Series / Project Blue Book

The truth is like the sun. The closer you look, the more it blinds.

Project Blue Book is a historical drama series that premiered on History channel in January 2019. The series is based on the real-life Project Blue Book, a series of top secret investigations on UFO's beginning in 1952

The main role of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the underappreciated astrophysics professor recruited by the Air Force, is played by Aidan Gillen, while his counterpart Captain Michael Quinn is played by Michael Malarkey.

Not to be confused with Project UFO, also based on the real-life files.

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Project Blue Book contains examples of:

• The '50s: The series starts in 1952, and the fashion in particular evokes the era splendidly.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: While Hynek is a real person, Quinn, while borrowing some aspects from original head Edward Ruppelt, has been made different to allow for more freedom in character dynamics and layered background.
• Agent Mulder: Dr. Hynek, though a bit less eccentric. Interestingly, he's not a blind believer, smart enough to identify hoaxes and misidentifications as they come, but by the end of season 1 the evidence has mounted to a point he can't ignore.
• Agent Scully: Captain Michael Quinn, though he's come to believe something's not right by the end of season 1.
• Alien Autopsy: Footage of a supposed autopsy of an alien becomes a major plot point. It's a fake.
• Alien Invasion: The CIA's psychics believe one is imminent, and the Air Force plan to use their home-made flying saucers to fake one in order to secure the government's permanent backing.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Harding is just as much of an antagonist as Valentine, but much more sympathetic, reasonable, and genuinely well-meaning.
• Ambiguously Evil: The aliens themselves. By the end, it's unclear whether they're planning an invasion, trying to save humanity, or something else entirely.
• Ambiguous Situation: What the aliens are actually doing on Earth, and what their plans are for the future. The CIA speculate there's an invasion coming, but whether it's true or not is up in the air.
  • David Dubrovsky's appearance in spades. His encounter has the aliens acting far friendlier and less mysterious than normal, and engaging in direct communication, not to mention leaving photographic proof of themselves for once. Years later Hynek dismisses him as a conman - but there's the matter of Hynek and Quinn finding the (very real) alien symbol burned into the ground outside his home, and how the hell he knew about the Robertson Committee in the first place...
• Arc Symbol: A mysterious rune resembling a triangle with various lines and circles through appears in various odd situations and places. It has something to do with the aliens, but what is ultimately never fully understood.
• Area 51: Shows up in the titular episode of season 2, where it's a hotspot of UFO activity and both the CIA and the Air Force's attempts to imitate them.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Seen when Quinn and Hynek have to defuse an angry mob out to get the family they think lied to them about UFOs. An annoyed Quinn simply gets close enough to the leader, kicks his ass, takes his shotgun and proclaims he's in charge now.
• Bait-and-Switch Lesbians: Hynek's wife Mimi and her new friend Susie. It's a seduction technique by Susie, a Russian spy, and she's later shown to have no problems seducing Quinn too. Mimi, however, seems to genuinely be bi or gay.
• Berserk Button:
  • Quinn despises Germans in general after his experiences in the war (he was one of the first Americans into Buchenwald), so dealing with Wernher Von Braun's ex-Nazi scientists constantly triggers him into irrational actions that almost get him fired.
  • After the speech mentioned in the Well-Intentioned Extremist entry, Hynek claiming it's all bullshit and Harding's a coward angers him so much he fires Hynek almost on the spot.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Air Force generals, the Soviets and potentially the aliens themselves. In season 2 the Men in Black and the CIA are added to the mix.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Daniel Banks, the CIA operative the boys meet, seems to be a Reasonable Authority Figure who's on their side, even helping Quinn save Hynek from the Men in Black. Then comes the Robertson Committee, and he does his best to discredit them and their cases under orders from the CIA, so they can take over the alien investigations themselves.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Cold War is prevented from going hot and the world saved, but Quinn is abducted or dead, Susie is arrested for espionage and likely to be executed, Hynek reluctantly agrees to work with Fairchild, and the aliens remain as inscrutable as ever. Hynek, however, holds onto hope that his friend is still alive and that he'll find Quinn some day.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Hynek speculates towards the end of season 2 that the aliens are trying to help the human race by stopping incidents that could start World War 3 - but their actual appearances in the story sometimes confirm this, sometimes go totally against it. Ultimately, their actions make sense to them alone.
