As any regular reader of this blog is aware, I have had a long-time interest in paranormal phenomena, and UFOs in particular. In the 1970s I grew up with paranormal documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, and was particularly fascinated by UFOs. My brother had a sighting when we were kids, and I was a member of MUFON, one of the first UFO research organizations.

Because of this background I was excited to hear about the History Channel’s new series, Project Blue Book, which purports to tell the story of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a seminal figure in UFO research, who created the nomenclature of UFO sightings and close encounters, which inspired Spielberg to produce Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unfortunately, what I hoped for in this new series, an exploration of Hynek’s background as an astronomer, his early skepticism of UFOs as encounters something otherworldly and later change of perspective, and just what led to this change, as well as an exposition of some of the more interesting cases he worked on for the US government and beyond, are not to be found. Instead, we have a largely fictionalized program that is heavily influenced by The X-Files. Diabolique has a good article on this by Robert Skvarla, and a quote illustrates this unfortunate state of affairs:

The sin of Project Blue Book is that it takes an extraordinary life and turns it into something ordinary, another in a long line of paranoid thrillers in the vein of The X-Files (1993) and The Americans (2013). It makes the unbelievable circumstances of Hynek’s time on the real-life Air Force study Project Blue Book even more far-fetched by branching out into the realm of conspiracy theories. And it reduces a curious scientist into a fame-seeking magician. The rub of it is that in doing so, it also creates the most accurate depiction of our current national psychosis. Project Blue Book is a brain-sucking worm lodged in the zombified skull of America, incessantly jamming the fear button in what’s left of our parasite-eaten gray matter to provoke us into shadowboxing hallucinations of the Deep State and Russian spies.

Perhaps I was naive in my hopes in the era of paranormal reality television.