376: Project Blue Book

00:00:02:01 – 00:00:32:21
Dan LeFebvre
Hello and welcome to Based on a True Story, the podcast that compares your favorite Hollywood movies and TV shows with history. With spooky season upon us. Today we’re pulling another classic episode from the vault. Actually, more than that, we’re going to do three episodes all about the same TV series History Channel’s Project Blue Book. In case the title alone doesn’t tell you what it’s about, Project Blue Book was the codename for the United States Air Force’s systematic study of UFOs.

00:00:32:23 – 00:00:56:27
Dan LeFebvre
Perhaps the best way to summarize it is from this fact sheet from the Air Force themselves, and I want to link to the whole thing in the show notes. If you want to read it all. But it starts like this. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated unidentified flying objects under Project Blue Book. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated December 17th, 1969.

00:00:57:00 – 00:01:28:06
Dan LeFebvre
Of a total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remained unidentified. Now, if you’re watching the video version of this, you might notice some of my little corrections to that document, because technically, Project Blue Book itself didn’t start in 1947. The truth is a little more complex than that, as we’ll hear throughout this episode. But as you might imagine, the TV show that shares the name of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book covers some of those reports created by David O’Leary.

00:01:28:07 – 00:01:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
Project blue Book ran for two seasons of ten episodes each. The first season was in 2019 and the second in 2020. So that means we have a lot to cover today. And to kick this off, we’ll get to hear from the host of one of my all time favorite UFO related podcasts, Rob Christofferson. He’ll help us separate fact from fiction in each episode of the entire series, both seasons.

00:01:51:04 – 00:02:10:08
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s two episodes, one for each season. And then for the third episode, we’ll get to go behind the TV show itself as we hear from the creator, David O’Leary and the showrunner, Sean Blonsky. Before we kick this off with Rob Christofferson, though, let’s set up our game Two Truths and a lie for the first season of Project Blue Book.

00:02:10:10 – 00:02:28:10
Dan LeFebvre
Now, if you’re new to the show, since based on a true story is all about separating fact from fiction in the movies and TV, you’ll get to practice your skills at separating fact from fiction. In this podcast episode, with the game of two Truths and lie. So I’m about to give you three things that we’ll talk about during the first season of Project Blue Book.

00:02:28:13 – 00:03:01:03
Dan LeFebvre
Two of those things are true, and one of them is just an all out lie. Are you ready? Okay. Here, there. Number one, Project Blue Book was the first time the government investigated UFOs. Number two, former Nazi Wernher von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney to promote the U.S. space program after World War two. Number three, the term Foo Fighters was used by World War Two pilots who saw unexplained phenomena.

00:03:01:06 – 00:03:20:25
Dan LeFebvre
Got them. Okay, now, as you’re listening to our story today, see if you can figure out which one of those. It’s a lie. And I’ve got the answer in the envelope right here. And we’ll open that at the end of season one of Project Bluebook to see how well you did. Oh, and speaking of the video version here, just so you know, these episodes are from the vault.

00:03:20:25 – 00:03:47:18
Dan LeFebvre
They were recorded in 2020 and 2021, respectively. And that was before I did video episodes. So these are remastered audio only episodes. But with that, now it’s time to playback my chat with Rob Christopherson from 2020 about the historical accuracy of Project Bluebook Season one.

00:03:47:21 – 00:04:24:15
Dan LeFebvre
I’d like to start by setting the stage for Doctor J. Allen Hynek and his work on Project Bluebook. Now, according to the TV show Doctor, Hynek was an astrophysics teacher at Ohio State before he he’s recruited by the US Air Force to investigate flying saucers, what they called Project Bluebook. Now, there’s one little bit of dialog in the show where they give a very vague reason as to why they picked Doctor Hynek, and it’s when General James Harding tells Captain Michael Quinn that Hynek, quote, did some things for us in the war, end quote.

00:04:24:18 – 00:04:45:24
Dan LeFebvre
So not a lot of details there about that. But they do give some details about why they started Project Blue Book itself. Now, the reason that the show gives for that was because there are Hollywood movies about aliens coming out, and the public know something’s going on, but no one knows exactly what, including the government. According to the show.

00:04:45:25 – 00:05:08:00
Dan LeFebvre
So they want to find out, but they also want to cover it up. We get the sense from the show that the military picked Hynek because of his scientific background, because he’s not in the military, they’re hoping that they can give a little bit of some scientific proof to the public for flying saucers. That’s outside of the military.

00:05:08:03 – 00:05:30:12
Dan LeFebvre
Now, in the show, Doctor Hynek agrees to join Project Bluebook on three conditions. One is that he stays on staff at Ohio State. Two is he gets a paycheck from the government, some extra money for his family. And the three is that he gets recognition for whatever he finds. So that is, according to this TV show, a kind of setting all of this up.

00:05:30:14 – 00:05:36:19
Dan LeFebvre
How well do you think the show did depicting the way that Doctor Hynek got involved in Project Bluebook?

00:05:36:21 – 00:06:08:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So Doctor Hynek, joining Project Bluebook was kind of a matter of convenience for most. So, when Project Bluebook comes into being in late 1951, this is essentially the government’s third attempt to study the UFO phenomenon. And doctor J.L. and Harnick was part of the government’s first UFO study, which is called Project Sign, signed commenced in January of 1948 and was shuttered later that year.

00:06:08:21 – 00:06:40:11
Rob Kristoffersen
He joined the project in the spring of 48, for a few different reasons. He was at the time the director of the observatory at Ohio State University. All of the government’s UFO projects were run out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was about 60 miles away from him. And Hynek already had a high security clearance from his work on the proximity fuze during World War two, which is what they kind of allude to him doing things for us during the war.

00:06:40:14 – 00:07:06:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And when you factor in all of these things, Hynek was kind of the guy they needed an astronomer to rule out any kind of astronomical explanation that there could be for the sightings. And, he was a perfect guy to do it. So, as our good friend Sam stated on the Not Alone podcast, right place, right time, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

00:07:06:08 – 00:07:10:27
Dan LeFebvre
I love that. So,

00:07:10:29 – 00:07:46:27
Rob Kristoffersen
When Hynek took the job, he believed that this would be a quick one. He was pretty sure that what the UFO phenomenon was at the time was just Cold War nerves, world War two, latent nerves, you know, stuff left over. So, one of the most important cases that Hynek worked on, and that will come full circle for his involvement in Project Blue Book is a case involving a pilot by the name of Thomas F Mantell, who died while in pursuit of a UFO in January of 1948.

00:07:47:00 – 00:08:25:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Mantell and a few other pilots were taxiing planes from Marietta, Georgia, to Stanford Field in Kentucky. And while they were doing that, Godman Air Force Base, which was located near Fort Knox, had received a few unidentified blips on their radar and asked Mantell and his crew of a few other pilots to go investigate it. Well, Mantell pursued the object, but, unfortunately, he didn’t have oxygen on board, so when his plane climbed too high, he suffered from epoxy, which basically caused him to crash his plane.

00:08:26:02 – 00:08:50:15
Rob Kristoffersen
And Hynek was the one that kind of made his determination on this case. And he claimed that he was chasing the planet Venus. So really just kind of debunking mentality. And that was at the start of Project Sine. That was the mentality that, and Hynek had. So.

00:08:50:18 – 00:09:17:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Project sine was basically shuttered largely because of a document called The Estimate of the situation, which basically said that these crafts were extraterrestrial in origin. No surviving copy of this document exists, though, like, the generals that this report went to basically said, you have to destroy every single one of these, documents. There’s no way that we’re going to the president or anybody with this kind of information.

00:09:17:06 – 00:09:54:02
Rob Kristoffersen
So no surviving copy has ever been found, but there have been people who have attested to it, including Doctor Hynek himself. So signed was shuttered and was reactivated as Project Grudge. Now, grudge was strictly a debunking campaign. They downplayed reports and at times just threw them out. Didn’t even bother to investigate them. Grudge officially lasted for about a year, but they kind of kept somebody on staff so that if somebody did want to report UFO sightings to there, there would be somebody there.

00:09:54:02 – 00:10:25:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And that guy’s name was Lieutenant Jerry Cummings. And in 1951, there was a sighting at Fort Monroe, Monmouth, new Jersey, and Air Force personnel witnessed a disc shaped object. And a report was, filed, but was ultimately dismissed by Cummings under the directive that he had been working with. And this report made its name to a general by the name of CP Campbell, who requested to see the report and didn’t really like the looks of it.

00:10:25:15 – 00:10:55:04
Rob Kristoffersen
He didn’t feel like people were being honest with him, and Cummings basically told him how the project had been handled up to this point, that it was there just to debunk reports. And, at that point, Cummings got or sorry, Campbell got pretty angry and, he ordered that, Project Grudge be reactivated in full force. Unfortunately, Cummings was on his way out, back to a civilian life.

00:10:55:04 – 00:11:08:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So he got a gentleman by the name of Captain Edward Rupert, who was the first Project Bluebook head to, spearhead this project. So.

00:11:08:12 – 00:11:32:16
Rob Kristoffersen
Captain Rupert was essentially the backup pilot, for the crew of the Enola Gay. So if any, of the pilots that were involved in that flight couldn’t, somehow make it, for whatever reason, he was the guy that was going to fly that plane, and he had worked with Doctor Hynek before on Project Sign, and he quickly got in there.

00:11:32:16 – 00:11:52:15
Rob Kristoffersen
He whipped this project into shape, and it soon it would be relabeled Project Blue Book. But one of the things that he did was he went back into the old reports just to see what was there, to see how things were ruled. And Rupert was the kind of guy who was going to give you his objective opinion.

00:11:52:15 – 00:12:14:20
Rob Kristoffersen
He wanted this to be as objective study as possible. So if you leaned one way, either one way to one side or the other, you were kicked off the team. So, one case report that he looked at was the Thomas F Mantell case, and he saw that Hynek was the one that made the determination on that one.

00:12:14:22 – 00:12:47:00
Rob Kristoffersen
So he basically called him up and said, I need you to come back in here. We need to reexamine this case. They determined that what Mantell was chasing was a Project Mogul balloon. This was a newly declassified project. As of 1951, that essentially set up weather balloons to, with audio equipment attached to them. And they were basically there to detect Soviet atomic bomb tests.

00:12:47:03 – 00:12:56:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And that’s basically how Hynek made his way onto Project Bluebook. He stayed, after that, through the entirety of the project.

00:12:57:01 – 00:13:14:26
Dan LeFebvre
So just to make sure I’m understanding there was a captain, because in the show, there’s Captain Quinn, and we also meet a couple generals. General Harding and General Valentine are the character names. Were they also were they based on those, those generals and the captain that you were referring to, or they just completely fictional?

