PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 2 Episode 1 – SPOILERS

Someone has been telephoning General Harding (Neal McDonough) in the middle of the night, threatening to expose his coverup of the Roswell crash, so he, and Quinn (Michael Malarkey), and Hynek (Aidan Gillen) fly to New Mexico in an effort to contain the situation. Harding visits the guy who first came upon the wreckage and tries bribing him to keep quiet. When that doesn’t work, Harding’s men beat the crap out of him. (A recent book, “Cover-Up at Roswell: Exposing the 70-Year Conspiracy to Suppress the Truth” by Donald Schmitt, the former Director of Special Investigations for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, explains in detail how the US government used “extreme measures” to keep witnesses silent about the incident.)

It was impossible to figure out in what year this episode was happening until this tweet from Dennis O’Leary on 21 January cleared things up. “Given Roswell was a ‘cold case’, we had to figure out how to bring our guys back 6 years after the fact. Then we realized ROSWELL is the answer — it really was a town that was silenced, so someone would speak up with the smoking gun.” That would make it 1953, about a year after the events in Washington, D.C. that happened at the close of the first season. During that year, Hynek has made his wife Mimi an active part of his investigations, probably because he does not entirely trust Quinn.

Mimi (Laura Mennell) has been attending the weekly meetings of a UFO group called Citizens for Saucer Studies (which is almost certainly a fictionalized version of Civilian Saucer Intelligence (CSI), a group founded in New York City in 1954. According to Michael D. Swords, a board member of the Hynek Center for UFO Studies, CSI was the main source of Hynek’s main source of UFO information during the mid-1950s. The fictional group’s leader Evan (Kier O’Donnell) figures out who Mimi is, and suggests to her that they should work together to expose the government cover up of alien visitations.

Susie (Ksenia Solo) is now banging Quinn. While he is away, she searches his rooms, and we get to see some of his books: The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Psychology of Jung, The Complete History of Rome, The Greek Years, and The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. That lipstick that she dropped the last time they were together is sitting on his coffee table.

Evan mentions (in passing) the 1897 UFO crash at Aurora, Texas, which is interesting because of where it was. Aurora is located at 33.607 N Latitude, about 700 kilometers from Roswell, New Mexico, which is at 33.3943 N Latitude. Remember the Lubbock Lights in Episode 1.3? Lubbock is located between Roswell and Aurora at 33.5779 N. Latitude.

The Aurora incident also involved the recovery and burial in an unmarked grave of a deceased UFO pilot. Pieces of the downed craft were said to have been buried with the pilot, who was described (in the 19 April 1897 edition of the Dallas Morning News) this way: “The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.”

An unmarked grave of suitable age and location has been located in Aurora, but exhumation of whoever is buried in it has not been permitted. One of the people Hynek and Quinn interview in Roswell (also severely beaten by Harding’s men) tells them he buried an alien from the Roswell crash on his property “under a dead tree”. We don’t know yet if Hynek will go find that tree.

NOTES

Heather Doerksen (Donna Smith in “The Lubbock Lights“) will be Lotus Cloud in David Fowler’s horror film WELCOME TO THE CIRCLE. After a random bear attack during a family camping trip, Greg (Matthew MacCaull) and his daughter Samantha (Taylor Dianne Robinson) are trapped by a demon-worshipping cult called The Circle. There is an infiltrator in the ranks of the cult who is in contact with a former member on the outside (Ben Cotton), with a plan to lead rescuers into the heart of The Circle, but Greg and Sam don’t know that, and the rescuers might not arrive in time to save them. Among others in the cast are Hilary Jardine and Cindy Busby. A trailer is available on YouTube. WELCOME TO THE CIRCLE should be released in Canada later this year.

Laura Mennell spoke to Dave Nelson about Project Blue Book’s second season, her character Mimi Hynek, and whether or not she believes in flying saucers and aliens.

(The interview has moved to Facebook.)







