I still get letters about this series. And e-mails. And questions. About when the DVD set will be coming out... about what happened to our characters after the last episode... about whether I really believe in UFOs or not...
Dark Skies was an NBC series with just possibly the most unusual twist on the UFO phenomenon that you've seen. We constructed an entire premise -- and shot 20 hours of episodes -- laying out the case that John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he was going to tell the nation the truth about UFOs if he was re-elected to a second term. It got weirder from there.
NBC -- 20 hours -- 1996-1997
Created by Bryce Zabel & Brent V. Friedman
In the course of that first and only season, we told the story of the years from 1961 to 1967. Characters who had a personal encounter with flying saucers included Ronald Reagan, Carl Sagan, Timothy Leary, Jim Morrison, Dan Rather, Bobby Kennedy, Jack Ruby and others, and we told stories set in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, the Space Program, etc. Man, was it fun.
In order to sell the series, Brent and I created an ultra-classified "Briefing Book" which laid out the entire history of UFOs going back to 65-milion BC through our present day. It was sealed with a gold foil seal and wrapped in brown paper tied in twine and stamped "Top Secret." The essence of the pitch was that Brent and I had met a man named John Loengard who wanted to get the truth out about UFOs and felt that telling the story as fiction was the only way. This led to the so-called "Loengard letter" which was the centerpiece of the notebook. Click on it to see a larger version if this isn't readable on your screen:
Is John Loengard a real person? Did he really write that letter? We always said that he was and he did.
Dark Skies has achieved at least a sub-cult status among certain sci-fi fans because of its NBC airing, followed by multiple cycles on the Sci-Fi Channel. As for the DVD question, the series has yet to be released on disks, although I'm not sure why. SONY, which owns the rights, is the place where opinions should be taken. Good luck. Anyway, here is the script for the 2-hour pilot episode:
This script was co-written with the amazingly talented Brent Friedman, someone who I'm friends with and collaborate with to this day. One of our main characters, the head of Majestic-12, Frank Bach, utters the line that became our mantra: "The truth is overrated." This is our JFK episode film.
And here is the script for my favorite episode, a solo sample, "Prey in Darkness."
This script deals with the New York City power black-out of 1965 and how it ties in with the death of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and her investigation into the death of John Kennedy. It's pretty crazy stuff, but I like it.
I hope you enjoy reading these as much as we enjoyed writing and producing them. As we said in our main titles (which won an Emmy) --
"They're here. They're hostile. And powerful people don't want you to know."
