"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?
Friends and supporters have been contacting us, many with congratulations on how our “Dark Skies” has been made into a new film, starring Keri Russell, to be released by Dimension Films next February. While it sounds like a dream, we tell them, it’s actually a nightmare.
To set the record straight, we’re Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman, the two writer/producers who created the NBC series called “Dark Skies.” It was produced by Columbia TV (now Sony) and aired in 1996 and 1997. We wrote the pilot, multiple episodes and produced all twenty hours that were aired in primetime on Saturday nights.
Our original “Dark Skies” introduced viewers to an alien invasion that featured a continuing focus on the mysterious and terrifying abduction phenomenon. So our well-intentioned friends can be forgiven if they hear about the Dimension Films version that focuses on an alien abduction and assume we had something to do with it. While that is decidedly not the case, our definitive version may have inspired it.
Our “Dark Skies” had been in the news even before Dimension decided to use our title for their film. Our series was given a world-wide release on DVD in 2011 from both Shout Factory (US) and Medium Rare Entertainment (UK). In dozens of reviews, the work received critical praise as a classic that has stood the test of time in the sci-fi and UFO media. It also spawned new interest in the reboot of our series, something that we were talking to Sony TV about when the news from Dimension Films broke.
Our "Dark Skies" has established itself in the minds of a significant number of science fiction fans as a gripping piece of conspiracy drama set in the world of UFOs and abductions. It anchored NBC's Saturday night "Thrillogy" concept in the 1996 season premiere and starred Eric Close ("Nashville") and the late film character actor J.T. Walsh (“Sling Blade”). Its main title design won the Emmy award and its pilot screenplay received a Writers Guild nomination. The Syfy Channel aired the entire series multiple times. Since 2010 there's been a Facebook page where thousands of fans from many different countries push Sony for a TV revival.
And yet here we are. A film in the same genre as our work is being promoted right now using the same exact title as our work. Most Hollywood businesses legitimately consider creative and artistic interests and rights in these cases. This one seems to have slipped through the cracks of acceptability.
Supporters of the creative rights of writers should ask Dimension Films to let their film stand on its own merits and call it by a different title. "Dark Skies" is taken.
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.
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.
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.
Well, so much for Obama as the "Disclosure President." Don't hold your breath.
Last night at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, the President of the United States was having a lot of fun at Donald Trump's well-deserved expense. Yet when he cast the "birther" controversy as a nutty conspiracy theory, he also placed it in the company of whether we faked the moon landing, where are Biggie and Tupac, and what really happened at Roswell. Each played as big laugh lines.
These people ought to know better, of course, but they don't.
You can watch for yourself in this video, it's about ten minutes in:
So, there you have it. Another example that our nation's politicians do not understand the essential reality of the UFO/ET situation and neither do the reporters who hold those elite positions. To them, it's truly just a laughing matter.
“Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately but no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?" ~ President Barack Obama, White House Correspondent's Dinner, April 2011
This would be funny in itself except that, as we know, it's not a laughing matter. Sigh...
For what it's worth, the UFO field is buzzing about time travel, anticipating that it is the Next Big Thing in this unfolding story.
At the recent IUFOC in Phoenix, for example, Bentwaters witness James Penniston re-told the story about how in September 1994 he allowed himself to be hypnotized to help him recall what happened in Rendlesham forest and what it might mean. In the session, Penniston stated that he received telepathic communication from a landed craft in the forest and that the craft’s occupants had come from Earth’s future to gather genetic material to help them survive.
When I heard this, I knew that sounded more than a little familiar to me. Then I saw a post today from UFO skeptic Ian Ridpath who offered the explanation that Penniston may have gotten the idea from a movie he'd seen that claimed the same thing and aired just ten months before his hypnosis.
I wrote that movie.
In November 1993,the first original film for the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) was produced from my screenplay, Official Denial. Although it was about the UFO cover-up and was the first piece I wrote that invoked Majestic-12, it contained a twist ending in which the question turned out to be not where the aliens were from, but when they were from. The Others were not alien after all: they were ourselves. Having bred diversity from their DNA in order to survive an environmental collapse, they had returned backward in time to save us, and thus to save themselves. The abduction of certain people was part of a protocol to follow specific bloodlines that were important in DNA development and ancestry. Later, I followed that "Bloodlines" theory up in Dark Skies as well, as that was the title of our final episode.
