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 screenplay, the role of psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, Steven Spielberg, and, in classic Aykroyd fashion, ending with a cliffhanger about a car...
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 screenplay, the role of psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, Steven Spielberg, and, in classic Aykroyd fashion, ending with a cliffhanger about a car that “they made disappear” in front of him. From there, Bryce and Brent step into one of the strangest intersections of UFO history, Hollywood storytelling, and cultural memory: alien abduction.
The episode focuses on two foundational cases — Betty and Barney Hill in 1961 and Travis Walton in 1975 — and asks whether film and television merely reflect the UFO phenomenon or help shape how people experience and remember it. Bryce and Brent walk through the Hills’ missing time, their hypnosis sessions with Dr. Simon, the Outer Limits “Bellero Shield” theory skeptics use to question their account, John Luttrell’s overlooked Boston Traveler reporting, The Interrupted Journey, Barney Hill’s surreal appearance on To Tell the Truth, and the 1975 NBC movie The UFO Incident. Then they pivot to Walton, whose reported abduction occurred only two weeks after The UFO Incident aired, raising the uncomfortable chicken-and-egg question that runs through the entire hour.
Finally, the conversation turns to Fire in the Sky, written by Bryce’s friend Tracey Tormé, and the way Hollywood transformed Walton’s reported experience into one of the most terrifying abduction sequences ever filmed — even though Walton says that is not what happened. For Bryce, this is not an abstract topic: he reported on Walton in real time as a young radio newsman, wrote the Hill case into the Dark Skies pilot with Brent, appeared as an on-camera expert in Discovery documentaries on both cases, and has spent years developing his own Betty and Barney Hill film, Missing Time. By the end, Brent’s own missing-time memory enters the conversation, and the episode lands on the larger question: if these early abduction stories really happened, what does that mean now — especially as Spielberg’s Disclosure Day brings alien abduction back into the mainstream as something that may not be fiction at all?
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