Project Blue Book 2.1: The Coverup Continues

The pulpy science fiction that is Project Blue Book was back on the History Channel last Tuesday for the debut of its second season.  I was kidnapped by a UFO so didn't get a chance to watch and review until now - no, only kidding, I was really up in Boston last Tuesday, for a radio show in which my new album Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time was debuted.  That's true - listen to this - and I promise everything else I say in this review will be true, at least as far as I know it.

Here's the set-up, inherited from season one:  Dr. Hynek (very loosely based on the real person) and Captain Quinn (totally fictitious) are the essence of Project Blue Book, now self-tasked with a very strange task indeed.  Hynek believes flying saucers are real alien visitations.  Quinn started off the first season doubting that, and moved from not so sure to pretty much believing it.  But the two need to pretend that they think all the UFOs are hoaxes, so General Harding will keep them on the case of making the public believe that the UFOs are hoaxes.  This is the only way Hynek and Quinn can keep on the cutting edge of this.   Also, there's a gorgeous Soviet spy who is well on her way now to getting Quinn wrapped around her finger.

Episode 2.1 features Hynek, Quinn, and Harding out in Roswell, New Mexico, in our real history the continuing focus of all kinds of UFO investigations.  Of course, in Project Blue Book, the UFOs were and are really from outer space, or least not of this Earth.  And Harding wants to keep this quiet.  He "confesses" to Hynek and Quinn that he indeed covered something up at Roswell a few years back.  But it wasn't an alien spacecraft, it was some kind of new weapon that we could use against the Soviets, so of course he needed to keep it secret.

The continuing tension is how long can Hynek and Quinn keep their mouths shut, when they both know that Harding was lying in his confession?  I thought last year, and still think now, that Harding himself might well be an alien.  I mean, he looks like an extraterrestrial, you can't believe anything he says, and this series is science fiction, isn't it?

See also:  Project Blue Book 1.1: Science Fiction, Or? ... Project Blue 1.2: Calling Roy Thinnes ... Project Blue Book 1.3: Peggy Sue Gets Space Ship ... Project Blue Book 1.4: von Braun ... Project Blue Book 1.5: A Theory ... Project Blue Book 1.6:  The Team ... Project Blue Book 1.7: The Star People ... Project Blue Book 1.8: 'Already Here' ... Project Blue Book 1.9: Shiny Round Object ... Project Blue Book Season One Finale: Truman

here I am talking Ancient Aliens a few years ago on the History Channel

                    1st starship to Alpha Centauri 

Project Bluebook 1.3: Peggy Sue Gets Space Ship

I'm continuing to enjoy Project Blue Book - as a science fiction story based on some actual events.  Along those lines, it would be a great twist if Hynek himself was an extraterrestrial, wouldn't it.  Such a move would have about the same relationship to reality as most of the other high points in this series.

Take our government organizing a massive coverup, and urging Hynek and Quinn to help them sell this to the public.  The truth is that our government was engaged in all kinds of coverups in the Red-scare 50s.   The government is no doubt involved in all kinds of coverups today.  But that's still a long ways off from a coverup specifically being about sundry alien sightings.

Episode 1.3 takes us to Lubbock, Texas in 1951, where strange lights were seen for many nights in the sky, and, according to some reports, a guy's truck was demolished but he escaped physically unscathed.  Hynek and Quinn investigate, and encounter a professor who concluded the lights were made by a formation of plovers - flying terrestrial birds, not extra-terrestrial spaceships (in reality, Hynek actually learned this from the professor years later, in 1959, but ok).  Unsurprisingly, Hynek and Quinn don't put much credence in the professor's assessment, though Quinn is always happy to acquiesce to his superiors' commands.   (I predict, though, that as this series progresses, he'll come to reject them.)

So Lubbock goes down as a major example of another government-suppressed incident of visitation from outer space.  One facet not explored in this episode is the connection of all of this to Buddy Holly, Lubbock's best known citizen.   He appeared on television for the first time in 1952, just a year after the Lights.  He had a fabulous, original voice, and wrote irresistibly catchy songs, loved by the Beatles and everyone else.  Could Buddy have been influenced by those lights in the sky, inspired by them to change the world with his music?

Now that would be a story.

