First Person
Close Encounters of the Hollywood Kind
How I searched for the truth about UFOs by writing fiction, and learned the world really is stranger than you imagine.
An Unsettling Quest
For over thirty years now, I’ve been on an unsettling quest to know the difference between what may or may not be true on the UFO front, and to consider how we ought to deal with it. I’ve had the chance to have my creative feelings on the subject expressed in multiple TV series and films, plus a non-fiction book. Mostly, it’s been a blast, with a few moments that were odd and troubling.
Since transparency is everything, particularly in the field of UFOs and UAP reality, I think all of us who hope to influence this Brave New World we’re entering need to be open about our past experiences and relationships with the subject. In that spirit, here’s a short summary of the UFO experiences that shaped my journey.
To this day, I can’t tell you exactly what I think is going on in our skies and oceans because my mind is still not made up since evidence has been so shrouded in secrecy. I have opinions and theories. Don’t we all, these days?
I’ve never even seen anything in the sky that’s truly unidentified beyond a dancing light. I’ve never been abducted. What I have done, though, is talk to hundreds of people who have seen serious extreme strangeness in our world with their own eyes. I’ve also read deeply in the books, documents and reports on this subject, most of which can rattle you to your bones.
Until recently, people who accepted UFOs and UAP as a reality had to live in a world where this understanding was not given even a shred of public dignity. These individuals were forced to live in a completely unfair state of cognitive dissonance. What they knew to be true was treated as false by society at large.
I have lived that reality as many of you have, and deeply appreciate that it is now ending.
The journey to acceptance that things are not as they seem often starts with not thinking about the topic much at all, followed by learning something but being skeptical. Then, after a period of time, the world view is challenged by a friend, a book, a public figure, or even, these days, a news report. And then, there’s a rush to understand, and, eventually, the epiphany.
This is how it went for me.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
I remember, early on, doing research for the production re-write of a film I’d written and was a co-producer on, Official Denial. I was in a mostly dark house, except for my reading light, and my wife and kids were all asleep. It was Los Angeles, and we were having one of those winter storms where it dumps buckets in the middle of the night and clears up in the morning.
The books I had been going through that evening were not woo-woo alien encounter stories. Instead, I was reading about one case after another, each one authentic and mystifying, amplified by qualified witnesses from the military, aviation and law enforcement worlds, including nuclear weapons officers. Plus radar returns and other technological confirmations.
That’s when it hit me.
I’d been reading as a writer trying to devour as much content as possible, to get it into my head, so I could support an awesome movie. But while I’d been doing that, I’d stumbled onto what, at that moment, was an uncomfortable truth that could not be any clearer to me.
At least some of the craft flying around in our skies are from someplace that isn’t here and they’re being flown by someone who isn’t us. Plus, they have an agenda we don’t know.
I put the book down. There I was alone in my dark house wanting nothing more than to wake up my wife or kids or drive over to a friend’s house and scream:
“This is real!”
Oh, my. What to do?
Full Disclosure
This is where it gets weird. By starting out to make up a UFO story, I learned enough about them to believe they’re real, but instead of getting the crap scared out of me and doing something else with my life, I doubled-down on them, something that’s hardly endeared me to many of my “normal” friends or, in particular, my family — but now feels like I’ve placed a bet on a winning horse.
Admittedly, a guy who makes up stuff for a living probably isn’t the world’s greatest source to speak on the issue of what should or shouldn’t pass as UFO reality. I get that.
In my defense, I can only say that I didn’t start out as a Hollywood producer. I received a BA in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Oregon, had a career as a TV reporter and anchorman that included being the on-air correspondent at CNN’s LA bureau. I worked as an investigative reporter for PBS here in Los Angeles. So I wasn’t a complete push-over when it came to this topic. I had been lied to by professionals on dozens of stories. Skepticism was part of my training.
I knew a bit about the UFO topic, not too much, and like a lot of people, Whitley Strieber’s Communion just blew my mind. I was working as a writer/producer in the entertainment industry at the time, had even created a network TV series, and was having a good run at it overall.
I became compelled by a “what if.” What if, I imagined, the government knew that Strieber was telling the truth? What if they wired up his house so the next time these Visitors came for him, it would set off electronic trip-wires, and the military could target the craft and shoot it down?
That led to my first produced film on the UFO topic.
Official Denial
My first solo film credit, Official Denial aired on the (then) Sci-Fi Network in 1993, the first original film the channel had ever produced. It’s about an abductee who is targeted by the government in order to shoot down a UFO during his next abduction. The shock ending was the aliens weren’t from another place but another time. They were us, from a troubled future, looking for a way to set things right again. This project aired over a quarter-of-a-century ago as the time flies.
The government knew UFOs were real and that abductions were happening, but was willing to officially deny their reality at the same time. So the main character was being made to feel he was losing his mind, jeopardizing his marriage and his happiness.
