Dark Skies at 25

‘History as We Know It is a Lie’

A quarter-century after Dark Skies first aired, NBC’s landmark alternate history television series still has a lot to say about where ufology is today. Can we find our future by looking in the past?

These days ufological circles are on fire with debate about the “threat narrative” and the idea that the government continues to maintain unrelenting secrecy about the UFO topic even while feigning transparency with a handful of declassified videos and a too short government report.

Let’s roll the calendar back 25 years to a TV series that reflected those feelings of secrecy and threat in its core DNA from its first episode to its last — the one-hour sci-fi drama, Dark Skies.

1996 Was a Very Good Year

1996 was an intriguing year for ufology and the search for extraterrestrial life. NASA announced preliminary findings related to the Martian meteorite ALH84001 amidst fanfare and controversy. Meanwhile, the US Air Force prepared to release The Roswell Report: Case Closed as the blockbuster film Independence Day brought Area 51 and Roswell further into the public consciousness at cinemas worldwide.

And on NBC that fall, on September 21st, a new television series tapped into the ufological zeitgeist, telling viewers that not only had aliens arrived at Roswell, but that they had been influencing our world ever since. To the point that “history as we know it is a lie.”

That series was Dark Skies, a show that, even as it turns twenty-five this month, remains one of pop culture’s most unique takes on the questions of ufology and alien visitation. Now a cult hit, the series did so with an Emmy award-winning title sequence that summed up its premise neatly for viewers. Take a minute and bask in its potent mix of nostalgic paranoia.

“My name is John Loengard. I’m recording this because we might not live through the night. They’re here, they’re hostile and powerful people don’t want you to know. History as we know it is a lie…”

An Alternate History of the 1960s

Covering the years between 1960 and 1967, Dark Skies combined American history, period setting, and UFO lore. In the series, viewers learned that following the events at Roswell in 1947, a shadowy US government agency called Majestic began to fight a covert war with an extraterrestrial intelligence called the Hive, hellbent on covertly taking the Earth from humanity.

As a result of that conflict, a wide-ranging series of events ranging from the 1960 U-2 incident to the JFK assassination to the Beatles’ first US TV appearance and beyond have all tied into that shadowy conflict, as have people as wide-ranging as Robert Kennedy, Jim Morrison, and Howard Hughes. It created an alternate history of the recent past, tweaking events and adding a ufological subtext to events large and small, the underlying facts unchanged, but with a different driving force behind them.

Ufology Baked into its DNA

Unsurprisingly, then, Dark Skies engaged numerous notable elements from ufology as part of its storytelling. Familiar aspects and events such as Roswell, crop circles, cattle mutilations, abductions, and the grays all come into play, with the series making its particular twists on them. Roswell, as noted above, became the starting gun for the secret war at the heart of the series.

The show made a similar twist on the grays, not content with featuring them for their familiarity, making them hosts for the ganglion-like creatures known as the Hive. It is the Hive that seeks to take over humanity as it once took over the grays. Dark Skies reveals within a short time that the Hive has been implanting the ganglions in people for some time, ranging from average citizens to members of Congress and ultimately within Majestic itself.

As references in the series to everyone and everything from Jesse Marcel to the Socorro landing and Project Blue Book will attest, Dark Skies didn’t merely sprinkle in passing mentions to ufology. It made them the tectonic plates upon which the entire series moved. Dark Skies beat a certain TV series set in the Sixties to the air by a full decade, but the comparison does paint a valid picture.

Mad Men for the Close Encounters Set

Dark Skies shows us these events through the eyes of John Loengard (played by Eric Close), who begins as an idealistic congressional staffer and ends up a soldier on the conflict’s front lines alongside his girlfriend and White House staffer Kim Sayers (played by Megan Ward). The two of them together sell the reality of the series as two ordinary young people caught up in extraordinary events that both bring them together and threaten ultimately to tear them apart.

Leading Majestic is Captain Frank Bach, played by the late character actor J.T. Walsh, the career naval officer determined to fight the secret war against the Hive his way and at any cost. Walsh sells the reality of events by bringing a sense of authority to both Majestic and the character of Bach. Through them and a supporting cast including Conor O’Farrell as Bach’s right-hand man Lt. Commander Phil Albino and Jeri Ryan’s Majestic agent Juliet in later episodes, alongside real-life figures such as James F. Kelly as Robert Kennedy or Gary Lockwood as Chief Justice Earl Warren and Joe Urla as Carl Sagan, viewers were given a window into the shadowy conflict driving this alternate history.

