PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 5 – SPOILERS

Because Susie (Ksenia Solo) rescued Mimi from Lieutenant Fuller in the previous episode, she gets a visit from Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey), who is suspicious because, though Susie says she lived in New York City, he can find no record of her being there. (One would think Soviet spies would have created at least a flimsy fake background record, but apparently they did not.) She also gets a black eye from her “associate”. She doesn’t get upset about any of this, but instead keeps her appointment with Quinn the next morning and asks him out for a drink.

As he prepares to climb a radio tower in Terre Haute, Indiana, Lieutenant Fuller (Matt O’Leary) tells police to remember the numbers three, forty-two, eleven, seventy-six, and seventy-nine because they will save their lives. (He says the numbers twice so there can be no mistake.) General Harding (Neil McDonough) gives that sequence of numbers to Hynek, not as distinct numbers, but written as a string of digits with a zero added (between the seven and the six) which makes them correspond to digits 91 to 100 of Pi.

That leads Hynek to a short wave radio broadcast the source of which is a photography studio specializing in pinups and lingerie shoots. When he explains how he located the place, Kelly (who runs the studio and is paid anonymously to maintain the broadcast) gives him an envelope with two photos in it. One is of a squadron of P-61’s. The other is a picture of earth taken from an altitude of about 12,000 miles (roughly the orbit of a GPS satellite). Quinn tells Hynek that the planes in the photo are the 415th night fighter squadron. Hynek apparently already knows this, and tells Quinn that squadron was the first to report sighting Foo Fighters, and says the sightings happened over Germany in 1944.

In actuality, the 415th was in southern France in 1944, supporting the 7th army, and were flying Bristol Beaufighters. In the spring of 1945 they moved to Germany and started flying P-61s, but flew only a few missions in them before the war ended.

One night in November 1944, a Beaufighter with pilot Edward Schlueter, navigator Donald J. Meiers, and intelligence officer Fred Ringwald on board, was flying along the Rhine river north of Strasbourg when the three crewmen saw eight to ten bright orange lights off their left wing, flying at high speed. The objects did not register on anyone’s radar. When Schlueter turned toward the lights, they disappeared. Later they appeared farther away. The display continued for several minutes and then ended abruptly.

Meiers, who was from Chicago, named the objects Foo Fighters, a nonsense word frequently used in the Smokey Stover comic strip, which ran in the Chicago Tribune from 1935 to 1973.

The objects were sighted many times by pilots on both sides of the conflict. They never interfered with the aircraft they were following (so it is unlikely they were a weapon). And they never showed up on radar. It seems possible that their purpose was to illuminate the aircraft they followed to make them more easily observed from a distant vantage point (perhaps 12,000 miles above the earth).

Many of the (fictional) airmen interviewed by Hynek and Quinn believe that they can communicate with extraterrestrials. (The fictional Hynek points out logical reasons why this cannot be so.) Meanwhile, Fuller steals a car, and is able to start it without a key by passing his hand over the ignition switch.

Hynek tells Quinn about the abandoned amusement park and takes him there, but the indoctrination facility he found on the way back from Fargo (see Episode One) has been removed. Fuller also turns up at the amusement park. Hynek shows Fuller the drawing he made of one of the alien pictographs, and asks him if he knows what it means. Fuller promptly douses himself with gasoline and sets himself alight.

General Harding later suggests to General Valentine that someone flipped Fuller’s “off switch”. Was Fuller programmed to self-destruct when shown that image?

Mimi’s neighbour Donna (Heather Doerksen) stops by with cookies. She is very curious about the soldier guarding the Hynek house, and asks just what kind of a name Hynek might be. (Mimi responds with incredible politeness to these inquiries.) Donna hurries home to watch DRAGNET which debuted on NBC on 15 December 1951. A historical reference in Episode Three is also from 1951 (the third Soviet nuclear test, which occurred on 18 October of that year).

---

NOTES

PROJECT BLUE BOOK has been renewed for a second ten-episode season by The History Channel.

Nadine Lewington (Kelly) will be Geraldine in THE POISON ROSE, based on Richard Salvatore’s 2018 novel of the same name. In the book, Carson Phillips, an ex-football player turned detective, is hired to return to his hometown to find a missing person. After he discovers that his long-lost daughter is the prime suspect, Phillips is caught up in a complicated mixture of blackmail, drug smuggling, and murder in an effort to prove her innocence. John Travolta will star as Phillips, and Morgan Freeman will be Doc, a Galveston, Texas crime boss. THE POISON ROSE completed production last summer, and will be released in The Netherlands on 21 November.

Laura Mennell (Mimi) was asked by Crookes Magazine if she had ever experienced a ‘close encounter’. She replied: “I might very well have. I was with my boyfriend in the summer looking up at the sky and saw this light that was bigger than a planet. It wasn’t blinking like the usual aircrafts one might see at night and there was no sounds of jet engines. It was flying in our direction for a a short time, then just seemed to stop in mid-air for at least ten minutes. It was bizarre. Who knows, maybe it was something out of the ordinary, but I guess I’ll never really know for sure.”

Robert Stromberg, who directed “The Fuller Dogfight“, will direct RELATIVITY, a biopic inspired by the true story of Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić. The film will chronicle Mileva’s relationship with Albert Einstein through love, science, marriage, and scandal. (Einstein and Marić were married in 1903 and divorced in 1919.) Written by Emiliana Monahan Dore and Adrienne Lusby, RELATIVITY should begin production in Prague later this year.