00:13:14:29 – 00:13:55:22
Rob Kristoffersen
They’re inspired. They’re not, totally those people. For instance, Captain Quinn is kind of based on to Project Blue book heads, Edward Powell, like I mentioned. And, another one by the name of Colonel Robert Friend, who was a Tuskegee Airman, and he served, I think, for about a year. But he was he had had that Edward Pelt mentality, which was he they were skeptical, but they wouldn’t let their, skeptical beliefs really shatter any kind of, reports or anything like that or, you know, lead them down a road.

00:13:55:22 – 00:14:24:12
Rob Kristoffersen
They didn’t think they should be going. In general, Valentine, I do believe, is based on General Nathan Twining, who was the general that actually created Project Sign, and he was kind of a figure in the background during the government UFO research project. So he was always kind of there in the background, always kind of got Intel and he’s, you know, made some interesting statements on UFOs and such.

00:14:24:14 – 00:14:36:05
Rob Kristoffersen
The there’s some funny interviews with him. There’s one in which he alludes to UFOs kind of thwarting U.S. forces in Vietnam and stuff like that. It’s, there’s a lot of fun stuff out there.

00:14:36:08 – 00:14:49:19
Dan LeFebvre
Well, yeah. Okay. I was just curious because obviously Doctor Hynek being real. I was just curious who on the military side of it would have been real. But it sounds like they’re more just composite characters, which is very common that we get for movies and TV shows.

00:14:49:22 – 00:14:59:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, for the most part, the only, real to life characters on the show are Doctor Allen Hynek and his wife, Mimi. Mimi Hynek.

00:14:59:21 – 00:15:25:25
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned the pilot there, and that leads right into the next question that I have, because in episode one, it kicks off with something that they call the Fuller Incident. Now, I’m going to assume that’s not necessarily the the same incident that you were referring to, because this in the show at least happens in Fargo, North Dakota, and it’s named after Lieutenant Henry Fuller, who is the pilot who gets into this dogfight with a flying saucer.

00:15:25:27 – 00:15:48:18
Dan LeFebvre
And according to the show, that was essentially the reason why they started Project Blue Book. But then after the investigation of the incident, Doctor Hynek concludes that the object the lieutenant was chasing was nothing more than a weather balloon. And you mentioned something similar to that. So was the fuller incident that we see in the show. That event that you were referring to, is that something else?

00:15:48:20 – 00:16:20:04
Rob Kristoffersen
No, that’s a little bit different. It has some of the hallmarks of the Thomas F Mantell case, but the Fuller incident is based directly on an incident called the Gorman dogfight. And, this involved a man by the name of George F Gorman, who was an Air National Guard pilot out of Fargo, North Dakota. And on October 1st, 1948, his squadron was returning from a flight at night, and Gorman decided he wanted to stay up in the air for a little bit, longer for some night flying practice.

00:16:20:04 – 00:16:42:06
Rob Kristoffersen
And after circling around a football stadium, this was around 9 p.m. that night. He was approaching Hector Airport and was notified by the tower that there was a Piper Cub plane below him. And, he was forced to circle the airport for a short period of time. And on one pass, he saw what he believed to be the tail light of another craft.

00:16:42:06 – 00:17:10:26
Rob Kristoffersen
Pass the cape, the Piper Cub plane on his right. It was white and color, blinking in intervals and approximately 6 to 8in in diameter. So this object was not registering on radar in any way. But, he went into an investigate it. And when Gorman made his approach, the light stopped blinking and basically just took off. And Gorman engage with the object.

00:17:10:26 – 00:17:40:28
Rob Kristoffersen
He pursued it. He found himself out, maneuvered basically at every turn, but was able to get behind it at one point. But when he did, the object basically turned around and flew straight in his direction. It passed right over his canopy and turned around to do it again. But before it seemingly was supposed to make impact, the light abruptly turned upward and shot straight up into the air.

00:17:41:01 – 00:18:04:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Now, Gorman attempted to pursue the object, but it was such a steep climb that his plane stalled out at 14,000ft. He was able to restart it, though, and landed. So, it’s not like it is. It’s depicted in the show. It’s the. He doesn’t crash the plane or anything, but, what makes this sighting so powerful is that there were numerous eyewitnesses to it.

00:18:04:29 – 00:18:28:05
Rob Kristoffersen
The two men manning the tower that night, Lloyd de Jensen and H. Johnson attested to the object’s fast speed, maneuverability, and the Piper Cub plane. The pilot of it, doctor A.E. cannon, also saw the light and testified to basically the same thing. And here’s a here’s a fun quote from, Mr. Gorman, quote.

00:18:28:05 – 00:19:08:18
Rob Kristoffersen
I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvering. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia, because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate, and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve. End quote. So this case was one of the Landmark Project’s nine cases, the other being The Test, the death of Thomas F Mantell, and another account known as the Child’s Weighted Account, which involved two civilian pilots that witness basically a long cigar shaped object fly alongside their plane at night.

00:19:08:21 – 00:19:18:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So that’s really what, that incident and, what that, episode was based on.

00:19:18:03 – 00:19:22:08
Dan LeFebvre
Sounds like movements that you would expect from a weather balloon. Right.

00:19:22:10 – 00:19:32:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Kind of. It kind of reminded me of, like, if you think about it, like, maybe like an alien playing with a laser pointer, you know, it’s it’s got those hallmarks there, I like that.

00:19:32:19 – 00:19:33:21
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

00:19:33:23 – 00:19:36:03
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. And we’re just the cats following along, right.

00:19:36:05 – 00:19:37:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Absolutely.

00:19:37:15 – 00:19:57:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, something that happened after this in the show was when Doctor Hynek used the term UFO for the first time. And, it was I thought this was funny because when he used it, the Captain Green character, you kind of looks at him as like a what? And then he goes on to explain, well, I’m kind of trying to coin this term to explain what we’re investigating.

00:19:57:16 – 00:20:02:13
Dan LeFebvre
Was he the one that actually coined the term UFO? And was it after that incident?

00:20:02:15 – 00:20:28:26
Rob Kristoffersen
No. Actually, the person that coined the term is it’s one of the people that coined is based on, Edward Rupert. He actually coined the term and early 52, he was looking for a different term because, flying saucer had such, negative, connotation associated with it. So he wanted a fresh term to go in with an unidentified flying object, is what he came up with.

00:20:28:28 – 00:20:36:25
Dan LeFebvre
I guess. Makes sense, too, because it’s not. You mentioned earlier a cigar shaped craft. They’re not always saucer shaped.

00:20:36:27 – 00:20:37:29
Rob Kristoffersen
No.

00:20:38:02 – 00:21:05:05
Dan LeFebvre
Now, in episode two of the show, Doctor Hynek and Captain Queen go to investigate a case in West Virginia where a mother and her children see something strange. And this is the case, according to the show called The Flatwoods Monster, because it’s not a flying saucer. This time or a UFO use that term, but it’s also involving a creature of some sort.

00:21:05:07 – 00:21:25:11
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe an alien creature. Well, that’s what Doctor Hynek and Captain Queen are there to find out. Ultimately, Doctor Hynek once again gives a rational explanation for the strange things that were seen. He stands up in front of the town and gives this speech. Captain Quinn and Doctor Hynek explained that the spaceship they saw was just a meteor.

00:21:25:14 – 00:21:47:00
Dan LeFebvre
The creature that they saw was a great horned owl. And Doctor Hynek goes on to give a scientific explanation about hot air and cold air, causing light to refract in different directions. It’s why stars twinkle and mirages are formed in the desert, according to his explanation. And it’s also how you can see an owl in a burning forest and think it’s a monster.

00:21:47:03 – 00:22:00:28
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s how the the movie or I’m sorry in the movie, the TV show sets up the flatwoods monster case. Was that a real investigation and how well did the show do explaining those events that happened?

00:22:01:00 – 00:22:30:04
Rob Kristoffersen
The flatwoods monster case was a real case that, took place in September of 1952. And it really is almost something out of a horror movie, especially when you look online at the images that were created once the eyewitnesses described what they were seeing. So, a group of kids, Eddie and Fred Mae and Tommy Heyer, witnessed this fireball in the sky in September of 1952.

00:22:30:07 – 00:22:55:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And they saw it go down in the forest. So they gathered a small group that included, the Mae’s mother and Gene Lemmon, who was a 17 year old National Guard member. And Lemmon led the charge into the into the forest. And they had first see what they believe was just two lights. But the more that they stare at them, the more that they realized that they look more like eyes.

00:22:56:02 – 00:23:23:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And then they see this large metallic looking creature that had, they described it like a spade behind its head, but it was completely red and apparently everyone in this group, which consisted of seven the seven people witnessed this creature. The town was kind of on edge a little bit, but not as bad as they depict it in the show.

00:23:24:01 – 00:23:54:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But, Project Blue Book really didn’t play much of a part in this case. This was really more investigated by civilian, UFO groups and, independent investigators. One of the most prominent was a an investigator named Gray Barker, who, did and investigated a number of cases, including the, famed Mothman flap in, West Virginia in 1966 and 1967.

00:23:54:11 – 00:24:32:06
Rob Kristoffersen
But basically all Project Blue Book did was looked at the, sighting of the object in the sky and just basically determined that it was a meteor. But they didn’t seem to acknowledge the creature at all in their, in their files. So, yeah, they didn’t really play much of a part, but, I did enjoy the depiction, of the way that they did things the skeptics have pointed to, an owl in a tree as being the culprit of this, but, I don’t necessarily pi that.

00:24:32:09 – 00:24:35:19
Dan LeFebvre
But it’s but it’s just, you know, the hot air and the cold air and.

00:24:35:21 – 00:24:36:02
Sean Jablonski
Well, the.

00:24:36:02 – 00:24:48:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Cool thing is the, when he’s talking about how stars twinkle, he was the astronomer that discovered how stars twinkle. So. Oh, it’s kind of fitting for him, you know?

00:24:48:29 – 00:24:58:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, well, that’s cool. I didn’t realize that. That they. I’m sure they they pulled that in as a as a little, little nugget there too, for somebody to find that cool.

00:24:58:03 – 00:25:25:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Or the, the cool thing about this show is that his children, Paul and I think another one of his children actually consult for the show. So it’s a lot more it’s it has its, you know, dramatic elements, but it’s, pretty accurate, as best as they have been able to contribute, there are some mannerisms that Aidan Gillen will do that, apparently are the same ones that Doctor Hynek would do.

00:25:25:22 – 00:25:54:04
Rob Kristoffersen
And, and, they’ve actually used like, personal items that, Jalen Hynek and maybe Hynek had for their characters in the show. So, you know, it’s a cool it’s a cool nod. And, the show is very respectful of his legacy. So I, I appreciate it for that because he is this really monumental figure in UFO research.

00:25:54:07 – 00:26:20:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, let’s, continue on because there’s more episodes that we need to cover. After the flatwoods monster case, we see that Doctor Hynek is he’s taking his role very seriously, and he’s he’s really trying his best to come up with some scientific rationale behind both the faller incident and the flatwoods monster. But then the next case is the Lubbock Lights.

