Bryce Zabel’s Dark Skies (1996) reimagines UFO lore as a 1960s-era "alternative history" series, blending crop circles, animal mutilations, and Roswell theories—including claims Truman witnessed a "surrender ultimatum." Despite network skepticism (e.g., dismissing Hostile Convergence, a Nazi saucer script), the show thrives on ratings, weaving government cover-ups like Watergate’s "Deep Throat" into its narrative. Callers debate green flashes (NASA/FAA’s unverified meteor theories), astronaut sightings, and even biblical "alien mind implants," while Zabel hints at global figures like Billy Meyer and fractal crop circle math. The episode ends with Art Bell’s playful alien line—where callers claim Pleiadian origins—and a tease of "reverse speech" UFO connections, suggesting the show’s speculative universe may hold deeper truths than mainstream history allows. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning as the case may be across all these many, many time zones from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Islands racing eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands south to South America, north to the pole and worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Have the morning, everybody.
I'm Art Bell.
And as promised this morning, in a moment, the executive producer of Dark Skies.
Bryce Zabel is going to be here.
So stand by for that coming up in just a moment.
I know a lot of you have questions about dark skies and interest in it.
And speaking, by the way, of dark skies, not so dark, just a short time ago, I'll read you a story.
Something has gone across the northeastern sky.
A scene just about everywhere.
I'm getting faxes and email.
We'll talk about it in a second.
Good lead-in, actually, for Bryce.
As a lead, I guess, into what we're going to talk about, this is an Associated Press story sent to me by one of my affiliates, and I thank them for that.
I wish I could remember which one, and I would thank them by call letters.
People, it just came in before the beginning of the show.
People from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and I would add to New Mexico, have reported seeing a mysterious green flash streak across the northeastern sky.
Authorities say they don't know what it is.
Frank Donnell, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, says he doesn't have any information on what it is, but he says if it was that high up, it probably was a meteor or a re-entering satellite.
And there's a period after that.
They could have had another or I'm sure it's a meteor.
The FAA said they've received many reports of the flash from as far away as San Francisco, said he also had no idea what it is, but it was certainly too high to be an airplane.
Here's another one.
Hey, Art, something out here in California hit the ground.
They tracked the object over a few counties near Yosemite and the Central Valley.
It hit here in Mariposa, we think, on a ranch.
A close family friend said this.
He manages the ranch, said the object lit the sky to almost daytime, and he thought for a second that a beam of light hit the car.
So we may have something down on a ranch in California, in the Mariposa area.
My, my, my.
Look out for pods out there.
All right.
Now, for quite a period of time, NBC advertised Dark Skies with us because, of course, a lot of the material that we have here on the air.
And I so much wanted to have Bryce Abel on during that period, but I thought, no, the audience is going to buy this as an infomercial or something, and I didn't want to do that.
So I waited until the advertising, which ran its course prior to the and just after the pilot, until it ran its course.
And now I feel very comfortable in doing it because a lot of you who heard the advertising, zillions of you, have many questions.
And so here is the guy who is the executive producer of Dark Skies, who will answer your questions.
And I'm going to let him tell us a little bit about himself.
Bryce, welcome to the show.
unidentified
Thanks a lot, Art.
I feel like my entire career has been a warm-up for appearing on your show.
And with the material that we've got here, you can imagine there were a lot of extra added attractions to conspiring to keep us from getting on the air.
Well, mostly it's the concept that to get on the air these days, you know, you have to have something that someone can look at and go, well, that ought to work.
And despite the success of the X-Files, I don't think that people would necessarily say, well, you know, a UFO show should just work on its own.
I think we had to prove to NBC that we had a show that had legs.
So when I say the resistance, I mean, I mean, we've had a remarkably good run, but I mean, once you take this kind of material and you float it out there, then a lot of people want to give you their comments.
And the hardest thing in any television series is to maintain a consistent vision of any kind.
And I'd done a lot of reading, and we started talking about what we knew.
And the paradigm shift that we call that goes with Dark Skies was simply that instead of doing a science fiction show that might take place in the present or the future, near or far future, we would set it in the past.
And once we made the decision to go back to the 60s to start our series, I think that was really what the vision was all about.
And then we kind of expanded from there to say, let's try to do a TV series that's all about the unification theory of UFO.
You can call them mythology or theology or actuality, whatever you want, but try to make sense of crop circles and animal mutilations and sky sightings and abductions and try to come up with one theory that would tie it all together.
Well, I mean, I think we planted a lot of seeds in our pilot and our first episode, and hopefully that we'll have a very long run on NBC, in which case we'll have time to harvest a lot of those concepts.
Obviously, with crop circles, we probably raised more questions about what the crop circle was really about than we answered.
But on the other hand, it sure made for a very, I don't think I've seen a crop circle in a crop circle on a television series, and maybe not even in a film yet.
We're going to get into a lot of interesting areas, obviously, here.
And what I would like to do is tell you all that right now, on America Online, in this Periscope area, it's called Periscope.
My wife is presently sort of hosting a little get-together of people with regard to questions on dark skies.
And if you have questions, that is one more avenue where you can broach them.
So to get into that chat room, simply go on to America Online, enter keyword art bell, and it'll take you to the Periscope area or enter a keyword Periscope.
That'll take you there.
When you get there, go into the Grassy Knoll chat room.
And if you have a question for Bryce or something about dark skies, pose it there, and she will take the best or the cream of the crop and bring them in here.
So all right, back.
Bryce, research.
There must have been a lot of research.
No matter what you ended up doing dramatically or with dramatic license, you had to start out with a base of what you thought reality was.
Sure, although I am sure that a lot of your listeners tonight are going to call in and want to discuss what they see as inconsistencies or incorrect takes on things.
