INTERVIEW: ‘Project Blue Book’ examines top-secret search for UFOs
Photo: HISTORY’s new drama series Project Blue Book premieres Jan. 8. The cast features, from left, Laura Mennell as Mimi Hynek, Aidan Gillen as Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Neal McDonough as Gen. James Harding, Michael Harney as Gen. Hugh Valentine, Michael Malarkey as Captain Michael Quinn and Ksenia Solo as Susie Miller. Photo courtesy of Matthias Clamer / HISTORY / Provided by HISTORY press site with permission / Copyright 2019.
Project Blue Book, HISTORY’s new drama series, details the strange occurrences of a top-secret investigation by the United States Air Force in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, they were looking for evidence of unidentified flying objects and other unusual phenomena, and their searching was set amidst the uncertainty and fear of the Cold War.
The series, created by David O’Leary, stars Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen and The Vampire Diaries’ Michael Malarkey, and it premieres Tuesday, Jan. 8 at 10 p.m.
Although the plot may seem like pure science fiction — perhaps something out of an early Steven Spielberg film — there is a set of historical breadcrumbs to follow. The entire series is based on the work of Dr. J. Allen Hynek (Gillen), a college professor brought into the investigation by the Air Force. Each episode of the show will delve into a new case file from the Hynek portfolio, striking a similar chord to The X Files.
Some of the cases investigated on the inaugural season are: the Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia, the Gorman Dogfight of North Dakota, the Lubbock Lights of Texas and the Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter of Alabama.
O’Leary not only created the show, he’s also a co-writer and co-executive producer (with Robert Zemeckis, of all people). Hollywood Soapbox recently exchanged emails with O’Leary about the new series. Questions and answers have been slightly modified for style reasons.
What first attracted you to telling this story and signing up for this project?
I’ve always been interested in the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe,’ and I don’t think you can examine that issue fully — or truthfully — without looking at the UFO issue, which, in my opinion, is one of the great, true unexplained mysteries that persists to this day. My fascination with UFOs goes as far back as I can remember. As a kid growing up in New York City, I’d consume as much material on the subject matter that I could, whether it be reading Whitley Strieber’s Communion or Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time, or watching a UFO docuseries like Sightings and Unsolved Mysteries.
Once I moved to Los Angeles, and I was working as a writer, I began delving in deeper, not just into the current UFO situation, but America’s very secretive and mysterious history with UFOs, culminating in Project Blue Book, a real-life 17-year investigation into UFOs conducted by the U.S. Air Force to determine the nature of UFOs, and if they were a threat to national security. What was particularly interesting to me was that not only did the chief scientific adviser to Project Blue Book, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, shift his skeptical opinion on UFOs by working on this program, but so did the project’s first director, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt. Both men left the program convinced that the UFO phenomenon was real and could not fully be explained given our current paradigm of understanding, and was therefore worthy of rigorous scientific study and interest.
As a writer, I, of course, am always looking to marry my interests with what I write about. And one evening, over a glass of wine with my wife, it hit me — what if I wrote a TV series that went back and looked at all of the seminal cases of Project Blue Book through the eyes of these two historic figures. A real-life X Files set in the time of Madmen. It got me really excited, and I still have the napkin where I scribbled this idea down. I wrote the pilot on spec (meaning for free), and my agents shopped it around town. And we were fortunate that it was well-received and soon found a home on HISTORY with A+E Studios and Bob Zemeckis’ Compari Entertainment producing.
How closely does the TV series align with documented truth?
Our show aligns with the documented truth quite a bit; it’s a historical drama in every sense. What was most important for us is that every week the show examines real-life UFO cases that really occurred during this time period which Project Blue Book investigated.
What was also important was that we portrayed our lead character, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, truthfully and accurately, and to ensure that we did, we recruited his two sons, Paul and Joel Hynek, to come on board the series as consultants. Of course, when you’re dramatizing history and trying to tell a story in roughly 42 minutes a week, you do have to take some liberties in your storytelling — whether it be with certain characterizations or plot points.