The period setting of the 1960s likewise was a large part of Dark Skies’ DNA. Alongside the impressive sets for Majestic’s headquarters with excellent period details and 1960s technology, the series featured first-rate costumes and recreations of period settings. Something which gave the series the range to go from the halls of power in Washington to NASA’s launch site at Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, and across much of the United States. All of these allowed its main characters the chance to engage with events anyone familiar with the period would recognize, including Francis Gary Powers U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union to the Cuban missile crisis, the Civil Rights movement, the space race, the 1965 Northeast blackout, and much more. All the while following the trajectory of the decade from the hopes of Camelot to the cynicism of Vietnam.

A Complete Masterplan for World Domination

Where the series was ahead of its time was in its storytelling choices. Namely, that Dark Skies not only incorporated all of the elements aforementioned, but it also did so within what 21st-century viewers would recognize as long-form storytelling. Indeed, its 1996–97 season was merely the first salvo of a five-season arc, one that would incorporate everything from Watergate and Reagan’s “Star Wars” to the rise of the internet as part of the shadowy war against the Hive. A war in which Majestic would be complimented, if not supplanted, by a grassroots resistance movement of people outside that agency in the know, taking the series title as their name. It was a plan that wasn’t to reach fruition. Scheduled for an early primetime slot on Saturday nights as part of NBC’s Thrillogy programming block, Dark Skies faced frequent preempting. The series rarely managed to run for more than a couple of weeks consecutively before being pulled and then starting up episodes again weeks later. In an era before DVRs and the ability to binge-watch shows, Dark Skies didn’t manage to find the audience it either needed or deserved. The series aired its final episode on May 31, 1997, seemingly destined to fade away.

A Legacy Imitated

Dark Skies lingered, however. Though its run on NBC might have ended, it found a new home of sorts in re-runs on the Sci-Fi Channel where it aired during the daytime Inhuman Land slot as part of the ‘S.C.I.F.I. Worlds’ marathons that ran between June 2000 and December 2001. Those airings introduced the series to an audience that had previously been marginally aware of the series during its original run. More unexpectedly, ideas from the program began to feed their way into the UFO world, once a set of ‘new’ leaked Majestic documents surfaced, linking the supposed agency to the JFK assassination. The series borne out of UFO lore had now begun to cross-pollinate with it. Not only that, its influence resonates across pop culture takes on ufology. The Emmy winning miniseries Taken from 2002 featured a sweeping, decades-long narrative that effectively began at Roswell and continued into the 21st-century (and featured Eric Close among its ensemble cast, and used Dark Skies pilot director Tobe Hooper to direct its pilot). Later on, The Event, another single-season NBC program from 2010, involved a group of aliens hiding amid the American people since the 1940s, with its pilot episode involving an assassination attempt on a sitting President. History’s 2019–20 series Project Blue Book, with its 1950s setting and tie-ins to historical cases and featuring JFK (though often engaging in vast fictionalizations in the name of drama), offered up echoes of Dark Skies. Even its very title has resurfaced, with the release in 2013 of an alien abduction horror film of the same name, causing some confusion among fans of the original series. Even so, Dark Skies remains a unique piece of work. Its combination of recent American history with the blossoming field of ufology and an ongoing, long-form narrative remains unmatched even after a quarter-century. Like the shadowy conflict it portrayed, Dark Skies has lingered in the background for decades. With the anniversary of its first episode airing being later this month, now is the time to discover a series that ended before its time and still cries out for a deserving audience today.

Matthew Kresal is a writer, critic, and podcaster. His book-length analysis of Dark Skies was published by Obverse Books in 2020. His Cold War alternate history thriller, Our Man on the Hill, was published in 2021 by Sea Lion Press.

Dark Skies is only available as a four disc DVD set, and not on streaming services. The DVDs contain all episodes, a full-length documentary, features, alternative edits and Easter eggs, produced by Shout Factory and available on their site. Also available on Amazon.

Trail of the Saucers, published by Dark Skies co-creator Bryce Zabel and co-edited with David Bates, focuses on UFO/UAP news, history, culture, and analysis. Here are a few related articles from our library —