That's the thing that differentiates a TV series, I guess, from a film, is that just because you put an episode on doesn't mean it's not a work in progress.
But in answer to your question about what kind of research went into it, I've been reading on this subject for a number of years, like I'm sure most of your listeners have been doing.
And Brent has certainly been interested in it as well.
I've got a fairly large library of UFO materials and so forth.
And then, of course, we kind of dipped our toe in some of the stuff that we're finding on the internet.
And I have to admit, the more you read, the more you realize you might as well just take your own crack at what you think might work because there's so many theories and counter theories out there that almost anything you do is mutually inconsistent with some other theory.
And I just happen to think it's a very dramatic area to work in.
Also, for myself, I happen to believe in the reality of the UFO phenomenon, which not a lot of people that I've run into necessarily share my beliefs.
Certainly among a lot of the people that we've had to take the series out to and discuss it with, a lot of them see it simply as a dramatic creation with no bearing in reality.
So Brent and I keep our own opinions closely held and try to make an entertaining show, and everybody seems to be happy.
Yeah, that was kind of a kick because at the time I gave up an anchor job in Arizona where it was kind of an insecure thing to give it all up and move to L.A. for this CNN which nobody knew what it stood for.
They called us the Chicken Noodle Network when we first got here.
I've got to tell you, that's kind of normally how you might sell a TV series.
But everything about getting dark skies on the air has been a little different than what normally is the procedure.
For example, when Brent and I decided to do this, one of my greatest concerns was that if we just simply went in and pitched kind of a cool UFO story, somebody could dismiss it by saying, well, that's really a terrific story, but you can never come up with five years' worth of stories for it.
So Brent and I decided to work very hard to answer that objection.
So we literally arced out five seasons worth of stories, wrote a timeline that went from 75 million B.C. to the year 2008, and packaged it all up in this ultra-classified briefing book.
So by the time we actually, and of course we sent that around to, well, actually, Just Sigansky at Sony picked up on it right away.
And by the time we got to the various networks, we knew we had a pretty hot property.
unidentified
Wait a minute, five seasons in one book?
Well, you know, in the, you know, not episode by episode and beat by beat, but, you know, in the general.
Yeah, the chronology was pretty strong because, you know, beneath dark skies is also a very, I think, unusual concept, which is that we plan to let our characters grow old and we plan to let the series move forward.
So we're starting in the 60s, but our intention is by New Year's Eve 1999 to have caught up with New Year's Eve 1999 in real time.
Well, it's challenging, and it's certainly my intention to do it now, and let's knock on wood and hope that NBC will allow us to grow these characters.
And I don't think it would be as fun for the audience to watch because I think the audience wants to figure out this big mystery about what's really going on at the same time our characters do.
And somebody on the internet's wondering whether you went and talked to Dr. Marcel or even Jesse Marcel before his death in getting any approval for the series or any help.
I wish that I had been able to talk to Jesse Marcel before his death.
And, you know, we simply there's lots of material out about what Jesse Marcel's story was, and I've certainly read accounts of what his son has had to say.
And, of course, in Dark Skies, we go one step beyond even what perhaps the theories or the account told.
So we came up with our own interpretation of Roswell that was even more strikingly different than what the account currently is.
I mean, when Close Encounters came out, I remember a common conversation had by people after they came out of that movie was, boy, you know, if they would just land in my backyard, I'd get on and go away with them.
And our feeling, our kind of motto at Dark Skies is don't get on the ship because we just don't think it's where you want to be.
And we base this on the literature that's in the movement right now that would imply to me anyway that if whatever the reality of what's going on, it would seem that these visitors or whatever we want to call them are at the very least supremely indifferent to what we're up to.
So we think that prudence would indicate that you treat them with a certain amount of hands-off status.
Well, when I say I believe I don't know that there are, you know, Dark Skies takes its own interpretation, and we'll, I'm sure, get into it later tonight about, you know, my feeling about Dark Skies being entertainment first.
I'm not personally sure whether this interaction is of a completely hostile nature, but I don't think that it's of a benevolent bringing us into the cosmic universe kind of nature either.
unidentified
So that's really where I come down on a personal level.
News Talk 780, KOH Reno, for first wire report on this object seen by millions across the West.
And I'm going to read you something that I have no, absolutely no confirmation of.
We're trying to confirm it right now.
And this may well be total bull.
But we have had a few indications that something has hit the ground.
And I'll just read you this.
This may be total bull, but I do have a return number and we're trying to get through.
So if Jason, Jason, if you're out there, unbusy your phone so we can get through.
He sent this as something he got from Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Tonight, 3 October 96, at about 20, 15 hours, Edwards Air Force Base personnel witnessed a strange green flash in the northeastern section of the sky, about 25 miles from Edwards Air Force Base.
Interceptors, it says, were dispatched from Edwards as well as Nellis in Nevada to that section of the state.
On arrival, four pilots in F-16C aircraft saw several glowing objects on the ground.
The pilots took up station around this area and proceeded to shadow it.
Approximately 10 minutes later, said glowing objects left the ground at an alarming rate and moved vertically through the formation of planes and disappeared both visually and on radar in a matter of moments.
An investigation is pending, more news to follow, per release from the commanding officer at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
Now, this could be absolute poppycock, something somebody put together very quickly to take advantage of the reports that are real of something that has streaked across the western sky and has been seen by millions.
In a moment, back to Bryce Zabel, executive producer of Dark Skies.
You know, I have to tell you, NBC put out a press release about three weeks ago saying that the amount of promo they had put behind Dark Skies was the most they put behind any new series in network history, and I think that's pretty well demonstrated.
Well, you know, look, I can't do a five-year series and make it dramatically viable for everyone at networks and studios and so forth and make it just the truth, and besides which, what is the truth?
