I hate to admit it, but I have no choice. I’ve started to look forward to the weekly one-hour shows of the History Channel series, “Project Blue Book.”
My initial response to the debut episode two weeks ago was that it was trash: awful as history, mediocre as drama. I still think it’s trash, but the kind of trash that creates and sustains a gosh-what’s-gonna-happen-next suspense even though you know in advance that what’s going to happen next will be neither credible nor intelligent. It takes real talent to produce garbage of this quality.
Ten Tuesday-evening episodes are projected for this first season, and so far three have been broadcast: “The Fuller Dogfight” (January 8), “The Flatwoods Monster” (January 15), and “The Lubbock Lights” (January 22). Each is based on a real incident–or, in the case of the Lubbock lights, series of incidents–from the first decade of the UFO phenomenon (1947-57), plucked out of its historical context and distorted and sensationalized out of all recognition.
The UFO events are systematically twisted so as to seem eerier and more inexplicable, the military authorities more efficiently sinister. Names of witnesses are changed. Pilot George Gorman, who in October 1948 engaged in an aerial dogfight with a mysterious light that’s been plausibly explained as a weather balloon, becomes “Henry Fuller” in the first episode, psychologically shattered by his experience as the real Gorman never was. As if there’s a limit in outraging the memories of the dead, beyond which the creators of the series are unwilling to go.
Like “The X-Files,” to which the new series is universally and inescapably compared, “Project Blue Book” follows the adventures of a pair of sleuths as they investigate the mysterious doings. The rumpled, bespectacled, unworldly Professor J. Allen Hynek (Aidan Gillen) is the Mulder equivalent, the tough, cocky Air Force Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey) the analogue to Scully. With an important difference, however.
Dana Scully’s skepticism about the paranormal events she and Mulder kept stumbling on was genuine. The two were on the same side, both in search of the truth that was “out there” although neither the Mulder-Scully team nor their fans could tell just where. They just had different perspectives on how to approach it. Whereas Quinn is using Hynek as part of a predetermined plot by the military to cover up what the plotters know perfectly well to be true: that UFOs are real. Poor schlemiel Hynek, whom Quinn alternately hails as a “genius” and mocks as “the dumbest smart guy I’ve ever known,” is there to provide a scientific rubber stamp for the debunkery.
When he resists, Quinn turns nasty.
An exchange in this week’s episode sums up their conflict. “Our job is to close the case!” Quinn instructs his partner.
Hynek: “Our job is to find the truth!”
The poor, sweet child. The historical J. Allen Hynek, who died in 1986 and is no doubt (as my old friend Rick Hilberg says) “spinning in his grave” right about now, also had his quarrels with his Air Force employers. He ended up giving a powerful affirmation of UFOs’ reality and importance, the precise opposite of the message they wanted to convey. But he was no bewildered naif, and they weren’t nefarious schemers. The truth was more subtle and complex; in the hands of a real dramatist, it might have made for a compelling and authentic story.
But that kind of drama is not what “Project Blue Book” is about.
Part of the fun of watching the show, for those with some memory of the UFO scene of those bygone times, is recognizing the occasional bits of fact buried amid the masses of fabrication. Some of its characters, most prominently Hynek, really existed. Donald Keyhoe, the best-known UFO author of the 1950s, makes an appearance in the latest episode, sharing practically nothing but the name with the historical Donald Keyhoe. (The real Keyhoe was never abducted by Air Force agents, nor did they stick a gun into his mouth while advising him that all his future writings would be subject to their censorship.)
Hynek’s wife Mimi was also a real person. She’s played by the luminously beautiful Laura Mennell, which prompts the skirt-chasing Quinn to smirk upon meeting her, “She’s way out of your league, doc!” The Hyneks did have a son named Joel, although the boy is inaccurately represented in “Project Blue Book” as their only child. This week we’re given a glimpse of the boy’s bedroom. By his bedside stands a lamp that the initiated will recognize as a cute little red-and-green figurine of the Flatwoods monster, of a kind first manufactured in the 1960s.
