"A.D. - After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact" by Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel. What happens after they finally tell us the truth about UFOs?
FACE is a multi-media meditation on the role of perception in the abduction experience.
What we know is that there are a lot of contradictory emotions about the experience as reported by the people who have experienced it. And, of course, that not everyone reports the same thing, not by a long shot.
I woke up early a week ago with this bit of an idea banging around in my head trying to get out. So I armed up heavily with iMovie, Pages, Comic Life Magiq and JixiPix and set to work on my iMac. This is what happened.
There have been three separate steps to the current version of FACE. For this one, I drew inspiration from an ET head model designed and created by Todd Masters of Mastersfx.com as well as the song, "Don't Leave Me This Way," this awesome cover-version recorded by LA singer-songwriter Cherish Alexander.
Anyhow, right now, just turn off the lights, turn up the speakers, watch this in the best resolution you can muster on your monitor, and we'll talk after...
FACE - Set Me Free (Music: Cherish Alexander)
Hopefully, despite the four-minute duration of the video, you weren't bored. With the images changing every two seconds, that's a lot to think about.
The words seem to have a metaphoric power here and Cherish Alexander's vocals scream in rage about love. I'm still trying to sort out exactly what it's making me think as I go into a different kind of meditation about it all every time I see it.
What follow now are two more versions. In both cases, the music is instrumental and is not as emotionally raw as the "Set Me Free" version above.
Joyce from Rochester sends us this photo of how she has provisioned herself for the storm watch that so much of the country is under. She's just received her copy of Dark Skies and is ready for an evening of 60s themed resistance fighting at Majestic-12.
We don't mean to minimize or seem unaware of the plight of so many Americans. We thought this image might get your attention. Now that it has:
If you would like to contribute toward assisting victims of the recent battering the nation has taken from severe weather, here is the way to contact Red Cross. Please help if you can. We are all in this together.
Like a lot of ufologists, I have a problem with S.E.T.I., or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It's always seemed to me that if UFOs are real, then you don't need to listen for alien signals from space, you should start looking here on Earth. So the news that the Allen Telescope Array near Mount Shasta is being shut down over the budget crisis leaves me with mixed feelings. I'm in favor of science, but I'm not in favor of sham.
But it has me thinking about one of America's earliest and strongest advocates of S.E.T.I., Carl Sagan.
Sagan took America by storm during the 1970s and 1980s and became, practically speaking, America’s public Scientist-in-Chief. He first entered millions of living rooms as the affable scientist who appeared regularly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Cornell University professor had a passion for astronomy and a gift of making complex ideas easy to understand.
Sagan’s celebrity increased with the release of the PBS Cosmos series in 1980, when he became famous for his phrase “billions and billions” (which he denied ever saying exactlly in those words) to describe galaxies, stars, and planets. He pioneered the science of exobiology and promoted SETI through the use of radio telescopes to listen for signals from space.
As an investigative reporter for PBS, specializing in space science, I met Carl Sagan several times in 1981. Cosmos was still airing on the network, and the unmanned Voyager spacecraft was approaching the planet Saturn.
Sagan gave a live, on-air interview as the pictures came in and were assembled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He was effusive about what a great moment it was for humanity. He talked passionately about how this first step beyond Earth would someday lead to manned adventures further and further into space. He was positive that the universe, because of the sheer numbers of habitable planets and what he saw as the “bias” toward life, would be teeming with intelligent beings.
Call me a crank, but for many years now, I have been a watcher of sunsets and sunrises, a sky gazer in general, on this “pale blue dot” we call Earth, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as Carl Sagan so beautifully and humbly immortalized our predicament. I was recently talking to a landscape photographer, and we both agreed it had to do with perspective, whether photographing or just gazing, of catching a moment, a zenith, the cusp before it turns. A kind of boundless immanence where nature, where life does not stop to catch its breath and goes on forever, into the inky phosphorus dark of imperial night, or the unconditional mystery and open promise of a new day.