I mean, I think you do an entire show every night trying to figure out what exactly the truth is.
So my feeling, here's what, you know, I think it's a good time to stop down and explain what it is that we feel, those of us who are working as the creative team on the show, as a promotional venue, saying that here comes the truth is a pretty smart idea to get people to the party.
And I don't control the NBC publicity machine, as you can well imagine.
I, too, am not a big baseball fan, though I'm on many stations that, for example, KBC in Los Angeles carry the Dodgers, so they probably don't want to hear this.
But, you know, it preempts me from time to time.
And frankly, I'm hoping the umps go out on strike and stay out, ending the season forever.
Anyway, so you'll be back in two weeks.
I don't suppose you want to tell us anything about what is coming.
unidentified
Oh, I'd love to tell you about all kinds of things that are coming.
I, a long time ago, had this conversation with Brent when we were talking about, you know, if we, in success, would our timeline end up posted on the Internet?
And would we have to be very careful about whether our scripts would be posted and things like that?
And we decided there were only two tactics you could take.
You could either try to keep a lid on something, which maybe you could never keep a lid on, or you could be a little more open about it and let the people who don't want to know some of the things that are coming tune out.
So we've taken the attitude that unlike some shows and movies that number their scripts and try to keep them from getting out because I guess they're paranoid.
We have enough paranoia in our show that we don't need to have it in our lives as well.
So I'll be happy to talk about anything that's coming up.
You know what he's done, though, is he's actually provided a real-world lesson in just what we're up against here that I'm sure you face every day of your life, which is how do you separate the wheat from the chaff here?
unidentified
How do you decide who's leveling with you and how do you decide who's scamming you?
Yeah, and in fact, just to show you the kind of fun we're going to have, in a later episode, Loongard is actually going to testify before the Warren Commission, and some of the tape that he believes to be true will actually have been doctored.
And of course, in 1964, the Warren Commission is going to say, well, you can't alter videotape, Mr. Loingard.
Well, that is the, you know, for everyone who says, well, that's the same old thing, seen it before, I don't think anyone has actually said that the ganglion which is controlling the grays is now seeping into the human population, which I think is at least a pretty provocative new idea in the whole thing.
unidentified
You know, we can talk about the ganglions later.
What was the first part of that question on the facts?
The story that Betty told and Barney told as to what happened to them that night up near Portsmouth, in the White Mountains, actually in New Hampshire, that story is lifted from their actual descriptions of what happened to them.
So depending on what particular thing we're talking about, there's a lot of fact in there.
Also, when it comes to history, to answer your listener's question, one of the things we want to do with history is insofar as it is possible to stay true to things that we all know how they really went down, we want to not contradict those things, and we want the dark skies interpretation to be the thing that sneaks in the cracks or comes in the back door.
Well, there will be those who will charge your muddying the waters disinformation, taking a seed of truth, and building a mountain of disinformation that's going to do damage to ufology.
unidentified
Well, I don't know that anybody can go do damage to ufology at this point.
And, you know, I think that the whole business has to kind of pull itself up by the bootstraps.
And there are some people out there really trying to do it.
You know, although it is interesting because I have been asked by people, well, are you worried that if you actually go forward with this show that someone will try to shut you down or you're threatened in any way?
And my feeling, and although this could change because we're just getting started, I don't know how things are going to shake down.
But my feeling has always been that two of the people that are actually in charge of this cover-up, they probably look at dark skies and say, well, you know, it's just more adding to the mix, and for every person it causes to get riled, it'll confuse somebody else.
So I suppose there is that element to the whole thing.
On the other hand, I think that any program that can gain a wide audience, or at least a very significant audience, and that challenges them to think about what really might be going on and to discuss at the water cooler at work on Monday when they come back to work the ideas and concepts floated in, say, Dark Skies, I think that's all to the good.
Well, for both Brent and I, we looked at the sort of the situation and said that Roswell was pretty much the Rosetta Stone of the whole UFO movement.
And we happen to also believe that it's a factual event.
So our take was if that really happened, then all kinds of other things have happened that maybe you didn't exactly hear the truth about as they would have you believe it.
We decided to start in the 60s, though, as opposed to right after Roswell, simply because we felt that we did that for two reasons.
One, that we felt the 60s represent a time when UFOs kind of got a little more respect.
We stopped talking about flying saucers and we started talking about unidentified flying objects.
We stopped talking about little green men and we started talking about extraterrestrials.
Although your question goes to the nature of Roswell, which we did make a very big deal about in our first standalone episode called Moving Targets that aired last Saturday.
On the Roswell situation, what we tried to do, just for those people who are listening that may not have seen the episode, what we did in our first full episode is we went back to Roswell, and level one of Roswell may very well be that a weather balloon crashed there, and level two of Roswell may very well be that a UFO crashed there, and they covered it up.
Well, the Dark Skies level is level three, where we said that they had arranged a contact meeting, that Harry Truman was there, that they came and presented us with what amounted to a surrender ultimatum, and that we shot at them and took a chunk out of it, and that's why it dropped into the New Mexico desert.
So your question is, do I have any basis to allege that Harry Truman was at Roswell?
And again, this goes to the heart of why I think there's been some misunderstandings, partly because of the promotional campaign.
I think there are some people that are saying, well, you know, doggone it, that muddies the waters because that's not what we believe the historical record about Roswell really suggests.
And to those people, I say, you know, I understand that.
I've read the same materials that you've read.
Our intent is to not only send up American history by giving alternative interpretations, but also to throw some change-ups out there in the field of UFOs.
And the concept here is, again, there may be core truth to a lot of what we're talking about, but what the series is about is an alternative history, which is a dramatic genre of its own kind, and that I think that we're being fairly faithful to the rules of alternative history.
