PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 2 Episode 5 – SPOILERS

The Fixer (Ian Tracey), having kidnapped Hynek, allows him to call home (under supervision) to reassure his wife that he’s all right. Hynek tells Mimi to kiss Joel goodnight for him, and that tips her that something’s wrong, since Joel hates being kissed goodnight. Mimi calls Quinn and tells him that Hynek’s in trouble. Quinn goes to Daniel Banks (Jerod Haynes) and explains the situation, suggesting that Rebecca (the clairvoyant from the last episode) might be able to help. Rebecca (Hayley McLaughlin) scribbles a lot and makes a multi-layered picture of the artifact that Hynek stole for The Fixer in Episode 1.6. When Rebecca draws the alien artifact in layers, does that indicate that the device is naturally divided that way? It might give a hint to how the thing functions.

It turns out that The Fixer and his fellow dudes in black (are there no Women In Black?) are like Rebecca in that they can sometimes view things remotely in time and space. The Fixer, whose name (Banks says) is William, went rogue after the agency failed to act on what he saw, resulting in several deaths (which he also experienced remotely).

William is hoping to recruit Hynek, and even buys him a black overcoat, but the professor continues to wear his grey suit under it and wears no hat, possibly to distinguish himself from the dark-suited men who have taken him prisoner.

Mimi (Laura Mennell ), whom Quinn has confined to base, is intentionally left alone by Quinn’s assistant Faye (Jill Morrison) so she can have a peek at classified Blue Book files. She locates a picture of The Fixer at Maury’s Island in ’47, and Quinn figures that must be where Hynek has been taken. (Maury Island was the first place to report seeing the Men in Black.)

The Maury Island incident happened on 21 June 1947. Harold Dahl was on his boat with his son and his dog and a couple of other workers salvaging logs in Puget Sound. Six doughnut-shaped craft appeared in the sky, and one of them seemed to be in trouble. It began expelling chunks of hot metal. (Perhaps it was dumping fuel.) One of the metal bits burned his son’s arm, and another killed the dog, but most of the stuff fell into the Sound and on the beach. All of this could have been the result of odd-looking cloud formations combined with (or created by) meteorites. The key to finding out if the encounter was genuine would seem to have been to autopsy the dog, but there is nothing written anywhere about anyone doing that.

Three days after Maury Island (on 24 June), Kenneth Arnold claimed that, while piloting a private plane, he saw nine shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds he estimated at a minimum of 1,900 kph. This was the first post-War sighting in the United States that got nationwide news coverage. To put the estimated speed of the objects in perspective, on 14 October 1947 Chuck Yeager flew the experimental rocket-powered X-1 to a speed of Mach 1.07 (1322 kph), becoming the first person to break the sound barrier.

According to newspaper accounts, William Brazel first observed debris from the Roswell crash about three weeks before the story broke on 7 July 1947 (some accounts list the date as 14 June), so the Roswell crash, the Mt. Ranier sightings, and Maury Island all happened at about the same time. Bits of the metal shed by the ship over Maury Island were collected by the Air Force and put on a B-25 bomber to be taken for testing in California. The bomber crashed, killing two crewmen.

On the show, The Fixer, as he prepares to fly away in a private plane, takes credit for causing the bomber to crash. He tries to convert Hynek to his cause, but the professor refuses. Hynek is the anti-Mulder (someone who really doesn’t want to believe). The CIA later locates William’s plane which was forced to make an emergency landing because Quinn shot holes in its fuel tank, but the Men In Black and the samples of possibly alien debris they collected were nowhere to be found. Banks says the CIA has no idea where William the Fixer might have gone, but everybody, including Hynek, knows he’s headed for Antarctica.

At the end of the episode, Hynek and Quinn are informed by the Generals that Project Blue Book is to be investigated by The Robertson Panel (which will be next week’s topic).

NOTES

Peter Graham-Gaudreau (Sheriff Washington) is George Ginley in “Autopsy” (Episode 3.16 of THE GOOD DOCTOR) in which Dr. Murphy (Freddie Highmore) becomes obsessed with performing an autopsy on a Jane Doe, and Doctors Reznick, Andrews, and Brown treat a college student with a split personality disorder. Highmore directed the episode, which is scheduled to air on 24 February at 10/9c on ABC.

The app Project Blue Book: Hidden Mysteries is a hidden object adventure game based on the series, and is now available for both iPhone and Android. A player starts off as a newly recruited agent in the 1950s working for Hynek and Quinn and investigates real declassified UFO incidents. (Some of the cases are exclusive to the game, and are not mentioned in the series.) The app is a free download, and requires a Google Play Games ID.







