Dark Skies and UFOs with Bryce Zabel

Show Transcript

I don't know if this was silly but I built a crop circle mostly because I wanted to see if a crop circle could literally be built by human beings in a short period of time with us today is Mr Bryce Sable Bryce thank you so much for being on the show today I gotta ask how are you H I'm I'm good I will tell you I'm having a knee replacement in a week in a month so I'm not happy about that I was training for a 10K here in my hometown and um blew out a knee so other that's bad but otherwise I'm I'm very good things are exciting uh there's news being made all the time and I'm right in the thick of it so I enjoy it my life is good I I like how you balanced the optimism with the detrimental news you know what like that's a skill that not many people have well you know this is what life presents you and you sort of get to a place where you go well there's virtually nothing I can do about this I mean I've had people look I mean also science is science so these days people The Sciences they look at an MRI of your body part and go oh well looks like you're going to have to do this and what are you gonna argue with them and say uh you know in my experience interpreting MRIs doctor I believe you know you're not gonna do that so you know you just you you go with the flow and actually the truth is um I know I'm going to be laid up for a couple of months and I'm looking forward to watching a lot of movies about aliens because um that'll give me a chance to you know watch for the first time or a second time most of them and I am writing a book about that area right now so that'll be good it'll be a research break I like it there's your there's your spin for optimism yeah there you go yeah and very quickly because we have a lot to cover in a short period of time before we get into our questions can you just give people a a background on who you are because between you and me you have a very extensive background who are you who's who's Bryce Sable you know I have a lot of credits but I have so many credits that my agents for years have been saying don't put all your credits out there people think you're old well I am old I guess but I have a lot of credits here's what I would say professionally my first career was as a TV journalist I started in Oregon as an anchor and a reporter then I went to Arizona doing the same and then the big break for me was I got hired to be the first um on camera on air uh CNN correspondent here in Los Angeles which was you know pretty pretty wild and pretty fun nobody had ever seen CNN before so it was kind of interesting to do that and I I enjoyed it and um I then I became an investigative TV reporter for a PBS station so all of that is kind of world one for me and it was fascinating because I always say it teaches you a lot about human nature because most of the time as a reporter when you're interviewing someone it's quite commonly the worst day of their life or the best day of their life and it's kind of interesting to see those highs and sort of you know in it what people are all about from that and I've enjoyed that um my second career was in Hollywood uh you know making television shows and movies still doing that and sort of a call back to my past has been working uh more openly on the TV to on the UFO topic with the need to know podcast with my partner on that Ross colart and um I've I've had a lot of chance to be involved in UFOs over the years there's a lot of details in that but but in essence that's who I am I'm a guy that has started in news has a foot right now in television and film and podcasting and um and I I guess I'm a I guess I'm what they call a subject matter expert these days but you know what I'd have to say to you I was just looking at your YouTube channel Christina all the topics that you have talked about and I thought you know I'm not sure I'm an expert on any of this stuff half of it you know I might be qualified to ask the questions but I certainly wouldn't be qualified to answer all of them so my hat is off to you you know commendations girl I mean that's a lot of quality work and and well done oh thank you like that's all I can say but like I'm blushing if I wasn't wearing Foundation my face would be the color of a tomato and maybe the shape as well but something that I'd like to talk to you about because your background really is in news and in media you've created TV shows you've been a part of movies and so one thing that I'd love to talk to you about is obviously the Twilight Zone I grew up being a Twilight Zone fanatic that's what really got me into the topic of aliens and you ifos at a very young age and in your childhood you were a big Rod sirling fan but out of all the people all the role models all the storytellers why was he your goto as an idol and inspiration you know what's so interesting about the Twilight Zone it works so well there have been four versions of it and the only one that really works across the board of all of them and and these are very talented qualified people that have tried to reboot it um the first one is the best you know listen here's what I remember I was told you can't stay up that late and you can't watch the Twilight Zone of course so I would sneak down the stairs when it was on and sort of look over the banister and see what was going on and it was it was crazy um and I will say I did kind of have a fixation about Rod sirling I