Every single TV series that's ever existed has to evolve, and had evolved and will evolve.
All series have to evolve because you keep doing it every week, and that's a lot of material that you've got to fill, and you've got to let things happen, and then actors come and go.
unidentified
They get older.
Evolution is natural.
A lot of times, though, people fight the evolution.
And just as we shifted the paradigm to go back into the past, we reserve the right to shift the paradigm at any moment to create the most intriguing, interesting series that we can possibly do.
And I assume that the ganglion scene with the ganglion coming out of that guy's brain must have come to some degree from that because it did to my stomach exactly the same thing.
Maybe even more out of the head.
Oh, man.
unidentified
Well, the ganglion, you know, there's a couple of things about the ganglion.
I mean, what we've done in the series is make it very real and very physical.
There are other people who say, you know, really what's going on is some form of mind control or whatever.
Now, my feeling to my answer to those people would be, well, then go ahead and enjoy Dark Skies and look at the ganglion as the metaphor for mind control, if that's what you want to believe.
I wonder if that's something he's always wanted to do.
We'll ask him in a moment.
I want to deal with a little real news that is going on.
This from the Associated Press, thanks to KOH.
Thank you guys.
People from LA to San Francisco, and I'm about to correct that, have reported seeing a mysterious green flash all across the sky.
Authorities say they have no idea what it is.
Others think it's a meteor.
Frank Donnell, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, says he has no information on what it is, but he says if it was that high up, it probably was a meteor or a re-entering satellite.
The FAA says they received many reports of the flash from as far away as San Francisco.
Now, you know what's interesting about this is we have what probably is a meteorite out there flying around, and yet we've been sensitized to being suspicious of official pronouncements or anything these days.
And a lot of us are willing to believe almost anything about this report, and we just don't even know right now.
I wrote a feature film about the face on Mars called The Face 10 years ago, and Joel Silver, who you probably remember from lethal weapon pictures and all that, was going to produce it.
And along came Dayton and kind of messed up the movie because it was about a race between the Russians and the Americans to get there and find out what was going on.
Things like that, I'm very interested in tying into the dark skies scheme of things, and you will be seeing something about the face on Mars at some point.
I think that they will re-air probably not only the pilot, but the first episode, because they're really kind of linked episodes.
I believe that that would be one of the first things NBC would want to do is to re-air those when they can to kind of give people who missed them a chance to see them.
unidentified
So I think you'll get a chance to see them on the air.
If you want tapes, I don't actually have anything to offer there.
You know, yeah, we do something in the TV business at the beginning of an episode called a saga cell, which is to sort of bring you up to date on what's happened in the series.
So when you see the next episode of Dark Skies, you'll see one of those 45-second blurbs previously on Dark Skies, and they'll kind of bring you up to date.
Yeah, well, I think we pretty much got up to speed on the second episode, but nonetheless, if you ever want to have a good time with somebody, when you're explaining how your show operates, especially with the ganglion, when you get in the middle of the part where you're explaining where the ganglion is, take their hand and put it on the back of your head and trap it there very lightly.
And right when you get to the good part, telling how it comes out of the mouth and everything, turn around and act like you're going to bite them.
And I've got to tell you, Bryce, before the advertising began, so I might know what it would be about, NBC sent me a videotape that has all kinds of stuff at the beginning saying, you will not divulge this.
And this is something that you might want to incorporate.
I've been kind of nagging Art a little bit about it.
I've called three, four times and talked to him about this.
Well, nag me.
Okay.
In the Time Life series, the Art of Warfare or the Century of Warfare, there is a tape that is called Gulf War and the Future.
And there is a fuel air explosion that happens on that tape.
Okay.
And around the fuel air explosion, there are things that appear as spheres that may be high-resolution probes that appear around it.
And I believe it's the original military high-speed tape of the first event.
And if you can get that tape and then slow it down and stop it one frame at a time, you can see these spheres, how they appear, and things go past them and they don't move, and then they disappear.
Now, of course, if I were to use that on the show, it would probably not rise to the level of special effects, and people would say I was cheaping out on the special effects.
So I'd have to do something fake to make people believe it was real.
And in some cases, this stuff requires computer-generated effects and post and sound design.
And there's all kinds of little tricks you do to make it work.
And, you know, the rule of thumb in doing these effects is that if you have to hold it together with chewing gum and bailing wire for the five seconds that you need to shot, that's all that matters.
You know, it's interesting that you say that because I understand that when Spielberg was asked those questions after close encounters, he used to say it was too personal for him to talk about instead of answering no.
And I'd love to have some kind of glib answer, but the truth is I've seen my share of lights in the sky that I think everybody has seen, and I would ascribe the likelihood of all the things that I have seen that they were just identifiable events to be very high.
unidentified
So I haven't seen anything that would be a good sighting.
Do however, have a number of people who I consider to be good, solid witnesses, and some friends and some just people that I've come to know, who have seen things much more up close and personal and and they were very real to them.
Toby Hoop, for Toby Hooper, for example, who directed the pilot, saw your basic cigar shaped UFO in Texas, I think, over 20 years ago, and it was anything but just a light in the sky.
I mean yeah I Bryce, I saw the real deal okay, not close, 150 feet above my head.
When I was 48 years old, I'd never seen another thing, like you, some lights in the skies, maybe a few green fireballs meteors, whatever.
But Bryce, I saw something that came directly over my head, and my wife was there as well, and we pondered for some time after we saw it and I dragged her on the air with me and made her validate what I was saying.
It was a close call and I didn't know whether I ought to go on the air and tell everybody what I saw or not, but it changed my life.
And I, let's face it, you may not trust my account of something, but you trust your own account, you trust your own eyes and your life can never be the same after an event like that.
Well, you know one of two things you know, either our government has things that are generations beyond what they admit many generations or it's something from elsewhere, one of the two.
