In this clip from the Dark Skies episode “Dark Days Night,” Majestic-12 agent John Loengard finds himself backstage at one of the most iconic pop-culture moments of the 1960s: The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. As the band rehearses in daylight before the broadcast that will change music history, Loengard meets Ed Sullivan, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and John Lennon himself — who leaves him with a strange and memorable gift. But in Dark Skies, history is never just history. While America is about to fall in love with the Fab Four, Loengard and Majestic-12 are investigating a darker possibility: that the alien Hive has infiltrated the government’s MK-Ultra program and is using human mind-control experiments as part of its long-term invasion strategy. Dark Skies — created by Bryce Zabel and Brent V. Friedman — was NBC’s 1996 alien-invasion conspiracy thriller, and the first dramatic series to explore a possible connection between the JFK assassination and the UFO cover-up. Told through the eyes of former congressional aide turned Majestic-12 operative John Loengard, abductee Kim Sayers, and their hybrid son created by the alien Hive, the series blended real history, UFO lore, Cold War paranoia, and 1960s pop culture into one sweeping alternate-history mythology. The series’ signature premise was simple and unsettling: “History Is a Lie.” In Dark Skies, the major events of the 1960s — from the Kennedy assassination to The Beatles, NASA, Vietnam, and the counterculture — were all reframed as part of a secret war between humanity and an alien intelligence hiding in plain sight.