00:26:20:04 – 00:26:40:11
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s when things start to change as far as the show is concerned. And this is episode number three in the series. It’s the first time that both Captain Quinn and Doctor Hynek experienced something themselves. They’re out in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and Captain Quinn is inside the car and Doctor Hynek is outside of the car.

00:26:40:11 – 00:27:13:16
Dan LeFebvre
When the car just starts going crazy, lights are flashing, the radios tuning frequencies, the entire car is shaking, and then a massive V-shaped crack with blue lights fly over, and they both see it now in the show. General Harding and General Valentine in the military give Quinn and Hynek the explanation that what they saw was a top secret experimental craft that has a V shape wing, and they show some photos that look like they could be real from that time period.

00:27:13:18 – 00:27:38:12
Dan LeFebvre
But despite this explanation, Doctor Hynek doesn’t believe that this is true. Doesn’t really believe what the military is telling him. And so he’s starting to get the sense that perhaps he’s not getting the full story. At the very end of episode three, we see him writing in his notebook. He writes possible government cover up. So was the series correct?

00:27:38:12 – 00:27:49:27
Dan LeFebvre
And showing that Doctor Hynek started to have experiences of his own that he couldn’t explain around the time of the Lubbock Lights? And did he start to suspect that he wasn’t being fed the full story from the Air Force?

00:27:49:29 – 00:28:15:20
Rob Kristoffersen
Hynek, as far as I know, never witnessed a UFO while investigating any cases during Project Blue Book. There’s a really great biography of him called The Close Encounters Man by Mark O’Connell, and in it he talks about a sighting that he may have had while looking, through a telescope. He claimed he saw, like a strange object, fly over the face of the moon or something like that.

00:28:15:20 – 00:28:56:17
Rob Kristoffersen
But, he never had an overt UFO experience during his time. In regards to what the Air Force was letting him in on, Hynek was the one of the people that was on the inside. So it they never really kept anything from him. If anything, he knew things that he couldn’t really talk about. And, in 1953, there was a CIA led panel called the Robertson Panel, which basically came in, and the reason why they came in, we’ll, it’ll be coming up later in, in the line of questioning.

00:28:56:17 – 00:29:32:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And then it pertains to an episode like the last episode in the season. But they came in, they assessed the work of, Project Bluebook, and they basically determined that, like Project Grudge, they had to now downplay reports in order to keep the public calm. So, in order to prevent mass hysteria, they were going to have to misidentify things and, essentially Project Blue Book from 1953 onwards became Project Grudge all over again.

00:29:32:21 – 00:30:17:15
Rob Kristoffersen
But Hynek was there. He was he was doing the best that he could. He couldn’t really come forward and say what he wanted and not. Or he would be losing access to the Project Blue Book Files, which at the time were the best place to get UFO files from. There weren’t civilian organizations as of yet. They would pop up not long after, but, essentially in 53, that was a turning point for Hynek, where he had started to change from this total skeptic there to debunk reports to, okay, now I’m being told that I can’t do my job properly.

00:30:17:20 – 00:30:41:23
Rob Kristoffersen
I don’t like this, so I don’t really trust the CIA at this point. And, he would essentially go through this metamorphosis over time where he would become a believer in the phenomenon. So the way that they kind of depict it in the show, his turn doesn’t happen that quickly, but, it does it does happen over time.

00:30:41:25 – 00:30:57:08
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah. It sounds like they, again, we see this a lot in movies and TV shows where they simplified it. It sounds like they just gave him an experience. Instead of trying to explain the CIA panel and all of these other, aspects, perhaps.

00:30:57:10 – 00:31:26:11
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. Absolutely. And, the Lubbock Lights photographs are real photographs. I do believe the ones they show in the actual episode are the real Lubbock Light photographs. And, that case took place in early 51. That was during the transitionary period from when Rupert was coming in. But, that was a case that stumped a lot of people.

00:31:26:13 – 00:31:50:18
Rob Kristoffersen
There were scientists that studied it, and, the the individual that actually took the photographs. He was a student, I do believe, at one of the universities. They took these photographs over a couple different nights, but they essentially show a group of lights in an arrow type shape, in passing over the skies of Lubbock, Texas.

00:31:50:18 – 00:31:55:19
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s, it’s really fascinating case. Then, go look up those photos online.

00:31:55:19 – 00:31:56:20
Sean Jablonski
They’re fun.

00:31:56:22 – 00:32:14:26
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And in, in the show, don’t they kind of pass it off as possibly a flock of birds or something like that, reflecting off lights. Was that a, an excuse or a, natural reason that was kind of thrown around there as one of the possibilities.

00:32:14:29 – 00:32:42:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, that was an actual reason that, investigators pinned, and they did end up doing a test and taking photographs. And what happened was you could see one speck of light from one bird. There wasn’t enough, reflection to actually pick it up. So it’s not clear exactly what the Lubbock lights were. They actually traveled quite fast.

00:32:42:25 – 00:32:51:11
Rob Kristoffersen
They determined, when they flew over them, that they were traveling at somewhere near 1800 miles an hour or so. Pretty sure birds can’t do that.

00:32:51:18 – 00:32:55:04
Sean Jablonski
Not many birds that they come across. Okay.

00:32:55:06 – 00:32:58:21
Dan LeFebvre
I hope not. At least that would be, the fast flying birds.

00:32:58:24 – 00:32:59:08
Rob Kristoffersen
That is a.

00:32:59:08 – 00:33:02:14
Sean Jablonski
Flat like work.

00:33:02:16 – 00:33:33:02
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the the next episode, episode number four, brings in Operation Paperclip. And this is when we’re introduced to Verner von Braun. He is a former Nazi who built the V-2 rocket and post-World War II two. He’s heading up America’s space program. So Doctor Quinn and or. I’m sorry, doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn get a firsthand look at von Braun’s work, as they think that maybe one of the UFOs that they’re investigating is just one of his rockets, and it’s a top secret rocket.

00:33:33:04 – 00:34:00:17
Dan LeFebvre
So during this on the show, von Braun pulls Doctor Hynek aside and offers him a job to work with him. But Doctor Hynek doesn’t trust the former Nazi. I wonder why. But then, regardless, von Braun tells Doctor Hynek that he can’t explain the sightings. He knows about anybody. He can’t explain them. And then at the end of the episode, we see von Braun overseeing a test with an American pilot being forced into a giant flying saucer.

00:34:00:19 – 00:34:23:12
Dan LeFebvre
And as the saucer starts to take off, there’s some massive rings rotating around it. Obviously, you know, we have some effects going on there and then, you know, poof, it just disappears. And then von Braun simply says it worked like he’s not. The IT show is implying that he’s working on a lot more than just rockets. Can you give us an overview of Operation Paperclip?

00:34:23:12 – 00:34:31:26
Dan LeFebvre
And did Project Bluebook cross with paperclip and take Doctor Hynek to meet up with, Verner von Braun?

00:34:31:28 – 00:34:33:12
Sean Jablonski
So.

00:34:33:15 – 00:35:02:21
Rob Kristoffersen
For Operation Paperclip? Basically, as World War Two was winding down, American, British and Russian forces were racing to scour Germany for military resources, technological advances and anything that they could get their hands on that the Germans may have created, the Germans at the time were known for, really high technological advances, especially in, in rocketry.

00:35:02:23 – 00:35:30:17
Rob Kristoffersen
And, the allies actually discovered a list called the Ozen Berg List that contain the names of every single scientist, that had worked for the Third Reich. Funny enough, they found it in a toilet. So let’s take that for what you will. Okay. The allies, essentially tracked down 1600 scientists and brought them to America. The OSS, the sponge, expunge their records.

00:35:30:19 – 00:36:04:29
Rob Kristoffersen
So they were basically given a slate clean slate to work for the government. And the most infamous individual was, Wernher von Braun. And he is basically the father of modern rocketry. He designed the V-2 rocket, and he was instrumental for us, in the space race. He pretty much got us to the moon. So, I got to say, Dan, I didn’t really expect to find anything because I didn’t think that Hynek had done anything with V-2 rockets or had met Wernher von Braun.

00:36:04:29 – 00:36:21:15
Rob Kristoffersen
But, you brought out the best to me, Dan. So I got to thank you for that. Now, I discovered this blog post on, I think it was Ohio Moo Funds website. And let me tell you, this website looks like it’s from the 90s. I love it.

00:36:21:18 – 00:36:23:13
Sean Jablonski
Hey, nice.

00:36:23:15 – 00:36:55:16
Rob Kristoffersen
And it was written by John Hynek secretary, a woman named Jenny Zeeman, and apparently Hynek worked on V-2 rockets while at White Sands Missile Range after the war. Now, he had imagined he had allegedly met Wernher von Braun at that time. But nothing. Nobody has ever come forward with this information like it’s not even in his biography. And even Heinrich’s closest friends do not know anything about this.

00:36:55:18 – 00:37:07:18
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, apparently he may have worked on, V-2 rockets at one point. So, Yeah, that that’s new information to me, man. So good job.

00:37:07:21 – 00:37:18:07
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. No, I mean, there are two high profile characters. I mean, I’m I’m not intimately familiar with Von Braun, but he’s kind of the the face.

00:37:18:07 – 00:37:19:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Of.

00:37:19:22 – 00:37:42:03
Dan LeFebvre
The US after the war, getting a lot of of Nazi scientists to to work on American technology. And for me, he was always kind of the face of that. So when I saw them together on the show, I knew that was something I had to ask, like, did they actually meet each other? Or is this just a show, having two names that people might recognize and using it as an excuse to put those two together?

00:37:42:06 – 00:37:47:15
Rob Kristoffersen
Right. Yeah. And, apparently they did cross cross paths at one point.

00:37:47:18 – 00:38:05:29
Dan LeFebvre
Well, speaking of crossing paths with names, I’m going to ask you another one here, because in the show there’s one point where Doctor Hynek tells Captain Quinn, as you know, he doesn’t trust Von Braun. And he’s like, you know, how do you make a Nazi look legitimate? You have Walt Disney give him his own special and Beemer right into your living room.

00:38:06:01 – 00:38:13:13
Dan LeFebvre
And we see this happen on the show. Did Von Braun and Walt Disney actually team up for a TV special?

00:38:13:15 – 00:38:37:24
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, yeah, a number of times. The first time was on an episode, what they called Disneyland back at that time. Today, you would know it as the wonderful world of Disney and he appeared on screen to talk about plans for the American government to go to the moon. So, he would also appear in a number of Disney specials after that.

00:38:37:24 – 00:38:51:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So Wernher von Braun was the face, early on of the for the space race. So, yeah, he definitely did team up with, Walt Disney a time or two.

00:38:51:03 – 00:39:17:05
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. That’s that’s fascinating. Wow. Okay, so moving on to the next episode. This is episode number five, and it’s entitled Foo Fighters. And in this episode, we see that Lieutenant Fuller from the very first episode, he’s back. And this time he’s in a group of people who have experienced something similar to him. You know, lights in the sky, maybe not the exact same thing as him, but they’re all similar experiences.