• Body Horror: Thanks to Valentine, Harding is under the impression that the alien bodies are actually just those of children gruesomely modified into looking like that by Josef Mengele as part of a Russian conspiracy. Some of them might be.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: An army platoon claiming to have seen UFOs turn out to be this, having been unwittingly dosed with fear gas to study how they turn on each other.
• Cult: Pretty much what The Men in Black turn out to be. Fairchild is a former victim of the CIA's psychic experiments who has amassed and radicalized a bunch of true believers in aliens into an organization devoted to making first contact no matter what.
• Dirty Communists: Susie and her handler want to know everything about Operation Blue Book on behalf of the Soviet Union. Gradually subverted, as we see Susie has a lot more layers to her than it initially appears.
• Double Agent: The Air Force turn Rizzuto into one after Quinn and Hynek blow his cover, with Harding using him to see if Quinn stole an alien device. Unfortunately, Quinn unwittingly reveals this to Susie, who kills him to save her own life after her superiors decide she's no longer useful.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Harding and Valentine may be willing to lie, intimidate witnesses and cover up alien incidents, but they're sincerely furious when they find out one of the Secretary of Defence's pet projects involved testing fear gas on American soldiers.
  • While Hynek has come around to thinking the truth about aliens should come out, he refuses to let it happen because of a lie, and exposes the fake Roswell autopsy video accordingly.
  • When a Honey Trap Air Force effort to uncover who an agent is working for goes awry and he starts threatening their "prostitute" operative, Harding doesn't hesitate to step in and save her - in stark contrast to Valentine, who's only concerned about blowing their cover.
  • Both generals are genuinely distraught over the supposed death of Quinn in the season 2 finale, with Harding even recommending him for the Medal of Honor. They may have hated the guy, but they didn't want him to die.
• False Flag Operation: A conspiracy within the Air Force is faking UFO sightings with makeshift flying saucers and such to try and get more backing from Washington. Unfortunately, there's also very real aliens and their fakes make investigating the real deal even harder.
• Femme Fatale Spy: Susie is this, with a bit of Sensual Slav coming into play.
• Flash Forward: Unusually, "Close Encounters" does this, having an older Hynek and Mimi interviewed on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, just so they can do a Whole Episode Flashback to the show's normal timeframe.
• Foreshadowing: In the Flash Forward in "Close Encounters", Quinn is conspicuously absent despite Hynek's presence, hinting at what'll be happening to him in the finale.
• Fun with Acronyms: Hynek invents the term UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). His partner has no objection, because it saves time typing up reports.
• Government Agency of Fiction: With the subject matter being aliens, surprisingly averted - Project Blue Book really did exist to investigate UFO sightings, and each episode is based on a case they investigated - even if a lot of creative liberties have been taken regarding the actual circumstances.
• Government Conspiracy: Air Force generals Harding and Valentine, as well as the Secretary of Defence, are shown to be at least partially knowledgeable of alien life, and create Project Blue Book as a smokescreen to reassure the general public. "The Washington Merry-Go Round" makes clear Harding is willing to lie to the President that the latest incident is Russians, despite the risk of this starting World War 3.
• The Greys: The alien corpse we see in "Operation Paperclip" strongly resembles one. So does the fake one in "The Roswell Incident". And the ambiguous ones in "Close Encounters".
• Historical Domain Character: As it's based on a real story, it's not surprising many real historical figures show up over the series, including Wernher Von Braun, President Truman and then-Senator John F. Kennedy.
• Historical Fiction: Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, with many notable events and figures of the era being tied into the plot.
• Honey Pot: One Air Force sting operation involves having an agent pose as a prostitute to seduce a spy and find out who he works for. It backfires when the targted spy twigs that something's up and starts threatening to kill the "hooker", forcing Harding to intervene.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: For as inscrutable and scary as the aliens are, it's ultimately human foolishness, jingoism, and paranoia that nearly causes World War 3, while the aliens may have been trying to prevent it. In general, just as many, arguably more, of Hynek and Quinn's problems are caused by their fellow earthlings rather than the alien menace they're ostensibly trying to uncover.
• Insane Admiral: A major threat in the series finale is a hard-headed and especially overeager Navy admiral who helps almost cause World War 3.