remember covering a Twilight Zone retrospective for ABC U Back In I think it was the 80s and I I did it on the Twilight Zone just so I could get my hands on all the Twilight Zone episodes and hire a rod sirling impersonator to do it and that was so much fun but I will say this one of my favorite credits favorite credits of all of all is that I when I was the TV Academy CEO I was the first writer to be elected to that position since Rod Serling and what honor you know it's I don't know if it's an honor or a quirk of Fate I you know but it just makes me feel good because first of all um the guy was a writer at a time when they didn't always want writers to expound uh you know on tough issues like Rod Sterling did through the the prism of of Science Fiction and he did it anyway he figured out how to do it a brilliant writer he died too soon um obviously um but but what I loved about the Twilight Zone and still do and I think is maybe one of the reasons the reboots haven't quite been as successful is that he was the guy that gave us those twist endings so you know no matter what you thought was going on it pivoted and did something else at the end and I just loved that I thought it was creative I thought it was wonderful and you know there have been lots of people that have competed with the Twilight Zone over the years the OB starting with the outer limits going forward to a number of a number of shows even uh Black Mirror right now is kind of a Twilight Zone esque kind of show but what was great about it is the audience wasn't ready for it you know you'd be ready for it right now you know I know you like it too but when you sit down and watch you know what amounts to a 22-minute black and white uh show it's not it doesn't surprise us anymore we Delight in it but we're not surprised by it like we were and I just remember uh hearing about what my parents thought about it and you know I I think my dad was an old kudan and he was like well I don't really know about that but my mom was like oh my it was incredible and then they you know and I thought well that's that's power you know this guy Rod sirling um was able to write something that shocked people get it on the air you know and he also is for one other thing he smoked like a crazy man on the air back when you could still smoke on the air and that's what you know that black suit with the skinny tie he kind of looked like a man in Black and I'd say a good 50% of The Twilight Zone episodes do deal with aliens so it you know it was sort of half science fiction and half fantasy if you will but great show great freaking show I could watch it if you said come on over right now we're going to start a Twilight Zone Marathon we won't be done till Sunday afternoon uh I'd probably say yes because uh well you're a nice person but also I'd say yes because who doesn't want to watch the Twilight Zone again it's fantastic exactly and that show laid an incredible foundation for so many TV shows and movies to attempted follow up but that's leading into the next question is what is your take on recent alien themed movies and shows that have come out and if you could provide any potential examples on that bigger question I'm sure we can go into this at more depth is the relationship between Hollywood and uh the UFO issue and perhaps the cover up and I've been really deeply involved in that all my career which is why I'm writing this book The book's name you can't buy it right now so I'm not really promoting it but the the book I'm working on is called strange visitors U uh Close Encounters of the Hollywood kind so I I'm going to try to tie in the various things that have happened to me during my career working with UFO movies and all that with all the people I've talked about it uh with and and also just all the movies have been made and and the TV shows and now podcasts and what do they all account to like is the media involved in disclosure in soft disclosure and honestly as I think about it I think it's actually the opposite um I think the media is complicit in opposing disclosure because they cover the legitimate story so poorly because they've bought Whole Hog into the um denial and ridicule aspect of sort of the cover of what's behind the cover up and so the media uh if you're talking journalistic media okay the journalistic media isn't out there to break the disclosure story because if they were after 77 years since Roswell they would have already broken it they have no inclination to break it in fact uh when the report came out uh last month about all the reports that had been done by the Govern government about UFOs and they concluded nothing to see here and you know it's all uh there's no uh plan that it's extraterrestrial or whatever you know I I think people well all I know is what happened in the media is the headlines across all mainstream media was UFO issue seems to be solved there's nothing there which struck me as so bizarre that the government which has covered it up for all these years gets to put out a a report card on themselves and conclude they've done good job I I just you know I I didn't buy that but the essence of your question though is I do not think that the government um needs the media to put aliens out there into the Zeitgeist because we do it anyway I mean writers like myself screenwriters we love to write about aliens we love us a good ET story and we also know that they're good for conflict because then you