Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome back to Plot Pit, the show where we forge fiction from fact and folklore. William Atkinson in studio with John LeVay. And on the phone, we have special guest Brian Peterson. Hello. Brian. How are you?
[00:00:13] Speaker B: I am well, thank you very much for asking.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Excellent. Today. Skunk works in the pit. But before we do that, Brian, why don't you introduce yourself for our listeners.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Are I am Brian W. Peterson. There's lots of Brian Peterson's out there in the world, it seems, and they all write. I am an author. I have was trained in screenwriting and writing novels. I have five published novels, two Sci-Fi, two psychological thrillers, and then a true story that is set in the Great Depression World War II area excuse me, era that I researched for over 20 years before I started writing to keep it as a true story. I am someone who is geared toward a bizarre, mind, fiction writing imagination. And also I recently produced and wrote a Star Trek fan film that has just hit YouTube here about a month ago.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Oh, that sounds cool. Can you give a little description on that?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Sure. First, to find it, go to YouTube and search the Lost Starship Avalon because of one of the universes that channels. Avalon Channel is hosting it, and they have the Avalon universe. The Lost Starship is set in the original series timeline, but it's not the Enterprise. The sets are the same sets for the fan series Star Trek Continues, which was shot about a decade ago, and it continued the three year mission. Well, the sets give it that original series feel.
This fan film has excellent production values. The acting is good, excellent story, excellent effects, and so we are getting lots and lots of views. So check out the lost starship. Avalon.
[00:02:10] Speaker C: That's awesome because the first thing I thought of was Star Trek Continues. So that you have a tie to that is really neat because I've never watched it, but people speak so highly of that fan produced series.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Yeah, and the director of my film was the gentleman who was behind Star Trek Continues.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: Wow, that is just so cool.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: That is really cool, folks. I will leave a link in the description below so that way you can get that as well as links to Brian's social media, which, brian, would you give us those socials for us now?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Sure. It is written by BWP, so whether that's Gmail written by BWP at gmail. Whether it's Facebook or Twitter, at written by BWP.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Sweet. So we got your socials and tell us a little bit about one of those psychological thrillers that you had written.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Okay. I have one called Dead Dreams. It's about a 20 something. He moves back in with his parents. When he does, he starts having dreams. Each dream is different, but they all have the same ending. He's murdered by his family. So as he's researching dreams, trying to figure out what's going on. The dreams grow in intensity, and as they do, he starts to lose touch with what's real and what's dreamed. So he decides he either has to stop the dreams or he has to stop his family. It's called dead dreams.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: That is really a very cool take on that whole dream scenario. And that almost reminds me about that movie that came out, what, about 1520 years ago? I think it was like 24. And I'm not talking about the Keeper Sutherland series.
This gentleman, he gets a message from basically the future or something. He's got 24 hours to prevent his own murder.
So it's kind of an interesting take on that sort of universe of tapping into the psychological or the supernatural, in a way. So what inspired you?
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Well, that's actually what I was going to say. So we're in sync here. So for me, I wanted to write a story that incorporated sleepwalking because for most of my life, I was a sleepwalker. I rarely do now, but as a kid I did a lot. But as I put it together, I started realizing sleepwalking wasn't going to fit what was in my mind.
But I love dreams. I have intense dreams. I have a lot of dreams where my wife says, when I tell her about them, you're weird. And so I love those. I think it's great when you wake up if you wake up sweating, you had a great dream. And so the story just evolved from there. I wanted dreams to be a central.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Factor that is really interesting. So when you dream and you say that you have intense dreams, are we talking like horror dreams, nightmare type stuff, or are we talking just dreams in general that feel very surreal?
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Usually I have a lot of but I'm an author, so what the heck? I have a lot of violent dreams and where people are trying to kill me, I'm trying to defend myself, or the only way I'm going to stay alive is to kill somebody. I have a lot of dreams like that. One of my most intense dreams when I woke up is one where I had been kidnapped and I was fighting to escape. And they're just so realistic that when I wake up, I have to remind myself, okay, I'm in bed. It was a dream that was not real. So that intensity is something that I.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Just think it's crazy interesting.