• Inscrutable Aliens: The aliens are mysterious and ill-understood, their motives and nature difficult to determine to a point where it's often unclear what they're even trying to do. Some of the sightings are downright contradictory to one another, and it's all made worse by there being a conspiracy to fake sightings, meaning some of their appearances aren't real. By the end, the best guess Hynek can make is that the aliens were trying to prevent WWIII, but that doesn't answer as many questions as you'd think. They're simply something beyond current human understanding.
• Interservice Rivalry: A recurring theme of the series is head-butting and feuds between the various government agencies over everything from conflicting agendas, competition for funding, glory-seeking, and plain old petty rivalries.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Banks's demolishing their credibility to the Robertson Committee wouldn't be nearly as effective if his charges - staging alien invasions, breaking onto bases, stealing alien technology, inciting mass panic - weren't all things Hynek, Quinn and the Air Force have variously done in the series.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Hynek and Quinn spend a lot of their time annoying local authorities. Beyond that, season 2 has the two investigate Area 51 - under the jurisdiction of the newly-formed CIA, in turn leading to their competing with the Air Force throughout the season to be the only ones sanctioned by the government to investigate aliens. And the season 2 finale has them investigate an underwater UFO sighting on the battleship Wisconsin, coming up against a hard-headed Navy admiral who loathes the Air Force.
• Knight Templar: The Men in Black want to reveal the truth about aliens like Hynek and Quinn, but are much more extreme about it to Tautological Templar degrees. They don't care how many dead bodies it takes, just that first contact happens and happens soon, and won't hesitate to put down anyone they deem to be hiding the truth.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: By the end of the show, it's clear there are aliens, but it's maddeningly vague as to how many of the strange things that happen are real alien/paranormal activity and how many are either misunderstandings or frauds.
• The Men in Black: They're a group following Hynek, but unlike most examples of this trope their leader seems to be trying to help Hynek, not that he's receptive to it. In a rather unique twist on the concept, it turns out that they're actually more of a cult than a spooky conspiracy; their leader is an ex-CIA psychic desperate to make contact with aliens under any circumstances, and has amassed like-minded followers willing to kill those who'd suppress the truth. In the finale, Hynek reluctantly joins their ranks to try and find Quinn.
• Mystery of the Week: Each episode takes from a different, real-life Blue Book file.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: While Hynek genuinely wants to uncover the truth about the aliens, Quinn would much rather just use the Blue Book project as a cushy position where he can close cases with minimum fuss until retirement. As time goes on, however, he's increasingly forced to be in it for the revolution.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In "The Roswell Incident" Hynek fakes being excessively drunk, deliberately provoking General Harding so he can take his leave of the situation to investigate what's actually going on. Works a little too well in that Harding ends up firing him, and only his successfully stopping Harding's actions being exposed on live TV save him.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Quinn can take all manner of craziness in stride, but freaks out when he finds Hynek went over Harding and Valentine's heads to obtain equipment for their latest case.
  • Harding when he realises he's been tricked into playing a film seemingly showing the existence of alien life on nationwide TV.
  • Hynek when his ally Banks starts destroying their credibility to the Robertson Committee so the CIA can take over alien investigations.
• Psychic Powers: The CIA's experiments with psychic powers form a major plot point, and seem to be bearing fruit. One of their former test subjects, Fairchild, is the leader of the Men in Black.
• Red Scare: The show is set in the early Cold War and Atomic Age. Both Valentine and Harding are convinced that at least some of what they're seeing is engineered by the Soviets, including the Roswell Incident. There are actual Reds to worry about though - the series shows a network of Soviet operatives at various points, including Susie, while "Broken Arrow" revolves around a crashed Soviet aircraft and its missing nuclear bomb.
• Roswell That Ends Well: Perhaps not surprisingly, Hynek and Quinn end up there at the start of season 2 to investigate an alien autopsy video that ultimately turns out to be fake.
• Shaming the Mob: Quinn does it in the most blunt, badass way possible by just kicking the shit out of the leader of the angry mob, taking his shotgun, and making clear he'll gun down anyone who doesn't settle down and listen up.
• Shout-Out:
  • A meeting of army brass are shown watching an upcoming Hollywood movie - The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
