance, loneliness, and human appetite. In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce and Brent follow the entire strange afterlife of the concept: the book, the Bowie film, the failed 1987 television pilot, Bowie’s late-stage theatrical work Lazarus, and the 2022 Showtime series that continues the story with Bill Nighy as an older Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a new alien visitor named Faraday. Along the way, they ask why this one image keeps returning across generations: the brilliant but stranded being who walks among us, hiding in plain sight, desperate to get home. This is not just a fan conversation about a beloved science-fiction classic. Bryce and Brent connect The Man Who Fell to Earth to David Bowie’s own reported UFO experiences, to the changing way audiences think about aliens living among us, and to the larger Sound, Light & Frequency question: has Hollywood simply reflected our fascination with alien contact, or has it helped prepare us to imagine that the impossible may already be here? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On December 17, 2017 — the morning after The New York Times helped blow open the modern UAP era with its Nimitz/Tic Tac reporting — Bryce Zabel was in New Orleans when he turned his phone back on and found a message from Dan Aykroyd. That voicemail, saved for nearly a decade, becomes the portal into this episode: Aykroyd talking about Bryce’s Betty and Barney Hill screenplay, the role of psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, Steven Spielberg, and, in classic Aykroyd fashion, ending with a cliffhanger about a car that “they made disappear” in front of him. From there, Bryce and Brent step into one of the strangest intersections of UFO history, Hollywood storytelling, and cultural memory: alien abduction. The episode focuses on two foundational cases — Betty and Barney Hill in 1961 and Travis Walton in 1975 — and asks whether film and television merely reflect the UFO phenomenon or help shape how people experience and remember it. Bryce and Brent walk through the Hills’ missing time, their hypnosis sessions with Dr. Simon, the Outer Limits “Bellero Shield” theory skeptics use to question their account, John Luttrell’s overlooked Boston Traveler reporting, The Interrupted Journey, Barney Hill’s surreal appearance on To Tell the Truth, and the 1975 NBC movie The UFO Incident. Then they pivot to Walton, whose reported abduction occurred only two weeks after The UFO Incident aired, raising the uncomfortable chicken-and-egg question that runs through the entire hour. Finally, the conversation turns to Fire in the Sky, written by Bryce’s friend Tracey Tormé, and the way Hollywood transformed Walton’s reported experience into one of the most terrifying abduction sequences ever filmed — even though Walton says that is not what happened. For Bryce, this is not an abstract topic: he reported on Walton in real time as a young radio newsman, wrote the Hill case into the Dark Skies pilot with Brent, appeared as an on-camera expert in Discovery documentaries on both cases, and has spent years developing his own Betty and Barney Hill film, Missing Time. By the end, Brent’s own missing-time memory enters the conversation, and the episode lands on the larger question: if these early abduction stories really happened, what does that mean now — especially as Spielberg’s Disclosure Day brings alien abduction back into the mainstream as something that may not be fiction at all? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.