Aug 25, 2023
UFO’s. New books. A movie script with a character who has a gold nose, and a beaver dinosaur. Star Trek, Yerkes Observatory, and of course, aliens. Mark O’Connell brings the best stories and big news to the show this week- everything you would expect from a Star Trek writer, screenplay writer, UFO book author, podcast host…. All around awesome friend of the show! You’re going to love this episode.
Mark O’Connell got his start in television writing for Star Trek:
The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, most notably
DS9 fan favorite Who Mourns for Morn? Since then, he has had
feature screenplays optioned and placed in development at Al Ruddy
Productions, DreamWorks Animation, and Disney. His comedy
screenplay Doug and Dave was in development at Disney with the late
Bill Paxton attached to direct. Mark’s first book is The Close
Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOS, a
biography of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, famed UFO researcher and
inspiration behind Steven Spielberg’s epic film Close Encounters of
the Third Kind. The Close Encounters Man was published by Dey
Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. Mark was recently
featured in a UFO documentary produced by NHK, Japan's Public TV
network, and he can currently be seen in the National Geographic TV
Documentary UFOs: Investigating the Unknown, streaming on HULU.
Mark lives in Georgia with his wife Monica.
Get a copy of Mark’s book, Close Encounters Man, and follow him as an author here: https://www.amazon.com/Close-Encounters-Man-World-Believe-ebook/dp/B01KFBO77U?ref_=ast_author_mpb
Other Oddities Mentioned on the Show:
Yerkes Observatory: https://yerkesobservatory.org/
The Movie 65 with Adam Driver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65_(film)
Watch Now: National Geographic’s TV Show, UFO’s: Investigating the Unknown (where Mark is featured along with his work and research) Episode 2 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/shows/ufos-investigating-the-unknown/episode-guide/season-01/episode-02-giant-ufo-in-texas/vdka32402838
And Episode 3: Close Encounters at Nuclear Bases:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/shows/ufos-investigating-the-unknown/episode-guide/season-01/episode-03-close-encounters-at-the-nuclear-bases/vdka32402854
Listen To Far Fetched, Episode 35, My Unsold Star Trek Pitches: https://ococonnell.podbean.com/
AND, check out the Micro-G NEXT project opportunity at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center NBL here, as mentioned in the
commercial! https://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/about-micro-g-next