In the summer of 1981, eighteen-year-old Brent Friedman and a couple of his friends drove two cars across the country carrying a dog and the household belongings of a family friend who had recently moved from California to Washington. That friend was John S. Herrington, a successful lawyer, former Marine officer and longtime associate of Ronald Reagan who had joined the new administration at the White House. Within weeks, President Reagan would nominate Herrington to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Four years later, Herrington would enter Reagan’s Cabinet as Secretary of Energy.
What happened one night at Herrington’s Virginia home has stayed with Brent ever since.
Brent had known Herrington since childhood. Their families were close, their children grew up together, and Herrington had been enough of a presence in Brent’s life to teach him how to throw a baseball and take a personal interest in his future. That night in 1981, after dinner, the two went outside to talk privately. According to Brent, Herrington described having undergone an extended series of highly classified briefings at an underground facility in West Virginia. He told Brent that what he had learned was so disturbing that he had cried himself to sleep at night because this was not the world he thought he was bringing his daughters into.
Then he told him why.
As Brent remembers the conversation, Herrington said extraterrestrial beings were real, that they were already here, and that he had personally seen them. He described an enormous government effort to manage the secret, including both genuine information and deliberate disinformation, and told Brent that even the people inside the system did not fully understand what was happening. Brent was an eighteen-year-old theater student preparing to enter UCLA. He had no background in UFO research, intelligence programs or the exotic details that would later become central to the UAP debate.
There is no document that proves this extraordinary conversation occurred exactly as Brent remembers it, and Herrington has denied the disclosure account. What exists instead is a chain of circumstances that makes the story difficult simply to dismiss. Herrington was not a random Washington functionary. At the time of the alleged conversation, he was already working inside the Reagan White House and was about to assume a senior civilian position in the Department of the Navy. He would subsequently return to the White House at a high level and then spend four years running the Department of Energy, an agency responsible for some of the nation's most sensitive nuclear facilities and classified programs.
There is also Brent himself. He did not suddenly produce the story decades later after becoming immersed in UFO culture. He told members of his family after returning from Washington. More importantly for the history of Dark Skies, he told Bryce Zabel the story in detail when the two first got to know each other in 1994. Bryce has heard Brent tell it repeatedly over more than thirty years and says its essential details have remained consistent.
The timing of that 1994 conversation became consequential. On the very morning Bryce and Brent first sat down together at Ca’ del Sol near Universal Studios, Bryce had independently sent his agent a two-page treatment for a television concept then called Majestic. Its premise involved a Hollywood producer becoming entangled with a secret organization hiding the truth about UFOs and using fiction as a way to let some of that truth escape. When Brent told Bryce the Herrington story later that day, the real world suddenly seemed to intersect with the fictional one Bryce had already begun imagining. The two men continued talking, Brent suggested a new title — Dark Skies — and the Herrington story became one of the real-life experiences informing the series as it developed.
Then came an extraordinary postscript. When Dark Skies reached NBC in 1996, Brent says he received a note on John Herrington stationery congratulating him and telling him, in essence, that he had finally gotten his story out there. Whatever Herrington intended by the message, Brent regarded it as an acknowledgment that his old family friend understood that something from their 1981 conversation had found its way, under the cover of fiction, into Dark Skies.
For decades, Brent was reluctant to tell the full story publicly. Sound, Light & Frequency changed that. In the episode “The Man Who Cried Himself to Sleep,” Brent finally laid out the 1981 encounter in detail, including the parts that make him uncomfortable and the portions he cannot independently prove. Rather than asking listeners simply to believe him, the podcast examines what was known then, what became known later and what can be documented about Herrington’s extraordinary access.
That trail now extends to David Grusch.
Before Grusch became nationally known for his sworn congressional testimony about alleged U.S. crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, he came to Bryce Zabel’s home in 2023 to prepare for the interview that would introduce him to the public. Bryce asked him directly whether he knew the name John Herrington. Grusch’s reaction was immediate: he knew about him. When Bryce pressed for more, Grusch indicated that he could not discuss what he knew.
That moment did not prove Brent’s 1981 story. But it changed the context surrounding it.
The story became still more consequential when people involved in the congressional UAP investigation began trying to persuade Herrington to testify in a secure setting. Grusch himself became involved in that effort, seeking to have Herrington speak inside a SCIF about what he may know concerning alleged crash retrievals. More recently, Grusch has communicated directly with Brent about efforts to bring Herrington before investigators.
That brings an intensely personal story full circle. In 1981, an eighteen-year-old Brent Friedman drove John Herrington’s cars across America to Washington and came away saying that a man entering the highest levels of government had told him an almost unbelievable secret. In the 1990s, that story helped inform the creative partnership that became Dark Skies. More than forty years later, people involved in the modern congressional UAP investigation have independently become interested in the very same man.
We do not present the John Herrington story as settled fact. We present the record: what Brent says happened, when he first told it, who Herrington demonstrably was, what happened afterward, and why serious people investigating the UAP issue now consider Herrington potentially important.
That is why the story matters.
If Brent Friedman has been accurately recounting what he was told on that Virginia veranda in 1981, then one of the most remarkable UFO disclosure stories of the modern era did not begin with a whistleblower hearing, a leaked document or a grainy military video.
It began with a trusted family friend talking privately to an eighteen-year-old kid.
