Episode 4 Jan 28 2018
Werner von Braun makes his debut with a doozy of an operation and with a black hatted coverup role to boot.
Alejandro Rojas provides a great review here:
Episode 4 recap at den of geek
Hard to say if a fatal derailment has occurred with this episode….we shall see.
Episode 3 Jan 22 2019
After this post, my future postings will simply entail sharing a link to the excellent reviews by long time Ufology journalist Alejandro Rojas. Here is his summation and review for episode 3:
https://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/history/278807/project-blue-book-episode-3-review-the-lubbock-lights
In this episode the who, what, and why of the MIB comes into greater focus after the Secretary of Defense chews out the 2 military UFO cabal holders of the secrets for having their operatives threaten Donald Keyhoe. He is a very public voice in these times, as a retired Marine Major, combating UFO secrecy policies.
The scene of a MIB guy shoving a gun barrel into Keyhoe’s mouth is truly LOL stuff.
The case investigated in this episode is still a puzzle. It involves a large v shaped cluster of bluish lights witnessed traveling at high speeds over Lubbock Texas over a couple of weeks during August and September 1951.
Here are more details to the end notes regarding Ruppelt’s unreaveled solution, from Jerry Clark’s The UFO Book, 1998:
Episode 2 Jan 15 2019
This episode is based on an incident happening in the early evening of Sept 12 1952 at Flatwoods, West Virginia and reported by multiple witnesses. Description here from 1976 book by Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Encounters With UFO Occupants:
After the very last completely and wildly off base scene, a few seconds of which are in the following 1 minute clip, a true history and likely resolution (misidentifying what was actually a meteor crash and horned owl in tree) is provided at the end:
A more full mitigation of potentially misleading (based on viewer gullibility) fictionalized elements (i e. mj12 like cabal and mib misdeeds and creepiness) was published by the New York Times on the day of episode two airing, in this true background history of Project Blue Book:
The show opens with the dramatization of the Flatwood incident and then jarringly shifts to a scene with Hynek in his home study closely examining the symbol he encountered in the last episode in a scene where a MIB guy leads him to its discovery. He writes down coordinates and find they indicate an Antartica location.
Huh?
The blond lady spy (apparently Russian) continues to reach out to Hynek’s wife Mimi, taking her out to a beatnik club where Mimi freaks out after seeing two guys kissing. The blond spy has her out of the house so her spy partner can plant a bug in Hynek’s study and on his phone.
All these MIB and apparent Russian spy storyline developments, including the murder by one MIB of a witness residing in a mental hospital, jarringly alternate with the story surrounding the case being investigated.
(The MIB seem to be leading Hynek somewhere, since before the lady witness/patient takes a dive from an upper story window she handed Hynek a picture of an obelisk like object with strange symbols. She tells Hynek the man with the hat visited her and wanted Hynek to have the picture.)
At the moment it feels like this show has seriously derailed into a wild jungle ravine full of predatory monsters in stealth mode. Sadly, this cabal-mib storyline reinforces a growing pathologically harmful perspective in our body politics.
At this point, the Russian spy partners monitoring Hynek makes sense but who the MIB are, and who they are linked to, and what their agenda is in leading Hynek to clues await clarification in the development of this MIB story thread in future episodes.
Judging by social media postings, that part of the series has been attractive. People are hooked by it, jazzed by it.
Old people like me are a bit concerned by the impact in encouraging adoption of beliefs and perspectives that in the end are a break from reality.
Episode 1 Jan 8 2019
A new history channel show weds speculative fiction and high adventure drama (that never happened in actuality) with specific cases investigated by the 3 official UFO investigation programs that the US government openly had: Project Sign in 1948, which soon after became Project Grudge and then finally Project Blue Book from 1952 to 1969 when the government bowed out of having an official public program.
In episode one, the show establishes two key speculation and imagined based threads that will give the show a jazzy narrative stringing through the separate cases Hynek and “Quinn” examine in each episode.
Here in an old 1962 book by Coral Lorenzen is a brief description of the case for episode one:
The 2 threads to the underlying narrative which will carry these 2 guys from case to case are, 1, the high strangeness element that is often a feature of ufo events and, 2, the workings of a secret cabal with the traditional MIB characters as well as a beautiful blonde spy befriending Hynek’s wife.
Opening first and half minutes:
The high strangeness element for this episode, not actually evident in anything Gorman reported, is this veteran pilot becoming obsessed in listening to a song he says (in the dramatization of his post event briefing) that he heard during his 27 minute “dogfight” (in his head, if I remember right) :
While listening to How High the Moon non stop in some hospital setting, in an ending scene, Gorman is restrained by 3 orderlies in white, given a shot via a huge needle, and dragged away.
In real life, decades later he retired from the Air Force as a Lt Colonel.
The dark cabal side of things is represented first in a scene likely based on the February 1953 Robertson Panel (scientists and military and Intel folks commissioned by the CIA) and its action plan to use press and entertainment industry contacts to instil an atmosphere of ridicule and denial around the ufo subject. The purpose was to limit the potential for outbreaks of public hysteria and the ability of Russia to exploit UFOs for cover.
Of course that scene is a few years after the October 1, 1948 case profiled in episode one.
But, it explains what the authorities expected of Hynek in his role as scientific consultant to their ufo project: debunk reports or explain them as due to more mundane causes than the suspected extraterrestrial source (as many early Air Force people thought). Hynek was actually part of the 1953 panel. His growing resistance in later years to that debunking role grants this show a basis for the dynamic of conflict in the Hynek/”Quinn” partnership. In the beginning.
The MIB make appearances in initially sketchy and puzzling ways, so that side of the narrative should help keep viewers attracted and plugged in to see what’s up with all that.
Cosmic Pluralism Studies 