PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 3 – SPOILERS ⁓

Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey) interrupts a radio speech from U.S. President Truman. “They call the bomb Joe-3,” he says. When Hynek (Aidan Gillen) asks why, Quinn continues: “The Russians drop their first atom bomb test, somebody somewhere’s gonna give it a name. I’m guessing there was a number one, and a number two before that.” When Hynek suggests that the idea of nuclear war is insane, Quinn says: “You ask Harding. It’s only a matter of time before we find out whose nukes are bigger.”

Joe-3 was called RDS-3 by the Soviets. The 47 kiloton bomb was tested on 18 October 1951 in Kazakhstan.

Reading about UFOs is giving Joel (Nicholas Holmes) nightmares. Mimi (Laura Mennell) and Alan discover him sleeping in the bottom of his closet. Then the phone rings, and Dr. Hynek is summoned to Lubbock, Texas to investigate strange lights in the sky.

The next morning, while cleaning fresh snow from the baseball glove Joel left in the backyard, Mimi sees her neighbour Donna (Heather Doerksen) carrying supplies to a large wooden shed.

MIMI: “Are you stocking up for the bomb shelter?”
DONNA: “Jack wants to be fully prepared for the end of the world.”
MIMI: “Sounds like one of Joel’s nightmares.”
DONNA: “Well, with those reds in Korea, Chairman Mao in China, nightmare sounds about right.”
MIMI: “Was it difficult to build?”
DONNA: “No, we just picked it up at the hardware store. It comes mostly assembled. Those underground ones are so expensive.”
MIMI: “And it makes you feel safer?”
DONNA: “Snug like bugs in a rug…But the thing is, there’s only room for one family inside.”
MIMI: “Oh, of course. I wasn’t suggesting…”
DONNA: “Oh, I know you weren’t, but Jack and I, we discussed it. I mean, you have to. What would you do if someone came knocking?”
MIMI: “Well, what would you do?”
DONNA: “Jack bought a rifle and told me not to worry about it.”

Susie (Ksenia Solo) pays Mimi a visit. She does not use the doorbell, but instead noisily rattles the doorknob as though expecting the door to be unlocked. Mimi does not find this at all strange. The two women apologize to each other for the events of Episode Two, and Mimi reassures Susie that they are still friends.

Someone is following Mimi and not being at all surreptitious about it. A guy with a hat pulled down over his eyes turns up at the hardware store as Mimi is negotiating the purchase of a prefabricated bomb shelter. The next day, when Susie is helping Mimi build the shelter, the same man is seen standing in front of the Hynek residence. The man vanishes, but Mimi is spooked and changes all the locks.

Meanwhile, in Lubbock, Texas, Hynek and Quinn find themselves investigating mysterious lights that appeared to fly in formation over the city causing power blackouts and other mysterious occurrences. Both of the men see the Lubbock Lights for themselves, and experience their effects.

Professor Carlton Fanshaw (Tony Alcantar), comes forward with an (easily disproven) explanation that the Lights were really a flock of Plovers. (How the ‘Plover Theory’ actually came about is described in detail in Chapter 8 of Edward J Ruppelt’s 1963 book “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.”

On their return to Washington, the generals try to feed them a story about a top-secret, experimental aircraft, but Hynek doesn’t buy it.

Other things are happening in Washington. When the Lubbock County Sheriff’s nephew tips off a tabloid reporter about the sightings, he makes passing mention of Thomas Mantell, a real-life Air National Guard pilot who died when his plane crashed after he gave chase to a UFO. Mantell’s encounter happened over Kentucky on 7 January 1948. The Gorman Dogfight happened nearly ten months later, so it is surprising that Mantell was not mentioned in PROJECT BLUE BOOK’s first episode. (Mantell’s UFO was, like Gorman’s, dismissed as a weather balloon.)

Unknown American agents try to intimidate the reporter into silence, and this comes to the attention of the (fictional) U.S. Secretary of Defence William Fairchild (Robert John Burke), who is outraged. He confronts General Harding (Neil McDonough), and threatens to tell Truman about all of the General’s secrets unless he puts a stop to such things, creating the impression, true or not, that actions of the U.S. military were intentionally concealed from its Commander-in-Chief.

The power outages and other UFO effects the show describes may or may not have accompanied the Lubbock Lights, but such things did happen elsewhere. In testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Astronautics in July, 1968, University of Arizona physicist Dr. James E. MacDonald was asked if there were other events frequently related to UFO sightings, MacDonald said: “Yes. Certainly there are many physical effects. For instance, in Mr. Pettis’ district, several people found the fillings in their mouth hurting while this object was nearby, but there are many cases probably on record of car ignition failure. One famous case was at Levelland, Texas in 1957. Ten vehicles were stopped within a short area, all independently in a two-hour period.’ Levilland is fifty kilometers due west of Lubbock.

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All 20 episodes of PROJECT BLUE BOOK can be streamed on THE ROKU CHANNEL.

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** — Revised. Originally posted on 26 January 2019