These are the kinds of things I think about but the last six months have given me a new way to ponder because of two projects that seem to have "right place, right time" written all over them.
A.D. After Disclosure: The People’s Guide to Life After Contact
Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel have some much more radical ideas on the question of UFOs, and the far ranging implications thereof for us on terra firma. Published in 2010, the book is a collaboration between an Oxford trained academic turned UFO researcher and historian, and a producer and writer who created the cult classic show Dark Skies, and former chair of the US Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Dolan has spent the last decade writing and publishing volumes of his UFOs and the National Security State, which meticulously chronicle a history of UFOs and their cover-up that is still being written, in the real world and on the page. A modern archeology of declassified documents and witness testimony, of lives and careers that were made, and even buried because of the UFO, the conceptual rosetta stone to understanding this subterranean world being the historical formation and ascendant hegemony of the National Security State. ‘Like the “missing mass” astronomers are trying to locate in the far reaches of our universe, the UFO phenomena rests on an ocean of dark matter, deep secrets, and forgotton wars fought only in shadows,' writes Jacques Vallee in the foreword to Vol.1 of Richard’s history.
Dark Skies: History is a Lie
Mid-January 2011 saw, for the first time on DVD, the release of Dark Skies. Watching it, the first thing that struck me about it is just how good it really is. It was ahead of its time, and tragically cancelled just as it was beginning so promisingly. No wonder that some people speculated it was cancelled for political, i.e., conspiratorial reasons, owing to its themes, which cover crop circles, cattle mutilation, alien abduction, ancient astronauts, secret space programs, and many historical personalities woven into the script including the Kennedys, with every episode reminding that History Is a Lie, following John Loengard and partner Kimberly Sayers as they go on the run across America from Majestic 12 and the alien threat. Certainly, it is criminal, the treatment the series was handed, given how much work and clearly love was put into it. The show captures some of the optimism, idealism, wonder and terror of the 60’s. The beautiful, glowing cinematography brings to life the ambiance of the times, without gimmick but with plenty of novelty and dark humour, each episode flies by and each year rolls on, passing through the decade, through the heights and the depths, bittersweet and retrospective, archive footage blending seamlessly and kinetically with the story, the sci-fi with the historical.
The need you buried deep, The secrets that you keep are at the ready, Are you ready?
Foo Fighters, The Pretender
In the Beginning...
One of my favorite scenes is from the pilot, where Captain Bach of Majestic 12 and his suit-and-tie adorned team of need-to-knows investigating a classic-style crop circle make a fly-over in a military helicopter of the field. It’s just charming. It captures such a quality of the mystery and wonder and even naivety that must have accompanied any such incidents, where now the phenomena proliferates multidimensionally on dorm posters and fridge magnets, but back then was a very new world to be discovered, studied and conquered. You can easily imagine it would have been just like this, back then, to those in the know.
Was President Kennedy's interest in the facts about UFOs a major or even a contributing factor in his own murder?
There are actual documents coming to light in the past week that say it's a possibility. Watching this happen is almost an out-of-body experience for me.
Relating Kennedy's assassination to his desire to tell the world the truth about extraterrestrial visitation was, in fact, the central organizing premise of my UFO-themed TV series Dark Skies (co-created with Brent Friedman) that ran on NBC from 1996-1997. On one level, it's true that Brent and I conceived the idea of JFK's death being connected to UFO disclosure as a way of putting the two most compelling modern conspiracies -- the JFK public execution and the UFO cover-up -- into an atom collider, thus creating the Ultimate Conspiracy. But it was more than that. We both accepted the validity of the Roswell event as the crash of a piece of technology that came from some place that wasn't here on Earth. And, if you accept that premise, then the world as we knew it in the 1950s and 1960s (through today, of course) is simply not the same as it appears. For us, that included the Kennedy assassination. As the series log-line stated: "History is a lie."
