Bryce Zabel relays the “John Herrington saw alien life” claim — IUFOC 2018 lecture clip
Source: Bryce Zabel, “Fear & Loathing on the Trail of the Saucers,” 2018 International UFO Congress lecture. This ~4.9-minute excerpt circulated via Joe Murgia (@TheUfoJoe) on X, 16 Sep 2022 (the “2/2” tweet; video attached). Full lecture rentable at internationalufocongress.vhx.tv. URL (clip): https://x.com/TheUfoJoe/status/1570673994701111296 Captured: 2026-06-21 via OpenAI Whisper (scripts/speech_to_text_remote.py, —timestamps). Single speaker (Zabel). Verbatim machine transcription — note Whisper renders the surname as “Harrington”; the man is John S. Herrington (the tweet’s own text spells it “Herrington”). What this is: Zabel recounting a secondhand story. Relay chain: John S. Herrington (Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1981, then Secretary of Energy 1985-1989) allegedly told Brent Friedman — Zabel’s friend and writing partner, then 18, a family friend/neighbor of Herrington in Northern California — in 1981, after Friedman drove Herrington’s car cross-country to Washington, that “There is alien life on Earth, I’ve seen it”; that he had spent about six weeks being briefed at an underground base outside Washington; and that he “cried myself to sleep every night” over the world his three daughters would inherit. He framed non-disclosure economically (“disclosure would disrupt the economy … allows the population to be controlled”), said “the truth is, we don’t know what the hell is going on,” and “who’s going to believe you?” Zabel also tells this in his book A.D. After Disclosure (with Richard Dolan). It is a relayed, uncorroborated account; Herrington has not publicly confirmed it. Analysis and reliability framing: herrington-relayed-disclosure-claim.
[0.0s → 33.3s] Okay, now we’re gonna get into where we’re gonna break some news here, at least UFO news. This is the man Brent talked to. His name is John Harrington. John Harrington was Brent’s neighbor up in Northern California. He was a man highly involved in the Reagan administration. In the opening days in 1981, he was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In the second term of Reagan’s, from 85 on, he was our Energy Secretary, okay? [33.3s → 46.0s] This is no nobody, he’s somebody. Here’s what happened. Reagan gets elected, Harrington gets offered this job in Washington, and he has to move [46.0s → 51.6s] to Washington. So he moves his family to Washington, and he hires Brent, who’s 18 years old, to drive [51.6s → 61.3s] his car cross-country to deliver the car to him. So Brent says, okay, I’ll do that, I mean, you know, free food, free gas, what’s not [61.3s → 66.6s] to like? So Brent drives the car all the way across the United States, and shows up at night and [66.6s → 93.0s] delivers it to Harrington’s house. And he goes there and has dinner with the family, and Harrington had a briefcase with him that a guy who Brent had never seen, a guy in a suit, stood in the front hall watching it, and then Harrington basically after dinner said, well, you can take it now. [93.0s → 99.1s] So the guy took the briefcase and left. In other words, Harrington had taken work home, but he wasn’t able to continue looking [99.1s → 112.2s] at it. Brent noticed that Harrington had been drinking heavily, and that Harrington never drank, to the best of his knowledge, and he grew up down the street from him. [112.2s → 122.0s] And Harrington said, well, let’s go outside. So they went outside, and, you know, Harrington was just in kind of a mood, one of those dark, [122.0s → 131.0s] cloudy moods, and Brent said, you know, what’s going on? And Harrington said, and this is the quote that Brent gave me, Harrington said, there [131.0s → 155.1s] is alien life on Earth, I’ve seen it. And Brent said, okay, Brent was 18, he didn’t know what he was referring to, he knew nothing about anything, he just kind of said the first thing that came to his mind, he was thinking he’d seen a body or something, and he said, is it alive? And he thought that Harrington would say, no, I saw a body, or whatever. [155.1s → 170.7s] And Harrington said, that depends. Then Harrington went on to tell him that he had spent, when he came to Washington D.C., six weeks at an underground base outside of Washington. [170.7s → 182.4s] It’s undetermined to me whether he’d lived there, I think he visited because it was nearby. And he said, and I cried myself to sleep every night, which freaked out my 18-year-old friend [182.4s → 197.5s] Brent, and he said, why? Why would you do that? And Harrington said, I have three girls, this is the kind of world they’re going to grow up in. I don’t know exactly what that means, all right? [197.5s → 237.8s] He said that we’re definitely not alone, he said, why don’t we know about this? And Harrington told him, he said, disclosure, the same things we’ve just seen, disclosure would disrupt the economy, it’s the primary engine that powers civilization and allows the population to be controlled, and he said, what would we tell them anyway? The truth is, we don’t know what the hell is going on. And Brent said, well, why are you telling me? I’m 18 years old. And Harrington said, who’s going to believe you? [237.8s → 244.0s] And he said, well, why don’t more people know about this? And he says, lots of people know about this, just go to any bookstore, which I think is [244.0s → 249.4s] kind of interesting. That’s the sort of, we’re already in a disclosure world in this room, but a lot of people aren’t, [249.4s → 263.0s] but there’s books out there, books you can go buy right now about it. So that is the thing that, this is John Harrington, and that’s what he told Brent according to Brent. I wasn’t there, but that’s what Brent says. [263.0s → 275.4s] So Harrington was saying that he spent six weeks being briefed outside Washington, D.C. in 1981. He cried himself to sleep, because he has three kids, and this is the world they grow [275.4s → 285.0s] up in, that nobody would believe Brent. And he did not get fired for any of this. He got promoted. [285.0s → 291.4s] He became the energy secretary, and he continued to have a career in Republican politics.