PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Episode 109 – Abduction – SPOILERS ⁓

Just as he is about to quit Project Blue Book, Dr. Hynek (Aidan Gillen) is taken hostage along with Quinn (Michael Malarkey) by a man who claims to have been abducted by aliens. Thomas Mann (Malcolm Goodwin) and his wife Valerie (Khalilah Joi) are from New Hampshire, just like Betty and Barney Hill, the first widely publicized alien abductees whose close encounter happened in September 1961.

After Hynek hypnotizes him, Thomas gets Valerie to dig an implant out of his neck. Shortly after that, Quinn saves Mr. Mann from certain death by knocking him out of the way of a sniper’s bullet. Quinn’s actions could indicate genuine sympathy for Mann’s plight, or (more likely) that all of Quinn’s actions during the hostage situation were designed to persuade Hynek not to quit Blue Book.

Quinn surprises Hynek by being familiar with the word “pareidolia” (the tendency to impose meaningful patterns on random or ambiguous forms). He uses the term after Hynek determines that the pattern of dots drawn by Mr. Mann corresponds to the Pleiades star cluster as seen from an unearthly vantage point. This is almost certainly a fictionalized reference to Betty Hill’s star map which many think shows the arrangement of nearby G-type stars as seen from the Zeta Reticuli system, some 39 light years from Earth.

Implants have allegedly been found in the bodies of many (but not all) abductees. Some have been removed surgically and analysed, with inconclusive results.

The episode’s best moment happens when Valerie gets impatient with Quinn’s inability to understand why she’s risking prison to help her husband. “I’ve known him for fifteen years,” she says. “I love him. I trust him. And if he says aliens abducted him, then I believe him, and I’ll do whatever I can to help him get better. Do you not have anyone in your life that you’d do that for? No wonder you don’t understand.”

Back in Ohio, Susie’s associate Cal Miller (Currie Graham) finds some surveillance photos of Mimi (Laura Mennell) among Susie’s personal things, and they give him an idea. “Let’s say,” he tells Susie, “Mrs. Hynek were to have a dalliance of sorts and it was photographed. I’ll bet her husband, the esteemed professor and Air Force lackey, would do just about anything to keep those photos out of the public eye.” He goes on to suggest that, if Susie should fail to do this, he might find his own sort of blackmail to use against the Hyneks.

Fortunately, Susie (Ksenia Solo) has another plan. After provoking Cal to hit her again, Susie visits Mimi, shows her bruises, and suggests the two of them get drunk together. Whether Susie got the the pictures her associate wanted is unclear, but if she did she does not give them to him. She meets her partner in espionage late at night at a prearranged, isolated spot, and shoots him three times, making it look like self-defense. Poetically, someone on the radio is singing “Oh,Donna”. (It is not Richie Valens, but another, unidentified, singer.)

In “The Green Fireballs (episode 1.6), Susie’s associate forced her to dispose of the body of Donna, one of the Hyneks’ neighbours.) Mimi, however, is beginning to get suspicious of her new friend. If she finds the listening device in her husband’s study, Susie’s plans will almost certainly fall apart.

Hynek comes home to find The Fixer (Ian Tracey) waiting outside his house. The “man-in-black” hands him a plane ticket, and explains: “You need to leave tonight. Something big is about to happen, something you’ve been waiting for since you took this job. Proof.”

Hynek goes inside and tells Mimi that he has to go away again. On TV in the background is Episode 11 of the science fiction anthology series TALES OF TOMORROW, titled “The Search for the Flying Saucer”. As Hynek walks out the door, Jack Carter’s character is saying: “I don’t know, Ginny, but I’ll find out. I’ll find out a lot of things. I’ll find out why they come here; who sent them; what’s behind all this.”

After the events of “The Green Fireballs“, Hynek was planning to let Mimi know everything that was going on with Project Blue Book, and involve her in his work. Donna’s death and Mimi’s reaction to it made him change his mind about that. Now he seems to have bonded with Quinn again. He tells Joel (Nicholas Holmes) and Mimi he needs to fly to Washington, D.C. (Quinn told Hynek earlier that he is headed there as well.)

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Miscellaneous Info

TALES OF TOMORROW aired Fridays at 9:30pm on ABC, and “The Search for the Flying Saucer” was first broadcast on 9 November 1951. In the episode, Army pilot Vic Russo (Jack Carter), who was grounded after reporting an encounter with a UFO, and is determined to prove flying saucers exist, travels to a remote New Mexico town to investigate saucer sightings, but the locals refuse to talk about the subject. All except Crazy John (Vaughan Taylor), who offers to take Vic to a landing site.

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All 20 episodes of PROJECT BLUE BOOK are available from Amazon Prime Video and on DVD and Blu-ray.

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** — Revised. Originally posted on 11 March 2019