00:39:17:07 – 00:39:46:02
Dan LeFebvre
And Captain Quinn explains the title of the show. He explains that during World War Two, pilots would see lights that they couldn’t explain, and they called them Foo Fighters. That’s why they named the episode that. But in the episode, Lieutenant Fuller and his group of experiencers show Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn the lights themselves. They bring out this contraption that they’ve built, and they seem to be able to call the lights, to them.

00:39:46:05 – 00:40:12:11
Dan LeFebvre
But Doctor Hynek is quick to dismiss these as just car truck headlights bouncing off the fog in the distance. They’re not really calling them to them. And then at the end of the episode, Doctor Hynek runs across Fuller at a secret hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that’s now abandoned. And Doctor Hynek shows Fuller something and almost immediately, Fuller douses himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire.

00:40:12:13 – 00:40:37:24
Dan LeFebvre
Now, after this, the show cuts to General Harding and General Valentine. This is very stereotypical, secret government. They’re just kind of sitting around this table in, you know, very dark room and just kind of what you would expect for a secret military government, I guess. But, but they talk about how somebody or something must have flipped Fuller’s off switch, whatever that means.

00:40:37:25 – 00:41:01:03
Dan LeFebvre
It doesn’t really explain a lot right there. It just says, oh, it must have flipped him off, which sounds like something else, but that’s. But, in the show, they said, flip the off switch. Now, when I was watching this episode, it was one of the first episodes that I was thinking, am maybe this really wasn’t based on something real.

00:41:01:06 – 00:41:24:27
Dan LeFebvre
After all, the episode itself was claiming that Foo Fighters were was a term used in World War Two, and this is, after all, after World War Two. And so I just assumed that maybe this was the show stretching things, and I got the implication just watching the show, that Doctor Hynek probably never actually investigated Foo Fighters because those were during World War Two.

00:41:24:27 – 00:41:32:03
Dan LeFebvre
And this is supposed to be happening after World War two. Or am I wrong there? Did he actually investigate Foo Fighters like we see in the show?

00:41:32:05 – 00:42:04:25
Rob Kristoffersen
He did not investigate Foo Fighters. He was really busy working on the proximity fuze by that time. But, Foo Fighters were a real phenomenon during the war. And it was experienced by both Allied pilots and axis pilots, and they both believed that this was, technology from both sides being thrown at planes. But, that’s kind of confusing because like, clearly it’s not none of them, you know, claimed responsibility for it.

00:42:04:27 – 00:42:33:17
Rob Kristoffersen
And, if we’re talking about, like, the Germans, the Germans would totally take responsibility for that back in the day. There’s no way that they wouldn’t. But yeah, the Hynek never investigated the Foo Fighters. There wasn’t really a lot of, resources to investigate the Foo Fighters at the time. They there was a brief investigation done by American forces, but they couldn’t come to any definitive conclusion.

00:42:33:17 – 00:42:49:11
Rob Kristoffersen
But, yeah. Doctor Hynek, he was working on that proximity fuze, which I do believe time magazine ranked it as the third best innovation to come from the Second World War.

00:42:49:14 – 00:42:51:04
Dan LeFebvre
What is the proximity fuze?

00:42:51:07 – 00:43:14:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Basically, it’s a fuze that sends out radio waves. And when the radio waves bounce off something and come back and that signal gets shorter and shorter, the bomb basically explodes and realistically, you see that same technology in, like, noise cancellation headphones. Now.

00:43:14:11 – 00:43:16:00
Dan LeFebvre
We have Doctor Hynek to thank for that.

00:43:16:02 – 00:43:17:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah.

00:43:17:21 – 00:43:42:25
Dan LeFebvre
So I’m curious though, because in the in the show, when we see Lieutenant Fuller, his off switch flipped or whatever happens there and he it’s a very tragic death. It you know, he sets himself on fire. But if his experience was based on, a pilot named Gorman, I believe you said, was that what essentially what happened to Gorman?

00:43:42:27 – 00:43:57:28
Rob Kristoffersen
No. There’s not a lot known about Gorman, but he seemingly lived a normal life after the Gorman dogfight. He served in the, forces for a little bit longer, and then, went off and did his own thing.

00:43:58:00 – 00:44:26:24
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, well, the next investigation in the show covers green fireballs. They’re sighted over a nuclear testing ground. And Project Bluebook is called in to verify that these are, in fact, meteors, a perfectly natural explanation. But something happens during the investigation, and Doctor Hynek sees the fireballs in the sky himself. And they are very clearly not meteors. Now, with another super secretive character on screen.

00:44:26:27 – 00:44:47:00
Dan LeFebvre
Man, that is simply cast. I had to look them up afterwards, he just to see if he had an actual name. But they just call him the Fixer. He shows up and, Doctor Hynek theorizes out loud that perhaps the green fireballs are some sort of craft monitoring our nuclear testing sites, because that’s where they were seen.

00:44:47:03 – 00:44:53:23
Dan LeFebvre
Can you give us an overview of the the real event that this episode had based on and what Doctor Heinrich’s reaction was to it?

00:44:53:25 – 00:45:23:04
Rob Kristoffersen
Sure. In November of 1948, reports started to trickle in, out in the west of of the phenomenon known as green fireballs. They were at first quickly dismissed as green military flares, but on the night of December 5th, 1948, two separate plane crews, one military and one civilian, in New Mexico, each attested to seeing a green fireball while in the air.

00:45:23:06 – 00:45:41:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Each of them described the object resembling a green meteor, but ruled out meteors when the object basically abruptly turned, turned up, and then leveled off, which I’ve never heard of a meteor doing. But, you know, the those fancy meteors, they just do what they want these days.

00:45:42:00 – 00:45:44:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you’ve never heard of birds that fly that fast either, so.

00:45:44:10 – 00:45:46:10
Sean Jablonski
No meaning.

00:45:46:13 – 00:46:17:04
Rob Kristoffersen
So, three days after that sighting on the eighth to Air Force Office of Special Investigations, pilots witnessed similar phenomena while they were in the air. And they described it as resembling a military flare. But it was too big and it was a lot brighter. And then four days after that, a man by the name of Doctor Lincoln LaPaz, he was an astronomer with the University of New Mexico, had his own sighting of the green fireballs.

00:46:17:04 – 00:46:40:29
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot of people were seeing them in and around military bases in New Mexico, mostly. And, he basically was able to triangulate their position over Los Alamos National Laboratory. And in a letter to the Air Force, he stated that they could not be a meteor because it was traveling too slow at the time, and it didn’t have a tail coming off of it.

00:46:41:02 – 00:47:14:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So those sightings would continue from, yeah, November of 1948 until April of 1949, and most of them were centered in New Mexico. Now, Doctor LaPaz was tasked by the government to study the phenomenon. So it wasn’t carried out by this would have been, Project Grudge at this point. Went from project sign to Project Grudge. But the military was growing concerned that this was, foreign weapon, which could, you know, would make sense for them.

00:47:14:21 – 00:47:39:28
Rob Kristoffersen
It seems weapon like. So, a lot of their top secret projects were also conducted in New Mexico. So it makes sense that they would be, interested in it. And there were also similar objects sited over nuclear storage areas in Fort Hood, Texas. So, Doctor LaPaz determined that whatever these objects were, they were not natural.

00:47:39:29 – 00:48:16:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Most, or. Yeah, they were not natural. Most of the sightings were centered. Yeah, really in Los Alamos National Laboratory and many of the staff there, he interviewed and many of them claimed to see these green fireballs. Now, the sightings would become more sporadic after April of 49, but, they still continued on to the point where, in December of 1950, the government decided to set up an instrument observation station at Holloman Air Force Base, and it was only manned by two officers.

00:48:16:00 – 00:48:22:23
Rob Kristoffersen
But they, classified this project as Project Twinkle.

00:48:22:25 – 00:48:57:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So, LaPaz, you know, had other ideas. He felt like this deserved a more rigorous study. And ultimately, when the government was done in 1950, they would downplay the sightings in their final report. But the sightings still continued on after that for a little while. Every witness that saw them claimed that it could not have been a natural phenomenon, which is, you know, rare because you’re talking about trained observers, scientists and the such.

00:48:57:11 – 00:49:20:17
Rob Kristoffersen
Another fun fact about Doctor LaPaz. He had an earlier UFO sighting in 1947. And it was in Roswell, New Mexico. So he may have witnessed the actual Roswell craft crash, maybe, I don’t know, but, it’s just an interesting little tidbit there, but, Hynek, we’re not really sure of what Hynek thought about these.

00:49:20:17 – 00:49:37:27
Rob Kristoffersen
We’ve never gotten any comments from him about it. And the investigation wasn’t carried out by Project Sign or Grudge. It was something that the government was trying to keep under wraps. So, yeah, not really sure what happened and what Hynek thought there.

00:49:38:00 – 00:50:03:26
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if there were many other, cases like that that were outside of Project Sign or garage or Bluebook? I guess I’m assuming that those projects were the kind of the official official government investigation. And it sounds like this one was kind of, and off the books. Not really. I mean official, but not really official, if that makes sense.

00:50:03:26 – 00:50:10:22
Dan LeFebvre
You know, in that way, to kind of not throw it in with all the others where there are a lot of other cases like that that we know of.

00:50:10:24 – 00:50:42:11
Rob Kristoffersen
Not really. There isn’t a lot of declassified information that I’ve ever come across that really points to additional, government studies. Though Hynek later in his career, after really Project Bluebook was shuttered, he would make these comments that he was like the public face of like the UFO investigations, but he always made it seem like there was something else going on behind the scenes that the public didn’t know.

00:50:42:11 – 00:50:46:21
Rob Kristoffersen
So there’s a possibility that there are projects that we don’t even know about.

00:50:46:24 – 00:50:47:15
Dan LeFebvre
Of course.

00:50:47:17 – 00:50:49:14
Sean Jablonski
Yeah. Okay.

00:50:49:16 – 00:51:11:29
Dan LeFebvre
Well, moving on to the next episode. We’re up to episode number seven, and we come across the first hoax in this series. And according to the show, it’s with a Boy Scout troop leader who claims to see a UFO and even claims to shoot at it and hit the alien that comes out of the craft. And for some time, the Scoutmaster disappears.

00:51:12:03 – 00:51:35:03
Dan LeFebvre
But then he staggers back into town, just as Doctor Hynek is explaining that the lights that they saw were caused by swamp gas. And before long, though, Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn are able to figure out that the town’s sheriff sent a telegram to Hollywood about having proof about the flying saucer story. And that happened before the scoutmaster came back into town with that proof.

00:51:35:03 – 00:51:49:00
Dan LeFebvre
So it would seem that the sheriff and the Scoutmaster were in on this, trying to make a bunch of money on, what clearly was a hoax, trying to sell the movie rights. Did this hoax really happen the way that we see in the show?

