How Project Blue Book Could Revive the History Channel’s Reputation
Photo: Eduardo Araquel/HISTORY
As U.S. Air Force investigator Edward J. Ruppelt relates it, in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, at 9:20 p.m. on August 25, 1951, four professors from Texas Technological College, in Lubbock—one each from the departments of geology, chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, and physics—watched, startled, as a semicircular formation of bluish-green lights flew across the sky. An hour later, it happened again, only this time the lights did not appear in any particular formation.
Being the sort of men who gather on late summer evenings to discuss micrometeorites and drink tea, the professors observed the lights on 12 subsequent occasions, up to three times in a single night, measuring the angle and timing of the lights (30 degrees per second) and their cardinal direction (north to south). Friends, colleagues, and wives were recruited as fellow watchers, divided into teams connected by two-way radio to determine the lights’ speed and altitude (inconclusive). As Ruppelt soon discovered, the Texas Tech contingent was not alone: Over the course of two weeks in August and September 1951, hundreds of witnesses in and around the college town reported seeing the same lights, often at times and locations that corroborated the professors’ accounts. Theories emerged. Plovers—quail-sized waterfowl with oily white breasts—reflecting mercury-vapor streetlamps. An experimental stealth plane undergoing testing by the federal government. Interplanetary spaceships. In the Report, first published after his retirement from the Air Force in 1956 and expanded shortly before his death in 1960, Ruppelt described UFOs as a “Space Age Myth,” though of what came to be called the Lubbock Lights he offered only this, declining to provide specifics to protect the anonymity of the scientist responsible: “The lights that the professors saw have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon.”
History Channel’s new drama series, Project Blue Book, ultimately prefers sexier suggestions. Rather than focusing on Ruppelt, a skeptic, it concentrates its attention on astrophysicist-turned-ufologist (and Close Encounters of the Third Kind consultant) Josef Allen Hynek (Aiden Gillen), his smug Air Force handler, Capt. Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey), and a pair of shadowy generals (Michael Harney and Neal McDonough, both wasted) eager to close cases despite the cost to the truth. Still, in “The Lubbock Lights,” Project Blue Book hits upon one of the key insights contained in Ruppelt’s phrase, “Space Age Myth,” which is that the high point of American interest in UFOs—from roughly 1947 to 1969—corresponded closely with the fraught, panicky decades that began the Cold War. Hoping to photograph plovers darting above the streetlamps, Hynek and Quinn venture into a sleepy neighborhood at night, only to be confronted by suspicious residents wielding hard-edged voices and baseball bats. “You look like a Commie to me,” one accuses, the circle closing fast.
Though it isn’t much more than The X-Files in period clothing—a case-of-the-week procedural based on historical UFO sightings, with Hynek playing the open-minded, impractical Mulder to Quinn’s doubtful Scully—Project Blue Book nonetheless constructs a useful scaffolding around the UFO craze. In a fundamental sense, the series is not about what happened in the skies over Lubbock, or Fargo, or Flatwoods, West Virginia, but about why what happened became, as Quinn remarks in the pilot episode, the subject of “mass hysteria”: They may not generate much narrative momentum, but from references to The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing to plot threads involving fighter pilot crack-ups, above-ground bomb shelters, and mob justice, Project Blue Book ably weaves together the prospects of alien and Soviet invasion until they’re almost indistinguishable. The result is a period drama surprisingly in tune with its period’s (oft-forgotten) cultural static; this was, after all, the zenith not only of Joseph McCarthy, but also of flying saucers, brainwashing—a fear that followed Korean War POWs in particular—and the “Bad Blonde”—Nora Sayre’s term for the communist seductress of Hollywood fantasy. (For more, see Ellen Schrecker’s expansive social history, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and Susan L. Carruthers’ fascinating Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing.)