East Of The Rockies, you're on the air with Bryce Zabel.
Well, unfortunately, ratings has a great deal to do with the success, so I hope that everyone that's listening who hasn't tuned in will take advantage and watch the show, and if they like it, make some kind of public comment about it.
And I also think that Dark Skies is very friendly to multiple generations.
I have young kids who enjoy watching the show because of the effects and the creatures and just the kind of the fun of the thing.
But a lot of my contemporaries enjoy the show because of the 60s angle.
And then my father, for example, who is watching the show, is a history teacher who I'm sure is watching the show and probably finds certain things to be fairly problematic and other things to be very interesting, but it's fun to watch.
There's just nothing better art than music to set the time.
And one of the great powerful things that Dark Skies can do to try to invoke its time place is to use music and also just our set decoration, the clothes.
We've got the cool sunglasses, the cool hairstyles, the cool cars.
And I think that the totality of it, all the newscast, the milieu that we create every week is at least taking you to a place that, for those of you who lived in the 60s, you haven't been there for a while.
And for those of us, for other people who weren't conscious, I guess, in the 60s, it gives them a chance to go there for the first time.
do you think you're telling will be since parents that's not very as we as i think we have discussed already tonight the truth is a rather slippery thing I think that there will be elements of truth in even our fictional description.
And I leave it up to the wisdom and the good sense of the viewers to decide which part is which.
Somebody sends me a fax and wants to know what if a bunch of dark suits, a bunch of guys in black suits and white shirts and narrow ties with the NBC logo on them, show up at my door to demand the return of the tape, Ron from Birmingham, Alabama.
The answer to that, Ron, is I claim self-defense.
Let's see.
P.S. Enjoying Dark Skies.
Only question is, can it keep up the level of interest and excitement it has established thus far?
What we hope to do, though, is build our world of Dark Skies to such a degree and our characters that inhabit the world of Dark Skies to such a degree that we don't need Roswell and Kennedy every week for you to stay interested.
We thought that the Roswell-Kennedy connection was a very strong way to get the show started because that way you have a really interesting story to watch while you're getting used to the world of dark skies.
How many Bryce has quite a bit of experience in this type of thing, including experience on the he was one of the originators of the very successful Lois and Clark Superman series.
It's a shocking amount that they develop every year.
First of all, there's 10,000 members of the Writers Guild for an example, and a lot of them are TV writers and trying to pitch shows to the network.
The network hears thousands of pitches.
There's no single network, but all the networks hear thousands of pitches out of which they may decide to develop scripts for several hundred out of which they may actually they might develop more scripts than that.
But I mean it's a winnowing process and it's one hoop after another.
Well first of all, you know, you sort of have to get in the club to be one of the people that they want to sort of trust writing a pilot for a TV series because it requires a whole picture.
He's going to make three times what the entire Dark Skies pilot costs.
And let's face it, success is the best thing that you can have going.
I've talked to some people who are on successful shows, and basically they'll tell you off the record, well, basically, there is no budget.
We write the script, and they go try to shoot it.
And that is clearly not what's happening with us right now.
We have a healthy budget for a one-hour drama, but we are hardly unlimited, and once you get on the air, we have an accountant who's literally got an office in our building, and his job is to worry about things.
Yeah, I'm glad I got through, and hope I speak for a few other listeners with my question regarding the JSK Roswell connection.
A question that I have goes to your research into that.
I don't know how much you did, but there's obviously been a lot of speculation out there that you find about the potential for a connection there.
It seems like a natural enough thing to wonder about if you accept a Roswell scenario and something like Majestic as having been real.
Wondering if you're going to develop a character, you don't have to give this away if you don't want to, of course, but a character based on Dorothy Kilgullen.
Dorothy Kilgallen is a major player in the Dark Skies universe.
And in fact, you will be seeing, assuming that we do an entire season, you'll be seeing a storyline on Dark Skies that ties in the fact that Dorothy Kilgallen had been interviewing Jack Ruby before her death and planning to expose what she thought would be the Kennedy, the real truth of the Kennedy assassination.
She died under mysterious circumstances in New York the night before the New York power blackout.
Yeah, but she had indeed reported in one of her columns at one point, this was in Britain, a rumor that she had heard from someone in British top brass about the British military having inspected a crashed saucer.
And that was as early as the early 50s.
And very few people have attempted to tie that together or wondered about the possible connection with Jack Ruby.
But it's good to know that you're going to be going in that direction.
Well, I'll tell you one of the things that just to give you sort of an insight into how Dark Skies approaches its story selection, Apollo 13 has already had a big movie done about it, and a lot of people are talking about it.
Our attempt would be probably to, if we can't find something really, really cool to do about Apollo 13, we have another take.
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And we, in fact, how many Apollo flights were there?
He is convinced and has convinced many, there are artifacts on the moon from an ancient civilization.
And it's not so wild, Bryce, because right now here on Earth, archaeologists are beginning to figure out that, for example, the Sphinx, the pyramids are far, far older than we previously thought.
We will be doing our, in fact, we have the very next episode.
It's called Mercury Rising, and it deals with sort of a black ops program within the NASA program, and it does have to do with a secret moon base, and I think you'll be very intrigued by it.
If God says we're his children, how come we keep calling his messengers aliens?
And evolution spelled backwards is know it you love.
Another thing, Mars might be a picture of Earth a couple of hundred years from now, especially when you look at that upside-down Sphinx area that they saw.
Then maybe Jupiter is another couple of hundred years hence.
I think you can't do a series about another life form that is perceived as a hostile one to ours and not get involved with what is God and is God God to everybody.
And in fact, I must tell you, we're doing an episode that takes place during the Alaska earthquake where it's about faith and what you believe in and so forth.
