“You’re famous for saying that there are billions and billions of stars out there in the Universe. Newsman Zabel was not then “a UFO guy.” At any rate, Zabel walked Sagan out into the parking lot… He was also very much a believer in extraterrestrials and UFOs and even believed that dolphins might have a role to play in the matter.

Sagan was already famous for the 1980 TV miniseries Cosmos: Bryce Zabel, “ Cosmic Collision: My UFO Debate with Carl Sagan” at Medium (August 24, 2021) Now I was going to sit on the same stage with him and talk a little space travel. After all, he was designing the messages for extraterrestrial civilizations that would ride with that Voyager spacecraft on the “Golden Record” at the same time I was a hippie radio news jock in Eugene, Oregon during college. I got to host Saturn and Beyond, and it was going to be Carl Sagan and me “live,” without commercial interruption, for thirty minutes on a show that got picked up by PBS for broadcast across the United States. His idea was to interview Sagan (remember the insignificant Pale Blue Dot that Earth is supposed to be?). It was even going to send back photos in almost real time. Now, four years later, it was due to make its closest approach to Saturn on August 25, 1981. The Voyager II unmanned spacecraft had been launched in August of 1977. Sci-fi screenwriter Bryce Zabel recalls a memorable dispute with cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934–1996) in a parking lot forty years ago:

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