Using James Cameron’s The Abyss as a springboard, this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency dives beneath the surface of the UFO mystery to explore the strange and increasingly serious world of USOs—Unidentified Submerged Objects. Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman trace the connection between Hollywood’s long fascination with underwater unknowns and the growing real-world evidence that some anomalous craft may move seamlessly through oceans, lakes, and rivers as easily as they move through the sky. Along the way, they connect classic and modern screen stories—from The Abyss to Atlantis: The Lost Empire and beyond—to the deeper question of whether Non-Human Intelligence may have been hiding in Earth’s last great frontier all along.

The episode also brings the mystery closer to home with two stories that includes the host’s wives. First, Brent shares the story of seeing an unidentified object plunge into the water near Vancouver Island, with his wife as a witness, then Bryce reflects on his own creative connection to the enduring Atlantis myth when he and his wife were the original writers on Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Smart, eerie, and highly entertaining, “Staring into the Abyss” uses movies and television as a portal into one of the most unsettling possibilities in the entire UAP conversation: that whatever is out there may not only be above us—but deep below us as well.

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In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce and Brent take on Contact (1997), Carl Sagan’s beautiful, brainy, and decidedly UFO-free journey into alien possibility. But beneath the film’s awe, wonder, and cosmic longing lies a more provocative question: what did Sagan really think about the mystery of contact — and was there more going on beneath his public skepticism than most people realize? Using the film as a springboard, the hosts explore the strange space where science, belief, Hollywood, and hidden history all seem to overlap.

This episode also carries an unexpected personal edge. Bryce recalls his own face-to-face encounter with Sagan after a live television appearance, and he and Brent reflect on why the famed astronomer later found his way into the mythology of Dark Skies. Along the way, they touch on the long and complicated road that brought Contact to the screen, the emotional legacy Sagan left behind, and one of the most famous quotations he never actually said. Thoughtful, surprising, and just a little subversive, “Sagan Makes Contact” looks at one of popular culture’s most revered science storytellers from a distinctly Sound, Light & Frequency point of view.

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For forty-four years, Brent Friedman has carried a story he has never fully told in public. A few fragments slipped out here and there, but never the names, never the full context, and never the larger implication of what it all meant. In this episode, that changes. Brent finally revisits a startling conversation from the summer of 1981, when an older family friend with extraordinary government access shared something so unsettling it stayed with Brent for the rest of his life. It was the kind of moment that sounds impossible — until you hear the details — and the kind of confidence given only because the speaker believed no one would ever believe it.

That same year, the scrappy UFO thriller Hangar 18 was floating provocative ideas into the culture long before most people were ready to take them seriously. Bryce and Brent use the film as a portal into a bigger conversation about secrecy, storytelling, and the uneasy space where Hollywood and hidden history may overlap. As Brent tells his account in full for the first time, Bryce adds new pieces that don’t close the case so much as deepen it — and together they point toward the central question behind Sound, Light & Frequency: what if movies and television weren’t just reflecting the mystery, but helping us live with it?

Hosted by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman.

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Sound, Light & Frequency is produced by Stellar Productions. Executive Producers are Bryce Zabel, Brent Friedman, Nick Johnson, and Jackie Zabel.

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