See also:  Project Blue Book 1.1: Science Fiction, Or? ... Project Blue 1.2: Calling Roy Thinnes

here I am talking Ancient Aliens a few years ago on the History Channel

 

Project Blue Book 1.2: Calling Roy Thinnes

Having just watched the second episode of Project Blue Book - 1.2 - I've come to realize what at least a part of this series really is:  a version of Roy Thinnes' The Invaders (1967-1968), still, for my money, about the best extra-terrestrial invasion series ever on television.   Thinnes' character does a great, largely futile, job trying to alert our world to the invaders' presence.  And it's tough, seeing as how they can induce heart attacks when needed in powerful people who are beginning to suspect their existence.

There's definitely an alien presence in Project Blue Book, making that part straight-up science fiction (though of course I could be wrong if extra-terrestrials are really among us).  They, or one of them, presumably killed that poor lady in the mental institution.  Presumably, the blond (played by Ksenia Solo), and the guy who looks like the guy who usually plays sleazy attorneys (Currie Graham), are extra-terrestrials, too.

Or maybe not.  They could be working for the government - our government - in which the generals are keeping a lot of things from the public, including a flying saucer literally under wraps.  That our government keeps things from us is true.   That they kept - and for all I know, are still keeping - flying saucers from us is unknown, but, for the reasons I mentioned in last week's review, likely fiction.

So, given that there really are extra-terrestrials afoot in this science fiction series, who isn't?  I guess everyone is suspect, including even Quinn.  But, at this point, I'll give him a pass, as well as Hynek, though you just never never know with these kinds of stories.

In its mix of reality within fiction within fiction - a docudrama based on a real scientist, Hynek, and a government that really lies to us all the time, so why not about flying saucers - Project Blue Book continues to be an unusual series, and worth watching.

See also:  Project Blue Book 1.1: Science Fiction, Or?

here I am talking Ancient Aliens a few years ago on the History Channel

 

Project Blue Book 1.1: Science Fiction, Or?

Project Blue Book, the docudrama on the History Channel about Dr. Allen Hynek and his research into UFOs, couldn't have come at a better time.   I mean, a better time for me.  I read and reviewed Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding, about John W. Campbell and the golden age of science fiction,  And Hynek's story - at least, as it begins on Project Blue Book - begins in 1952, which many people, including me, would regard as the peak of that golden age.  Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which had first been published as a series of stories in "Astounding" (the magazine), was smack dab in the middle of being published as three books.  Robert Heinlein had just published, a year earlier, his Puppet Masters, to this day one the very best books about an extraterrestrial invasion ...  But I digress.

Or maybe not.  Because Project Blue Book - the docudrama - is right at the nexus of strange-but-true and science fiction.  Hynek is called upon by the Feds to give his scientific imprimatur to their insistence that flying saucers were nothing more than natural phenomena like birds or human technological phenomena like weather balloons.  The perspective of the docudrama is that we the audience know better, and Hynek quickly comes to know better.

Unsurprisingly, the government apparently knows better, too.  The first episode leaves us with the impression that the government knew we (the Earth) were visited by flying saucers, but they (the government) did not want the public to know.  This is a familiar characterization of our government on many issues, and may or may not be true in real history about flying saucers.

Speaking of reality, I'll own up to being skeptical to agnostic on extra-terrestrial visits.  I'm a skeptic, because if we've been visited, are being visited, by beings from outer space in space ships, why don't they ever land on 58th Street in Manhattan in front of CNN so everyone in the world can see them?  Or, if they don't want us to know anything about them, they've been doing a pretty poor job of that.  But I'm ultimately agnostic on the question of UFOs because there's certainly no reason in principle that there aren't intelligences other than ours out there in the universe, some of them far more advanced than ours in their penetration of the cosmos.

Back to more mundane matters, it was good to Aidan Gillen (from Game of Thrones and many other memorable performances) in his portrayal of Hynek.  The first episode offered several phenomena - like damage on the pilot's plane - that weren't explicable by science, according to Hynek.   One of those, however, a pilot hearing a California radio station in Fargo, North Dakota (that's right) high in sky at night could be explained by the long distances some radio waves can travel at night.  I wanted to shout that across the screen to Hynek.  But if all of this turns out to be science fiction, that's more than ok for me to watch on television.  Hey, strange things do happen in Fargo, if memory serves.


here I am talking Ancient Aliens a few years ago on the History Channel