For those who aren't familiar with him, James Penniston was an Air Force Staff Sergeant at a joint U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force base at Bentwaters in the UK. On December 26, 1980, he was sent to investigate strange lights in the forest. What he and others found was a triangular craft that he examined at close range and for an extended period. This has become one of the best documented UFO sightings in history, referred to as the Rendlesham Forest Incident.
My film was released on video in May 1994, only a few months before Penniston’s hypnosis. As Ridpath interprets it, "The similarities between the film and Penniston’s story are striking. Of course, we have no evidence that Penniston actually saw this film, so it could simply be coincidence."
The world has turned upside down. What seemed unthinkable a mere month ago has now become a major political force throughout the world.
Hosni Mubarak, the autocratic head of Egypt, a man who had ruled his country for thirty years under a “State of Emergency,” who had suspended the Egyptian constitution, who had suspended the most basic human rights, who ran an irredeemably corrupt regime, who enriched himself and his family to the tune of more than $70 billion from the backs of the Egyptian people, has fled the country.
It took just two weeks of massive public demonstrations to get rid of him.
The events in Egypt – and before them, Tunisia – are electrifying for many reasons. In the first place, there hasn’t been a real popular uprising in the Arab world against their perennially autocratic rulers in most people’s living memory. There have been Islamicist movements, yes, and there have been many government-sponsored public demonstrations regarding the plight of the Palestinian people. Yet, for year after year, generation upon generation, Arab people continued to suffer at the hands of their own governments.
A populist venting of the people hasn’t occurred since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism of the 1950s and 1960s. And even those protests pale in force and depth of feeling to those of today.
For what we are seeing now is something Nasser never encouraged: a true democratic spirit, a true voice of the people. Not an anti-foreign, anti-imperialist populism, but a genuine populism that has identified the corruption and evil of one’s own government, and which seeks to remove the tumor.
Across the Arab world, people are euphoric. Everything is up for grabs. Right now, demonstrations are occurring in Algeria, Yemen, and Jordan. Look for them to expand in Palestine and Syria.
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.
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.
Forty years ago, in his game changing book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler said that we were entering a super-industrial society where people didn't just have a single career but they had "serial careers." I certainly have.
I started out as a journalist and morphed into a dramatic screenwriter. This means that sometimes I've been paid to get the facts and sometimes I've been paid to make things up. When you throw UFOs into the mix, it can get a little complicated, particularly if you cross between the worlds.
This site, as you know, is dedicated to the non-fiction book I've co-written with Richard M. Dolan -- A.D. After Disclosure. In its 321 pages, we try very hard to adhere to historical research and journalistic standards. There is nothing I would ever want to do that would undermine its truth and credibility.
At the same time the book has hit the market, however, by a sheer coincidence of the calendar, there is viral campaign being waged on behalf of the DVD release of the fictional NBC sci-fi TV series I co-created with Brent V. Friedman -- Dark Skies -- that raises its own issues about the line between fact and fiction.
Worlds Collide
I'm a trained journalist with a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Oregon. I came to Los Angeles as a CNN correspondent, worked as an investigative reporter for PBS, and a magazine producer for ABC. I'm also a dramatist who has worked on a dozen hour-long TV series and created five of them, and had some films produced. A thread from my journalistic days to my entertainment days has been space science and UFOs -- from interviewing Carl Sagan live for KCET during the Voyager fly-by of Saturn to working with Steven Spielberg during the development of his abduction minseries Taken.
Often these two distinct backgrounds of journalism and drama support and deepen the other, one hand washing the other. For example, journalism experience increases your ability to research, channel authentic dialogue, hit deadlines and write succinctly. Dramatic writing improves journalistic efforts by its emphasis on understanding emotion and character.
