“Project Blue Book,” “The History Journal,” and the New York Times

For about fifteen seconds, it did look like a real newspaper when my friend Jake Horwitz handed it to me over lunch.  HUNDREDS WITNESS MYSTERIOUS UFOS, the headline proclaimed in enormous type, and beneath it a photo of an arc of white lights embedded in a luminous green ring, against the background of a black sky.

This was a “sunrise edition” of “The History Journal,” out of “Lubbock, Texas.”  Its price was given as 10 cents in the top right hand corner, while the top left promised “cloudy” weather.

Only in small print at the very top of the page did it announce what it really was: a special four-page advertising supplement to the New York Times, part of last Sunday’s paper.  What was being advertised was the new History Channel series “Project Blue Book,” which premiered at 10:00 EST last Tuesday evening.

I wondered what would have led the Times to print something like this, and of course the answer came quickly enough.  Money.  Lots of it.

“It must have cost millions,” I said to Jake, which turned out to be an exaggeration.  I learn by Googling that a full-page ad in the Times is likely to run in the neighborhood of $150,000.00.  So I don’t suppose the producers of “Project Blue Book” paid out much more than half a million.  Still, to paraphrase a remark attributed to the long-ago Senator Everett Dirksen, a half-million dollars here and a half-million dollars there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

So the question remains worth considering: why did the producers of “Project Blue Book” choose to spend a chunk of their budget in this way?  And why did they pick the New York Times as the place to spend it?

For an old UFOlogist, this “History Journal” is a stroll down memory lane.  Its front-page story is the mysterious lights seen in the night skies at Lubbock, Texas, on multiple occasions from August through October 1951, familiar to all of us in the old days as the “Lubbock lights” episode.  Captain Edward J. Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (termed a “definitive 1956 casebook”) is liberally quoted as a source.  That, too, is a real nostalgia-evoker.

To us in the early 1960s, Ruppelt’s Report was the gold standard of sober, reliable information about UFOs.  He certainly knew what he was talking about.  From 1951 to 1953, he headed the Air Force’s UFO information project, first called “Project Grudge” but then renamed “Blue Book.”

Unlike those Grudge/Blue Book chiefs who preceded and followed him, Ruppelt insisted on a fair and open-minded evaluation of the data his team received.  “Maybe the earth is being visited by interplanetary spaceships,” he wrote at the end of his book, sounding like he really believed that might be true.  “Only time will tell.”

So when in that same book Ruppelt declared the Lubbock lights to have been “a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon,” we were inclined to trust him.  It was frustrating that, supposedly to protect a source’s privacy, Ruppelt wouldn’t say what that phenomenon was.  Still, we assumed he must have had legitimate reason.  There was plenty of other proof that UFOs were real; we crossed Lubbock off the list.

Which the last thing the “Project Blue Book” TV show and the “History Journal” hyping it are willing to do.  A lot of disillusionment with our government, plus “The X-Files,” have come in between.

“INVESTIGATOR GOES COY,” declares the sub-headline in this supposed “news” story; and Ruppelt’s solved! verdict is dismissed as “curiously evasive.”  (Which it was, come to think of it.)  The premise is that the Air Force project from which the show takes its title, and which it falsely claims to have been top secret, must necessarily have been sinister and conspiratorial.  The Air Force knew the truth of alien visitation; they were bent on suppressing it.  “And so the mystery [of the Lubbock lights] remains unsolved,” the “History Journal” writer concludes, emphasizing how scary it all was; and 1951 is dubbed “that strange Texas summer.”

So far the front page.  Open the supplement to pages 2-3, and this is what you see sprawled across them:

A bulletin board, blanketed with UFO-related clippings (genuine) from the New York Times of 1950-1960, the “All the News That’s Fit to Print” motto prominently displayed.  Tacked amid the clippings are snapshots, among them the “Flatwoods monster” of September 1952, flanked by two of the witnesses to the monster’s landing.  (The photo is posted to the “History Channel” website; click here and scroll down to see it.)  There’s a sketch of the classic “gray” alien face, with its light-bulb shape and huge black oval eyes.  The bulletin board also holds a piece of graph paper with the residue of a coffee cup that once rested on it, marked with these annotations:

Case notes – Jan 8^th West Virginia

• Family reports seeing “something” falling from sky
• Mother claims to have seen something she says to be “not of this world.”
• Findings have been coming up inconclusive

Possible government cover up?

