Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

In the piece about the upcoming Ben Mezrich/Matt Shakman/Josh Friedman asteroid movie, Alasdair Stuart joked about how the ’90s are back and maybe Britpop will pop back into vogue next. Turns out he was wrong, it’s UFOS!

In addition to Ryan Coogler’s The X-Files revival, we’ve got Spielberg and Koepp’s Disclosure Day barrelling down the pipe towards us and now another familiar face has returned to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) fold.

Bryce Zabel has been here before, more than once. He worked with Spielberg on his excellent multi-generational UFO saga Taken (that launched several careers including Ryan Hurst, who’s currently starring in the God of War TV adaptation) and most notably, Dark Skies.

Dark Skies was one of the most thrilling TV experiments that didn’t quite work I’ve ever seen. It starred Eric Close as John Loengard, a congressional aide who discovers a shadowy war being fought with an alien race called The Hive. The first, and only season, ‘Official Denial’ was set from 1961 to 1969. The second season, ‘Progenitor’ would have run from 1970 to 1986, the third, ‘Cloak of Fear’ from 1977 to 1986 and the fourth ‘New World Order’ from 1987 to 1999. The final season, ‘Stroke of Midnight’ would have unfolded across 2000 to 2001 as the Hive went public and attacked the planet. It was a great idea and there were rumours the 1999 season would finish with a faux Presidential address and Loengard announcing the existence of the Hive to the world.

Unfortunately, despite some fun ideas and some very entertaining cameos from historical figures, the show didn’t make it past its first year. But Zabel’s new idea certainly seems to share some DNA with it.

Unidentified will unfold across three times. The first is the infamous 1947 Roswell incident where the USAF announced, and then denied, that they’d discovered a downed UFO. The second strand, in the 90s will follow investigators of the incident racing to secure testimony from an eyewitness and then a present day strand involving a murder mystery connected to the incident. It’s set to focus on nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and author Donald Schmitt and their attempts to uncover the truth. It’s also loosely based on Schmitt’s book, co-written with Thomas Carey, Witness to Roswell.

This sounds fun! It also sounds, as someone who’s been around these fields a lot, familiar. Roswell’s well-trodden ground but these folks, especially with The Boys and Fargo director Sylvain White attached, will tell it well.

But Unidentified is not alone. Jerry Bruckheimer, presumably taking time off from his recent sociopathic comments about job losses in the industry, is producing a UFO disclosure movie for Apple. Joseph Kosinski, beloved in these parts for Top Gun: Maverick and… less so, for F1, is directing. It’s described as ‘a UFO disclosure-themed take on All the President’s Men’ which is tremendously exciting and no one seems to have a scriptwriter for it yet which is much less tremendously exciting. Also Pentagon UAP whistleblower David Grusch is consulting and Grusch’s claims are WACKY. Grains of salt of standby, by the truckload.

That being said, this is fun ground to cover, and it’ll be interesting to see the differing takes on it. No word yet on release for the Kosinski movie or Unidentified, but Disclosure Day is out on June 12. Dark Skies is available on Blu-ray, as is the Blumhouse movie it shares a name with which is also a good time.