00:51:49:03 – 00:52:17:24
Rob Kristoffersen
Man, this is one of my all time favorite cases. This is a really fun one. This is the case of a Florida scoutmaster by the name of Sunny divergence uncorked on August 19th, 1952. Divergence was, driving a group of Boy Scouts home, when he saw a bright light flash over. It’s a trail called Military Trail near West Palm Beach, Florida.

00:52:17:27 – 00:52:42:19
Rob Kristoffersen
He thought it could have been a stranded motorist or a plane that had gone down. So he pulled over onto the shoulder and basically went in to investigate. He told the three boys that, he was driving home to remain in the car, and he basically took a machete and a, flashlight with him, and he instructed the boys to run to the farmhouse that was nearby.

00:52:42:19 – 00:53:09:21
Rob Kristoffersen
If he didn’t come back in 15 minutes or so from the car, the boys claimed that they could see like a ring of lights, descending into a grove of trees. And they could also see, the flashlight as well. And when they saw that his flashlight had gone out, the boys ran to the farmhouse, and soon an officer arrived on scene and they were, about to commence a search.

00:53:09:24 – 00:53:38:23
Rob Kristoffersen
And it had been an hour or so, but divergence emerged from the, palmettos and was frantically waving his machete in the air and just, like, raving like a mad man. But, according to his testimony, he had been searching for about four minutes when he started to smell this nauseating odor. He also said that you felt like he was being watched, and he next claimed to feel this really intense heat that was coming down from above him.

00:53:38:23 – 00:54:03:12
Rob Kristoffersen
And when he looked up, he could not see the stars above him. There was this object that was just hovering over him, and it was, he described it as a dull black object in the shape of a saucer approximately 30ft in diameter. Divergence moved back from the object. And when he did, he claimed to hear this metallic scraping sound.

00:54:03:14 – 00:54:31:07
Rob Kristoffersen
And when he looked up again, there was this hatch that was opened on the side of the object. He noticed a red light coming from the inside it, and it soon developed into a mist that engulfed his body. And, the divergence lost consciousness not long after that, and he woke up a short time later and he was propped up against a tree, but he couldn’t really remember propping himself up against a tree.

00:54:31:09 – 00:54:57:17
Rob Kristoffersen
And his eyes were apparently so burned that he couldn’t see out of them. But, divergence underwent questioning with the local police, and they had noticed that the hairs on his arms were actually singed. So, they also went back to the area of where it where it occurred, and they discovered burnt patches of grass on the ground.

00:54:57:19 – 00:55:27:02
Rob Kristoffersen
Now, when Project Bluebook was notified, Edward Ruppel went to investigate and he took samples and then had them tested. They found that the soil had only been burnt at the top. So whatever had happened to them, it wasn’t some kind of natural rot from underneath that or anything like that. But Rupert would come to call this entire case a hoax, and in fact, he would call divergence the best hoax or that he had ever seen.

00:55:27:04 – 00:55:47:22
Rob Kristoffersen
He was painted as media hungry and also an opportunist willing to sell his story. But the problem was, is that they were never able to explain how he did it. They were never able to explain the burnt patches of grass, or like they couldn’t explain anything that this guy did. They just did hoax.

00:55:47:24 – 00:55:57:29
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow. Okay, so even after the investigation, they’re just like, we’re not going to even bother to try to figure out exactly what happened here. Just assume that he’s he’s hosting it.

00:55:58:01 – 00:56:24:06
Rob Kristoffersen
It those kind of cases. And they were very rare at the time like case cases, something very extreme. It’s on the level of like, a flatwoods monster kind of incident. And the government didn’t really want to get involved with cases like that. And you would see, from time to time that, if they were reported, they would downplay them almost immediately.

00:56:24:06 – 00:56:30:12
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, the government really didn’t want to talk about weird cases like that.

00:56:30:15 – 00:56:52:25
Dan LeFebvre
I’m curious, though, because one of the things that we see in the show, I mentioned very briefly, but, is when Doctor Hynek is when he’s explaining lights, he uses that says it was, caused by swamp gas. And that’s I have to ask about that because it’s something that I’m familiar with from, that movie Men in Black, of course, because they use that an explanation of, you know, swamp gas.

00:56:52:25 – 00:57:05:19
Dan LeFebvre
You know, that’s pretty much the explanation for UFOs. And so I think it’s something that’s kind of caught on in popular culture as a common explanation for UFOs. Was that really an explanation that started with Project Bluebook?

00:57:05:21 – 00:57:32:15
Rob Kristoffersen
It mostly started with Hynek. One of the most infamous investigations that he did occurred in Michigan in 1966, in the Dexter Hillsdale area, for approximately a week, sightings had been taking place in that area. It began on, March 14th, of 66. The police and Washtenaw County first witness strange lights in the sky over, Lima Township.

00:57:32:17 – 00:57:56:10
Rob Kristoffersen
And they chased these lights for a period of time. But, they were outmaneuvered every single time they tried. And throughout the week, people in Washtenaw County reported seeing similar objects in the sky. Some went on to report them as resembling like a spinning top. But the culmination of these sightings occurred two nights, later that week, on March 20th.

00:57:56:12 – 00:58:20:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Frank Manor of Dexter Township reportedly saw a strange object in the swamp behind his home. He described it resembling a pyramid with a porthole on it, from which this bluish green light was emitting. And then the next night, at nearby Hillsdale College, over 80 female students witnessed a strange light rising and falling in a swamp near their dorm.

00:58:20:09 – 00:58:49:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Hynek was sent to investigate that case and was basically forced to conduct a rushed investigation. He didn’t have a lot of time and, was forced to give a press conference. One of the witnesses in that case had mentioned that at first, because they ended up witnessing what the girls did at the college dorm room in Hillsdale believed it to be at first swamp gas, which is a real phenomenon.

00:58:49:28 – 00:59:45:07
Rob Kristoffersen
Basically, what happens in a swamp is when vegetation is dying, it will release methane into the air. And sometimes, you’ll basically see like a, short flash of light that it creates. So Hynek basically was forced to say that what happened in Dexter Hillsdale was swamp gas, and he was ridiculed heavily for it. And in fact, it was his determination on that case that really shuttered Project Bluebook toward the end, because what happened was, I believe he was governor at the time, Gerald Ford, he was not happy with the determination that Hynek came to and basically ordered for a panel and an independent panel of people to investigate UFO sightings.

00:59:45:07 – 01:00:17:04
Rob Kristoffersen
And this led to the Condon Committee, a, group of scientists out of the University of Colorado that studied UFOs for a couple of years and ultimately determined that, UFOs were not a threat to national security. In fact, they couldn’t determine what they were at all. And, that was the end of Project Blue Book. So the swamp gas thing is essentially Doctor Hynek probably most fumbling move during his time at Project Blue Book.

01:00:17:06 – 01:00:48:07
Dan LeFebvre
Going back to the TV show, the Nixon investigation that we see when I was when I was watching this, it really started to turn the entire series a little more sinister in my mind. It gave the idea that the military is trying to cover up some psychological tests that they’re doing on their own soldiers. We see a group of Army soldiers who got a UFO attack on the platoon on film, and we’re watching this.

01:00:48:09 – 01:01:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
Doctor Hynek is watching this, and the and the military is watching this. And that’s kind of the what kicks off the investigation. But then in the end, we find out that the soldiers were shell shocked from experiences in World War Two. And at the end of the episode, there’s a scene where the two generals, Harding and Valentine, are upset that the Secretary of Defense has been testing chemical weapons on their own.

01:01:11:20 – 01:01:15:15
Dan LeFebvre
Soldiers. How much of that actually happened?

01:01:15:18 – 01:01:52:09
Rob Kristoffersen
This incident is based on testimony from a private first class named Francis P wall during the Korean War. This is like one of the most harrowing tales that, you will ever hear. And there’s some really messed up stories from, soldiers during a war about UFOs and such. And, while was stationed near shore, one which, is was roughly 60 miles from Seoul, and his regiment was prepared to bombard a nearby village with artillery.

01:01:52:09 – 01:02:22:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And right before the attack was set to take place, this UFO appeared in the sky right above the village, and, they just started firing off. Artillery burst after artillery burst and, there were shells that exploded right next to this object, but it didn’t seem to take a hit. And, at the time, the object was emitting an orange light and it just was hovering over the village.

01:02:22:24 – 01:02:51:24
Rob Kristoffersen
That’s when wall basically asked his commander for permission to fire at this thing. And when permission was granted, everybody opened fire. The object changed to a blue green color. And it started to make these eerie arcs in the sky. And then it started to shoot beams at these people. They all reported feeling a burning and tingling sensation as the beams of light were shown at them, and were all forced into underground bunkers at the time.

01:02:51:24 – 01:03:24:28
Rob Kristoffersen
They had to take refuge from what this whatever this thing was, most of the men were trucked out by ambulance. They were actually too weak to walk. And doctors, once they got back to a hospital, noted how all of their white blood cell counts were really high. So, they never explained what happened to these men. Some have pointed to, like, a Soviet weapons test, but even that’s kind of out of the realm of possibility, even for me.

01:03:25:00 – 01:03:46:06
Rob Kristoffersen
As far as we know, it wasn’t a government chemical weapons test, but I wouldn’t put it past the government to have done that at any point in history. Like the the government has done some shady stuff in the past. If you want a, a good example of that, there’s a, book that came out, last year.

01:03:46:06 – 01:04:17:11
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s called Poisoner in Chief, and it’s all about a, one scientist’s work during, a project called MK ultra. He was basically tasked with, seeing what if they could use LSD? To basically as a form of mind control. It was a very is a very dark project for the government. So, I really wouldn’t put it past it at any point for the government to have done tests like that.

01:04:17:18 – 01:04:28:04
Rob Kristoffersen
There was the Tuskegee experiment, which I really don’t want to get into, because it was some pretty sick stuff. But yeah, I, I really wouldn’t put it past the government to have done tests like that at some point.

01:04:28:06 – 01:04:29:12
Sean Jablonski
Wow, wow.

01:04:29:14 – 01:04:52:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, let’s get back to the show then, instead of getting even darker. But, yeah. So in episode nine, Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn come across their first abduction case. And this is the case of someone named Thomas Mann, who claims that he was abducted by aliens. And there’s a few key things from that episode of the show that I want to get your insight on.

01:04:52:09 – 01:05:25:20
Dan LeFebvre
First is during this episode is when we see Doctor Hynek hypnotize Thomas to help him remember more about the abduction experience. Now, through hypnosis, Thomas is able to remember things that he couldn’t remember otherwise. When I saw this, it hit me that this is similar to what we talked about when we covered the movie communion. When you were a guest on the show to talk about what these strippers experience, there, and I, I wasn’t sure if Doctor Hynek kind of started that idea.

01:05:25:20 – 01:05:46:17
Dan LeFebvre
We get the when I was watching, Project Blue Book, I got the idea that nobody was really familiar with using hypnosis in that way. When he’s using this on on Thomas Mann. So was Doctor Hynek using hypnosis in his investigations? And was he one of the first to do that for abductees?