Now, almost a decade and a half later, the breaking news seems to be that maybe we were a lot closer to the truth than we thought. The best summary of it to date comes from Lee Spiegel of AOL News in a new column. I'd urge you to read Lee's thoughtful examination over some of the other versions getting traction on the Internet, specifically the coverage from the Daily News.
I remember vividly thinking in 1995 that it was possibly one of the most subversive acts ever propagated on an American television network -- devoting 20 hours of programming, produced at a cost of over $40-million, to the theory that President Kennedy died over UFO disclosure. Even as the executives who sponsored us at Columbia TV then at NBC gave us the greenlight to series, none of them really believed the concept. For them, it was just "pushing the envelope" to get an audience.
Now, some researchers are taking this premise seriously. Certainly no one is embracing the every detail of what we did in Dark Skies. It was obviously fiction, designed to attract an audience. But people are talking about the Big Picture idea and saying that it might just have some merit to it.
It was fifty years ago on January 20 that John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States. While historians debate over the nature of his legacy -- whether as just another proponent for the military-industrial complex who actually got the U.S. further embroiled in Vietnam, or as a possible renegade with a vision of a different future, who was eliminated before matters got out of hand -- there is no question that there was something about the man that brings the world back to him, again and again.
Yes, it was youth, that sense of style, that energy -- above all the sense of possibility that pervaded the man himself. His assassination, essentially a public execution, finalized the image and gave the entire world a sense of loss from which it has never fully recovered.
I am convinced that the day will come when we as a society will agree that JFK was killed in a conspiracy, something involving elements from within the U.S. national security establishment. The truth on that matter will not remain buried forever. So many people already know that the official statements of the U.S. government -- that it was all the work of one single unstable individual -- are false.
Even President Bill Clinton didn’t believe that. Shortly after he became President, he asked his Assistant Attorney General, Webster Hubbell, to investigate two things. “One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?”
Clinton may not have realized how closely the two questions may have been connected. Consider the likelihood that there is indeed a UFO reality and -- of necessity -- a UFO cover-up. Could Kennedy’s assassination have been related to the latter? The world of conventional wisdom would never pause to consider this, but -- really -- why is this so difficult to imagine?
The Kennedy assassination is something like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone had a motive: the Mafia, the CIA, the Cubans, the Pentagon, the Soviets, and the Federal Reserve, for starters. Could that list also include Majestic Twelve, the name often ascribed to the powerful insiders who control the UFO secret?
My answer to that question is, why not?
Dark Skies, now n DVD as of 2011, is an entire 20-hour (fictional) NBC-TV series that relates the JFK assassination to the UFO cover-up. The pilot episode deals with the events leading up to Dallas, and Robert Kennedy is a continuing character in the series. Episode #17 deals with Dorothy Kilgallen's death and her investigations into JFK's death and UFOs. Dark Skies is created by Bryce Zabel & Brent V. Friedman.
By buying through this link, you receive the DVD at 50% of list price and receive a free collectible lithograph.
We must recall that the UFO topic remains the great hole in our modern history. The great unspoken reality around which so much has happened within classified circles, and about which so little has leaked to the outside world. There is an enormous history there, waiting for future researchers to describe, once the repository of data becomes available. And it will. Make no mistake, it will.
Something as important as UFOs would not have escaped the attention of JFK. Throughout the 1950s, American newspapers reported sightings of the “flying saucers” much more seriously than they do today. The topic was major news several times during the decade. We know, furthermore, that at classified levels, the topic was taken very seriously. Why then, would Kennedy not have been interested? More to the point, how would it be possible for him not to have known something about it?
Kennedy was close to a legendary figure in the CIA named Art Lundahl, who had provided briefings to four U.S. presidents, as well as to Congress and the Senate, Lundahl was renowned for his outstanding ability to explain technical concepts clearly to laymen. Interestingly, Lundahl’s main interest appears to have been UFOs, a topic which dominated his personal library. In addition, according to an interview with Lundahl by W. Todd Zechel, a UFO researcher and former employee of the Army Security Agency, Lundhahl briefed Kennedy not only on Soviet missiles in Cuba, but on UFOs. Interesting, for sure.