The issue you raised, listen, I don't have any great answers to the ultimate mystery of the universe, but I think that you cannot do a show of this level without looking square in the eye of the idea of a creator and coming up with at least some take on it.
The interaction that has been experienced has probably been going on a great deal longer than 1947, and it need not be confined to simply one species of aliens.
Once people start, if people can either, if we start doing things that begin to appear repetitive or we get in a rut or people start to think that they've figured it out completely, then we're going to change our game.
And we're going to try to become unpredictable and surprising.
I must say, I called up your website and I've been reading about that and I find it fascinating because I had a similar kind of experience offered to me last year that did not reach fruition as yours seems to have.
By the way, my wife is on AOL hosting a kind of Ask Bryce a question session.
If you want to get there, simply go to America Online, use keyword Art Bell, my name, or keyword Periscope, and then go to the chat area on AOL in Periscope called the Grassy Know.
Pretty appropriate.
We'll be right back.
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The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
We take
you back to the past on ART BELL, Somewhere In Time.
Sean and Phil from KKOH in Reno have sent the following to me.
It is a follow-up.
Experts say a colorful flash of light that lit up the entire northeastern western sky may have been, get this, a dying satellite or chunk of space rock.
People from San Francisco to New Mexico reported seeing the mysterious greenish-yellow flash shortly before 9 last night.
Witnesses say it lasted only seconds, but was intensely bright.
And so the notion that there is an alien autopsy film, that there have been knockoffs of it that may or may not be true, all of that will figure prominently into Dark Skies when we catch up with the time of the alien autopsy.
I will tell you this, by the way, when we were shooting Dark Skies, we talked to a number of people that we were trying to hire to do our creature effects and also the computer-generated effects.
And we ran across someone who said that he had been approached in Europe to do the Fox autopsy film, to do the special effects for it.
I guess what I'm saying is I think that had we set out to make an alien autopsy film that would have looked like it came from Roswell and had a reasonable budget and reasonable time, I saw that special, and I never quite understood exactly why these effects people were saying, boy, that's just so good.
Listen, you know, actually, reverting to what the caller said, there was a lot of strange stories that have come out of the Third Reich era about UFOs and all kinds of strange.
In fact, I'll tell you that as we were shooting the pilot film, NBC gave us an order for six backup scripts.
And so one of the backup scripts that we wrote was an episode called Hostile Convergence about the Socorro, New Mexico landing of 1964, where a police officer named Lani Zamora had actually seen something land.
And our explanation for what landed in Socorro, New Mexico was a Nazi saucer in that script.
And interestingly enough, of all the crazy, odd, bizarre ideas that I have floated and hope to float in the future past studio and network executives, this was the one where they said, well, nobody could ever believe that.
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How could you say that?
That's just too outrageous.
And so there will be no Nazi saucers on Dark Skies.
By the way, just as something that was very unusual in the world of series television, I thought we had a terrific two-hour pilot, and then we had actually Bren and I, among these backup scripts, had written an episode called Paranoia Strikes Deep, which took place exclusively in Dallas, Texas.
And the network originally said, well, we don't think anyone will be interested in Kennedy because they had done the JFK movie that Oliver Stone had done, and they'd re-aired it, and it didn't do well for them.
unidentified
So they said, no one will be interested in Kennedy, so you can't do that.
So we had to throw out our Paranoia Strikes Deep script, and we shot another episode instead about Lone Guard going home in the aftermath to get money.
And frankly, we all looked at that film about three weeks ago and said, you know, this is a good episode, but it ain't a great episode.
And we wrote an entire new episode that merged the best parts of the Paranoia script in with the Roswell situation and made the episode that you saw last week moving targets.
We are harvesting in the 90s a distrust of the government that was begun basically going back even before the Kennedy assassination to the fact that there were LSD experiments the CIA was doing to the fact that bomb tests, all that kind of Watergate Iran-Contra.
We are harvesting the paranoia and the distrust of government.
I don't think it's at all over, because the other day, for example, yesterday, we went from 150 soldiers exposed to some sort of nerve agent in the Gulf War to about 100,000.
I am familiar with Billy Meyer, and our intent, I think, would be to try to, let's face it, in the whole UFO literature, there's probably 30 or 40 key player events that some of them hoaxes, some of them the real deal, some of them unknown, but all of them part of our literature.
And Billy Meyer happens to be one of them, and he will definitely be worked in when we get to that time.
Of course, that also implies that we're going to broaden our or widen our net from the United States to the entire world, which is also part of our plan and success.
I think that it's incumbent upon our show to, at some point, just like we were talking about God earlier, where you have to, you know, there are certain issues raised that you just have to deal with.
So in other words, this character that they have in the pretender, Jared, would need to be stumbled across by John Loingard as a young boy in our show.
And in their show, we'd have an old Eric Close playing John Loingard coming across their character.
And I doubt that on any creative level, the fans would even want to see that.
But I think that there are so many practical impossibilities.
We're produced by different production companies, and we're on different networks.
X-Files tried to do a crossover with Pickett's Minters, I think, a season or two ago, and they were able to do that only, I think, because they were both produced by Fox Television.
Well, the last guy kind of took my thunder, but that's okay.
I've been a big X-Files fan ever since it started.
I have practically every episode on tape.
I plan on taping every episode of yours, regardless of whether he got me into any type of legal problems, but I don't really care.
Tape away.
Exactly.
Thank you.
I really like your show because two of my favorite shows, sci-fi-wise, at least have been other than Star Trek, have been X-Files and The Invaders, and I think you embody both of those.
And I was pleased to see them bring back the Invaders on Fox, what, last year, about a year ago or so, and too bad they didn't follow through with it.
But anyway, I think we have kind of a fresher take on the invasion.
