Sound, Light & Frequency

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How do you say goodbye to a story that isn’t finished? After 36 episodes of  Sound, Light & Frequency , Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman reach the end of their first season—and neither is ready to leave. They set out to explore Hollywood, UFOs and secrecy through a mystery that had followed them since  Dark Skies . What emerged was more than either could have scripted: an a...

What happens when a rock star goes looking for the people who supposedly know the truth about UFOs—and actually finds them? In “Why Do Rockstars See UFOs?,” Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace the extraordinary journey of Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge from lifelong UFO obsessive to participant in the modern disclosure story. DeLonge didn’t wait for government ins...

John Herrington is in denial. The former Reagan administration official and Secretary of Energy has finally spoken publicly about Brent Friedman's extraordinary account of a 1981 conversation in which Herrington allegedly revealed that aliens were real, the government knew it, and he'd seen them himself. In an explosive interview with Jesse Michels on American Alchemy, Herrington denies the conver...

A pounding on the door wakes Daniel Tibbets from a dead sleep. It’s around midnight, and a producer friend is standing outside telling him to get dressed—they have to go. Where they’re headed, who they’re meeting, and what those mysterious visitors say they have to show them will become one of the strangest nights of Tibbets’ life. After the reveal of the Formula and...

A week after  Sound, Light & Frequency  released the mysterious drawing Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman have spent years calling “the Formula,” the reaction has been immediate, intense and far larger than they expected. The image—drawn for them in 1996 by the man who called himself J.C. and claimed to be from the Office of Naval Intelligence—has now escaped int...

For thirty years, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman have held onto a mysterious artifact from the night  Dark Skies  premiered: a formula written on the back of a bank deposit envelope by a party crasher who said he was from the Office of Naval Intelligence. He called it “Sound, Light & Frequency” — the “Secrets of the Universe.” Now, for the first time, th...

What happens when the creators of two UFO television series compare notes on how to turn the phenomenon into drama? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman welcome their friend  David O’Leary , creator, writer and executive producer of History’s  Project Blue Book , for a conversation about two shows that feel almost like secret-history bookends.  Project Blue Book  lives in...

For more than thirty years,  The X-Files  has been one of the most influential television shows ever made about UFOs, alien abduction, government secrecy and the possibility that extraterrestrials are already here. In this episode of  Sound, Light & Frequency , Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman go back inside the mythology of Mulder and Scully to ask a deceptively simple question:&...

What happens when  ET walks into a bar—and everybody laughs?  Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman set out to explore the history of aliens as comedy, only to make an unexpected discovery: some of the funniest extraterrestrials in television and movies have been carrying surprisingly serious UFO ideas with them for more than sixty years. It begins with the 1963 sitcom  My Favorite M...

Bryce is fighting laryngitis, but Brent comes to the rescue as Sound, Light & Frequency returns to the woo. After “All About the Woo,” the hosts go even deeper into the possibility that aliens, the paranormal, and the afterlife may not be separate mysteries at all, but different faces of the same phenomenon connected through energy, consciousness, sound, light, and frequency. Using...

What happens after first contact—when the ships have landed, the shooting has stopped, and the aliens aren’t going anywhere? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman explore the surprisingly complicated futures Hollywood has imagined for humanity once extraterrestrials become conquerors, occupiers, refugees, neighbors, employers, enemies—or even romantic partners. And they confront the que...

What happens when an alien comes to Earth alone—with no invasion fleet, no backup, and no easy way home? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace the evolution of the solitary extraterrestrial, from Superman, My Favorite Martian and The Cat from Outer Space to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Bryce recalls seeing E.T. at an early screening in 1982, while Brent explores the fi...

What does it take to make an alien feel real? Bryce and Brent welcome Emmy-winning creature-effects legend Todd Masters, founder of MASTERSFX and the artist who helped bring the Dark Skies Grays to life. Todd traces his extraordinary career from calling Ray Harryhausen as a kid and working on The Empire Strikes Back at thirteen to creating hundreds of monsters and extraterrestrials. He reveals how...

What happens when two civilizations meet—and one possesses technology, power, and knowledge the other can barely comprehend? Bryce and Brent begin with  The Twilight Zone ’s unforgettable “To Serve Man” and Stephen Hawking’s warning that alien contact might resemble Columbus arriving in the Americas: not because the visitors are necessarily evil, but because enco...

Fresh from taping an appearance with Dr. Phil and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Chris Mellon, Bryce brings Brent the behind-the-scenes story of the latest government UFO document release—officially known as “Tranche 4,” but perhaps better described as another UFO dump. Dr. Phil received an early look at the material, along with a handwritten message from President...

In this follow-up to “Missing Time It Was,” Bryce and Brent welcome documentary producer and filmmaker Dean Alioto, a longtime friend from Bryce’s UFO lunch club and a guest who lives at the exact intersection of Hollywood, UFOs, and experiencer testimony. Dean is the director of the new documentary  The Experiencers: Full Disclosure , which takes the UAP conversation beyond...

The Man Who Fell to Earth has always been more than a cult science-fiction story. Walter Tevis first imagined Thomas Jerome Newton in his 1963 novel as an alien who comes to Earth to save his dying world, only to become trapped and broken by ours. Nicolas Roeg’s haunting 1976 film, starring David Bowie, transformed that idea into one of the great screen portraits of alienation — a visi...

On December 17, 2017 — the morning after  The New York Times  helped blow open the modern UAP era with its Nimitz/Tic Tac reporting — Bryce Zabel was in New Orleans when he turned his phone back on and found a message from Dan Aykroyd. That voicemail, saved for nearly a decade, becomes the portal into this episode: Aykroyd talking about Bryce’s Betty and Barney Hill scr...

Sound, Light & Frequency has reached the halfway point of its first season, and the audience is growing fast. Thanks to recent appearances on The Why Files and American Alchemy — which together have been seen by more than one million viewers on YouTube in a single week, with likely as many more listening by podcast — Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman are welcoming a wave of new listen...

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day  has arrived with massive expectations, strong early box office, and a wave of polarized reaction from critics, audiences, and the UFO community. Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman watched the film twice — including Bryce’s Las Vegas screening with legendary UFO journalist George Knapp, followed by an IMAX screening in Austin with Jesse Michels...

Few science-fiction stories have had a stranger afterlife than  The War of the Worlds . H.G. Wells first launched his Martian invasion in the 19th century as a devastating reversal of empire: what if humanity was not the conqueror, but the conquered? What if something colder, smarter, and more technologically advanced looked at us the way powerful nations had looked at the people they conside...

In  “Deal or No Deal,”  Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman move their investigation from personal testimony into corroboration. After weeks of telling the story of the  Dark Skies  premiere party, the mysterious man who claimed to be from Naval Intelligence, and the offer to trade inside UFO information for story cooperation, they bring in their first outside witness: f...

Cemetery at Midnight  is the moment the  Sound, Light & Frequency  origin story moves from strange Hollywood anecdote into something far larger. After the mysterious J.C. crashed the  Dark Skies  premiere party claiming to be from the Office of Naval Intelligence, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman found themselves pulled into a second encounter — this time at their...

This week on  Sound, Light & Frequency , Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman finally open the file on a Hollywood story they have kept private and closely guarded for nearly three decades. It begins during the making of  Dark Skies , their NBC alien-invasion series, at the exact moment when their dream job became a corporate pressure cooker. What followed was not just a normal network/stu...