Then there is the controversial Marilyn Monroe UFO document, which came to light in 1992. This is a single page memo from the CIA dated August 3, 1962, one day before she died, almost certainly because she was murdered. The information on the document came from two monitored telephone conversations: one between the journalist Dorothy Killgallen and her friend Howard Rothberg, and another between Marilyn Monroe and JFK’s brother, the Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The Killgallen-Rothberg conversation revolved around the fact that Monroe was telling secrets to select Hollywood insiders regarding her liaisons with the President, one of which was “a visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space.” The conversation between Monroe and RFK focused on her anger at the Kennedys, the sensitive information she had in her journals, and her willingness to give a “tell all” press conference. The document bears the signature of James Jesus Angleton, head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.
Although the document lacks the kind of provenance that would make it of undisputed authenticity, I am one of the researchers who believes it is genuine. You can see the document and read more about it here.
So it looks like JFK was not only very interested in UFOs, but had connection to the topic in his capacity as President. Whether or not he was killed for reasons having to do with UFOs is not something on which I would care to pronounce a judgment. But I would say that, given the circumstances of his Presidency, it cannot be ruled out.
Like many people who have reviewed the life and Presidency of JFK, it’s my feeling that we lost something very important on that dark day of his assassination. What we lost was the implicit bond of trust that existed between the American people and their government.
The system that had been evolved for a century and a half, which despite all imperfections had moved in fits and starts toward greater power to the people, had made a great transformation during the Second World War. That was when the American republican system government became increasingly swallowed up by a “national security state.” It did not take new boss very long before it decided to remove the President in what became for all intents and purposes a silent coup d’etat.
Thus for good reason are we unable to look back at JFK, at the era of Camelot, and avoid that feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That feeling of loss, and the conviction that his assassination was a criminal action yet to be punished, or even acknowledged.
Yet, I prefer to remember something else about JFK. He was, without question, one of the greatest orators in American history. Much of that was thanks to Ted Sorenson, one of the greatest speechwriters any President was fortunate enough to have. But surely JFK had something to do with it, too.
So I would like to take a moment to re-read a classic statement made by the man. It was from a speech made at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on April 27, 1961. He gave it to the National News Publishers Association. His subject: the dangers of secrecy.
“The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it’s in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.”
If we want to honor the memory of JFK, we can do no better than to live by these words, and to fight what is most assuredly the best fight of our lives. It is the fight to bring truth to this world, to shine light into the darkness, to scatter the forces of evil.
If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.
As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.
This year is the 50th anniversary of that cold day in Washington, D.C. when John F. Kennedy was sworn into office as President of the United States. Currently the Internet is buzzing over the release of certain documents which seem to draw a connection between JFK and UFOs.
What did JFK know about UFOs? Did he do anything about it? With so many motives for so many potential assassins (Cubans, CIA, military, Mafia... even Oswald himself), is it even in the neighborhood of credibility to include the UFO secret-keepers on this list?
There are stories about President Kennedy telling Marilyn Monroe about UFOs in 1962 after, allegedly, receiving detailed briefings from CIA analyst Arthur C. "Art" Lundahl. Kennedy was even said to have seen a UFO in 1963 in Cape Cod. Another story that's gained a lot of traction in UFOlogy is told at The Presidents UFO Website, in an article by Grant Cameron:
A former steward aboard Air Force One Bill Holden, was on board Air Force One with Kennedy flying to Europe in the summer of 1963. A UFO convention being held in Bonn Germany that month prompted Holden to bring up the subject of UFOs with the President.
Holden asked "What do you think about UFOs, Mr. President?" According to the account Kennedy became quite serious, thinking for a moment. "I'd like to tell the public about the UFO situation," he stated, "but my hands are tied."
