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

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                    1st starship to Alpha Centauri 

Project Blue Book Season 1 Finale: Truman

Well, Project Blue Book ended its first season tonight pretty much the way it's been all season long: intriguing, worth watching, but still not getting beyond its cheesy pulp, though some of that was good, too.

President Truman in Washington DC takes center stage in tonight's story.  General Eisenhower will be in the White House soon - it's 1952 - and that makes General Harding happy.  He thinks Ike, as a military man, will be more likely to believe that the UFOs are Soviet.

Of course, Hynek and Quinn and we know different.  And as I've been saying  for a while this season, I wouldn't be stunned if Harding himself was an extra-terrestrial, and he's using the Soviets to cover his tracks.  We'll just have to see next season.

It is significant that Quinn is now completely on Hynek's side in believing the UFOs are extra-terrestrials, and Hynek's not above lying to the Generals to keep his real work - finding out more about the extra-terrestrial visits - from being obstructed.  It's also not 100-percent certain what General Valentine really thinks about all of this.  There's room there for him to make an unexpected move next season.

Mimi has made it clear to Susie that Mimi's not in the mood for love - with her.  But Susie is continuing to move in on Quinn, and it will be fun to see how that goes next season.  I'll be back here then with more reviews.

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

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1st starship to Alpha Centauri ... Native Americans figure in here, too

Project Blue Book 1.9: Shiny Round Object

Well, the round shiny object in tonight's Project Blue Book - 1.9 - wasn't in the sky, or even on the ground.  It was in Barney's neck, and was evidence that he had been abducted by extra-terrestrials.

In what passes for our real world - that is, the world you and I know, off-screen - Barney Hill and his wife Betty indeed claimed they were abducted by aliens from the Zeta Reticuli star system in 1961 (our system for keeping track of time).  They confirmed their stories several years later, under hypnosis - that is, under hypnosis they recalled that they had been kidnapped by extra-terrestrials.  The government (as far as we the public know) thought otherwise - that they two had similar dreams.  Books have been written about them. Movies have been made.  And tonight it was Project Blue Book the television series' turn.

As always - so far - our intrepid team come to no conclusion they want to stand up for and shout about.  Hynek and Quinn now both clearly believe there are extra-terrestrials at work on Planet Earth.  When Hynek asks Quinn what Quinn really believes, Quinn replies that it doesn't matter what he believes.  That's good enough as an admission.  He's being paid to help keep the public from going crazy about visits from the stars.   But, at some point, I'm hoping this character has to see that such a strategy is bound to fail, if, after all, we're indeed being visited by starships.

Meanwhile, on the Russian front back at Hynek's home, Mimi is drugged, seduced, and photographed by the wily Susie, which all turns out to be prelude towards the big terrestrial shock of the evening.  I liked this earthquake. I was glad to see her husband dispatched to someplace that even the aliens presumably can't reach.  He was an unpleasant and brutal guy.

Next week, the season finale takes us to Washington DC.   It's been an odd and interesting season, and I'll tell you more about what I think about it next week.

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'

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1st starship to Alpha Centauri ... Native Americans figure in here, too

Project Blue Book 1.8: 'Already Here'

"They're already here" - that's what the Corporal tells the Generals, who have brought him in to help with another strange situation in Project Blue Book 1.8.  The question, as always, is who are "they"?

Extra-terrestrials, bent on tormenting us with their presence but insistent on not being revealed?

We learn a little more later from Fairchild (played by Robert John Burke, who used to play Ed Tucker on Law & Order: SVU).  He's higher up in command than our Generals, and in regular touch with the President (who would be Eisenhower, but who knows in this science fictional universe).  Fairchild tells us that Corporal Wells was part of an earlier project that was supposed to be concluded, and Fairchild dresses down the Generals for deploying Wells.  But what was this earlier project?  Did it have to do extra-terrestrials, bent on tormenting us with their presence but insistent on not being revealed?  You know it did.   But why was it terminated?

Questions, questions.  The only thing really certain so far in Project Blue Book is that those Soviet spies - the ones living next door to the Hyneks - mean business.   Susie has disposed of nosy Donna's body.  Ok, that makes sense.  But why is she also teaching Hynek's wife how to shoot?  That's one question that likely doesn't have extra-terrestrials in its possible answer.   It's more likely that Susie is somehow hoping she can set up a situation in which Mimi mistakes Susie's brutal husband for an intruder, and shoots him dead.  Makes sense, right?

But not much else makes sense in Project Blue Blue, and I suppose that only makes sense.  After all, in a narrative that focuses on possible extra-terrestrials who have yet to introduce themselves to the world on CNN in 2019, how much sense could be made of them back in the 1950s?

But this makes for diverting television, and I'll see you here next week with my next review.

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

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

1st starship to Alpha Centauri ... Native Americans figure in here, too

Project Blue Book 1.7: The Star People

A strange, not really resolved, episode 1.7 of Project Blue Book, which features Native American legends of The Star People maybe come true, and Quinn himself under investigation for a good part of the story.

Indeed, this episode pretty much consists of two stories, barely related, and hardly tied together at the end.   We learn that Quinn's under suspicion for absconding with the peculiar artifact we saw Hynek take from the base last week.  General Harding choses to investigate Quinn by tasking him to interrogate, the hard way, the character played by Michael Imperioli - a Russian spy.  It turns out that Rizzuto (Imperioli's character) has switched back to our side, and Quinn passes the test.  Well, at least it was nice to see Imperioli again.