Captain Quinn became a fusion of a few of the early directors of ‘Blue Book,’ including Captain Ed Ruppelt. But — and this is really important I think for audiences to know — throughout the series, the benchmark ingredients to the show are all real, of course, with all our cases as I mentioned, but not just on UFOs, but other arenas we explore, including Cold War paranoia and espionage present at the time in America, the [Harry S.] Truman presidency and the seriousness in which UFOs were taken by our government, and even the geopolitical events and social issues happening at the time that we examine, which I think all help enrichen our show’s authenticity.
What do you like most about the partnership between the characters of Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Air Force Captain Michael Quinn?
What I like most about the partnership between Hynek and Quinn is that every week, we get to watch two very different men thrust together through circumstance, who now must work together to try and fathom and classify the truly unexplained.
Hynek is a meticulous astrophysicist, a college professor and family man who’s a stickler for detail. He’s driven by a scientific pursuit of the truth and doesn’t care if that quest violates military protocol sometimes. After all, it was Hynek who had to create a whole new system of categorization regarding UFOs (the ‘close encounters’ system, etc.), and he ended up also fathering a whole new science of ufology and was outspokenly critical of Project Blue Book after his tenure, once it shuttered in 1969.
Then you have Captain Quinn — he’s younger, brash, brave, single and a ladies man, but also incredibly bright and a real expert on people and human psychology. Quinn’s driven, however, by a different set of principles than Hynek — military duty and honor, the code of the Air Force, and an ambition to rise up those ranks.
These differences, of course, cause our duo to clash and disagree, even as they bond over the mysteries they soon uncover. As time goes on, audiences will also see a real, genuine friendship forming, built out of mutual respect and admiration; in many ways, it becomes a brotherhood.
The series also comments on the struggles of the Cold War and the rise of the so-called Atomic Era. Did you have to conduct much research into this time period?
We definitely conducted research into the Cold War and the rising Atomic Era, particularly with where these arenas intersected with our UFO drama. After all, UFOs were a part of the Cold War, as both sides feared that UFOs might be top-secret military crafts or weaponry possessed by the other side. Russia was very interested in Project Blue Book and what it might find, and even had its own UFO investigatory arm. The show certainly looks at this, as well as examining the reality of espionage occurring on American soil during this time period. In terms of the rise of catastrophic atomic and nuclear weaponry in the late 1940s and 1950s, without giving too much away, I’ll just say that there are many UFO cases that seem to pinpoint definite connections between UFOs and humanity’s rise of building weapons that could destroy our planet.
Do you believe that the earth has been visited by extraterrestrials?
Whether I believe earth has been visited by extraterrestrials is a tricky question because it’s asking me to answer what the nature of UFOs are simultaneously, and like Dr J. Allen Hynek, I think the nature of what we’re dealing with has a number of possible answers — each equally baffling and earth-shattering — but I just think the jury is still out on which one is correct (although, I do think it’s very possible we may be dealing with more than one ‘answer’ simultaneously).
What I do believe, however, is that the research and the science shows that the UFO phenomenon is real and not fictitious or exhaustively explainable through simple debunking, and that some UFOs represent an intelligence in our skies that humanity has yet to understand. Now, while I do think there is strong evidence for the extraterrestrial hypothesis, I also think it’s just as likely that we may be dealing with an inter-dimensional intelligence from a realm beyond (or even on top of ) our own, or potentially even an inter-temporal intelligence (such as time-traveling human beings from our own future). UFOs may even be an extraterrestrial artificial intelligence. We just don’t know yet.
I also think there’s undisputed evidence that suggests that certain pockets of our government, and likely those of other nations, are aware of the truly mysterious ‘unearthly’ nature and origins of some UFOs, and they’ve been covering this up for reasons we can still only speculate. I know many readers out there will question how could any government keep a secret this big; after all, generally governments are pretty bad at keeping secrets, especially in the long run. To which I say ‘exactly.’
They’ve done a terrible job keeping this secret, which is why so many highly regarded officials have come forward with their incredible stories, and why hundreds of millions of people around the world adamantly believe the UFO phenomenon is real and that we’re unfortunately still being lied to. I sincerely hope that our show plays a small part in people conducting research of their own so they can make up their own minds. I also hope it continues the conversation towards helping us all uncover the truth. Because whatever the answer is, UFOs are real.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Project Blue Book premieres on HISTORY Tuesday, Jan. 8 at 10 p.m. Click here for more information.
