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

 

Childhood's End 1.1: Familiar Territory

The first of the three-part Childhood's End mini-series began on the SyFy Channel tonight with a statement that Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 novel of that name changed and influenced science fiction for decades.   That's true.   When I read the novel a few years after its publication, it certainly changed my view of science fiction, making it more relevant to human life than even the great works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, which I still enjoyed more.  But the quietly breathtaking revelations of Childhood's End and the questions they raised were not to be matched.

The problem, though, as far as tonight's mini-series is concerned, was the pervasiveness of the influence of Childhood's End and its story of an alien visitation on Earth - a pervasiveness in all forms of science fiction, but especially on the television screen.  Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" on The Twilight Zone a few years later, The Invaders with Roy Thinnes the next decade, V at its beginning and best in decades after that, all drew upon the story of Childhood's End in different and memorable ways.   And that, inevitably, makes Childhood's End on television tonight less original, and therefore a little less compelling than it was as a novel in 1954.

Still, it was pretty good.  I knew the truth of what the Overlords looked like, but their unveiling was still a strong moment, and I'd imagine especially so and more so for anyone who hadn't read the novel.   I'm interested enough to see where this goes, and if the mini-series diverges in any way from the novel, whose ending was something that I didn't much like back then.

But it will be tough going.  Unlike The Man in the High Castle, whose daring, stunning alternate history was something we haven't seen at all on any television screen, Childhood's End is too familiar, too reminiscent of too many science fiction motifs, to be great - at least, so far.  And we'll see how the next two days go.

See also Childhood's End 1.2: Losing My Religion and Childhood's End 1.3: Literally



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