can have the bad guy if you will the aliens come and maybe they blow up the White House or whatever but there's conflict which is what every writer has beat into them you have to have conflict and I I don't think we have that now having said all that that I am a skeptic about an overarching policy to use the media that the media is complicit in and the fact that I don't see that particularly at this point because it's unnecessary I will say this there have been many instances throughout the the years going back to 1950 with a movie called The Flying Saucer where uh the military uh or the intelligence agencies have been involved in you know giving ad you know advice or whatever uh to filmmakers and I and I I know this will come up anyway so I might as well say it during the production of Dark Skies uh back in the90s I was approached liter and I'm not going to give the det details here again because I don't want to use up our entire program so the short version I was approached in this same house where I live now out there um at my barbecue at the premier party for Dark Skies so there were 200 people at my house and in my backyard all the crew uh the network people from NBC the studio people from columia TV um casting crew and and Friends of the show all of us were there and I knew all of them because I was the showrunner so we all gave ourselves these little magic badges m a m ajic for magestic 12 that were part of the dark sky show Dark Skies took place at Majestic 12 that was our you know home home base environment so everybody had one of these and then one of The Producers comes up and says Bryce you got to go talk to this guy you gotta see this guy so I go over to where this guy is standing at my barbecue he's about 30 years old he's got a blue blazer on and kind of you know not dissimilar from what I've got on but he doesn't have a badge and I've never seen him before and long story short he ends up saying that he um and his people have seen our show and they really like it they think it's good but they want to give us some assistance to help get things right and it this guy claimed that he was from oi the Office of Naval intelligence and they were impressed because the dark sky main characters at Majestic 12 were Navy not Air Force and they thought that was pretty good and um things happened after that which I'm I'm finally taking the time after all these years later to review what I think happened because I know people's memories aren't great you know sometimes we rewrite our own histories right everybody does it I'm not pointing fingers to anybody we all do it you know because you tell your story enough times so I'm calling up everybody who participated in that Sky's contact moment um and again not contact with aliens but contact with uh the the actual um coverup possibly and um and asking them what they remember about it and it's it's revealing there's a lot more details to it that that I'd forgotten and um just uh you know just to you know give you a a little bit more of a tease I threw the guy out of my house that night because I was busy you know throwing a party and I said I don't know you you have to leave and he came back with his supposed boss to the Dark Skies offices a week later and so-called briefed me and my partner Brent fredman for a couple of hours in our conference room um and and then suggested a third meeting at a rather unconventional place and that's about all I want to say right now about that it was just a powerful moment where these guys came in and said they'd seen the show and just so everyone can appreciate that it's not like a television show before it airs you know is kept in a vault you know at Fort Knox to be taken out preciously but it is hard to get hold of them you know particularly back in those days it wasn't like somehow it got the digital got leaked or whatever um you know there were people who had seen it but it hadn't aired yet and so when the guy said he'd seen it I said to him I was just being a wise ass right I just said oh yeah you're so smart well what happens after the crop circle scene and the guy looks at me without missing a beat and goes oh well then that's where they go back to Majestic 12 and they do that operation on the gangli and blah which was exactly what happened so they had seen it and it hadn't aired yet so you know a lot of you know my concern over the years has been was somebody just goofing on me but the more research I've done into it leads me to believe that it probably was something close to what it looked like you know that that it wasn't a goof on me or my partner or the show that's kind of what happened and that's always made me appreciate the inter relationship potentially between uh Studios networks UFOs and it goes you know it includes people like Steven Spielberg and and and many others um be surprised if it's going on a lot right now because I just don't see it I just don't think you need it if you want to know anything anymore you watch your podast and 10 other podcasts and you read 50 books that you can get at on Amazon delivered the next day so you know there aren't writers who are starving for inside information to the extent that it exists they can go get it after that second meeting that you had with that unknown person did you ever consider taking him up on the offer of getting information from him to enhance your show no uh we we Brent and I talked at length about it we were concerned