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In a lot of respects, it kind of, yeah, it is along the same lines.
I have a couple of quick questions.
Well, hopefully quick questions for you here.
One, I hope, I know the next episode that we saw at Trailer 4 was regarding the space race, and you've already talked a little bit about that.
I hope you're going to go into the sightings that various astronauts have supposedly made.
I mean, I believe them personally, but I'll just say supposedly, regarding some UFOs, including what some of the space shuttle astronauts have taped while they were up.
We'll not only have astronauts commenting on lights that they're seeing off in the distance, but in this next episode, our astronauts are going to have a very close encounter.
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Great.
Personally, I like J.T. Walsh as a character actor, and I'm glad to see him established in something for at least a set period of time.
I hope you're going to continue him as one of the main characters throughout the life of the show.
And it talked about the possibility of they were asteroids first thought to be just accidents that we were in a sort of an area of a lot of them and they were coming in and we blew them up with nukes and it turned out that was a bad idea because they were actually sending us a signal that we should have responded to.
Instead, we blew them out of the air kind of the way you had that saucer blown out of the air.
And this should be one of these days, like that object that came in tonight, had it been bigger or even much bigger, we wouldn't be doing this interview right now.
And I just want to say I really enjoyed Dark Skies and, of course, your show, Art.
And my question to Bryce is, I was wondering if he had heard or been familiar with remote viewing and was planning to incorporate that subject into his show.
And more specifically, if he'd heard of Courtney Brown's book, Cosmic Voyage, which specifically deals with extraterrestrials and their culture.
Yes, I've heard of remote viewing, and I've even seen that book.
I think it's our intention definitely to delve into that issue.
One of the things that we're it's not I I was going to say we're hampered by it, but we're not really hampered by it, but it's just a reality we have to deal with.
We want to be appropriate to our time frame and not introduce concepts in the 60s that are necessarily coming to the forefront in the 90s.
Yes, but when you get to the 70s, Bryce, they did a Ted Coppel did a Nightline show and had remote viewers on and released the news on that show that the U.S. government had secretly been doing remote viewing, had spent $20 million over the last 20 years.
He literally found a gold plate in the crop circle that had the hive glyph, that is what we call it.
That is the symbol of what will come to be known as singularity.
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We'll explain that in future episodes.
Oh, okay.
And the two comments were, well, I don't mean to sound like a bad guy here, but in the second episode, I believe it was when the military parade was supposed to be taking place during Kennedy's funeral.
I guess I guess part of the parade was some military plane flying overhead and then the Air Force won.
And the idea, and actually both answers are right, except I know it doesn't sound right.
When he said Ike appointed him God, what he meant was the idea that you don't have to tell the President of the United States what you're up to is what Ike is the power that Ike gave him by signing an executive order after Nixon lost the election to Kennedy.
And so in that regard, Ike did appoint him God.
Of course, in the first episode, Buck actually takes or gets given some kind of command authority over the Roswell situation by Harry Truman.
And so it clearly sounds like a discontinuity, but we were talking about two different things.
And frankly, the first episode was one of those things that happened because we had written the continuity, and then the network allowed us to go ahead and do the Roswell situation.
I do understand that there's a lot of people who might even be patriots who come down on the public can't handle the truth because they've seen things like the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast, and they think people can't even handle fiction, so they sure as hell can't handle fact.
And I believe that the fact that I'm on your show now and I'm having a dialogue with people from all over the United States on this topic.
And we are, yes, we're talking about a TV show, and I think that those of us who are talking about it understand it's a TV show, and yet our dialogue is able to advance beyond the TV show to a discussion of the real situation.
So I think we are dramatic proof of the negation of that.
Well, in one sense, certainly that's true, and I think most people understand it is a TV show, but there are a lot of true believers out there that are somewhat offended at what it's psychologically doing to the American people.
In other words, if we are being prepared for contact, surely that thing yanked from that guy's brain isn't going to help anybody to walk up to the nearest spaceship.
But you're saying they shouldn't.
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Well, yeah, I think, well, let me put it this way.
I wish I if there are maybe there are some people in this country who absolutely know the quote-unquote truth.
I don't know any of them, and I'm certainly not one of them.
So I can't really speak for exactly what the truth is, but I think we should and because of that, I think we should proceed with caution no matter what we're doing.
But in terms of, you know, a lot of people talk about the rollout of this information.
Let's assume that there is a rollout that is being postured for.
Listen, we would be, you know, if art would not take offense, I would think that at someday we would love to have some influential person broadcasting out of the Nevada desert and make a character out of that.
We have several unofficial ones, and we have the official NBC one.
And by the way, for those people who are computer literate in the audience, which I assume is most of them, look for something called the Dark Site, which as soon as the funding comes through, I have seen the prototype for it.
It will not say anything about a TV show, but it will allow you to go into Majestic 12 and become an analyst of UFOs.
And this is getting into what Zechariah Fitchin talks about.
And as a matter of fact, my first book, which should be coming out shortly, is being published by the same company that's doing Zachariah Fitchin's most recent book.
Well, what do you think it is?
Well, I think there's some information here that isn't anywhere else.
And what that deals with, and real quick, along with the lines of what Zechariah Sitchin talks about, the aliens that came here that did genetic manipulation on primitive man to create Homo sapiens, there's another story that's also in the cuneiform clay tablets from Mesopotamia that deals with the tree of knowledge that man eats.
And the gods don't want man to eat of this because it opens his eyes.
And the one god, Anki, or Ea, he's the one that fed it to them.
Now, this tree of knowledge is the Amanita muscaria mushroom, the same mushroom that is in all the other religions.
So this is something that this is really the heavy stuff when it comes to alien research and religious research.
And real quick, one little tidbit about this information is that have you ever wondered why during Christmas you put a brightly colored package underneath a pine tree to give each other as a present for the representation of God's gift to man?