  • When Hynek and Quinn find the alien body in "Operation Paperclip", their conversation about Hynek needing Quinn in the foreground to establish scale is taken word-for-word from Brody and Hooper's conversation about such in Jaws. Rather fittingly, that movie has a major character named Quint.
• Skin Walker: Explored in season 2's "Curse of the Skinwalker", but turns out to be a pretty vivid hallucination brought on by tectonic gas. Except in true The X-Files fashion, the final scene shows it might not be....
• Spotting the Thread: While Susie tries to hide the fact that she's just killed Rizzuto, she blows her own cover by claiming to be his girlfriend, which Harding doesn't buy for an instant because he can't imagine someone like Rizzuto managing to score a girlfriend as hot as her.
• Spy Fiction: Has many elements of this. Russian spies and conspiring American officials end up being just as much of a problem for Hynek and Quinn as the aliens.
• Subliminal Messaging: What the pilot from the first episode claims occurred, that the song played was an attempt to communicate with him, with something deeper in the melody. Judging by his incinerating himself when he sees Hynek's alien symbol, he's likely right.
• Take a Third Option: Said almost word-for-word in "Close Encounters" when, faced with a choice between letting the Robertson panel paint them as incompetents and telling the truth and bringing down the Air Force's wrath on them, Hynek brings in Daniel Banks, the CIA operative they've been working with, to provide character testimony on their good work. Unlike most examples of this trope, backfires massively when Banks buries them to the committee under orders from the CIA - so they end up taking a fourth option; letting David Dubrovsky give his testimony and then pointing out that aliens or no, Blue Book is needed so cranks like him can't panic the American people. It works.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • Quinn and Hynek frequently don't get on - Hynek's dedicated to uncovering the truth, while Quinn simply wants to close cases and keep his job. Things deteriorate towards the end of the season following Hynek's theft of an alien device from an Air Force base, to the point of fisticuffs in "Abduction". They patch things up after it becomes apparent that something really is going on in the finale.
  • Harding, Valentine and Banks come together to figure out who Garner is working for, as despite their many clashes, none of them want the details of UFOs being put into the public domain.
  • Hynek ends up working with the Men in Black at the end of season 2 despite his mistrust of them to find the disappeared Captain Quinn.
• Tested on Humans: It's uncovered that a pet project of the Secretary of Defense was testing a kind of fear-inducing hallucinogen on American soldiers, a revelation that shocks and angers even a lot of the more corrupt government officials. This also figures into the backstory, with Fairchild having been a victim of the CIA's experiments with psychic powers like MK-Ultra, which is what led him down the path to what he is now.
• Token Good Teammate: Project Blue Book is this to the Air Force pretty much by default given all the shady stuff Harding and Valentine turn out to have an hand in.
• Those Wacky Nazis:
  • Ex-Nazis in this case. "Operation Paperclip" prominently features Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi scientist responsible for the V2 rocket and later instrumental to the Apollo program - and here he's responsible for building the Air Force a UFO copy.
  • We find out in "The Roswell Incident" that Valentine has convinced Harding that the aliens were actually children surgically altered by notorious Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, and that the whole thing was concocted by the Russians. Notably, the following episode shows Harding beginning to believe the possibility it is actually aliens after all.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Harding bribes and intimidates witnesses, actively waterboards someone himself at one point and lies directly to the President that Russians were responsible for a mass sighting over Washington, despite the fact it could trigger a war. Yet he claims his work is crucial to protecting every man, woman and child on the planet, and at another point draws an indirect comparison between the bombing of Hiroshima and what he's doing, claiming both prevented the world from sliding into chaos.

  Harding: It requires a special kind of man to do that. The kind of man who knows where the line is drawn that separates the unthinkable from the necessary. The kind of man who has a job to do, and gets it done.

• Wham Shot:
  • The final scene of season 1 has Hynek's mysterious Man in Black contact discovering an alien obelisk resembling the Washington monument in the Antarctic.
  • Hynek sketching out the underwater UFO sightings around the globe on his map. The camera pulls back and it's identical to the alien symbol.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Hynek and Quinn evolve into this. Notably, for all their fighting and bickering, Hynek is devastated by Quinn's possible death.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: While based on a real investigation and taking inspiration from many real UFO cases, the show is ultimately more of a Historical Fiction that has little connection to the actual events, inventing many details and characters.