Later after telling his story, some questions arose as to whether Holden could have experienced the encounter with Kennedy as he claimed. Robert Collins, a researcher put some of Holden’s claims to his high level sources. They claimed that a loadmaster does not have access to the President and does not "start up a conversation" with the President. A check of an old personnel roster of people close to Kennedy was checked and Holden’s name did not appear.
The Holden story is just another example of the difficulty of getting at the true historical record of suppressed contact. UFOs are real, the reasoning goes, so there clearly has been an impact on our historical events. Since it has been covered-up so long and so successfully, it leaves the door open for stories to gain traction that may not check out. It's frustrating but, until there is true Disclosure, it's the world we live in.
Below you'll find some information written about the fictional Dark Skies TV series and how President Kennedy's assassination, and his brother Robert Kennedy, played a pivotal role in the 20 episodes.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of President John Kennedy's inauguration. That date was picked by Shout! Factory to be the release date of Dark Skies because the series begins with its main character, John Loengard, moving to Washington, D.C. in 1961 to be a part of JFK's New Frontier.
The DVD set, just released today, has climbed over the last 24 hours to be #30 on Amazon among the "Movies and TV" category. This is the one that has everything, where Social Network is currently #1. Dark Skies is also #4 in the category of boxed sets of TV dramas. This is a nice moment for all the cast and crew of the series who worked so hard to make the show special.
While driving Amazon numbers is always a good thing, if you order a copy through the Shout! Factory site, you will get it for $22 and you'll get a special lithograph that memorializes the alien looking through the bars of the American flag, an image that was used in the 1996 NBC promotional campaign. Just click on the banner in the top right sidebar of this page.
We know a lot of you are coming to the After Disclosure site for the first time because of the radio interview with George Knapp. Thank you.
Originally launched to support the initial publication of our book, A.D. After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact, the site has grown beyond that initial mission. It's turned into a place where people can share opinions about Disclosure, ET/UFO reality and associated thoughts.
Some of you, in particular, may want to know more about some of the projects brought up on Sunday night's interview.
Dark Skies -- the NBC series that Bryce co-created with Brent V. Friedman in the 90s -- is being released on DVD on January 18. You can read all the collected posts here. Or you can visit this YouTube "Channel" and see some clips for yourself. Including a classic scene where Coast-to-Coast's Art Bell plays CBS President William S. Paley as a member of the Majestic-12 Board of Directors.
On the subject of the Dark Skies DVD release, if you'd like to get a collectible lithograph and get the box set at the lowest price possible, click on the banner ad in the right sidebar and order directly from the company, Shout! Factory. You will also receive the set at just 50% of the list price.
Finally, George and Bryce briefly discussed Majic Men as well. It's the feature film about the Roswell investigation, and you'll find a few extra details here.
When Dark Skies debuted on NBC in the fall of 1996, it was almost 50 years after the infamous Roswell UFO Incident. The report that a UFO had crashed in New Mexico — and the subsequent cover-up of the story — is a watershed moment for the UFO community and those who believe it began a campaign of misinformation by the U.S. government.
They're here. They're hostile.
Set in the 1960s during the administration of President John F. Kennedy, the series revolves around a young idealist named John Loengard (Eric Close). A fresh recruit to the congressional offices on Capitol Hill, Loengard is tasked with auditing certain government programs. This leads Loengard to investigate Project Blue Book, the Air Force study of UFOs.
After interviewing UFO abductees Betty and Barney Hill, Loengard encounters Captain Bach (J.T. Walsh) and the men of Majestic — a top-secret organization that has been fighting a hidden war against aliens since the Roswell Incident in 1947.
Kevin Wohler writes about film and television for FilmGuru.Net. In addition to being a fan of Dark Skies, he created one of the show's first fan websites, Dark Skies Over Kansas. He's still waiting for a second season of the show so he can find out why the Hive created disco.