01:05:46:19 – 01:06:12:22
Rob Kristoffersen
So this episode is loosely based on the Betty and Barney Hill incident, which is, an incident that we recently covered on, a two part episode. And, essentially this New Hampshire couple reported having a close encounter with a strange object within the White Mountains. At one point, Barney had this dramatic sighting in a field, of this object through a pair of binoculars.

01:06:12:25 – 01:06:47:27
Rob Kristoffersen
He claimed to have telepathic communication with the occupants of this UFO. And they also claimed to have, suffered from missing time during this encounter, too. There was, period of time that they just couldn’t account for. They started to conduct their own investigation almost immediately after coming home. And, they read books voraciously, talked to experts, you know, from scientists to UFO investigators, until they ultimately decided that they wanted to explore their experiences through hypnosis.

01:06:48:00 – 01:07:12:24
Rob Kristoffersen
And they ultimately found this individual named Doctor Benjamin Simon. He was a Boston based hypnotherapist and through their work with him, uncovered an abduction narrative that involved the hills being taken on board a UFO, subjected to medical tests, and then returned to their car. Now, Doctor Benjamin Simon, was, pretty heavy hitter when it came to hypnosis.

01:07:12:24 – 01:07:41:01
Rob Kristoffersen
He set up a hospital, and I believe it was Long Island to treat soldiers coming home. From the war, from World War two with, with, all sorts of, mental problems, basically treating soldiers with PTSD before PTSD was known as anything. And he would use hypnosis to do that. Doctor Simon was the first to hypnotize an abduction witness.

01:07:41:06 – 01:08:07:09
Rob Kristoffersen
Hynek didn’t really do that. He did advocate for it in a couple of cases, but, he was, not a trained hypnotist in any way. The, probably the most infamous person to start doing this within the UFO community was a gentleman by the name of Doctor Leo Sprinkle. And, he used hypnosis on a number of, witnesses.

01:08:07:11 – 01:08:33:04
Rob Kristoffersen
And then later on in the 80s, man by the name of Doctor or not? Doctor, just, Bud Hopkins, he was a, New York based artist. He kind of put abduction cases on the map in the 80s by conducting hypnosis sessions and, working with, experiencers. So, yeah, Doctor Hynek never practiced, hypnosis in.

01:08:33:04 – 01:08:33:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Anyway.

01:08:34:01 – 01:08:54:15
Dan LeFebvre
Something else I want to ask you about with that, episode was when we see Doctor Hynek talk about this, a scale that he’s been working on. How’s it, close encounter. The first kind of close encounter. The second kind. Well, that’s what happened to Thomas. Their abduction, and then close Encounters of the Third Kind being even beyond that.

01:08:54:18 – 01:09:03:23
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s a term that I think we’re familiar with it from nothing else. The movie, was was that a scale that Doctor Hynek invented?

01:09:03:26 – 01:09:28:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. Doctor Hynek did invent, that scale. It’s what we call the, Hynek scale these days. There were actually six classifications. The first was a nocturnal light, which is basically your mundane sighting of a UFO at night. And then there is what he called the daylight disc, which is a sighting of an object during the day from more than 1000ft away.

01:09:28:10 – 01:09:56:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Then there is a radar visual sighting, which, is primarily, you know, witnessed by civilians and military pilots. It’s basically when a pilot sees something and it’s confirmed by radar data. And then, we get to the heavy hitters, close encounter, the first kind of the sighting of an object from approximately 1000ft away or less, close encounters of the second kind is a sighting, where an object leaves a physical trace of some kind.

01:09:56:13 – 01:10:24:27
Rob Kristoffersen
So in the Florida scoutmaster case, there was the burnt grass. And even in the Betty and Barney Hill case, there was, really strange readings that they got from their car on the back trunk. They noticed these semicircle, these circles, about a half dollar size that they don’t know where they where it came from. And, they ended up testing the trunk with a compass, and they found that it was magnetized.

01:10:24:27 – 01:10:56:22
Rob Kristoffersen
So that was a physical trace case. And then a close encounter of the third kind is when an object is an object is seen in an occupant of that object to scene. So some kind of humanoid being is seen at the same time. And the interesting thing about, the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind is that, when Steven Spielberg was working on that and he wanted to use that title, he actually had to go through J.L. and Hynek because that was his copyrighted title.

01:10:56:22 – 01:11:04:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So JL and Hynek ended up consulting on, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he even has a cameo at the end.

01:11:04:12 – 01:11:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, nice. Nice. I’ll have to watch that again and and look for him. I don’t remember, because I don’t know that I would be able to pick him out without finding a photo, but.

01:11:11:22 – 01:11:18:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Here’s, here’s the, hint that I’ll give you look for the man with the healthy Van Dike. You will notice him.

01:11:18:02 – 01:11:20:23
Sean Jablonski
Okay.

01:11:20:25 – 01:11:21:28
Sean Jablonski
Nice.

01:11:22:00 – 01:11:43:04
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, at the very end of episode nine, in the TV show Doctor Hynek gives, he’s he’s given a head up by that mysterious fixer guy that something’s going to happen in Washington, DC. So he flies there just in time to see a show of lights over DC. Now, in the show, this happens in the middle of the day.

01:11:43:06 – 01:12:05:24
Dan LeFebvre
And then later, Defense Secretary Fairchild, he was the one who was, doing the chemical testing on the soldiers, that we saw in an earlier episode. He’s killed as his car burst into flame just before he’s about to reveal the truth to the world. And then meanwhile, we see that lights come back and the military scrambles some Sf90 force to respond.

01:12:05:26 – 01:12:31:22
Dan LeFebvre
They have trouble keeping up with the objects as they’re flying around Washington, DC. And at the very end of the episode, which is the end of the season, Doctor Hynek tells Captain Quinn that he’s come to the realization that the only way they’ll be able to find the truth is to keep the jobs that give them access to information in more cases, but to convince the government that they don’t believe because that’s clearly what the higher UPS wants.

01:12:31:22 – 01:12:50:27
Dan LeFebvre
They’re given this cover up. So we get the sense that Doctor Hynek is pretty much just going to play the game and keep trying to find the truth. So how well did the TV show explain the lights over Washington, DC and what happened to Doctor Hynek and Project Bluebook after this?

01:12:51:00 – 01:13:19:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So 1952 was a big year for UFO sightings in the United States. Three incidents covered in the first season of the show happened in 1952 the flatwoods monster case, the Florida Scoutmaster case, and the most significant of them, which was a pair of incidents that came to be known as the Washington merry go round, as, Edward Pelt would call it.

01:13:19:12 – 01:13:48:03
Rob Kristoffersen
In July of that year. And over the course of two weekends, objects were seen by numerous eyewitnesses over and kind of outside Washington, DC. The first major incident took place on July 21st, just outside the city. Pilots and radar personnel, reported objects nearby. A pilot by the name of Casey Spearman of Flight 807 described the object resembling a falling star without a tail on it.

01:13:48:05 – 01:14:13:26
Rob Kristoffersen
And then on the 28th, objects were sighted again over Washington, D.C. this time, the Air Force scrambled jets to chase them down, but the objects outmaneuvered them very easily, and Rupert was summoned at the time by president Harry Truman for an explanation, but hadn’t been able to conduct an investigation at that point, and he didn’t have answers for them.

01:14:13:26 – 01:14:42:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So, ultimately, they rushed to call a press conference and quickly quelled all the excitement. The government blamed it on, weather. Yep. That’s right. Weather. But it’s basically because of this incident that the Robertson panel, which I mentioned previously, led by the CIA, was convened and then ultimately decided that UFO reports had to be downplayed.

01:14:42:21 – 01:15:11:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Edward Bruce Pelt would leave a Project Blue Book by the end of 1953 because of it. And, he ended up retiring. He wrote the first, really landmark book about his time, on Project Sign and Project Blue Book. It was called The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. He actually died very young, at the age of, I believe, 37 of a heart attack.

01:15:11:00 – 01:15:39:17
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, it’s, I think they did a good job of playing up the hysteria aspect. That’s the government was generally operating under the nature of cover ups when it comes to this phenomenon. And when it comes to the UFO history, it’s this question of, you know, you’re tackling this question of whether they downplayed reports to keep the public calm or because the government was hiding something that they had.

01:15:39:19 – 01:16:01:08
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s never really ever been cleared up. But I’ve always leaned towards the government was just trying to keep the public calm. I don’t think the government really has any, definitive information about this stuff, but you never know. It could be wrong. The government could come out and say, you know, we got aliens hanging out at area 51.

01:16:01:08 – 01:16:02:24
Rob Kristoffersen
I don’t know, you never know.

01:16:02:26 – 01:16:04:18
Sean Jablonski
You never know. Yeah. Yeah.

01:16:04:20 – 01:16:30:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, in that episode, which is episode ten, when we see in the show his name is Secretary Fairchild, the defense secretary, when he dies of very suspicious circumstances. That led me to think that maybe there was it was based on somebody that might have died in similar circumstances that they showed that. So, so plainly, there was that based on something that actually happened.

01:16:30:07 – 01:16:59:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Secretary Fairchild is based on the first Secretary of Defense, James V Forrestal. Forrestal died in 1949, well before the Washington merry go round. But he died under very mysterious circumstances. He was receiving treatment at the Bethesda military Hospital in Maryland for a mental breakdown, and his body was found having fallen from a great height from his hospital room.

01:16:59:03 – 01:17:42:02
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s unclear if he committed suicide or if he was actually just thrown from the window, but his death has been lumped into, conspiracies involving a group that most likely didn’t investigate UFOs, but was an actual group within the government. And, they were called majestic 12. Most point to majestic 12 as a group that essentially were studying the effects of radiation after bomb tests, but many have lumped them into this government conspiracy where, they were essentially trying to keep, the proof of extraterrestrial life from the public.

01:17:42:02 – 01:17:56:12
Rob Kristoffersen
And many believe that Forrestal was killed, because he wanted to come forward until the public about, extraterrestrial life being real and having visited us. So.

01:17:56:14 – 01:17:58:03
Sean Jablonski
Kind of darker.

01:17:58:03 – 01:18:03:11
Rob Kristoffersen
A little darker in the, in the real sense of, what happened to Forrestal here?

01:18:03:13 – 01:18:24:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, one thing that we didn’t get to cover that I just want to ask you about real quick, is a storyline that goes throughout the entire show, and that’s the character of Susie Miller. And, in the show, while Doctor Hynek is off on his investigations, it cuts back to home life with with Mimi, his wife, a lot.

01:18:24:15 – 01:18:44:25
Dan LeFebvre
And we get this sense that the character of Susie is a Russian spy of some sort. We hear some, her speaking in Russian over the radio to someone with her quote unquote husband, which we know is not really her husband. We get the feeling that it’s not really her husband, but that’s what she introduces him as.

01:18:44:28 – 01:18:59:16
Dan LeFebvre
And we get the overall idea that they’re probably Russian spies trying to infiltrate Project Blue Book through Doctor Heinrich’s wife. Was there any truth to that side of the whole show?