That is really cool, and especially this time of year where Halloween is right around the corner. Dead Dream sounds like a book that would be right up the alley for those who like a little bit of a spooky, Stephen King sort of flair going on in their reading. So, folks, I will leave links in the description below for all of Brian's works, including Dead Dreams and the YouTube film the Fan Fiction for Star Trek that he came up with, which is The Lost Starship set in the Avalon series. So with that said, when we invited Brian onto the show, he came to us with a very interesting topic on the skunkworks. So let's begin the descent into some fact and folklore, some strange history, and Brian, take it away with skunkworks.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Okay, so I used to live in Palmdale, California. It's known as the Antelope Valley. It's north of Los Angeles. Well, in the Antelope Valley, you have Lockheed and Edwards Air Force Base. So Edwards is about 40 miles away. Palmdale Airport is the overflow for Edwards Air Force Base. So there would be periods of time where every evening an F 117 would leave the Palmdale Airport. I live 3 miles away, and it would fly right over my house. I can't tell you how many times my wife and I went running out the front door to see what kind of cool plane was flying by. I saw the maiden flight of the F 22, which is quite by accident, and I saw the last flight of the SR 71. So because of that, I knew a lot of people who worked at Lockheed and a couple of other companies there.
And they were sworn to secrecy in a lot of were, and they were engineers and literal rocket scientists and all this. So you learned some things, you heard other rumors. Well, one of the jokes that they had was the reason that Lockheed had these great planes and the stealth technology is because they put it that Lockheed had the aliens. And what they were referring to is going back clear back to Roswell, that the joke was that Lockheed was given the technology of alien spacecraft. And that's why we have craft that we have today. They took it from the aliens. So as a writer, that just strikes me as a lot of fun. And so I thought about combining that with another idea or something that I think about occasionally. What would it be like if an alien was stuck on Earth? Allah Et. Except for humanoid, except for this time Et. Doesn't have Elliot to help them figure out how to get back a board. What would a bored alien do?
And so I think back to Jack the Ripper, who, unlike in the movies, what Jack the Ripper did is pretty nasty, the way he cut open bodies.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: Extremely gruesome crime spree.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Yes. And maybe trying to learn what human analogy anatomy is like. And obviously he helps the Air Force at some point with craft. And then I thought about DB. Cooper, the way DB. Cooper just disappeared, 1971, where he stole, I believe it was $200,000, and jumped out of the back of an airplane and disappeared. And I thought, okay, if I were a bored alien and was more advanced than everyone else, I might see what kind of cool things I could get away with. So what came to mind when talking about your show is what would the alien do next? What else would an alien do who's bored, who can't get home, can't communicate with home? And so he's just kind of entertaining himself.
That's where all this went with my mind.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: A little bit of history and deep diving on Lockheed Martin and the skunk work specifically that I came across was where the name came from. There was coming out of World War II, or the tail end of World War II, our intelligence agencies had realized that the Nazis were developing a jet aircraft, right? A jet engine aircraft. So they go to Lockheed Martin and they say, hey, we need a jet engine. We need a jet aircraft. We need it in five months. They give the project to this guy who basically gives a list of rules, one of which is, it's my project. Nobody else gets to say anything about it. I get unlimited budget almost, right, among a few other things. And they ended up delivering well, that ends up starting off this basically highly classified subdivision within Lockheed Martin. And somewhere along the way, there was a comic about this place that really rank, right? Just smelled really bad. And there was that same sort of thing going on in the warehouse where all of these aircrafts were being designed. The fumes of, I guess, jet fuel and all this other stuff, it just tank. And somebody answered the phone one day and said, sunkworks or sunkworks. Well, apparently, if legends are true around this, the comic artist went to court and basically Lockheed Martin had capitulated and said, okay, we won't use that. But they ended up using Skunk instead. So that's kind of where the name Skunk works comes from. So that was just kind of an interesting bit of history there. And then you'd mentioned this idea of an alien that was born on Earth, living a very long time, right? And then you mentioned D. B. Cooper. Well, there's two movies that immediately come to my head on that. And the first is kind of a young adult action adventure type thing. It's called without a paddle. And it's set in Oregon. Where? DB. Cooper apparently took that $200,000 after hijacking the plane and jumped out of it. And these kids are on the trail of DB. Cooper trying to, years later, figure out where he basically