Sounds like a great premise for an intense action-suspense drama. It's so good that NBC has utilized it as the basis for the highly anticipated television drama 'The Event', scheduled to debut September 20, 2010. The description above was taken directly from the trailer. Few television series have generated this much abject curiosity prior to their debut and no event since someone shot J.R. Ewing has been kept so secret by a publicity hungry television studio.

So what is the Event that will change television history?

According to Wikipedia, "The Event follows Sean Walker (Jason Ritter), a man who, while investigating the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée, ends up unraveling the biggest cover-up in U.S. history; a coverup which shapes the very core of mankind as a whole, whose implications are lifechanging."

According to Access Hollywood, what is being covered up and what the event is, is currently the best kept secret in Hollywood. So secret, in fact, that most of the cast do not know what the Event that drives the plot really is. Despite repeated attempts to pry the secret from the cast, Access Hollywood has been unable to get an answer to this public relations mystery.

The promotional clips for the series are a masterpiece of ambiguity as to the exact nature of the situation that forces the President to contemplate the most profound act of his political career. If you watch them with the mindset of the consensus paradigm, several possibilities come to mind: The well-worn notion of impending destruction of an American city by a terrorist nuclear device; the release of an unstoppable genetically designed plague; a planetary extinction level event cause by an impending meteor strike or something even worse. Whatever that might be.

There is an event in the first episode, apparently an attack upon the President by forces unknown, but that is not the event, which remains a closely guarded trade secret. According to Blair Underwood, who plays President Elias Martinez, a Cuban-American proud of his heritage, the true nature of the event will be apparent to the audience by the second episode, but the answer to that question will only engender many more questions which will be progressively answered as the series continues. And that statement itself is a clue.

You don't have to wait until the second episode to find out what drives the plot of 'The Event' and has Hollywood and the fall viewing audience in suspense.

The secret in the character dossier that Laura Innes is contractually forbidden to reveal is that her character, a mysterious and powerful leader of a group of detainees in at the Mount Inostranka facility in Alaska—think Gitmo on ice—is an alien being outwardly indistinguisable from indigenous humans. She is the leader of but one alien faction who is busy influencing world events. For that reason, Innes is probably the only one of the cast and crew outside the producers and scriptwriter who has a clear picture of the event.

The Event facing the President of the United States is the disclosure to the American public of the reality of alien life operating on Earth.

And he is facing a deadline for disclosure that is forcing his hand. The clock is ticking. Think '24' meets the X-Files.

The clues to the plot are readily decoded by anyone who has studied the UFO phenomenon and, more to the point, the development and implementation of United States public information policy on the issue over the last six decades, as the behavior of the characters in the trailers mirror that of their real life counterparts.

The series revolves around the problem of how -- and what would force you -- to tell a society that the reality they actually live in includes non-human intelligent life -- some of which has been visiting Earth before mankind as it thinks it knows itself was created. And the series is itself part of a novel solution to that vexing social problem.

Before you blame me for spoiling the plot, know that New York Magazine has already published the secret of the event. And realize that this ground breaking treatment will still bear attentive viewing as the series works its way through the laybryinth of implications of the basic plot. There are a nearly insurmountable mountain of problems associated with the act of disclosure.

Disclosure of the secret of 'The Event' by no means spoils the impact of this series or ruins its entertainment value. Indeed, knowing the real-life back story behind the script can only intensify the viewing experience.

Trust me, there will be enough plot twists built into the issue to keep everyone wondering around the water cooler for the run of the series just what complication will surface next or how the unwitting protaganist, the President, the head of the NSA, the leader of the alien faction and supporting cast of characters will behave in light of the latest episode's revelations.

Whether or not this is the most important secret in history, it is by now one of the most complicated to unravel. And unraveling it for themselves as the series progresses is perhaps the most important step a viewer can take in their lifetime towards a more accurate understanding of the world we actually live in.

As we will see in this series of articles, the real problem is how a society can re-educate itself. What is required is an acknowledgment by the society of a different understanding of reality than what they have depended upon for decades -- not the disclosure of a questionable alternate reality by a government with a track record of stonewalling and spin to a population ill-prepared to assimulate the truth. On this issue, a Presidential press conference is powerless, and potentially counter-productive.

It may be that The Event is the event we've been waiting for. Perhaps disclosure begins not with a bang but with a whisper.

It turns out that perhaps the only way out of the intellectual trap western technological society has created for itself is for each citizen to do his or her homework. The responsible literature to do so is in short supply, but it is available.

Sensible dialog is desperately needed on this issue. Debate on subject has been hopelessly polarized between the so called 'believers' a meme implying uncritical thinking to the mainstream and the so-called 'debunkers' and 'skeptics' a meme implying deliberate obtusification of the secret truth to those who have read the literature.

Neither term is accurate in its implied meaning. For that matter, neither is 'UFO', which has become, unfortunatly, synonymous with 'alien spacecraft'. The genre needs a new lexicon, as Leslie Kean points out in her New York Times best-seller "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record" which is currently 30 and rising on the New York Times best-seller list for very good reason.

To appreciate The Event, ask yourself this question:

What would YOU do if you were sitting in the oval office and discovered a society-changing truth was buried deep within the inherited national security apparatus of your administration and that matters were coming to a head that force you to try to tell the American public that everything they were taught in schools and religious instituions and know to be true is, well, inaccurate?

How real can fictional television be? Let's start by asking one question:

Is it plausible that the President would not know something supposedly this important?

Next Segment: The Missing Times.

This is article 1 of a five part series discussing the significance of the NBC television series 'The Event', which will premiere on September 20, 2010. The series appears to be the beginning of an effort to inform the American public of the reality of the UFO and alien life on Earth.

Sept. 11, 2010www.examiner.com/ufo-in-phoenix/nbc-s-the-event-the-secret-even-the-president-does-not-know