01:18:59:19 – 01:19:39:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Not really. There was no real, indications that the Russians were trying to infiltrate Project Blue Book. But interestingly enough, Andy Jacobson, who wrote a book about area 51, has this theory that the Roswell crash was a Russian craft designed to basically cause mass hysteria. And what she points to is that, her source claims that, Joseph Stalin really got a kick out of, the Orson Welles War of the worlds broadcast.

01:19:39:14 – 01:20:14:16
Rob Kristoffersen
And so he, he has said, her theory is that he essentially wanted to cause mass hysteria in that kind of way. Of course it didn’t pan out that way. Roswell was the case that was shuttered for over 30 years. So before anybody really started to know, that anything had crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. So, yeah, not not really there there was no real, attempt by the Russians to infiltrate this program.

01:20:14:19 – 01:20:18:18
Dan LeFebvre
Interesting. I never heard that, that possible theory about Stalin there.

01:20:18:20 – 01:20:20:00
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s a wild one, man. It’s a.

01:20:20:00 – 01:20:21:26
Sean Jablonski
Wild one.

01:20:21:28 – 01:20:32:14
Dan LeFebvre
Nice. Well, is there anything from the show that, as you were watching this, first season that you just wish that they had put in their.

01:20:32:16 – 01:20:37:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Listen, Hynek needs a van. Dike. Somebody get a van dike on Aidan Gillen.

01:20:37:06 – 01:20:38:04
Dan LeFebvre
We need it. There you go.

01:20:38:08 – 01:20:41:13
Sean Jablonski
Okay. Awesome.

01:20:41:15 – 01:20:57:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about Project Bluebook. I know we didn’t cover season two that much on this episode as we’re recording this, the season is still ongoing, but you’ll have to come back on once that season is over and chat about whatever the events are that we see there.

01:20:57:05 – 01:21:00:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, absolutely man, I’d love to.

01:21:00:02 – 01:21:20:11
Dan LeFebvre
In the meantime, if you’re listening to this, Rob has an awesome podcast that covers a lot of UFO related events in history. Go open up the app that you’re listening to this on and subscribe to Rob’s podcast called Our Strange Skies. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of your podcast and some of the great stories that you cover over there?

01:21:20:13 – 01:21:41:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Sure. So, for a long time I had the impetus to cover, singular UFO stories, and I had seen that nobody really did it. And a lot of podcasters just kept coming to me for, like, content. They just were like, hey, what’s a good UFO case to cover? And I’m like, I’d usually give them something, but I’m like, why don’t I just make a.

01:21:41:18 – 01:21:42:16
Sean Jablonski
Podcast of my own?

01:21:42:16 – 01:22:18:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So I, I created the Strange Skies podcast and we’ve been through a couple of transformations, but right now what we do is, we devote singular episodes or if, some require multi-part episodes to, UFO stories throughout history, from the United States, we’ve covered stories from Brazil and, a few other places, but, we just covered the Betty and Barney Hill incident, the Leilani Suborn incident, which is, another famous, New Mexico UFO sighting.

01:22:18:11 – 01:22:38:19
Rob Kristoffersen
We covered the first abduction case, which was occurred in 1957, in Brazil. And, there’s a lot of great episodes over there. So, yeah, if you want to know more about UFOs, come on over to the, our Strange Skies podcast. We got plenty for you.

01:22:38:21 – 01:22:42:00
Dan LeFebvre
Awesome. And you started a new show recently, too, right?

01:22:42:02 – 01:23:11:02
Rob Kristoffersen
Yes. It’s called the Coda, a music podcast. And every other week I’m joined by my buddy Brian Hastie of the Double Density podcast, and we discuss music news. And, we generally have a main feature or main topic where we discuss something from music. We’ve talked about our favorite opening tracks to an album. We’ve talked about our best albums of 2019, and we recently had a couple of guests on to talk about, a new album that they dropped.

01:23:11:02 – 01:23:17:11
Rob Kristoffersen
So, if you’re interested in music, talk, check out the The Coda, a music podcast.

01:23:17:13 – 01:23:19:22
Dan LeFebvre
Awesome. Thanks again so much for your time, Rob.

01:23:19:24 – 01:23:29:20
Rob Kristoffersen
Well, thank you.

01:23:29:22 – 01:23:47:06
Dan LeFebvre
We have a lot more to go. But I do want to point out that even though Rob was talking about his podcast are Strange Guys that’s not actively in production. Remember that chat with Rob was in 2020? You might still be able to find it online now if you want to go through the archives. If it is available, I’ll be sure to add a link to it in the show notes so you can check there.

01:23:47:08 – 01:24:13:20
Dan LeFebvre
Before we move on to season two of Project Blue Book, let’s find out the answer to our Two Truths and a lie game for season one. And as a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one lie again. Number one, Project Blue Book was the first time the government investigated UFOs. Number two, former Nazi Verner von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney to promote the U.S. space program after World War two.

01:24:13:23 – 01:24:26:23
Dan LeFebvre
Number three, the term Foo Fighters was used by World War II two pilots who saw unexplained phenomena. Did you figure out which one is a lie? I’ve got the answer in the envelope, so let’s open that up.

01:24:26:25 – 01:24:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
And the lie is number one. While Project Blue Book is typically the most popular investigation, the US government had into UFOs, as we learned from Robert, was actually a follow up to Project Sign and Project Grudge. So even though there were a lot of the same people involved in these different government projects, Project Blue Book was not the first time the US government investigated UFOs or what people these days called UAP.

01:24:52:29 – 01:25:21:25
Dan LeFebvre
Unidentified aerial phenomena instead of unidentified flying objects. Okay, now let’s set up another game of Tetris in line for season two of Project Blue Book. Are you ready? Okay, here they are. Number one. In the 1950s, the U.S government illegally experimented with LSD on unwitting U.S. citizens. Number two, the phrase little green men comes from a close encounter in Kentucky.

01:25:21:27 – 01:25:48:02
Dan LeFebvre
Number three, Project Blue Book was commissioned by JFK. All right, I’ll be back after the season two discussion with Rob to see if you got it right. And now here is the remastered version of my 2020 chat with Rob Kristofferson about season two of Project Blue Book.

01:25:48:04 – 01:26:17:15
Dan LeFebvre
All right, well, then, let’s dive into the second season and the first episode of the second season. We’re introduced to the Roswell incident. If there’s one name that just about everyone knows it’s connected to UFOs, it’s Roswell. But that doesn’t mean everyone knows the details of what happened there. According to the show on July 5th, 1947, there was a major storm around Roswell, New Mexico, and then the next morning, a rancher by the name of Mike Connors found a field covered in strange metal.

01:26:17:18 – 01:26:44:19
Dan LeFebvre
By the end of the day, his neighbors were collecting pieces of the debris, and he wasn’t really convinced that it was manmade. So he contacted authorities. They swooped in, but someone leak the story out, it hit the wire. And then it started to run worldwide. Newspapers in Europe even ran with this story. The show doesn’t really say how the authorities shut the story down, but it does say that once Harding got involved two days later, Connors bought himself a brand new car and the town stopped talking.

01:26:44:23 – 01:27:08:11
Dan LeFebvre
So I’m going to assume that they were paid off. The wreckage was flown to Texas, where Harding held a press conference explaining the saucer was nothing more than a weather balloon. Now, I know we could have an entire episode, entire podcast just dedicated to the Roswell incident, but in a nutshell, how? What did the show do depicting the events of the Roswell incident?

01:27:08:13 – 01:27:37:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Well, with this particular episode, the bare bones are there. You know, some details have been changed, but, the storm in question, that starts the episode occurred on the night of July 2nd, 1947. And the man in question, they call him Mike Connors in the show. Well, his real name was Mac Brazel. And on that night, Brazel claimed to hear a strange sound that didn’t quite sound like, thunder and lightning.

01:27:37:14 – 01:27:59:13
Rob Kristoffersen
So, he was the foreman of a sheep ranch owned by a man named JB foster. And the next morning, when he woke up to get started, he discovered a debris field outside. It was about, three quarters of a mile long by about, I think, like 20ft wide or so. So this was a really remote area.

01:27:59:13 – 01:28:20:11
Rob Kristoffersen
The closest town to the Foster Ranch is, a town called Corona, which is about 30 miles away. But, he showed the debris to his closest neighbors, which were Floyd, and were at a proctor who owned the ranch themselves. And, they tried to cut it, and they tried to burn it, but they were not successful in doing so.

01:28:20:13 – 01:28:55:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So, the doctors urged Mac Brazel to report the debris to the authorities. And Brazel ultimately did four days later. It’s not exactly clear why he waited as long as he did. It could have been a combination of the July 4th holiday and the hesitation on Brazil’s part to do anything with it. But, on Monday, July 7th, he brought the debris to the Chaves County Sheriff Department, who in turn notified the Roswell Army Airfield, which is, known today as the Walker Air Force Base.

01:28:55:12 – 01:29:18:10
Rob Kristoffersen
The base dispatch two officers, Major Jesse Marcel Senior and Captain Sheridan Cavett, to actually retrieve the material. They Brazel escorted them to the ranch, and, they actually ended up spending the night there before they headed back into town. They gathered up as much as they could, and they also tried to cut it. They tried to burn it.

01:29:18:12 – 01:29:49:09
Rob Kristoffersen
They also tried to hit it with a sledge hammer, and they found that they couldn’t make a dent with it. So it wasn’t until long after they brought it back that the military swarmed the place. And before Jesse Marcel junior there. Jesse Marcel senior. Sorry, actually brought it. To the, airfield. He brought it home. Where, his son, Jesse Marcel Jr and a few of his other family members claimed to have actually seen the wreckage.

01:29:49:12 – 01:30:18:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Some of them, some of the pieces, Jesse Marcel Jr claimed had, these, like, weird hieroglyphic writings on them that were in, like, this purple kind of script. But he said that it was more closely resembling metal. It’s kind of one of those things that gets debated a lot. But, the, military just swarmed the place and, they actually sent out a lot of this wreckage.

01:30:18:00 – 01:30:44:05
Rob Kristoffersen
It was ultimately going to be flown to, Wright Field, which, later became, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is where Project Blue Book was, stationed out of. But, in the meantime, while they were collecting all this stuff, the military decided to send out a press release. And, and the man that made that decision, was a man named Colonel William Blanchard.

01:30:44:07 – 01:31:07:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And he informed the base’s information officer, Lieutenant Walter Hot, to, send a press release into town. And like, he, hot physically brought these press releases to, like, the Roswell Daily Record and a few other places in town, which, seemed kind of odd for the times, considering that they could just send it, you know, via wire.

01:31:07:24 – 01:31:35:04
Rob Kristoffersen
But that’s, like one of the weird parts about this case, one of the tiny, weird things, but, they you that, ends up making the paper, the date, like, later that day saying, you know, Roswell Army Airfield recovers flying saucer. So, yeah, while this was all happening, Major Jesse Marcel, junior, he made a stop at Carswell Field in Denton, Texas.

