"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.
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.
The 1961 Betty & Barney Hill UFO abduction is being developed as a feature film by Stellar Productions.
The feature film, Shades of Gray, will tell their story based on new information from the book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience by Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden.
All ufologists know, of course, that Betty and Barney are not just the Flintstones' next door neighbors, but the names that belong to the Hills, the married couple who became the ignition point of the modern alien abduction era.
50 years ago, on September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home from Canada and about 100 miles northwest of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when they saw a UFO at close range and then suffered one of the first recorded "missing time" episodes. Later, under hypnosis, they gave strikingly similar and detailed accounts of their kidnapping.
It is a compelling and seminal narrative of the UFO abduction phenomenon. Over the years, it has spawned books, articles, a film and even, in my own instance, an appearance in the Dark Skies series.
I'm pleased to announce, in time for the 50th anniversary, that my production company, Stellar Productions, has optioned the film rights to Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience (New Page Books) by Stanton T. Friedman, MSc. and Kathleen Marden. Friedman, of course, is the leading scientific ufologist of our time and a former nuclear physicist, the man who broke the Roswell case. Marden is Betty Hill's niece and the trustee of her estate. I'm thrilled to be in business with them in bringing this profound and unsettling case to what we all hope will be its largest audience yet.
Their book, published in 2007, reveals a wealth of new information about the Hills’ lives, the UFO encounter and abduction, and the scientific evaluation of the evidence. It has given new life to the Hills’ extraordinary story, and has caused me to get involved.
I will be working on this with friend and producer Don Most, my collaborator on Majic Men, the film script that was just completed about the competition between Stan Friedman and Don Schmitt to prove the Roswell story beyond reasonable doubt during the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s. We'll have an update on that project soon.
This won't be the first time that Betty and Barney's story has been filmed or a book written about them, but it will be the most definitive book/film combo that has come to the screen. A 1966 book, The Interrupted Journey, written by John Fuller, topped the New York Times best-seller list and went on to be the basis of a primetime NBC movie of the week, The UFO Incident, in October 1975.
Captured! -- the book I have under option that will form the basis of the film Shades of Gray -- includes previously unpublished information about the lives of the Hills before and after Barney's death in 1969, their status as celebrities, Betty's experiences as a UFO investigator, and other activities before her death in 2004. Kathleen Marden writes in depth about new details from her discussions with her aunt Betty about the event and her riveting hypnosis sessions about their time onboard the spacecraft. Stanton Friedman, the original investigator of the Roswell incident, reviews and refutes the arguments of those who have attacked the Hill case, as well as the star map that Betty Hill saw inside the craft and later recreated.
That map, by the way, provides a whole new window on where humanity fits in the larger scheme of things by showing two sun-like stars that are 30 times closer to each other than our sun is to the next star over and a cool billion years older than our own sun and less than 40 light years away from us.
This video debuts in association with the May 8, 2012 "Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory" appearance of Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel. It is part of the new C2C use of videos that support appearances of their guests.
This book is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites for shipping and as an e-book. It will be in stores by the end of the month of May throughout the world.
As Stan Lee says on the cover of the new edition: "Zabel and Dolan have brilliantly created a compelling blend of history and informed speculation that makes their exciting world seem like tomorrow's news today. Don't dare miss it."
After a successful run as a Keyhole Publishing hardcover, A.D. AFTER DISCLOSURE: WHEN THE GOVERNMENT FINALLY REVEALS THE TRUTH ABOUT ALIEN CONTACT is being released by Career Press - New Page Books as a trade paperback. It has been revised, edited, updated and, if ordered from Amazon or Barnes & Noble on-line site will ship today. It will be in major bookstores throughout the nation by May 22, including Barnes & Nobles (and is a featured book in their stores this July and August).
With the book getting a major polish, the authors have taken one of their original book videos containing interviews and given it a major production overhaul as well. Please give it a look and tell your friends.
