Dark Skies Producers Release 30-Year-Old “Alien Formula” Provided By Navy Intelligence Spook

In September 1996, two television producers held a premiere party for their new NBC series, Dark Skies, at a house in Los Angeles. About 200 guests attended, including network executives, studio personnel and crew members. Each was photographed at the door and given a fake Majestic-12 security badge on a lanyard.

One guest had no badge.

The man, who identified himself only as “JC,” claimed to represent the Office of Naval Intelligence. He told the show’s co-creators, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman, that their Sci-Fi series about a government UFO cover-up had “gotten a lot right.” He proposed a deal: inside information about the phenomenon in exchange for conceptual access to the show’s storylines.

When Friedman appeared sceptical, JC asked for a pen and a piece of paper. Friedman’s wife, Patricia, tore off the back of a bank deposit envelope and handed it over with a pen. In roughly 30 seconds, JC drew a series of symbols on the scrap, folded it and handed it to Friedman.

“Put this away for 10 to 15 years,” JC instructed. “Put it in a safety deposit box and at that time if we don’t make a deal you’ll understand that I was for real.”

When Friedman asked what it was, JC replied with six words: “Sound, light and frequency. Secrets of the universe.”

Thirty years later, that scrap of paper has been made public.

The podcast and the reveal

Zabel and Friedman are the hosts of Sound, Light & Frequency, a podcast that has spent 36 episodes examining the intersection of Hollywood, UFOs and government. The series takes its name directly from JC’s parting phrase.

In an episode titled Secrets of the Universe: The Formula Reveal, the pair displayed the original artifact on camera for the first time and posted it to their website, soundlightfrequency.com, alongside six separate written analyses from independent researchers.

“This is not an episode where we are going to tell you we have solved what the secrets of the universe are. We still don’t know them,” Zabel told listeners. “What this episode is about, however, is to say that this thing happened to us. This object exists. It has a physical reality.”

Friedman echoed the sentiment but framed his investment differently.

“I take it extremely seriously now. The more I know and the more I’ve thought about it and the more I put it in context, I take it extremely seriously from a point of view of whether it’s part of an intelligence community operation.”

What the formula looks like

The artifact is a small piece of torn paper bearing a vertical arrangement of hand-drawn symbols in black ink. It was described on the podcast as resembling “a vertical ladder of symbols” enclosed within what appears to be a double helix or caduceus-like structure with directional arrows.

Read from bottom to top, the symbols include a solid black square, a crescent moon shape, a downward-pointing triangle, a six-pointed star (hexagram), an oval flanked by horizontal lines, a radiant circle with approximately 10 emanating lines, the handwritten word “anja” (believed to be a misspelling of the Sanskrit “ajna”) and a symbol at the top that multiple analysts have identified as Om.

Zabel described the physical object with deliberate understatement.

“Remember this is not presented to us like a sacred document. It’s no scroll. It’s scrawled on a tiny piece of paper ripped from the back of a bank envelope. It’s written in less than one minute, more like 30 seconds, with a pen in the palm of this guy’s hand.”

Jacques Vallée weighed in

The first notable outside assessment came from a chance encounter. Zabel recounted that while preparing for the podcast, he had lunch with the French-American computer scientist and ufologist, Jacques Vallée, and showed him the formula.

“Without blinking, he goes, ‘Ah, the seven chakras,'” Zabel recalled.

Both ChatGPT and Claude, when shown the diagram independently, arrived at the same baseline identification. The drawing maps closely to a traditional Hindu-Tantric schematic of the seven chakras, the energy centres in the human body described in ancient Indian spiritual traditions, running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head.

“They both agreed, but they did it in a different way,” Zabel noted. “Claude, if I’m not mistaken, looked at it from the bottom up, and ChatGPT looked at it from the top down.”

The AI analysis compiled for the podcast’s internal research document was direct in its assessment: “This drawing is not an unknown formula or an alien artifact. It’s a recognizable, fairly standard schematic from Hindu Tantric yoga: a map of the chakras and their traditional element-symbols, with the kundalini channels winding up through them.”

Not a textbook chart

Despite the chakra identification, both the hosts and their independent analysts argued the formula is not a straightforward reproduction.