Together with his girlfriend Kim Sayers (Megan Ward), Loengard eventually turns over evidence of this cover-up — and Majestic — to President Kennedy. Soon after, Kennedy is assassinated, pushing Loengard and Sayers to run from Majestic and find the truth.
To say that Dark Skies was an ambitious undertaking would be a major understatement. Co-creators Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman took 50 years of UFO mythology and wove it into American history.
History as we know it is a lie.
Each episode of Dark Skies not only tackles a new piece of UFO mythology, but also places it in time with an important historical event. Whether the Beatles performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 or the death of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June of that year, Dark Skies ties its stories to the events of that decade.
But our knowledge of history is a lie — as Loengard repeatedly reminds us in the show's opening.
The stories in Dark Skies are not merely set in the '60s, they become an underlying cause to the events of the decade. The UFO mythology takes on a historical tone, and the alien conspiracy is woven into the fabric of history. The turbulent decade becomes a metaphor for the fear, anger and frustration of the UFO movement. And it's not without controversy.
Letter from England: Synchronicity 2011
These are the kinds of things I think about but the last six months have given me a new way to ponder because of two projects that seem to have "right place, right time" written all over them.
A.D. After Disclosure: The People’s Guide to Life After Contact
Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel have some much more radical ideas on the question of UFOs, and the far ranging implications thereof for us on terra firma. Published in 2010, the book is a collaboration between an Oxford trained academic turned UFO researcher and historian, and a producer and writer who created the cult classic show Dark Skies, and former chair of the US Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Dolan has spent the last decade writing and publishing volumes of his UFOs and the National Security State, which meticulously chronicle a history of UFOs and their cover-up that is still being written, in the real world and on the page. A modern archeology of declassified documents and witness testimony, of lives and careers that were made, and even buried because of the UFO, the conceptual rosetta stone to understanding this subterranean world being the historical formation and ascendant hegemony of the National Security State. ‘Like the “missing mass” astronomers are trying to locate in the far reaches of our universe, the UFO phenomena rests on an ocean of dark matter, deep secrets, and forgotton wars fought only in shadows,' writes Jacques Vallee in the foreword to Vol.1 of Richard’s history.
Dark Skies: History is a Lie
Mid-January 2011 saw, for the first time on DVD, the release of Dark Skies. Watching it, the first thing that struck me about it is just how good it really is. It was ahead of its time, and tragically cancelled just as it was beginning so promisingly. No wonder that some people speculated it was cancelled for political, i.e., conspiratorial reasons, owing to its themes, which cover crop circles, cattle mutilation, alien abduction, ancient astronauts, secret space programs, and many historical personalities woven into the script including the Kennedys, with every episode reminding that History Is a Lie, following John Loengard and partner Kimberly Sayers as they go on the run across America from Majestic 12 and the alien threat. Certainly, it is criminal, the treatment the series was handed, given how much work and clearly love was put into it. The show captures some of the optimism, idealism, wonder and terror of the 60’s. The beautiful, glowing cinematography brings to life the ambiance of the times, without gimmick but with plenty of novelty and dark humour, each episode flies by and each year rolls on, passing through the decade, through the heights and the depths, bittersweet and retrospective, archive footage blending seamlessly and kinetically with the story, the sci-fi with the historical.
In the Beginning...
One of my favorite scenes is from the pilot, where Captain Bach of Majestic 12 and his suit-and-tie adorned team of need-to-knows investigating a classic-style crop circle make a fly-over in a military helicopter of the field. It’s just charming. It captures such a quality of the mystery and wonder and even naivety that must have accompanied any such incidents, where now the phenomena proliferates multidimensionally on dorm posters and fridge magnets, but back then was a very new world to be discovered, studied and conquered. You can easily imagine it would have been just like this, back then, to those in the know.
Continue reading "Letter from England: Synchronicity 2011" »
04/30/2011 in Dark Skies, Disclosure Talk, Guest Columns, Readers Comments, Reviews, S.E.T.I., Voices | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
| |