landed, right? So there's this kind of young adult action adventure movie. It's called without a paddle. I'll leave a link in the description below for you. And then the other one is this idea of a long lifed alien. There was a movie called man from Earth that postulates the idea of a caveman who doesn't die. And so he comes out of the dinosaur era or whatever, and he's living this extremely long life, and it progresses through this story of what would it have been like to basically outlive everybody throughout all sorts, know, ancient history through modern time. So the whole movie is kind of a low budget film and it's based on this idea of a Berkeley or a Caltech professor who is about ready to leave and go somewhere else. And he invites all of his professor friends to his house and they're talking and then the idea gets brought up, hey, well, what if? And so he latches onto that and tells this story that, yeah, I've been living forever. And of course there's all sorts of suspicion and everything else. And it's all set in this one little kind of room and it's heavy dialogue. It's a really fantastic story in an engaging way for how the director was able to coach out such a story and draw you into it as if you're a participant in a conversation because that's all it is. There's no special effects. It's all filmed in this one little room and it's just a dialogue. I think there was one or two scenes. One where they go to the kitchen, another where they kind of go out to the pickup where he's loading up everything. It's called man from Earth and it kind of ties in a little bit with what you talked about there, Brian, on the long lived alien, which I thought was really fascinating.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: I was just going to say that dialogue heavy. That's really tough to pull off. You've got to be really good to pull that off. So that sounds intriguing.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Yeah. What I want to throw into the collective stew, since you're talking about an alien that gets bored, that ties in with kind of a real theory from the investigator, John Keel, who looked into the Mothman sightings in the late 1960s. And Keel was really perplexed because he was seeing or maybe he wasn't seeing, but he was interviewing people who were seeing ghosts. They were talking to spirits, they were talking to the Men in Black, they were seeing UFOs and then they were seeing this cryptid like animal called the Mothman. And he couldn't make sense of why all these strange things would happen in one area. And then that really put him on a path of supernatural investigation for the rest of his life.
He looked into everything from like phantom clowns to bigfoot. And Keel came up with this theory that instead of extraterrestrials, what these things are, are ultra terrestrials, they're interdimensional beings who are bored, and they come to Earth to basically play cosmic practical jokes. And he even wrote a whole book on it called Disneyland for the Gods where basically Keel's theory is anything weird and supernatural that seemed to have happened, but is unexplainable. Are these godlike trickster beings playing jokes on us? So I thought with your alien thing getting bored, maybe that might be something we play with, maybe not.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: That's an interesting take on the Loki and Enki story. Right from Ancient Samaria. Yeah. Okay, so, folks, we have Lockheed Martin and Skunkworks with alien craft. We've got a long lived alien that might be jack the Ripper, we'll find out. Or potentially D. B. Cooper and the idea of extraterrestrials actually being interdimensional beings playing tricks on humanity. Let's begin the descent. Brian, why don't you kick us off?
[00:15:56] Speaker B: What I'm thinking is, what would he do next?
And if I'm a bored alien on a planet where I look like everyone else, the first thing I would do is make sure in this day and age of social media and television news cycles, I would make sure I was on those cycles. I would make sure I was in social media. So I'm thinking I'm going to do something like make something disappear and bring it back. Say an airline, say a ship. That'd be fun. And the whole point is things disappear, but they don't usually return. And when something disappears, they're presumed dead. They're some great mystery that isn't going to be unlocked. And it always has a bad ending for whoever those people are. So I'm thinking that maybe a cruise ship and a cruise ship disappears. It's huge news. Where did it go down? They're out looking and then it just pops up, say in another ocean had been in the Atlantic, now it's in the Pacific. So then the next question is what happened during that time period? So that's I think we'd have to explore. What did they know? Did the people on the ship know anything happened? Or did they simply, in a flash, they're somewhere else? I think that's what we would have to pursue. What we want to do that almost.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Has a Bermuda Triangle feel where, let's say this alien crash landed on Earth, I don't know, 500 years ago, right? So this would have been just about the time where Columbus is sailing into the New World. And presumably the New World is being discovered. Right. And through the Bermuda Triangle, we start having all these legends of ships disappearing. So maybe that's where he crash landed. And what we've got is some sort of teleportation.