“I don’t think that formula is a textbook chakra chart such as a chakra might be, but the overlap is too strong to ignore,” Zabel observed. “It has something to do with it. It feels like a non-standard chakra thing.”

The producers commissioned or received analyses from several researchers, each bringing a different lens. John Collins, a technologist and world-record paper-airplane designer whom Zabel knew from his CNN days, noted the drawing pulls from multiple cultural traditions.

“It’s Egyptian, it’s Sanskrit, it’s Hindu, there’s some Buddhist symbol,” Collins observed in his written analysis. “Yes, the chakras and structure, but there’s a mix. It’s pulling from many different kind of cultures.”

Collins also raised a point that shifted the interpretation away from the symbols themselves and toward the circumstances of their delivery. Given that JC had demonstrably seen the Dark Skies pilot before it aired and appeared to know the show’s internal materials, Collins suggested the formula may have been personalised.

“Whatever he was giving to us, they knew a lot about us. Not just as producers, they may have known everything about us from our whole life,” Zabel paraphrased. “And so that message that was given to us as the formula may have been personalised.”

The symbologist’s reading

Hans Dietrich, described as a symbology expert and author of books on the subject, produced a lengthy analysis that reframed the formula entirely. Rather than treating each symbol independently, Dietrich argued the drawing should be read as a complete system.

His central thesis was that the illustration represents a sequence: sound transforming into light, light into information, information into geometry, geometry into matter and matter into life and consciousness. In his reading, the outer looping structure is not merely decorative but intentionally evokes the double helix of DNA, suggesting a hidden architecture of reality beneath the biological code of life.

Dietrich introduced what he called the “device hypothesis,” a speculative reading in which the symbols function not as religious icons but as variables in a conceptual schematic.

“Om becomes sound and frequency. The blazing Sun or Sirius becomes light and electromagnetic energy. Ajna becomes consciousness and the observer. The oval becomes a portal, aperture or wormhole,” Dietrich wrote.

He compared the formula to the machine in the film Contact, in which humanity receives instructions for a device whose purpose is not fully understood until it is assembled.

His concluding formulation was precise: “Sound is the key. Light is the information. Frequency is the mechanism. Geometry is the structure. Consciousness is the observer, and perhaps the operator. Matter is the manifestation.”

The quantum lens

Bob LaPointe, a researcher whom Zabel described as “the best read guy I know,” approached the formula through the framework of quantum physics and string theory. His analysis connected the diagram’s symbols to concepts including wave-particle duality, superposition, entanglement and the ten dimensions proposed by string theory.

LaPointe connected the formula to a widely circulated quote attributed to Nikola Tesla: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

However, the AI research compiled for the podcast flagged an important caveat about this quote. No reliable primary source has ever been found for it. Quote researchers have traced it to Ralph Bergstresser, an Arizona inventor of so-called “Tesla Purple Plates,” who attributed it to a 1942 conversation with Tesla. The Tesla Museum in Belgrade holds no correspondence between the two men.

The AI analysis drew a pointed connection from this finding: “J.C. wasn’t quoting Tesla; he was speaking the dialect of the vibrational-consciousness underground, which the fake Tesla quote also comes from. That’s a fingerprint match, not a coincidence.”

A Kundalini connection?

Friedman’s personal account added a dimension that the written analyses could not.

Several years after receiving the formula, Friedman described an experience while driving home to the island where he lives. While thinking about the formula, he encountered a deer on the road, braked but appeared to pass through the animal without impact, then heard a voice in his right ear telling him to “just let go.” He released the steering wheel and described the car navigating three S-turns on its own before he grabbed the wheel again.

“In that moment, I felt as though I got struck by lightning. I felt a jolt go up through the base of my spine, up my back,” Friedman recounted. “When it finally reached the base of my skull, it produced this hot lava effect that went all through my head.”

After arriving home unable to speak clearly, Friedman researched his symptoms online and found a match: a Kundalini rising event, described in Hindu tradition as a surge of energy rising from the base of the spine.

“I am not a practising Hindu. I have since done some research that shows many people, many yogis, spend decades trying to have one of these Kundalini rising events,” Friedman explained.