about it um but again remember at the time I'm trying to produce 22 hours of television and that's that's hard it's hard to produce 22 bad hours of TV right but 22 great hours is really a struggle and you know from my point of view at that time looking at it only as a producer I was thinking you know NBC or Columbia TV are not the least bit interested where I get stories from right they just want it to work they want an audience to follow it and we already laid out the season uh Christina so there there wasn't a lot of you know what am I going to do stop the production some guys I've never met before have just walked into the office and they've got things to say and we have to rewrite everything I just couldn't see doing that and um they did propose a third um and final meeting that I did not go to um because I felt it was potentially threatening um to my safety and um you know at the time I was U you know recently Married with Children and I just said I got kids I'm not I'm not doing that and so I never saw these guys again building on that in the last 30 years how do you think television media has affected the Public's mentality on UFOs and aliens well I I I I guess the you know you can go on at length and talk about all the different iterations but don't think it's new to our generation or uh your generation or anybody's generation this stuff has been going on frankly people have been talking about aliens and flying saucers and abductions and all that stuff going back to magazines from the you know the 20s and 30s right so um I I I do think though that um it is kind of a self-reinforcing thing uh writers may see something in the in the journalism about this and that gets in their head and then they want they do what writers want to do they want to express themselves so they'll write about it but then there are other people who see the show business aspect of it and they go oh that's really interesting um and it's only being presented as a movie but then now they apply it as if it's happening in the real world so there is this sort of looping going on and one of the hardest things to do if you're just trying to report straight up what's going on is to realize that that interaction between Hollywood and journalism and and the actual phenomenon itself which we can't rule out the phenomenon itself is not a an you know uh an imp thing I mean it it it may not have landed on the White House lawn yet but it's talked I mean it it's doing something here and so I I I really think in some respects uh it's been good and bad it's been the red pill and the blue pill a little bit because uh if if there hadn't been movies and television and all that then we'd be talking about a very specific fact set but you know a lot of movies get made um and they they put things out there that don't exist and then they sort of come into the you know into the whole nature of the phenomena I'll give you one example Dark Skies this this show which frankly is not on streaming and if people want to see it it's the first Dark Skies the TV series because later Harvey Weinstein made a movie called Dark Skies about alien abductions which really pissed me off because uh you know literally taking our title and and using it with the same topics we all know the government has lied all right now that doesn't mean that they lie about everything um it doesn't mean that they're lying about UFOs but they have lied and we're all pretty sure now for example that JFK was killed not by a lone gunman right and that means there was a conspiracy and the government was in the middle of it the government doesn't always tell the truth truth so as these stories make their way around um it's easy to imagine the government being involved in in some kind of cover up and in fact uh the government has done multiple investigations so for them to say they haven't been that interested and uh all the investigations that they've ever done have shown no connection to extraterrestrial it's just frankly not even true I mean the government itself has been talked about internally that they thought it was e so I I just think we live in a time right now where the feedback loop such as it exists is wonderful from a viewing point of view and a a little bit confusing from a journalistic point of view and uh you know and and oh and you make things up you just make so I know what it was you it's not as a journalist it's my job to try to get as close to the truth as I can but as a Showbiz writer that's not my job I mean it's just not so for Dark Skies as an example um Brent fredman and I just said well what are the biggest two biggest conspiracies that ever existed UFOs and JFK so we thought well what if we put him in the atom collider and see what that looks like and that became our television series our pilot of the TV is JFK gets assassinated because he's going to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term and it's always been thus every time a something comes out based on a true story for example there's all these articles saying well how true is it really so for example um I have a movie shooting this summer called the last battle it's based on a New York Times bestseller about the last battle of World War II in Europe and I'm the uh so far I hope fingers crossed the only screenwriter on it so I you know it's it's sort of my version of that book and at the beginning I remember starting out saying well I need to to really get