Ah, the Flatwoods monster.
The first UFO story I ever read, at age 12, in the opening chapters of Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. It’s the subject of the second episode, which retells the story of what happened in September 1952 on a hilltop near Flatwoods, West Virginia, with as little accuracy as could possibly be achieved. The incident has been shifted from early autumn to wintertime, apparently so that the monster–depicted as a scary Rackhamesque tree creature with clawed, outstretched arms–can be explained by Hynek as an owl sitting in a leafless tree.
The introduction of the owl, which at first sight seems grotesque, may be the only authentic touch in the whole episode. One skeptical writer, Joe Nickell, has tried to explain the “monster” as the effect on a group of jittery witnesses of a barn owl suddenly flying at them out of the darkness, and I have to say that this makes sense to me. In “Project Blue Book,” a variant of Nickell’s theory manages to persuade the uncouth mob of West Virginians gathered to lynch the woman who, with her children, has reported the monster and who, by some logic, they’ve decided is herself an alien.
The lynchers are kept back by the two-fisted Captain Quinn. Only when Hynek shows them a photo of the owl in the tree and compares it to their “monster,” however, do they disperse.
None of this melodrama has any basis in fact. Nor does the most disquieting scene in the “Flatwoods Monster” episode: the killing by defenestration of a hospitalized madwoman who, in an earlier scene, had smilingly assured Hynek and Quinn that the monster betokens “the end of all things.” That the mysterious “men in hats” who’d previously visited her were frightened by it, as Hynek and Quinn should be.
The woman is said to have jumped out the window in her insanity. But, having been educated by “The X-Files” to see conspiracies everywhere, we know that she was murdered by agencies unknown for motives undefined. (Will we ever be told who they are? I suspect that at the end of the season we’ll be as mystified as we are now.) So by implication the woman had to die because she knew too much; and the monster was real and no owl after all, although the owl explanation will be entered in the Blue Book files as the solution and Captain Quinn will treat us to one more smirk as he says: Case closed.
But Professor J. Allen Hynek will stand by his conviction: “Our job is to find the truth!”
This ringing declaration made in the context of a TV series that shows in each episode its contempt for the whole idea of truth. That misapplies the concept of “poetic license,” by which one fudges the details in order to convey the essentials, to a grotesque and shameless warping of historical reality. Twist the facts, lie through your teeth. But scream “TRUTH!!!!” loud enough and it will be yours.
The worst message our present era could possibly hear, because it fits so neatly with what we’re prepped to believe anyway.
I wish I could say that “Project Blue Book” is a stupid, dishonest bore. Stupid it is. Dishonest it is. Bore it isn’t. And that may be the worst thing about it.
by David Halperin
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Great article Mr. Halperin. That blond woman keeping tabs on Mrs. Hynek is so totally accurate too.
John and Purrlie – thanks for your comments!
It’s bad UFO history, and more importantly for some of us, really bad drama.
It’s a bargain bin version of The X-Files with none of that show’s chemistry between its leads, wry sense of humor, and for the most part, intelligent, well-written stories and dialogue.
The Lubbock Lights episode mangled together the Lubbock lights of 1951 (that had no effect on vehicles or the power grid) with the Levelland UFO of 1957, in which multiple witnesses claimed the UFO caused their vehicle motors, radios, and headlights to stop working. However, the Levelland UFO also had no affect on the power grid.
Since Lubbock and Levelland are two Texas towns in close proximity to each other, the writer of this show (as well as many UFO buffs) apparently mistakenly believed they were a single event. I guess for Ufology, one Texas town is as good as another and time never passes. Sigh.
No wonder so many intelligent people think this is all bollocks.
The show is a dramatization which borrows from history, not a documentary. Although not up to the X-Files quality, I also look forward to the weekly episodes. I enjoyed the Lubbock lights episode best so far.