Bryce Zabel is an American writer, producer, director, and former television journalist. He created or developed genre series including Dark Skies and served as chairman and chief executive of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. His career has moved between news, scripted entertainment, and nonfiction work about unidentified aerial phenomena.

Zabel’s career includes newsroom work, television producing, screenwriting, and leadership of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He co-created the alien-invasion drama Dark Skies, later wrote and hosted nonfiction projects, and developed a long-running collaboration with journalist Ross Coulthart. That movement between scripted and documentary forms gives his biography a distinctive perspective on disclosure: he understands both how governments communicate and how entertainment supplies the images through which audiences imagine secrecy.

Dark Skies embedded UFO history and government-cover-up mythology inside a 1960s conspiracy drama, giving Zabel firsthand experience adapting disputed claims into mass entertainment. He later co-authored A.D. After Disclosure with Richard Dolan, co-hosted Need to Know with Ross Coulthart, and developed Sound, Light & Frequency with Brent Friedman. Across those projects, he examines how official secrecy, witnesses, and popular culture shape expectations about what “disclosure” would mean.

Zabel’s lasting contribution is his ability to move between the production machinery of entertainment and the belief ecosystem surrounding Hollywood and UAP. His scripted work helped shape the visual language of secrecy, while later interviews and nonfiction projects connected creators with journalists, officials, and experiencers. That dual career made him a long-running interpreter of UAP disclosure and of the cultural expectations attached to it.