You really have to give the ad designer credit for cleverness.  We’re taken right inside a UFO investigation office circa 1960, a few anachronisms notwithstanding.  (The light-bulb face was unknown until the beginning of 1987, when it appeared on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion.)  The margin to the left of the bulletin board lists six “key investigations” undertaken by the historical Project Blue Book, most of them familiar from Ruppelt’s Report.  These include the incident at Fargo, North Dakota, on October 1, 1948: “A veteran WWII pilot ‘engaged’ with a white orb that outmaneuvered his plane at speeds exceeding 400 m.p.h.” 

This is the episode, declared a “classic” by Ruppelt, that was fictionalized almost beyond recognition in last Tuesday’s premiere.

The show’s focus is the 1950s, which the self-proclaimed “History Journal” describes as “one of the most mysterious eras in United States history.”  To those of us with some memory of the time–a cadre that shrinks with alarming rapidity each passing year–it didn’t seem that way.  (Or as simple and innocent, or stuffy and buttoned-down, as it’s since been represented.)  I gather that the aim of “Project Blue Book,” and of the lavish advertising supplement in last Sunday’s Times, is to implant that image in the consciousness of those too young to have been there.

Impossible to avoid comparison with “The X-Files.”  There, as in “Project Blue Book,” we were given a paranoid–perhaps marginally truthful?–picture of a hidden reality of government conspiracy, wheels within wheels.  Behind it all a greater reality of uncanny entities and forces that could only be hinted at, never shown plainly. But “The X-Files” played by the rules of fiction, in a way that “Project Blue Book” seems unwilling to do.

Fiction has been called “the lie by which we tell the truth.”  When you read John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels, you know that Harry Angstrom, his wife Janice, and the rest of the characters don’t exist and have never existed.  Yet their stories display America in the second half of the twentieth century with a fidelity that future historians can use as a reliable guide to envisioning The Way We Were.  “The X-Files” never claims to do more than this: to depict reality through the vehicle of invention.  We know that Mulder and Scully are made-up people.  Yet they point to the essential truth (or alleged truth) promoted by “The X-Files,” with as much confidence as do the Angstroms.

“Project Blue Book” makes a far more drastic claim: that the events it depicts really, literally happened in 1950s America.

It’s a bit weasel-worded about it.  “BASED ON TRUE EVENTS,” the poster that fills the ad supplement’s back page assures us, never hinting at how very far it wanders–if last Tuesday’s premiere is any indication–from the true events on which it’s allegedly based.  Blue Book scientist J. Allen Hynek and his wife Mimi (played by Aidan Gillen and Laura Mennell) were real people; Hynek really did shift from skepticism about UFOs to the conviction that there was something real in the phenomenon, if not necessarily the reality that UFO proponents claimed.  (Notice how many times I’ve used “real” in the last sentence.)  But in “Project Blue Book,” the complexities of their historical existence are overlaid, indeed suffocated, by an “X-Files” agenda.

In this distortion, in this replacement of the intertwined history of the UFO and the nation by an alternate history mimicking it, the New York Times–traditionally the nation’s “newspaper of record”–is made complicit.  Embedded within the pseudo-history.  Or the pseudo-history embedded within it.

It’s an interesting question, to which extent the Times was ripe for being used in this way.  Once upon a time, the “old gray lady” of the newspaper world would barely touch the subject of UFOs, certainly not without holding her collective nose.  That attitude has changed in the past year or so, a shift I’ve noted in earlier blog posts (click here and here) and attributed to the seismic effect of the 2016 election on the American psyche, though the precise connection remains obscure.

Perhaps as a result of the Times’ new stance, it occurred to the promoters of “Project Blue Book” that readers might, for a second or two, be led to imagine that the All-the-News-That’s-Fit-to-Print newspaper could really trumpet: HUNDREDS WITNESS MYSTERIOUS UFOS.  And be tempted to tune in to “Project Blue Book” Tuesday evening to find out more.

Half a million dollars?  Cheap at twice the price.

by David Halperin
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