this right you know I really need to make sure it's super accurate and everything and the more I got into it the more I just said if people want to know the exact truth about it then they shouldn't be watching a movie anyway they should be reading the book so I I sort of untethered myself from the idea that I had to you know deliver something that nobody could complain about so I'm sure when the last battle comes out in a year or so and you get to see it in the theater you'll probably also be reading you know reviews from movie critics who say oh they just made up all this stuff and it didn't really happen that way and and I would freely say yeah you're right that's because so so there's so to go strictly to the UFO topic it's important to realize writers have been doing this since the 1947 you know when they started reading about stuff in the paper and they had to make up stuff to fill out their story and the question is did some of the stuff they made make up get into the journalistic part of it or not and I'm still the jury is still out for me on on the specific answer to that one it can be very difficult to gauge misinformation from the truth have it be from paperwork books or even people and that's going to lead me into my next question referring to David grush you knew about him before the world did what were your ini initial thoughts on getting someone of his caliber to speak out to the world about what he knew well the flip answer would be to say the day I met David grush I worried if I was GNA be arrested um here's what went down David gr you know I'm I'm partnering with Ross colart who's a phenomenal investigative reporter um on the need to know podcast and I had known about David grush but not by name for better part of a year because Ross was cultivating that and obviously journalists have to maintain their sources even from their podcast Partners right so uh around last May a year year basically a year ago uh Ross tells me grush is coming into town and they're going to record uh at the news Nation uh some news Nation Warehouse in the valley out here uh the next day and so I I met grush and Ross um at a um at a d I guess a deli which was just a Stones Throw from where the Kardashians live out in Calabasas didn't see any Kardashians though and while we were talking about it with another fellow there as well um that it came up that well I know we're supposed to record this tomorrow for news Nation but what if we show up and they arrest David grush or what if we show up and they arrest him and us then there'd be no interview what if they uh the justice department in Joins news Nation from even shooting it we you know who knows I mean it was a big Revelation what he said so everybody was like well we should record something with him today you know a safety copy and then everybody looks at me like well you're from here how would you get it recorded today and of course it's not like you snap your finger and there's a crew so I said well I have a son who just directed his first feature film so maybe you know so I called up my son Jared and said hey Jared can you come over to the house right now with your equipment and shoot an interview for me and he said yeah Dad really I'm kind of busy I got other things I'm doing to which I said I'll give you 500 bucks to which he said I'll be right over okay so that's how I met David grush and spent a lot of time that day you know seeing him get interviewed by Ross for the practice interview and also um talking to him in between and and then seeing the whole process repeated with news Nation the next day and I have to say um I just thought from the moment I met the guy that he's genuine um probably a patriot of of high standards and um I don't think he has embellished anything if anything I kind of found him more willing if you were to phrasee a question that sort of is a loaded question to him his brain would say would start to pull it apart and say well actually you've asked two questions this first one no that's not happening but this one and so I find him to be very honest and very credible and it you know kind of breaks my heart that it hasn't kicked the door open and there haven't been 40 more whistleblowers rushing in uh with new information but that day will come that day will will come have you kept in touch with him since only through Ross um I I sort of feel like um you know it just wasn't my you know I know he's available for other pod he probably done the podcast with you I think didn't you talk to him once or no I mean he's done a bunch of stuff I just felt like I didn't know that it would be part of the solution for me to be talking to him when he Ross had already spent so much time I was just glad to be kind of a a a witness to history I I felt like that's exactly what my role was just to Bear witness so I did it it was it was cool um I'd love to see him again I expect that I will someday um and I I know it's been hard it it no doubt has been very difficult to be the first whistleblower but I will always remember that two months before he raised his right hand and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth the truth two months before that he was in my home theater talking on camera you know so I just feel like you know history was was written a little bit that day and I also think in retrospect uh with the things I'm learning now about my own situation um in Dark Skies I think a little bit of History