Tuesday, January 08, 2019

Previewing Project Blue Book




Last summer I finally caught up with Game of Thrones and no matter how good you are at avoiding spoilers; there was still one inadvertent way I still was spoiled on certain character death: when they would show up on another television program. So when watching Game of Thrones I would go, “oh hey, there is Iron Fist… I guess he is going to die eventually.” I think there were five different Game of Thrones characters I saw as main characters on other shows that pretty much spoiled their fate. So if you plan on catching up on Game of Thrones eventually, or are behind by one season, be warned, a main Game of Thrones character is the star of Project Blue Book and I will be talking Game of Thrones spoilers.

Project Blue Book was an actual government program that investigated unidentified flying objects throughout the United States. So, yeah, basically a real life X-Files. And there are plenty of cases for a television to plunder because there were 12,618 cases of UFO reported (and more than a few went unsolved). On the show two men are responsible to determine what exactly happened in a time before everyone had a video camera on their phone to document the strange occurrences.

Michael Malarkey (The Vampire Diaries) is an air force pilot tasked by the government to prove that UFO’s do not exist while Aidan Gillen (R.I.P. Littlefinger) is an OSU astrophysicist professor, and as a scientist he is convinced there is other life out there but doubt of intersteller space travel. He is also the kind of guy who would read the entire encyclopedia Britannica when sick as a child. Yes, kiddies, that is what people had to do before the Playstation was invented. Malarkey want to close these cases quickly while Gillen wants be through. So yeah, Gillen is the Mulder and Malarkey is the Scully.

Some of the cases the duo goes out on in the first season include a fighter pilot racing against weird lights in Fargo. There is what is believed to be a flaming alien that causes some ailment around the eyes in Birmingham. They go to Lubbock, Texas to investigate blackout and V-shaped lights. There are multiple episodes of green hovering lights that dig into a government conspiracy. And there is even a cold case about World War II Foo Fighters. For those who do not know where Dave Grohl got his band name, Foo Fighters were UFO that fighter pilots claimed to see.

Then instead of a smoking man, there are mysterious men in hats who are following the duo around. There is also a mysterious woman (Ksenia Solo, Lost Girl) who just so happens to befriend Gillen’s wife at a time he takes the government job. So yeah, since this is based on real events and you can rule out alien, she is probably, most definitely a Russian spy. But this makes me wonder just how real the show is. Sure, they say these cases are based on real reports that they got from the Freedom of Information Act, but I do wonder if it is safe to assume everything else is poetic license. But as one of the characters says, there is a difference between science fiction and informed speculation.

Project Blue Book airs Tuesdays at 10:00 on History.

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