Introducing Midnight Radio

From the team that brought you THE BLACK PHONE and SINISTER movies comes MIDNIGHT RADIO: a new, fantastical horror podcast starring Ethan Hawke. Available now. New episodes every Thursday.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 active investigation that brought forward new witnesses, challenged old assumptions and turned their audience into collaborators. They thought they were taking listeners on a journey. They didn’t realize how profoundly it would change them, too. In “Case NOT Closed,” two longtime storytellers take stock of what happens when Hollywood experience meets journalistic persistence. Recovered production records, corroborating witnesses and other filmmakers’ firsthand accounts gave the investigation substance beyond their own recollections. The public release of the Formula and the unfolding John Herrington dispute brought intensely personal stories into public scrutiny. Now Bryce and Brent examine what they’ve established, what remains unresolved and how seemingly separate threads might connect. They also reveal the films that come closest to expressing where each has landed: the unsettling warning of They Live and the transcendent possibilities of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remembering the painful day the Dark Skies sets were torn down, Bryce and Brent confront another uncertain ending—but also imagine what could come next: deeper investigations, new territory in music and gaming, and more insiders willing to tell their stories. There’s even a direct invitation to J.C., the mysterious party crasher, to finally explain himself. Above all, this finale is a thank-you to everyone who listened, questioned and helped make the connections. A second season isn’t assured. The friendship, the curiosity and the determination to keep going are. The season ends. The case does not.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 insiders to find him; he went looking for them, eventually building relationships with generals, intelligence officials and aerospace figures and assembling the remarkable team behind To The Stars Academy. At the center of that origin story was retired Air Force Major General Neil McCasland, whom DeLonge privately described as a crucial adviser who helped connect him with other insiders. Now there’s a haunting new chapter: McCasland walked out of his New Mexico home in February 2026 and has never been found. There is no evidence linking his disappearance to UFOs—but considering the extraordinary things DeLonge claimed McCasland knew, it is one more mystery surrounding a story that was already difficult to explain. And it raises an uncomfortable question: when the worlds of entertainment and national security come together to tell the UFO story, who exactly is using whom? From there, the investigation travels backward through rock-and-roll history to perhaps its most famous UFO witness: John Lennon. On August 23, 1974, Lennon and May Pang said they watched a silent, gunmetal craft hover remarkably close to their Manhattan penthouse for as long as fifteen minutes before moving down the East River and disappearing. Lennon drew it, wrote about it, talked publicly about it, and eventually sang about “UFOs over New York.” Yet despite the location, the duration and two credible eyewitnesses, almost nobody else seems to have reported seeing what they saw. That mystery opens the door to David Bowie, Sammy Hagar, Robbie Williams, Billy Corgan, Ace Frehley and an astonishing musical history stretching from “Mr. Spaceman” and “Longer Boats” to “After the Gold Rush,” “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” and “Aliens Exist.” Why have so many musicians not only sung about the phenomenon but claimed extraordinary experiences of their own? Is it simply personality, lifestyle and openness to the unusual—or could people who spend their lives immersed in sound, light and frequency actually perceive the world a little differently? High Fidelity, High Strangeness follows the music into a mystery that may be much bigger than rock and roll. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 conversation ever happened and questions Brent's credibility. Now Brent fires back, armed with family photographs, a story he's told consistently for decades, and some pointed questions about Herrington's changing account. Who's telling the truth? And why does it matter more than ever? In this special breaking episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman also examine David Grusch's startling new revelations on Joe Rogan, Richard Dolan's perspective on the Herrington controversy and the mysterious Formula, and an intriguing discovery involving Steven Spielberg's family and Wright Field. What began as a conversation on a back porch 45 years ago has become part of a much bigger story about UFOs, Hollywood, and government secrecy. Brent and Bryce didn't plan to make this episode. Breaking events gave them no choice. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 the extraordinary reaction that followed, Sound, Light & Frequency moves deeper into its active investigation. From the beginning, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman have wondered whether what happened to them during Dark Skies was unique—or whether other people in Hollywood had their own encounters with mysterious insiders, extraordinary claims, and purported physical evidence. Veteran television executive and producer Daniel Tibbets now comes forward with a story that rivals theirs for sheer strangeness and specificity, along with previously unaired material connected to his experience. It’s a story that pushes the investigation beyond Bryce and Brent’s own history and raises a larger question: how many other people in Hollywood have stories like this that have never been told? To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 into the wild. Listeners, researchers, podcasters, skeptics and experiencers have begun comparing it to older systems of consciousness, tracing possible historical sources and raising new questions about what J.C. may actually have been trying to tell them.  