The reason is, is because the Amanita muscaria grows exclusively under pine trees, coniferous trees.
And during the rainy season, you'll go up and you'll find it underneath the tree, and it's red and white, and it's a little package.
Well, I'm not saying I don't have a specific response to anything the colleges said except that.
It is going to be clear and become clear to people watching our show that the framework that we're tying our show into is not a limited one that has to do only with our current day, but it's going to expand into the future and into the past.
Well, I've enjoyed it immensely, and I think one of the things that our show wants to do is maintain our contact with the people who watch the show because, you know, it's true that Brent and I got to create it, but now it's not our show.
It belongs to the people who are going to watch it.
Along those lines, Bryce, when the website gets up, will there be a place where people who are fans can come and give you ideas and feedback and whatever?
Well, I think you can already post, you can leave postings on the NBC website, and I check in on that one and read it, and I'll be checking in on all the things.
And, of course, you can email us or just plain write to us.
We won't give you the names of things because they'll mean nothing because you're going to come up with your own technological names as you go about being guided here.
And throughout your history, your writings have talked about what you call angels or angelos.
Yes.
We would like you to know that we have been with you and you have not been alone, but we've come to bridge the gap between your development as a spiritual being and be able to bridge the dimensional jump that you're going to have to do in the next couple years.
I'll tell you, let me tell you, on the last cruise, we were talking about that.
I was talking about that with Bob Crane.
I sat out there with a camera and my finger right on the button, waiting for that flash that you're talking about at the, you know, out in the middle of the Baltic.
And I never did see it, but I sure looked.
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Okay, and because I'm just wondering if that figure's in here because people are saying green.
Wouldn't it be sad if with so much up there, and I live here in the desert, somebody said you could almost see the Milky Way.
I see the entire Milky Way from one side of the sky to the other.
That's how bright it is.
And to have all those gazillions of stars up there with gazillions of planets going around them and to be limited here on the third rock from the sun would be very sad.
So someday, if not in my lifetime, I surely hope human beings do go to the stars.
I think my Christian faith leads me to believe that that's exactly why God has done what he's done for humanity, to show humanity the right way.
I think part of the reason that our technology is limited right now and that we haven't yet actually gone beyond is because we have things that we have to straighten out here on Earth first.
But anyway, like I say, I just hadn't heard anything about Giant Rock, California, and everybody's calling in, talking about other places being, you know, UFO capitals of the world.
In addition to the wire stories that we've been sending regarding the mystery flash, we've received numerous calls from listeners who witnessed the event.
Dave and Reno driving home from Chico saw a big flash in the sky, noted the light, had a tail, assumed the object landed in the area of Table Mountain in Butte County.
Another caller driving through Hunter County saw a huge green flash in the night sky, an explosion, said it broke in two.
He called shortly after the story broke on the wire and was so rattled by what he had seen, he couldn't specify what time it had happened.
Then there's Bryn in San Francisco.
Art, so there was a bright thing that came from the sky.
Then another caller reports another bright thing.
Oh dear.
Two words, Art.
Without warning.
And in honor of the object that has come in, whatever it is, we have the alien line open, a rare event here on this program.
But once again, with some trepidation, we go to it.
Oh, you mean you'll make a dimensional hop when this tired old alien body of yours dries up?
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Yes, it might.
When my people on my planet found me asleep under a tree with the book Earth, they had to immediately close the gap of the planet, or it would have been infiltrated by all kinds of earthers and everybody.
So what happens is I have to get back there myself, and I don't know how.
And this is what our message has been saying over and over again.
You just have not been aware of it.
After receiving our message, you know now that you're not alone.
We've been observing you for over 20,000 years before the death of your non-saber.
From that day on, and without your knowledge, we've been over time providing defense to your world.
After the invasion of Jogon, which ended all but two young lifelongs on your sister planet Mars, 1,300 years ago, after their rebuilding of the Jokan Empire, massive invasions of 13 sectors have ended in destruction to less advanced civilization.
76 planets which make up the United Planets to the Federation is spread too thin among the stars.
Your planet has proved to be advancing rapidly in knowledge and wise creativity.
We now call upon you to turn your attentions and resources to space technology.
We do feel interfering in your advancement would limit your own creativity to build your own and to provide the prime directive here, right?
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Right.
And we feel interfering would really limit your creativity to build your own unique systems and intergalactic warships that would provide and leap our enemy.
Anyway, this green flash story was out in that area.
I used to live in Yucca Valley, and one night I just looked out my window and it lit up the sky from where the base is out there at 29 Palms all the way down the hill, which would be probably to Fanning, you know, way down.
It just lit up the sky, like what you're talking about, but I didn't see any fireballs.
Say, I was wondering, let's see, I've come across some pretty startling information as far as alien encounters and, you know, their part in our history and who they actually are.
Hey, listen, when I was a dispatcher here with the city of Chico, we had a report one evening where a lady thought that a plane had gone down and right here in Butte County.
And during my time in the Air Force, I was stationed at Vandenberg for about a year and a half.
And it was not unusual to have reports from several hundred miles away that after a missile launch had gone off.
Okay, the synopsis is that a man wrote a letter on the stationery of his employer and said that he had information on the alleged federal government complicity in the crash of the TWA flight and the Challenger flight.
And that as a result of that, he's been getting death threats.
So we had to get a killer parrot to guard his home.
I have to think that if we wanted to believe that these beings exist below the Antarctic, as Bernard described it, there's a tunnel of some sort that goes from the pole to, you know, below the crust, I suppose.
Okay, that they had a density that was so great that in any area known to us on the surface of the earth, they would not be able to the earth wouldn't hold them up if there was a weight per cubic centimeter so great.