got written that day too when it comes to David grush he has become one of the new faces when it comes to UFO disclosure and the UFOs the UFO topic with the government he everyone knows his face now everyone knows his name and so when you said that it didn't kick the door open for 40 more whistleblowers to come forward I I found that a little shocking I'm just like whoa I mean obviously you know something that I don't because I was like for me he elevated the conversation but from your perspective do you think more whistleblowers will come forward do you have any sources that tell you so don't give me wrong uh Christine I think he did Elevate the conversation he skyrocketed in um you know before the the world so I have nothing but profound um agreement with that strategy of his and support for him personally um but what's happened though is I think the idea was there were people like grush that are still ready to come forward and had he been treated a little better in the aftermath might have rushed in but instead watched him be denigrated by a number of people including people within our government who know better and so we're we're now faced with a situation where the things that David grush has testified to have been testified to various congressmen and Sen s and um intelligence Community people behind closed doors but not in front of the people yet and I am optimistic that that will happen uh hopefully sooner than later I mean you know you're a a young woman who's got a lot of life ahead of you and you can probably still feel a little frustration saying well I wish they'd just get to this you know I would shut my podcast down tomorrow if they would just level with us you know because this doesn't have to be done unless there's a mystery to be discovered and they just haven't helped with that and I at my age um I thought when I was doing Dark Skies you know the the time frame of 30 years I thought was about right that's why I wrote ad with Richard Dolan because I thought you know this is this is going to happen and nobody's actually ever talked about what the world is going to look like after it happens that's why we wrote that book but um I I am very frustrated now it is looking like they're trying to close the door again and that could mean that I will in fact never hear what we know and what's frustrating about that is it's if there was nothing to know then I guess I wouldn't be frustrated but it's very clear there is something to know and some of the people who know more than I do and more than you do and more than every everybody else on this planet they're not sharing their work they're not telling us what they know I'm not burned out as much right now as I'm just ticked off you know we're were so close and now they're trying to push back on it and I just look I just have come to the conclusion that if there was a reason if if thing if the if the actual truth was bad in 1947 well it's probably bad today if that was the case but that in 1947 after winning World War II and just getting our hands on atomic bombs and facing off against Russia uh there was probably a good reason to sort of keep a lid on it for a while but I don't think that reason exists anymore I think we deserve to know the truth and frankly I look at this whole disclosure thing as a necessary component to perhaps saving ourselves it's the ultimate Hail Mary you know we live in a world where um Democrats and Republicans can't even can't even share reality uh with each other we live in a world where uh what's going on in the midd East threatens to blow up the whole planet any day and the only thing that might save us from feeling so like we're on this team or that team or whatever the only thing that might possibly save us in my view is to acknowledge that there's somebody here who's not us and those are the guys flying around these things that aren't ours and so I don't need every Last Detail I understand there's still going to be some classification of things but I would like confirmation I would just like confirmation of one basic fact that some of the things that are flying in our skies and coming around our seas are from some place that isn't here and they're being flowing by somebody who isn't us and that says nothing about Chinese drones or Russian drones or anything they all exist it's all part of pulling this apart but there were no Chinese drones in uh 1947 or in the 1950s China didn't even have an Air Force so I'm just tired of people trying to pull the you know you just pull this terrible game with us and I I think it can't be good and it has to end now I don't know if I'm going to have a role in that I'd be happy just to watch it right now A lot of people are feeling what you are feeling this level of frustration this level of feeling burnt out as well so knowing what you know today in 2024 what advice and or encouragement would you give yourself when exploring the UFO topic well first of all even when you get burned out you wax and Wayne on that you know this topic is so damned interesting that yeah took a 10-year vacation from it but then I got pulled back in because it still it still motivates me it still challenges me to want to know more so my advice to anybody right now particularly uh young people who have had the opportunity to see this this uh changing environment from 2017 on there's a lot that can be known and uh I think they should start knowing it as best they can and beca