Dark Skies: Mirrors Within Mirrors
In the 90s, I was the co-creator/executive producer for 20 hours of Dark Skies episodes and, considering the series arc dealt with JFK being assassinated because he was going to disclose the truth about UFOs, it was pretty edgy drama. The series incorporated other real characters from Howard Hughes to John Lennon, and UFO storylines from Roswell to Socorro to Betty and Barney Hill. The idea was to co-mingle real people and historical events into a fictional arc that was based to some degree on non-fiction UFO reality.
For the network pitches, Brent Friedman and I produced a mock "briefing book" as well as a letter from a man named John Loengard, who claimed to be a Majestic agent in the 1960s and who asked us to present the truth as a fictional TV series in order to protect the lives of the innocent. It was a good pitch. We got two networks to offer to buy the series on the first day.
Flash forward to 2010. Shout Factory is promoting the January 18, 2011 release of their outstanding DVD set that I've helped them prepare as a consultant. In our discussions, we obviously talked about the source material. Truth being presented as fiction. Fiction entertwined with truth. Real people mixed with the fictional (supposedly) characters of the series. The Loengard Letter. The actual nature of the world of disinformation. The background on Majestic-12, an organization we treat as real in the series, but which UFOlogists are bitterly divided about. That kind of briefing.
It is hardly surprising that this creative mix would yield a promotional effort that went beyond your basic buy a few ads and send out a press release tradition. It did.
First, there was this intercepted memo. It was discussed on the website TV Shows on DVD. Based on what the redacted memo says, it was no accident that it took 13 years to bring the series out on DVD, and the powers-that-be (as opposed to the fans) were none too happy that it was finally happening.
Then, last month, this apparently wiretapped phone conversation appeared on YouTube. I won't attempt to describe it. You should listen for yourself.
My fellow series creator, Brent Friedman, and I think that the above audio accurately reflects the same issues that we built the series on -- paranoia, invasion of privacy, secret organizations, behind-the-scenes manipulation of events, disinformation, claims of inside access, etc. We've never claimed that it's all true. It's just a TV series that mixes fact-and-fiction. That's the Dark Skies way of characterizing the long-standing UFO cover-up: levels within levels, mirrors within mirrors, fictitious facts and factual fictions.
But what we do think it provides for people like yourself who are reading this is a series that respects the overall truth that something real and extraordinary is happening in the world of contact, that it has been suppressed and that, as the series has always said, history is a lie.
Which brings me to...
A.D. After Disclosure: Our Version of Future Shock
The extenuating circumstance here is my new favorite passion, A.D. After Disclosure which my co-author Richard Dolan and I intended to be a book that came from the same DNA as Future Shock. Namely, we wanted it to take a hard look at where we were, where we've been, and then project -- carefully -- to where we are probably going.
We obviously think it is a clear piece of non-fiction about the stone-cold reality surrounding UFO/ET activity. We mean it to be taken very seriously. There are no games being played here. If you want to know what we really think, this book trailer, issued in support of the project, is direct and to-the-point.
My bottom line is that I hope lots of people, whether or not they saw the viral documents and video for Dark Skies, will still buy or rent the DVD set and enjoy the episodes in their pristine glory as well as the bonus features. I hope some of those same fans, because they see my work there, will also sample A.D. After Disclosure, and vice-versa. They are simply two very different projects that have allowed me to express my views on this complicated and difficult topic.
Still, at the end of the day, Dark Skies was a TV series, designed to entertain and hold an audience. A.D. After Disclosure is a serious book, an effort to bring truth and clarity to the upcoming debate about Disclosure. That's about as clear as I can state the facts.
Why is making this distinction so important?
I've just closed a development deal to write the screenplay for Majic Men, a project about the research that led to the truth about what happened at Roswell. It is based on two books, Witness to Roswell and Top Secret/Majic, as well as the life stories of Donald Schmitt and Stanton Friedman.
If my producing partner Don Most and I are successful at getting it made, Majic Men is going to be a film that is based on a true story. It may take some dramatic license here and there, compress some characters, and condense some time frames, but it is true, not made-up. I want everyone who reads the screenplay I'm writing and who will hopefully see it later when it is filmed to understand that I know the difference.
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.
