Sound, Light & Frequency

The Men Who Fell to Earth

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 visitor with superior knowledge who still cannot survive capitalism, addiction, surveillance, loneliness, and human appetite. In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce and Brent follow the entire strange afterlife of the concept: the book, the Bowie film, the failed 1987 television pilot, Bowie’s late-stage theatrical work Lazarus, and the 2022 Showtime series that continues the story with Bill Nighy as an older Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a new alien visitor named Faraday. Along the way, they ask why this one image keeps returning across generations: the brilliant but stranded being who walks among us, hiding in plain sight, desperate to get home. This is not just a fan conversation about a beloved science-fiction classic. Bryce and Brent connect The Man Who Fell to Earth to David Bowie’s own reported UFO experiences, to the changing way audiences think about aliens living among us, and to the larger Sound, Light & Frequency question: has Hollywood simply reflected our fascination with alien contact, or has it helped prepare us to imagine that the impossible may already be here? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Missing Time It Was

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? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hollywood/UFOs: The Case So Far

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 listeners and viewers into the investigation. So this week, they pause the ride just long enough to ask: what exactly is the case so far? In “Hollywood/UFOs: The Case So Far,” Bryce and Brent look back at the strange road that began with Episode #1, “Party Crasher,” when a man claiming to be from the Office of Naval Intelligence crashed the Dark Skies premiere party, said he had already seen the unaired pilot, offered “the deal,” and left behind the mysterious “sound, light and frequency” formula. Since then, the series has moved through Spielberg, Sagan, Hangar 18, The Abyss, Men in Black, Close Encounters, government secrecy, Hollywood myth-making, personal encounters, and the question that keeps returning: has popular culture simply reflected the UFO mystery, or has it helped shape it? For anyone just arriving, this episode will help get you on the same page. But Bryce and Brent still believe the best way to experience Sound, Light & Frequency is to start at the beginning with Episode #1, “Party Crasher,” and work forward in sequence. These episodes are evergreen, not dated news drops, and the story is designed as a journey — one that keeps widening, deepening, and getting stranger as the case unfolds. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Disclosure Day: “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 — and came away with evolving, complicated reactions. In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce and Brent do not review Disclosure Day as a conventional summer blockbuster. Instead, they examine it as Spielberg’s apparent “closing argument” on UFOs, aliens, secrecy, empathy, and the public’s right to know. What, if anything, is actually being disclosed? Why does the movie focus on private contractors, abducted “chosen” humans, alien avatars, Roswell, Jackie Gleason, and an elderly Gray called In Vivo 17? And what should we make of its final one-word message: “Listen”? As Hollywood and real-world UAP events continue to blur together, Disclosure Day may not be the hard-cut revelation some hoped for, but it has undeniably pushed the conversation further into the mainstream. Bryce and Brent ask whether Spielberg is simply telling a story — or whether this film is another sign of the long, strange convergence between Hollywood, UFOs, and the truth that may no longer stay hidden. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

War of the Worlds

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 considered beneath them? In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace how Wells’ nightmare managed to invade three different centuries. In 1938, Orson Welles turned the story into a radio broadcast so convincing it became a modern media legend, moving the Martians from Victorian England to New Jersey and making the invasion feel like breaking news. In 1953, Hollywood reimagined the attack as a Cold War apocalypse in Technicolor, where science, faith, flying machines, and atomic anxiety collided on screen. Then, in 2005, Steven Spielberg brought the invasion into the 21st century, turning it into a story of terrorism, sirens, refugees, broken families, and the terrifying sense that the attack had already begun before anyone understood what was happening. Bryce and Brent also bring the Mars obsession closer to home, with personal stories about the Red Planet’s hold on their own imaginations — from Bryce covering the first Viking lander as a young radio newsman to later writing and selling a screenplay about a Mars mission, known along the way as The Face. Because in science fiction, Mars is never just a place. It’s a screen we keep projecting ourselves onto. From imperial guilt to radio panic to nuclear dread to post-9/11 trauma, War of the Worlds has never really been about Martians. It’s been about us — our fears, our arrogance, our vulnerability, and the awful possibility that we may not be at the top of the cosmic food chain after all. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.