PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 10 – SPOILERS

The official explanation for the 1952 UFO sightings over Washington D.C. was a temperature inversion. At least they didn’t blame it on plovers. In the show’s fictionalization of events, the UFOs themselves are depicted accurately. In D.C. in 1952, there were a great many unidentified objects that flew with great maneuverabililty and speed. (The objects moved at around 160 kph most of the time, but were able to rapidly accelerate to more than 11,000 kilometers per hour.) They were tracked by radar, and pursued (ineffectually) by American fighter planes.

Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey) is almost certainly a fictionalized version of U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J Ruppelt, a Project Blue Book supervisor. Ruppelt was flying to D.C. at the time of the initial sightings and did not find out about them until after he arrived on the morning of 21 July. (The UFOs came on two successive weekends — 19 & 20 July, and 26 & 27 July). There were quite a few other sightings in the general area of Washington during that month, but most occurred on those two weekends.

In the fictionalized version of events, the Men In Black (whoever they are) have foreknowledge of the alien visitations, and provide Hynek and Quinn with proof that a UFO was responsible for the failure of a U.S. missile test. How would the MIBs know about things in advance? Are they aliens disguised as humans? Humans possessed by aliens? Time travelers?

Generals Harding and Valentine are almost certainly fictionalized versions of General Charles P. Cabell and Brigadier General William Garland. Garland personally handled all the UFO business for General Stamford, who was the Pentagon’s Director of Intelligence at the time. General Cabell set up Project Grudge in 1949, and created Project Blue Book in 1952. A year or so later, Cabell was appointed Deputy Director of the CIA. In 1961, he was forced to resign from that position after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

The fictional Secretary of Defense dies when his car explodes after he gasses it up at a White Rose gas station. (He must have driven to Canada.) But before his death, he alerted the President to Hynek and his work. Truman meets with Hynek and (it is implied) tells him to pretend to be a non-believer, and asks to be kept up-to-date (privately) on Hynek’s actual findings about UFOs.

The only cabinet member to die while Truman was in office was Labor Secretary Lewis Schwellenbach, who died in hospital of unspecified causes in 1948 after a long illness.

Back in Ohio, the home of Jack Smith (Donna’s husband, played by Kurt Evans) is raided by people who are listed in the credits as FBI agents but never identify themselves as such. Not one of them ever flashes a badge. They tell Mimi that they found surveillance equipment in Jack’s basement and are arresting him as a possible Communist Party sympathizer. (Susie apparently was able not only to break into Jack’s house, but also to transfer the quite bulky radio equipment from her place to his without being noticed.) As he is being led away, Jack pleads with Mimi (who is watching all this go down) to tell them it isn’t so. Mimi walks away, muttering: “Something isn’t right.”

Mimi (Laura Mennell) tells Susie (with disappointing certainty) that she is in love with her husband and is not looking for another sexual relationship, but still wants to be friends. Susie (Ksenia Solo) refocuses her sexual energy toward Quinn. At least she and Mimi will be able to double date.

At the end of the season one finale, The Fixer (Ian Tracey) finds an obelisk-like artifact in Antarctia (probably at the co-ordinates that Hynek deduced in “The Flatwoods Monster“, and uses the alien artifact that he had Hynek steal in “The Green Fireballs” (and that he subsequently recovered after the events of “War Games“) as a remote control to activate the obelisk.

Showrunner Sean Jablonski told Entertainment Weekly: “…the Antarctic holds a lot of secrets and ties back to Operation Highjump, which happened in the early ’40s following World War II when our government [and] military felt that the Nazis had discovered alien technology and bases in the Antarctic. There’s a lot of sort of energy around it now — by that I mean, a lot of curiosity about what’s going on in the Antarctic right now where you can see pyramids on Google Earth…when you see the object glow and the obelisk glow, we are not setting a stage for, ‘Okay, we just turned on a large antenna and have called the aliens to come down.’ We want to get people excited that we’ve expanded the mythology and get them curious as to what that allows us to do in terms of peeling back the layers of the larger cover-up.”

NOTES

Brendon Zub (radar tech) will be Chuck Dodgson in the CW’s BATWOMAN pilot. Dodgson works for a private security agency called The Crows, run by someone named Joseph, who might be a renamed Jake Kane (Batwoman’s dad) who (in the comics) was the leader of the Black Ops unit known as the Murder of Crows. Chuck Dodgson (coincidentally?) is also the real name of Lewis Carroll, who is the inspiration behind Alice, the alter ego of Batwoman’s nemesis, Elizabeth Kane.

Zub is also Prince Emile in A WINTER PRINCESS which stars Natalie Hall as Carly (alias Princess Carlotta) who is working incognito to plan a resort’s fiftieth anniversary celebration when her twin, Prince Gustav (Casey Mandersen), shows up and nearly outs her as royalty. A WINTER PRINCESS will next air on The Hallmark Channel Wednesday 27 March at 2pm .

Elyse Maloway (unnamed student in “The Lubbock Lights“) is Berry in Episode 4.10 of THE MAGICIANS, Titled “All That Hard, Glossy Armor”. The episode, which seems to be primarily focused on Margot (Janet Pluchinsky in the books), will be a musical one, and will air on SyFy (US) on 27 March . (Stephanie Lavigne, the ghost Daphne meets at Roman’s house in the GHOST WARS episode “Post-Apocalypse Now“, is also in the cast.) A promo video is available on YouTube.

Chad Rook (Randy Pitts in “The Lubbock Lights“) will be Mr. Adams in MY JURASSIC PLACE, a film about Luisa (Nikita Black), a strong-willed and imaginative pharmaceutical executive who comes to the realization that a cure for her son Max’s rare disease lies in dinosaur DNA. Her research gets her fired, and she flees to her home country, Austria with some stolen materials that enable her to continue her work. Eventually she clones a dinosaur, and the creature forms a strong bond with Max (Franko Njiric). Based on a book by Roman von Kenny Kellens, MY JURASSIC PLACE is currently filming in Austria.