It takes guts to do what Chattanooga, Tennessee reviewer Brian McDonald of UFO Book Review just did. He revised his review of A.D. After Disclosure from a fairly harsh criticism to a more positive outlook after he thought about it for a while. As Brian wrote us, "It's my belief that critical thinking, or the use of systematic thinking is a skill that many people lack today, but is one of the most crucial skills a person can acquire and use."
We won't say much more than that, but will let you look at it and evaluate it for yourself.
Brian stumbled upon his first UFO book by accident while browsing the science section of his local book store and casually flipped through the pages. It piqued his interest enough that he read the book in the following three days. Here's what Brian says on his YouTube page on the subject:
When one stops to ponder the Milky Way Galaxy and the estimated 100-400 billion stars it contains, it is only natural to ask the question, "are we alone?"
If indeed it turns out we are alone in the universe or we discover a cosmos full of life, either result has profound implications for us.
With an estimated 200-500 billion galaxies, and 300 sextillion stars "out there" in the Cosmos, perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask - Are we alone?.
It is the question of our time. Brian is an avid reader, as you can see, who's devoured books on topics that include quantum physics and current events and history, and now includes UFOs. We all welcome Brian, and people like him, to the fray.
More than that, however, what he has done here -- even though it is to our favor and we appreciate it -- is that he has shown the way forward for UFOlogy: an open, thoughtful mind, the ability to take in new information and evaluate it and, sometimes, to make changes.
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...
As regular readers know, we advocate that people who understand UFO/ET reality need to begin speaking out more openly about their beliefs -- not just to fellow believers, and not just in internet rants, but person-to-person. Our friends at Majic1947's YouTube Channel have put together a little animated back-and-forth on the subject of Disclosure, created using the xtranormal software and published to YouTube. Don't take it too seriously, it's just for fun!
Wonder what office these two work at? Majestic? But the point is if the dynamic is going to change, people have to start speaking openly -- at work, at school, in their homes.
If seeing this video causes any of our readers to experiment with xtranormal themselves, please send us your own bits and we'll put them on the site as well.
Everybody's busy these days, right? Getting through an entire book, even that can be a challenge. Enter "The UFO Cover-Up in 10 Minutes."
It's Rich Dolan's latest innovative way to bring the message of Disclosure to new audiences, especially the crowd that is just now getting turned on to ET/UFO reality. The video classroom format is expressionistic, unafraid and even has a sense of humor... at least that was the idea!
If you like this video, we thank you for passing it on to friends, as you have our other videos. Below, you'll find the one that Rich and Bryce completed in support of A.D. After Disclosure.
And finally, here is the trailer for the book project, set to the music, Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song.
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.
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.
Video Re-Review from UFO Book Review
It takes guts to do what Chattanooga, Tennessee reviewer Brian McDonald of UFO Book Review just did. He revised his review of A.D. After Disclosure from a fairly harsh criticism to a more positive outlook after he thought about it for a while. As Brian wrote us, "It's my belief that critical thinking, or the use of systematic thinking is a skill that many people lack today, but is one of the most crucial skills a person can acquire and use."
We won't say much more than that, but will let you look at it and evaluate it for yourself.
Brian stumbled upon his first UFO book by accident while browsing the science section of his local book store and casually flipped through the pages. It piqued his interest enough that he read the book in the following three days. Here's what Brian says on his YouTube page on the subject:
It is the question of our time. Brian is an avid reader, as you can see, who's devoured books on topics that include quantum physics and current events and history, and now includes UFOs. We all welcome Brian, and people like him, to the fray.
More than that, however, what he has done here -- even though it is to our favor and we appreciate it -- is that he has shown the way forward for UFOlogy: an open, thoughtful mind, the ability to take in new information and evaluate it and, sometimes, to make changes.
07/19/2011 in Endorsements, Publicity, Readers Comments, Voices, YouTube | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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