The Star People part is more interesting.  They figure in a Choctaw legend near Bowling Green, Ohio (which, maybe or maybe not relevant, I've long admired as a center for the study of popular culture).  Hynek, who has turned from a likely believer into a systematic debunker, discovers that extra-terrestrials had nothing to do with the lights (caused by swamp gas - the usual terrestrial explanation) and kidnapping of a scout master, who wasn't kidnapped.  But there is still room enough for real aliens here, given that the Choctaw really had petroglyphs and stories about them.

All of this adds up to a story that's hard to categorize.  Which makes sense, given that the series itself is hard to pin a label on.  Most of the time, it's deception and military jockeying masquerading as science fiction.  But enough real science fiction is thrown in - the flying saucer in the Generals' bunker, the traveler vanishing, the little edges that are not explained - that makes it worth watching.

Which I'll do when the next episode is on, next week, and be back here with a swampy report.

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

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1st starship to Alpha Centauri ... Native Americans figure in here, too

Project Blue Book 1.6: The Team

My favorite part of Project Blue Book 1.6 last night - and also likely to have some beneficial consequences for Hynek's investigation - is his decision to bring his wife Mimi into his investigations of extra-terrestrial visitations, so the two of them are a "team".

This is a crucial decision for all kinds of reasons.  Mimi is smart and loves him.  Hynek is learning that he can't really trust anyone else - including, sadly, Quinn, who folds when the Generals apply pressure.  I'm still hopeful that he might break away sooner rather than later, and work 100% with Hynek, but this has yet to happen.

My second favorite part is Michael Imperioli in a small role (as of now) as a Soviet agent (or, at least, identified as such by those Generals).   The Soviet part of this is a good counterpart to the extra-terrestrials.  They need to be reckoned with.  The blonde's husband is brutal, and doesn't hesitate to kill anyone who he thinks knows too much, and that apparently includes just seeing him.  Mimi on the team is thus a two-edged sword: she'll no doubt be a big help to Hynek, but her friendship with Susie (the blonde) means that the Soviets could have even better entree to Hynek's work.

And the role of the priest - who seems to know a lot, or more than Hynek, about the extra-terrestrials - is also an important development.  I've been saying for more than a couple of years that religion and space explorations are natural partners - see Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion - and it will be fun and significant to see where this goes.

Project Blue Book could easily be mistaken as an obvious, superficial narrative with 1950s B-movie values.  It's indeed that, but it's beginning to mine deeper elements.  Stay tuned.  I definitely will.

 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

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Project Blue Book 1.5: A Theory

A taut, tight episode 1.5 of Project Blue Book - may be my favorite so far - in which Hynek and Quinn chase down numbers and radio broadcasts and the mysterious Fuller, who meets his end by self-immolation.  Harding - more about the General below - thinks someone set off the kill switch in Fuller's head.  We know that Hynek did - unintentionally - by showing Fuller the diagram.

We also learn that there's a group of pilots - the Foo Fighters, from which the episode gets its title - who saw strange things in the sky in 1944.   They now believe they are in touch with the extra-terrestrials, a belief which Hynek (not Quinn this time), dispels.  Nice touch having Hynek being the one to shoot down incorrect beliefs about UFOs.   I also liked the possible commencing of seduction of Quinn by Susie the blond Soviet spy.



But let's get back to Harding.  Here's his picture.  You tell me: doesn't he look like an alien?  If he is, that changes everything.  It means at least he, and likely General Valentine, are not just trying to cover up extra-terrestrials on Earth.  Indeed, not even just working with them.  But ... they are part of the invasion from the stars themselves.

If that's true, if this story of Project Blue Book is the aliens are not only already here, but in our government, how far does this go?  Is von Braun, the focus of last week's episode, an extra-terrestrial, too?   Or, put otherwise, who isn't?  Likely not Hynek or his wife, or Quinn, but maybe Susie or her husband (now separated, or so she says).   No reason the Soviets shouldn't have extra-terrestrials amongst them, if we do.

We'll see what transpires in the weeks ahead.

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

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Project Blue Book 1.4: von Braun

An excellent episode (1.4) of the science fiction that is Project Blue Book tonight - the best in the new series so far - in which the main character was Wernher von Braun.

The real von Braun - who seems like something out of science fiction even aside from this episode - helped developed the Nazi's V-2 rocket, which almost knocked Britain out of the war (World War II), and indeed might have won the war for the Nazis.   The U.S. smartly (most people think, including me) gave von Braun and more than a thousand German scientists a home in the U.S., and soon a mandate to get the U. S. out into space and catch up with the Soviet Union's Sputnik.  Von Braun's work in Huntsville, Alabama got the U. S. off this planet with the Explorer satellite, and his development of the Saturn booster got us to the Moon,

The fictional von Braun is working on getting us off this planet, but via flying saucer, which, by the end of this episode, teleports or travels in time or who knows what to someplace else.  Not only that, von Braun has some kind of extra-terrestrial in a big vat.  Hynek and Quinn know about the vat but not the flying saucer.   General Harding knows about the saucer and (presumably) everything else.  Quinn hates von Braun for his Nazi work, and thinks he's assembling a fleet of rockets in Huntsville to reign down terror on American cities and I guess win the war, after all.   On this level, Project Blue Book feels a little like The Man in the High Castle.

Meanwhile, back home with Mrs. Hynek, she's threatened by one of the people Hynek earlier investigated, and saved by her blond friend, who we know now to be a Soviet spy.  This part of Project Blue Book is more espionage fiction than science fiction, based on the reality that von Braun was indeed instrumental, and in significant part responsible, for the U. S. catching up with the Soviets and beating them to the Moon,

As I've been saying, good fiction, and I'm looking forward to more.

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

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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

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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?

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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.


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