That was always the point of releasing it. Bryce and Brent have called Sound, Light & Frequency an active investigation from the beginning, and now the investigation has expanded beyond the two of them. In “Wisdom of the Crowd,” they open the file wider, bringing in the audience, fellow podcasters and outside researchers—not to declare the mystery solved, but to examine what has emerged since the Formula became public and to follow the new leads wherever they go. The reveal was not the end of the story. It may have been the beginning of a much larger one.  To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, they are releasing the original Formula publicly. In this landmark episode, Bryce and Brent retrace how the Formula came into their possession, reveal it in full, and explain where their investigation has led them — what they believe the symbols may represent, why someone claiming to be from Naval Intelligence might have wanted them to see it, and whether understanding the Formula makes that extraordinary encounter seem more or less credible. Then the investigation changes hands. The Formula is now available for anyone to examine, analyze, challenge and interpret. After thirty years, the wait is over — and the larger conversation can begin. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 the 1950s; Dark Skies begins in the 1960s. Both combine real people, authentic UFO cases and government secrecy with dramatic license—and, strangely enough, both produced exactly twenty hours of television. From J. Allen Hynek and Edward Ruppelt to Majestic-12, Roswell and the Washington UFO wave, three UFO TV creators finally get to talk shop.  O’Leary also reveals just how personal his interest in the unexplained has always been. Long before creating Project Blue Book, he studied cognitive science at Vassar and conducted a sensory-deprivation telepathy experiment for his thesis. After selling the series, he had his own startling UFO sighting—a glowing green object moving through the trees above his Los Angeles neighborhood—and says strange synchronicities continued throughout production. He takes Bryce and Brent inside the making of the show: its balance between authenticity and accuracy, the decision to dramatize real cases without pretending to be a documentary, Robert Zemeckis’s involvement, Steven Spielberg’s notes on the Close Encounters episode, and the remarkable access O’Leary had to Hynek’s family and the last surviving director of the real Project Blue Book.  Then the conversation moves from television history into the mystery itself. O’Leary discusses what he now believes the real Project Blue Book represented, why Roswell still convinces him, his views on Majestic-12, Foo Fighters and UFO interest in nuclear weapons, and why he suspects there may be several different intelligences or mechanisms behind the phenomenon—from extraterrestrials and artificial intelligence to interdimensional contact, time travel and consciousness itself. He also reveals where an unproduced third season would have gone: a global 1954 UFO wave, Stonehenge, Europe and the recovery of Michael Quinn after his extraordinary underwater encounter. It’s Project Blue Book and Dark Skiessharing the same table—and discovering just how much strange territory they have in common.  To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 did The X-Files actually say was going on? The answer involves real aliens, a secret Syndicate, abductions, genetic experiments, alien-human hybrids, black oil, rival extraterrestrial factions, government infiltration—and a conspiracy so layered that even Mulder is constantly mistaking disclosure for disinformation.  But the bigger question is the one Bryce and Brent have been asking all season: did Hollywood borrow the UFO story from UFOlogy, or did UFOlogy eventually start borrowing it back from Hollywood? Much of what The X-Filesdramatized—crash retrievals, MJ-12-style secrecy, alien bodies, implants, reverse engineering, government disinformation and abduction lore—was already circulating before the show premiered in 1993. Yet decades later, some of the same ideas are being discussed by whistleblowers, former intelligence officials and members of Congress. So was The X-Files simply a brilliant synthesis of existing UFO mythology, or did its enormous cultural impact help shape the way modern people now understand the phenomenon?  Along the way, Bryce and Brent revisit the show's Emmy breakthrough, its influence on prestige science fiction, Chris Carter's relationship to the UFO subject, and the intriguing claims of former AFOSI officer Richard Doty about his own involvement with the series. They also compare The X-Files with Dark Skies, reflect on what each show did differently, and look ahead to Ryan Coogler's new incarnation of the franchise. In the end, one thing seems certain: with The X-Files, the truth may indeed be out there—but it has never been simple.  To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Martian, whose pilot contains an Air Force aerospace test, an anomalous radar encounter, official suppression, a crashed spacecraft, a living non-human occupant, telepathy and an alien hiding in plain sight. Even stranger, Bryce discovers that the fictional X-15 encounter followed only months after a real X-15 pilot reported seeing something unexplained at nearly 60 miles altitude. From there, Bryce and Brent follow the alien comedy trail through Mork & Mindy, ALF, the Coneheads, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Men in Black, Paul, People of Earth, Resident Alien and SNL’s hilarious alien-abduction sketches. Along the way, a pattern emerges. Early alien comedy made extraterrestrials safe by turning them into eccentric houseguests and cultural anthropologists. Later stories became increasingly comfortable with the real language of the Phenomenon: abductions, missing time, Grays, government investigators, crash retrievals, memory suppression, secret programs and entire taxonomies of non-human beings. So was Hollywood merely reflecting a growing UFO mythology—or helping create the vocabulary through which we now understand it? From My Favorite Martian giving America permission to laugh at aliens during the era of Betty and Barney Hill, to Men in Black turning secret-keepers into heroes, to Paul literally joking that an alien has been feeding UFO lore to Hollywood for decades, this episode asks whether comedy may be the perfect delivery system for extraordinary ideas: the truth, wrapped in a joke. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.