Mimi’s Adventurous Afternoon
PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 2 – SPOILERS ⁓
Professor Hynek (Aidan Gillen) figures out that the mysterious sequence of numbers he found in the first episode represents coordinates located in the interior of Antarctica. Just as he is about to investigate this discovery further, Mimi (Laura Mennell) knocks at the door of his study which she is surprised to find locked. Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey) has arrived. The captain whisks Hynek away to a small town in West Virginia where the latest UFO sighting has occurred.
A short while later, Susie Miller (Ksenia Solo) shows up shortly after Hynek and Quinn leave, and insists that Mimi show her around town. Susie asks Mimi where she’d like to go. “You know, there’s this one place,” she says. “They read poetry, serve cocktails in soup cans, and smoke reefer. I’ve never been. I’ve only heard of it.”
They locate that club and have drinks there. The drinks are served (disappointingly) in glasses, not soup cans. Mimi is obviously uncomfortable with the atmosphere of the place, and Susie suggests she needs to loosen up. Susie leaves, saying she’ll be back in a minute. Then two guys sit down next to Mimi and start to make out. Either because of that, or perhaps because a strange woman whispers in her ear offering drugs or possibly other things, Mimi decides to leave without waiting for Susie to return. She sees Susie talking to a guy in a hat who looks out of place. so it is also possible that she suspects Susie has lured her out of the house for nefarious reasons, which is true. Susie’s associate has used the opportunity to place a bug in Hynek’s study. The name of her associate (played by Currie Graham) has not yet been revealed.
Hynek and Quinn are on their way to Flatwoods, West Virginia to investigate a UFO sighting. What really happened there? Data assembled from the Braxton County Official Website and other sources indicates that around 7pm on 12 September 1952, Fred and Eddie May (13 and 14 years old respectively) and another boy were playing in a field when they saw a bright object streak across the sky and apparently land on a hilltop on a nearby farm. Believing they had seen a meteorite impact, the boys ran to the May residence, and persuaded Mrs. May to go with them to have a look. Three others went with them to the site, including a member of the West Virginia National Guard, and a small dog.
When they got there, they encountered a mist that some described as having a “sickening, burnt metallic odour”. The dog ran into a pocket of the mist, came back out, then ran away from the site. The guardsman saw a pair of lights and when he pointed his flashlight in that direction, he saw what looked to him like a ten foot “monster” with a red face and a glowing green body. No meteorite was found. No ship was found either, likely because everyone was quickly chased away by the toxic mist. The ten foot tall creature was never located. Everyone in the group experienced nausea and vomiting to one degree or another. The dog reportedly died.
In the fictionalized version, Hynek finds a radioactive meteorite at the site. Though some branches have been broken and underbrush set on fire, there is no crater, so if that was the source of the sighting, it must have made a (relatively) soft landing. On arriving at the site, Hynek did say: “Surface soil’s loose. This area’s been jolted somehow. Like an earthquake.”
Confronted with a panicking town, Hynek discovers that a Great Horned Owl lives in the area and passes it off as a definitive explanation of the phenomena. The main thing wrong with that idea is that the woods were on fire, and an owl would probably flee from that, rather than sit calmly on a branch.
The mystery guy from episode one (Ian Tracey) turns up again. Labeled The Fixer in the credits, he again passes information to Hynek, this time a photo of alien symbols (similar to those that accompanied the Antarctic coordinates) through a woman named Evelyn (Mary Black). It is implied that, after she speaks to Hynek for a second time, either The Fixer himself (or another of the “Men in Hats”, as Evelyn calls them) shoves her out a window. She almost lands on Hynek and Quinn who are standing outside.
Miscellaneous Info
When Mimi and her son Joel (Nicholas Holmes) play scrabble, Mimi uses the word quasar. Quasi-stellar objects were discovered in the late 1950s, but the earliest recorded use of the word “quasar” is in a paper by astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu published in Physics Today in May of 1964.
Susie Miller’s car is a 1953 Cadillac, which could have been purchased in late 1952. It has 1951 Ohio license plates and no windshield sticker. Ohio issued single-year plates from 1910 through 1973, except in the years 1943 and 1952 when windshield stickers were issued instead of replacing the previous year’s plate.
** — Revised. Originally posted on 21 January 2019