Category: Feature

As a kid I was fascinated with all things UFOs and aliens. I read every book in my school library that covered them and found the idea of “Project Blue Book” to be fascinating. This was an official governmental investigation into UFOs that went from the 1950s until the late 1960s at a time when aliens came in all shapes and sizes where people would report being whisked off to Venus or Mars for the afternoon on a regular basis.

While officially Project Blue Book didn’t find any evidence that aliens were visiting the Earth in flying saucers, none-the-less the case files from those investigations have cast a long-shadow on all sorts of things in pop-culture, especially with the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the TV series The X-Files. I mention that show because while the new History channel series Project Blue Book reportedly takes much of its story from those actual case files, I think it takes just as much from The X-Files as it does those investigations.

In the first episode of Project Blue Book Aidan Gillen plays real-life Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a university professor trying to get a grant to study launching cameras in space in the late 1950s. Contacted by the Air Force to work on a special project since he also served in that branch during World War II, he’s brought in to be the civilian scientist helping investigate UFOs along with Capt. Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey). Hynek helping the Air Force will also help with him with that pesky grant he can’t seem to convince anyone to give him. Quinn and Hynek’s first investigation involves a pilot in South Dakota who chased a UFO one night, hit it and brought back evidence in the form of a damaged and radioactive aircraft. While Capt. Quinn and the Air Force want an open and shut case, they blame this one on a weather balloon, Hynek sees something different when weird elements of the pilot’s story begin adding up and pointing towards something much more scary.

The truth is out there!

Well, kind’a. I thought the first episode was good, if it were a bit too much The X-Files in the 1950s with one character being like Mulder a believer and another like Scully a skeptic for my taste. While this worked in The X-Files because the person driving the story was the believer and the skeptic followed, those roles are reversed in Project Blue Book with Quinn, the skeptic, in charge and Hynek with his alternate view is just along for the ride. I kept thinking during the episode that if the Air Force wanted reports that debunk UFOs rather than confirming them, why not just hire a skeptical civilian scientist rather than a believer? Wouldn’t that be easier?

Which is apparently what happened in real life. Hynek started off as a skeptic but was turned into a believer by what he experienced during his investigations. Which to me at least is a much more interesting story and a deeper character arc with someone changing rather than starting out one way and then staying that way until the end. And now that I think about it, that’s what happened to Scully. She started out a skeptic and by the end of The X-Files was more of a believer than Mulder.

My main concern for the show though is that if it’s all going to be cases based on Project Blue Book then that’s a little limiting. The X-Files wasn’t all aliens all the time, it was also monsters, supernatural entities and computers gone amok. If all Project Blue Book has are “little green men” I’m worried that’s going to get boring.

Also, I gotta assume that while Project Blue Book is based on real case files, they’re going to be, shall we say, “embellished” at the very least. The first episode was based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1948, which would have put it a few years before the official start of Project Blue Book, and does seem to have a pilot really chasing lights in the sky in his fighter but not everything else that happened with Hynek and Quinn reenacting the incident in another plane or the pilot ending up in an institution.

Whenever I come across a movie or TV show that was based on something that really happened I always think of this axiom from Mystery Science Theater 3000, “’Based on’? Yeah, in that they’re both in English!”