Tag Archives: Michael Malarkey

Two Weekends In July

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PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 10 – SPOILERS

Laura Mennell and Ksenia Solo

Mimi Hynek (Laura Mennell) and Susie Miller (Ksenia Solo) speak to anonymous, apparently federal, agents outside Donna and Jack’s house

The official explanation for the 1952 UFO sightings over Washington D.C. was a temperature inversion. At least they didn’t blame it on plovers. In the show’s fictionalization of events, the UFOs themselves are depicted accurately. In D.C. in 1952, there were a great many unidentified objects that flew with great maneuverabililty and speed. (The objects moved at around 160 kph most of the time, but were able to rapidly accelerate to more than 11,000 kilometers per hour.) They were tracked by radar, and pursued (ineffectually) by American fighter planes.

Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey) is almost certainly a fictionalized version of U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J Ruppelt, a Project Blue Book supervisor. Ruppelt was flying to D.C. at the time of the initial sightings and did not find out about them until after he arrived on the morning of 21 July. (The UFOs came on two successive weekends — 19 & 20 July, and 26 & 27 July). There were quite a few other sightings in the general area of Washington during that month, but most occurred on those two weekends. Continue reading →

Protecting Mimi

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PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 9 – SPOILERS

Ksenia Solo

Susie (Ksenia Solo) hatches a plan to rid herself of her associate

Just as he is about to quit Project Blue Book, Dr. Hynek is taken hostage (along with Quinn and his secretary) by a man who claims to have been abducted by aliens. Thomas Mann and his wife Valerie (played by Malcolm Goodwin and 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. Thomas gets Valerie to dig an implant out of his neck (an implant that he knows he has only after Hynek hypnotizes him). Shortly after that, Quinn saves Mr. Mann from certain death by knocking him out of the way of a sniper’s bullet, something one might have expected Hynek to do. Quinn’s rescue of Mann could indicate that he developed 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 the project. Continue reading →

Drinking in the Middle of the Day

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PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 8 – SPOILERS

Ksenia Solo

Susie Miller (Ksenia Solo) preparing to remove all traces of Donna from her associate’s car

The show seems to be getting a bit off-topic. Hynek and Quinn are called in by The Generals to investigate what turns out to be an experiment conducted by the American government and designed to expose a platoon of rangers in Missouri to a chemical agent without their knowledge. (To be fair, it did sort of look like a bunch of UFOs at the start, and The Generals were unaware of the experiment. The pattern created by the shells that were fired that contained the chemical agent looked a lot like what Hynek saw at the nuclear testing range in “The Green Fireballs“. It seems possible that Hynek was exposed to psychotropic drugs of some sort there. Continue reading →