Fun fact: The project was initially known as Progenitor. My agent sent it to L.A. Law as a writing sample and showrunner David Kelley hired me after he read it. It was obviously not about the American legal system but Kelley said it held his attention every page and that was the top priority for his show.
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
As Supervising Producer the first season, I wrote four episodes, including two that introduced UFO elements — “Strange Visitor” and “The Green, Green Glow of Home.” Clark, being an alien, was being pursued by the secret cabal known as Bureau 39. They knew that a UFO had crashed in Kansas, but the extraterrestrial occupant had escaped years before, and they were still looking for him, based on a rumor that he’d gone to Metropolis.
The year after this series, I ran a Fox show called M.A.N.T.I.S. about the first African-American superhero on television. We had a running storyline there about the Men-in-Black. It was there that I met a friend and collaborator and together we took our growing obsession to a completely new level.
Dark Skies
Everything else I’ve done pales in comparison to this one and if people seek to understand my background, this is the one to watch, although it is not streaming but is available on a profoundly well-executed DVD set from Shout Factory.
This NBC series allowed my brilliantly talented co-creator Brent Friedman and me to produce 20 hours of dramatic TV content on the UFO issue over an intense three year period. We learned so much together. He had one awesome real world experience with the UFO cover-up that rings more true with every passing year.
Set in the 1960s, Dark Skies tells the story of idealistic John Loengard who comes to D.C. to be part of JFK’s “New Frontier,” only to find himself recruited into Majestic-12 and made a part of the continuing cover-up of an alien threat. At the end of the pilot episode, President Kennedy is assassinated because he was planning to disclose UFO reality in his second term.
The series wove real historical events together with real ufological events, with characters that ranged from the Beatles to Timothy Leary in pop culture and events like the Watts riots, Freedom Riders and Vietnam. It also included UFO events like the Betty and Barney Hill case, the Socorro landing, Roswell, Area 51, cattle mutilations and crop circles to name just a few. It was Project Blue Book over twenty years before that series would debut on History.
Several real-life brushes with the darker side of ufology happened to Brent and me during this series, including a visit by people who said they were from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and an attempt to kill the series before it even got on the air. As these columns continue, I’ll write more on both of those topics.
Taken
Hired as a Co-Executive Producer, I worked in a terrific writers room breaking the season long episodic arc and, in a couple of spectacularly interesting video conferences, pitching our work to Steven Spielberg. The show went into hiatus over his schedule, and the original room was scattered to the cosmic winds.
Fun Fact: When Taken eventually aired, its pilot episode featured Eric Close who was our lead on Dark Skies and was produced by Steve Beers who was our producer on Dark Skies. It was directed by Tobe Hooper who directed our Dark Skies pilot. And, of course, yours truly worked in that writer’s room and I co-created Dark Skies. Several years earlier, in a meeting with Steven Spielberg about a videogame I wrote for him, he’d told me how much he liked the Dark Skies series. I took it as a glad-handing compliment at the time, the kind Hollywood is famous for but, in retrospect, it now seems he was telling the unvarnished truth.
After Disclosure
This speculative non-fiction book focused solely on the changes society will face when the reality of this Phenomenon is globally accepted and acknowledged by official sources. Co-written with the world’s greatest UFO historian Richard Dolan, the “what if” here seems to be more relevant today than the day we wrote it.
The book now celebrates its tenth anniversary. Reading it over today, I’m proud that Rich and I got much more right than wrong. It’s still a good introduction to what may be ahead for us.
These days Jackie Zabel and I (through our Stellar Productions) are in the market with several UFO themed projects based on books and life rights. The books include Captured by Kathleen Marden & Stanton Friedman, Witness to Roswell by Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, Top Secret/Majic by Stanton Friedman, and, of course, A.D. After Disclosure. I’ve had three incredible creative partners in this world: Brent Friedman, Richard Dolan and now Jackie Zabel.
A Feedback Loop Like No Other
Over time, in the creative feedback loop of researching an idea, selling it into development and production, and bringing it to audiences, I’ve been afforded an extraordinary opportunity to spend some time with some extraordinary people.
Example. I’ve worked with Stan Lee, Steven Spielberg and Carl Sagan, and had the chance to talk about UFOs with all of them. I’ve also been able to meet and discuss the issue with people like Buzz Aldrin, Dan Aykroyd, Whitley Strieber, Stanton Friedman, and so many others.
Imagine how compelling it’s been to hear them, in their own words, talk about their beliefs about a subject like this. It’s been a revelation.
Over the years, I’ve filled notebooks and hard drives looking into the whole issue. I’ve spent days staring at cork boards that look like set dec from A Beautiful Mind. I’ve spent nights letting my thoughts float before I go to sleep, trying to reconcile matters that seem not to fit.
It’s left me wanting to bear witness as a writer — someone who has experienced something mystifying, compelling and shocking, and needs to put that journey down in words.
In the future, as people try to write about the final days of UFO secrecy, and the beginning of openness, all of this, what we’re feeling, doing and thinking now, will be part of the story.
More to come…
Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer Bryce Zabel and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.