You know, he left his home planet or home galaxy or whatever. It creates this interdimensional travel scenario. And I don't know, maybe he was hitting the eggnog just a little too hard and miscalculated. Something ends up crashing in the Caribbean right at the center of the Bermuda Triangle. And that drive malfunctions to where it just randomly starts taking craft or anything that flies within a certain radius of it and teleports it to the other end of the world. So maybe in the Atlantic, deeper in Atlantic or possibly even across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. What do you think, John?
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Well, I was wondering yeah, kind of along the same lines. If we wanted to start taking real stuff like the Mary Celeste that disappeared, wasn't that the ship, the sailing ship, the Mary Celeste. Does that sound right?
[00:18:51] Speaker A: I'm not familiar with this one, John.
[00:18:53] Speaker C: I'm confident enough to go with it. I think it was called the Mary Celeste. And it disappeared, I think in the 18 hundreds. Actually, no, the ship didn't disappear. The crew just all vanished off the ship, and they never found the crew. And the then, you know, we could go with Amelia Earhart disappearing.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: We could also hit the Philadelphia experiment.
[00:19:10] Speaker C: That too. And then since Brian likes Star Trek, I got to thinking, well, what if this alien was kind of like Q from the Next Generation? Does that sound kind of in your vibe, Brian, or is he not like Q? Are you kind of going for that or not?
[00:19:26] Speaker B: It would certainly fit in the sense of an alien with humor.
[00:19:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm liking him having a sense of humor as opposed to Jack the Ripper, unless the Jack the Ripper was the bad alien or something like that in the past.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: So we have this long lived alien crash landing on Earth, say, I don't know, circa 1400 or whatever, we've got the new world coming over, and this alien has a mischievous trickster vibe, so not necessarily malicious, but rather not realizing how fragile the human body is.
All right, so Brian, you mentioned he looks like us, which would help him blend in, right, in modern day being able to use social media and everything, so taking selfies and all of that. But we could presume say he's kind of like Superman, where he grew up in a galaxy or a planet where the Superman lore's got kryptonite. Right. So there's no kryptonite basically there on his planet or there is there, which kind of weakens them or gives them strength or whatever. Over here, he's kind of come to figure out, and I'm super strong, I don't get sick or whatever. I'm super fast at healing, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he thinks all humans are that way here.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: I'm thinking that makes sense. But I'm also thinking that he's going to have to have a mean or an evil streak because you mentioned the Mary Celeste. I don't know a lot about it. I just know it was a ship that was found adrift without its crew. And so, you know, no good came of that. And so they didn't turn up somewhere else. They didn't turn up safe. So what I'm looking at is you could make him like Hugh, but he would have to have a mean or evil streak. And that's something know, that sadistic sense of humor would be what would drive him. Because for a ship to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, for example, if they show up elsewhere and they're all, everybody's safe and there was no real story, then there's not a lot to carry a story. So what I'm thinking is that he would have to have interaction with the crew and that they wouldn't just instantly pop up somewhere else, at least in their minds on that ship.
They would have to go through some struggle, some adventure, something to continue to carry the story.
So the alien would have to have an evil streak, not just pure fun.
[00:22:09] Speaker C: So he's a villain? Kind of, sort of, yes. Full on villain or antihero villain? Or does he need to be vanquished or does he just need to learn a lesson?
[00:22:20] Speaker A: What if he's a mad scientist and he's here studying humanity for some purpose? So often in the lore of the Greys or other alien abduction ideas is this concept that they're trying to make alien human hybrids. Maybe he's the initiating scientist that was sent here to do the preliminary groundwork.