The connection to the formula came later. After the formula was rediscovered in 2023 by Friedman’s daughter, a microbiology student who was paid US$500 by Zabel to find it, she conducted her own research and showed her father an image resembling the formula’s structure with the words “Kundalini rising” alongside it.

“You’re telling me that the formula might be connected to a Kundalini rising event that I had five, six years ago when I didn’t even know what Kundalini rising was,” Friedman recalled thinking. “How is it possible?”

The Navy connection

The podcast devoted significant attention to establishing that the Office of Naval Intelligence had documented involvement in consciousness research, lending at least circumstantial plausibility to JC’s claimed affiliation.

A declassified Naval Intelligence Command memorandum from September 14, 1978, names Dr William Mahuran as the Navy’s contact for the Department of Defense program on remote viewing, part of what became the Stargate program.

“This is significant in my opinion because it means that ONI and the Office of Naval Intelligence wasn’t just some kind of rumour in the investigation into the nature of reality,” Friedman argued. “They were interested in it. They assigned somebody to be a part of it.”

The AI analysis compiled for the podcast went further in connecting the dots. It noted that the Stargate program was declassified in 1995, one year before JC appeared at the Dark Skies party, “scattering a cohort of true believers with clearances into the world, many convinced the government had walked away from something real.”

The analysis concluded that the formula functioned “like a fingerprint” for a specific faction within the intelligence community.

“It doesn’t prove J.C. had UFO information. It strongly suggests which tribe he belonged to, or at minimum which tribe he was impersonating: the corner of the IC whose house position was, and remains, ‘the phenomenon is fundamentally entangled with consciousness.'”

Three acts, not one

The encounter did not end at the party. In the week following, JC returned to the Dark Skies production offices with a superior officer the producers refer to as “the captain.” This second meeting included a vial of what appeared to be gold flakes, presented with the assertion that “it’s all about the Moon,” and a push to reorient the show’s mythology toward lunar themes.

A third meeting was proposed: with an admiral, aboard or near a ship at Long Beach, at a cemetery at midnight. Zabel and Friedman declined.

“At that point, I’m speaking for myself, but I think I can speak for you. We both just flushed the whole thing,” Zabel recalled. “We’ve got a show to do. These guys are a little bit out there.”

The AI analysis read the three-act structure as significant in itself: “A one-off party encounter can be anything, but a three-act escalation, party, office briefing with a superior, proposed midnight meeting with a flag officer, has a shape and shapes can be read.”

It characterised the sequence as a recruitment funnel, noting that when the producers declined the final meeting, all contact ceased immediately.

“A con escalates when the mark balks, because the con needs the mark. A probe terminates when it hits a stop condition. The clean, total silence after your refusal is one of the more quietly professional details in the whole story.”

What it means, and what it does not

Both hosts were careful to distinguish between what they know and what they believe.

“You don’t have to believe us. You shouldn’t,” Zabel told listeners. “You should say, ‘I want to see this artifact. I want to see this formula.’ And when we do show it, we’d like you to take a good look at it.”

Zabel’s own conclusion was that the formula captures the worldview JC was attempting to transmit, rather than serving as a scientific equation or classified document.

“It clearly appears to me to be the intent of the person who wrote it for us. It’s about how reality is tuned and perceived and entered,” he explained. “I have come to believe that it was his shorthand for a hidden operating system of reality.”

Friedman took a more experiential view, connecting the formula to his own encounters and to the broader pattern of temporal disruption reported in UFO literature.

“If we take anything that JC said at face value, what he may have been imparting to us is some sort of instruction manual,” Friedman offered. “To take our matter and without having to die, without being on a drug trip, without having an unannounced out-of-body experience, actually go through the process.”

The file is open

The formula, along with the six independent analyses and supporting materials, is now posted at soundlightfrequency.com. The producers have invited the public to examine, critique and extend the investigation.

“This is not case closed,” Zabel concluded. “This is file opened.”

Update: This article has stirred-up some serious discussion (and likely explanations) over at the /r/aliens subreddit.

Last Updated on September 20, 2026 by Nick Ross