And so this alien race is trying to prepare humanity, shall we say, in not really a benevolent, kind hearted way, but they are vested in humanity's futures for whatever reason. Maybe they see the future and humanity plays a critical role in some intergalactic conflict 500 years from now, and they're trying to get us to where we are prepared for that. So they are doing these preliminary groundwork experimentations or whatever, and that process is not particularly well suited for the human body. And first they have to understand the anatomy. And so there's where Jack the Ripper pops into play. And I looked up Mary Celeste here. Basically it's an American registered merchant brigantine, which was discovered adrift in the Atlantic Ocean on the 4 December 1872. And what's curious is that none of the provisions on board, like the captain's personal belongings or the crews were disturbed and they had all of their alcohol intact. So a mysterious scenario as to the disappearance. With that being said, I'm kind of catching a little bit of the vibe of the idea that you've got this alien, and I'm feeling very much that we're going to end up with a two parter here. But he's got this trickster vibe. He's a mad scientist, and he was sent here on a mission by this alien civilization to prepare humanity to move forward. But he's not the leader. He's like maybe the assistant to the professor and has contention with the other individual. And so he's got a David Lee Roth versus Van Halen thing going on on creative direction.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: I like that.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: So you've got these two ideas on how to prepare humanity for it. He's been told by these superiors to do it the way that he doesn't want to do it. And so that's when he gets his mischievous streak, he's like, all right, fine. If I've got to do it this way, they're going to suffer.
So it's not really out of hate for humanity. It's more of his ego. Yeah, ego's been hurt. Okay, what do you think, Brian?
[00:25:02] Speaker B: I'll show you mentality. I'll show you. And the Mary Celeste fits in very nicely because of the reasons you just gave. And so I like the thought that, yes, he's someone that he has a job. He's not doing his job, he's doing what he wants. And by the way, if that means I get to have some fun, I'm going to get to have some fun. But he's got to do things that are audacious. He's got to do things that are going to bring a lot of attention to himself as the world continues to get more and more global by the day in terms of communications. And so I would like to move past the cruise ship that happens. And then while authorities are trying to figure out what happened, he's already moving on to his next big thing. So now what's his next big thing?
[00:25:55] Speaker A: So we've got the prelude of the story. So act one know, the first half of act one or so is kind of set up with a very fast, rapid pull through of our aliens trying to prepare humanity, setting up that motivation the conflict between Loki and inky or this alien and his superior, right. Or maybe even know there are two professors kind of at a research institution, but the superiors or the board told them to go in this direction. So the first half of act one is setting up all of that. And then we get to earth, where the crash landing happens or whatever to spawn. He's here doing this preliminary groundwork research. We get Jack the ripper, we get the Mary Celeste moving into DB. Cooper, and then we're in this age of social media and we go from act one into act two to establish the conflict. So I think we are hitting time to end this episode, hit a two parter, and we'll come back to this on Tuesday with a conclusion. What do you I think I think.
[00:27:02] Speaker C: That'S right because I have some more ideas where to take the story that would take us down a completely different rabbit hole.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Okay, Brian, why don't you give us a summary then, if you so desire, of where we are so far.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: So right now, we're dealing with an alien who is out to have fun, does what he wants. He's a bit of a rebel and he is disobeying his orders and we have to figure out that preparation for humanity. But someone who has experimented on humans.
Jack the Ripper, who has kidnapped people. Mary Celeste and someone who is basically ready to make his entrance into the world so that people know who he is or he just keeps them so flabbergasted that he is constantly in the news or making news. So we're dealing with somebody who is now ready to go to that next step of a lot of action.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Excellent. All right, folks, we have a lot of fact and folklore in this episode, and we are forging fiction in the pit, william Atkinson here in studio with John Lemay. And we have Brian Peterson on the phone. Brian, give us your socials on the way out for our listeners one more time.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Twitter at written by BWP. Facebook is written by BWP, and my website is writtenbybwp.com.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Excellent. And folks, you can catch us on our discord server, interacting with myself as well as John or many of our other guests that have been on the program, including Brian Peterson. And we have the opportunity for you to support the show by sharing the podcast with your friends and family, if you so desire. And we also have patreon as well as Buy Me Coffee and a donate button at our website, plopfit.com. If you are interested, I will have links to all of the Socials as well as Brian Peterson's books below, including the Star Trek fan film that he's recently written. That's quite interesting there. Thank you, Brian, for sharing all of that.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: It has been a pleasure and we do look forward to having you back on our next episode for the conclusion here come Tuesday. For the meantime, John, I think that's about it.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's it.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: All right, folks, goodbye from Rosal and.