01:31:35:04 – 01:32:04:20
Rob Kristoffersen
As he was accompanying this wreckage to right field and a gentleman by the name of, Roger Ramey, who was general. He, had Jesse Marcel senior pose with pictures of what, they were claiming was a down weather balloon. And ultimately, the next day, they would, retract their initial headline saying that they recovered a flying saucer and saying, no, it was all just a weather balloon.

01:32:04:23 – 01:32:27:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Now, Jesse Marcel Senior attested to the to the effect that it wasn’t the same stuff. He was saying that, they kind of made up this, mock weather balloon, had them pose with it, but it was not the actual wreckage that made its way to right field. And he went to his grave saying the same thing.

01:32:27:13 – 01:33:15:16
Rob Kristoffersen
Same with, Jesse Marcel senior. What’s interesting about this case is after it was retracted in 47 people, in the UFO community, by and large, forgot about this case for about 30 years. Wasn’t until 1978, when, independent researcher named Stanton Friedman was actually told, while he was conducting an in radio interview that he should talk to Jesse Marcel senior and from there, Roswell has become this big household name when it comes to UFOs and, you know, not trusting the government because the government has changed their mind as to what was recovered on multiple occasions.

01:33:15:16 – 01:33:19:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And, yeah, it’s just this big cultural touchstone now.

01:33:19:16 – 01:33:37:04
Dan LeFebvre
Wow, wow. So the I mean, I’ve seen the, the picture of him kind of, I’m assuming Marcel at on the front page of the paper he’s got holding something in his hand that would then be what they kind of staged as the weather balloon, not the necessarily the material that was actually recovered.

01:33:37:06 – 01:34:04:23
Rob Kristoffersen
Right? Yeah. That’s, that’s what Jesse Marcel both Jesse Marcel claimed is that it was not the same stuff. It was, swapped out. You know, they were trying to keep this thing, you know, on the down low, covered up. And that’s really why Roswell is as big a thing as it is. Because given that the, Air Force has changed their mind as to what it was on multiple occasions, now, nobody really trusts their explanation.

01:34:04:23 – 01:34:39:28
Rob Kristoffersen
So you have a ton of explanations out there. Now, there’s, a book called, area 51. It was written by a woman named Andy Jacobson. And she proposed at one point through one of her sources that what the Roswell wreckage was was a Russian craft that, had been sent over into American territory to cause hysteria because apparently Joseph Stalin was a big fan of, George Orwell’s or, sorry, not George Orwell.

01:34:40:00 – 01:34:40:29
Dan LeFebvre
Orson Welles, the,

01:34:41:03 – 01:35:01:09
Rob Kristoffersen
Orson Welles, for the War of the worlds broadcasts. Apparently, he was a huge fan, according to her source, and that this was a mock thing, dreamed up by the Russian government. That’s probably like the low end of believability on this. But, there are a lot of interesting theories when it comes to Roswell, I think.

01:35:01:09 – 01:35:23:21
Dan LeFebvre
I don’t remember if it was in episode one, but I do remember the the show actually mentioning that very, very briefly. I think that the two generals are talking to each other, and one of them talks about how, the things that Doctor Mengele did to those children and, you know, and the saucer was Soviet propaganda or whatever.

01:35:23:21 – 01:35:46:18
Dan LeFebvre
Like they just kind of imply that that’s what it was was it was Soviet. And then, of course, Doctor Mengele, the, the Nazi, doctor doing something to the bodies to kind of make them look like aliens or whatever it was. I just remember that very, very briefly in, in the TV show. So it sounds like maybe that that’s where that comes from.

01:35:46:20 – 01:35:59:18
Rob Kristoffersen
There are, you know, other theories like that out there. There’s, there’s some that get really, really dark, but, yeah, yeah, it seems like everybody has a theory on Roswell these days.

01:35:59:21 – 01:36:38:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, heading back to the show in episode number two, it’s the part two of the Roswell incident. And during this episode, we find out about a resident in town named Duncan Booker. And he crashes a massive UFO into the center of town to try to draw attention to what he says is the real story. General Harding agrees to go on TV with Booker to tell the world that this was nothing more than a hoax, but once they go live, Booker’s friend at the TV station starts playing footage of an alien autopsy, and then Doctor Hynek comes to the rescue and he realizes that, oh, you look the studio lighting in the footage is the

01:36:38:14 – 01:36:59:15
Dan LeFebvre
same. This is this footage is a hoax. But then Booker insists that, yeah, they recreated the footage, but it was actually from something that they actually saw. And I thought I remembered something about some alien autopsy footage that showed up quite some time ago, but I don’t remember if it was supposed to be from Roswell or related to that or not.

01:36:59:18 – 01:37:04:23
Dan LeFebvre
Is that real footage, and was it tied to the Roswell incident like the show implies?

01:37:04:25 – 01:37:45:28
Rob Kristoffersen
So the, alien autopsy video was huge. It was a real video that, came out in the, mid 90s. During that time, that’s where UFOs were kind of hitting their cultural balloon. This was when Roswell had really blown up in popular culture, and it was actually all thanks to Unsolved Mysteries. Unsolved mysteries was the first show to really give that case its do so by by this time, aliens and and UFOs are big and they’re appearing on a lot more television shows.

01:37:45:28 – 01:38:20:23
Rob Kristoffersen
And, one of the networks that really ran with it was Fox in the, in the 90s. And, they ran a program in 1995 called Alien Autopsy Fact or Fiction, and it was hosted by, Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek The Next Generation fame. And, a man by the name of race until he came forward saying that he found footage of an alien autopsy and he had at the time been looking through a retired military cameraman’s footage searching for, actually, footage of Elvis for, like, some documentary.

01:38:20:23 – 01:38:57:23
Rob Kristoffersen
And, he claims that he stumbled upon this autopsy of an alien being that he says was one of the bodies at Roswell. So the Fox airs this special, and it is huge. So much so that they re-air it a couple months later and, it kind of just dies down for about a decade. When in 2006 recently claimed that the footage was a recreation of footage that he had seen in 1992, it a degraded so bad that he couldn’t actually save it.

01:38:57:23 – 01:39:35:03
Rob Kristoffersen
So instead he he has this convoluted explanation that, in fact, he actually reshot the footage, recreated everything, in order to like, you know, bolster his claims. But, you know, it’s it definitely didn’t help his case. But, in 2018, a filmmaker named, Spiro Smulders revealed that he was actually the creator of the film, and he claimed that he created the alien sculpture using foam and stuffing the insides with, basically animal parts.

01:39:35:03 – 01:40:02:00
Rob Kristoffersen
So, this video footage kind of keeps, like, reappearing every now and then. There was a, leaked government document, about, I want to say maybe, late last year in which two guys, one of them was a, a high ranking military member. The other had been a consultant with the government saying that this footage was real.

01:40:02:00 – 01:40:06:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But, nobody at this point buys that. It’s actually really.

01:40:06:11 – 01:40:23:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it sounds like the show is is taking that concept, but there I mean, this is happening in the. Well, I remember Roswell being in 47, but then, you know, this happening after the fact in the 50s and stuff like that. With the as far as the TV show timeline, it kind of bounces back and forth. But none of that.

01:40:23:03 – 01:40:33:13
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like if it surfaced in the 90s, it sounds like they’re taking something from decades later and kind of throwing that in there just to add to the narrative.

01:40:33:16 – 01:41:02:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, pretty much, you know, there’s always been like UFO hoaxes. They’ve always been prevalent. The first UFO hoax goes back to 1947, in these kids, and I forget exactly what town they lived in. I think it was called Woodworth, and they ended up at, this is when, Kenneth Arnold had his famous sighting. It was shortly after that, and sometime in July.

01:41:02:15 – 01:41:21:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And these kids mocked up this UFO, and they put it on this one lady’s lawn. And the reason that they put it on that one lady’s lawn is because she was known as the town gossip. And she knew and they knew that, word would get around really quickly. And to the point where the, National Guard actually ended up coming to town and these kids got in trouble.

01:41:21:19 – 01:41:30:10
Rob Kristoffersen
So, I mean, there’s always been hoaxers and there’s always been people trying to make a buck. And, I mean, recently probably made a killing selling video tapes.

01:41:30:14 – 01:41:50:13
Dan LeFebvre
So I wanted to ask you about something that the show has. And when they’re investigating on the show, Hynek and Quinn, they come across a soldier who was at Roswell, and soldiers name is Stuart Terry. He tells them that there wasn’t just one crash site, but there was a second one. And at that second site, Terry talks about how he shot something.

01:41:50:15 – 01:42:08:02
Dan LeFebvre
Later, he recovered the remains buried in his land. And then Hynek and Quinn go to where it was buried, and they find some skeletal remains. But then I think there was a mention as well, where someone mentions how the authorities asked for five child sized coffins. So maybe there was more than just the one being that we see, shown on the actual TV show.

01:42:08:02 – 01:42:16:29
Dan LeFebvre
But what about this concept of two crash sites at Roswell where there were there actually two crash sites with multiple being supposedly found?

01:42:17:02 – 01:42:46:16
Rob Kristoffersen
There have been a few different narratives concerning, you know, the crash saucers at Roswell, one being that the craft in question was hit by lightning over the Foster Ranch, and it created this debris field, and that the actual saucer crashed 150 miles away in a place called the Plains of Saint Augustine in the late 70s, early 80s. As Stanton Friedman was researching this case, he learned of a story through a second hand and third hand sources.

01:42:46:16 – 01:43:18:27
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot of people came forward saying that this guy named Barney Barnett discovered the crash saucer and alien bodies at this place called the Planes of Saint Augustine. And Friedman was never actually able to talk to him directly. He had died, about a decade before he started researching it. But a lot of people came forward, I want to say like maybe 5 or 6 people came forward and said, oh, yeah, Barney Barnett, he told me the story about how he saw these, alien beings in this crash saucer all the way in this at the site.

01:43:18:27 – 01:43:42:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And there was also, allegedly an archeology class that had walked up upon it at the same time that he did. Now, there’s also speculation that what had happened was that there were two saucers that crashed, and one ended up at the planes of Saint Augustine, and the other allegedly crashed 2 to 3 miles away from the Foster Ranch.

01:43:42:27 – 01:44:18:18
Rob Kristoffersen
But nobody’s ever really been able to like and, you know, pin it down to one. And again, that’s what makes Roswell this like narrative that has been built on, over and over again upon time. The child sized coffin portion of this comes from a man named Glenn Dennis. He was a part time assistant at the local funeral home, the Ballard Funeral Home, and he claims to have received a call from the Army Air Force, inquiring about the availability of child sized coffins.

01:44:18:18 – 01:44:42:23
Rob Kristoffersen
He claims to have delivered 3 or 4 of them to the base, and, he also claimed to have ran into a nurse on the base who had witnessed the alien bodies, and even drew a sketch of them on a napkin, of which, Dennis actually recreated. I don’t think like there are photos if you Google Glenn Dennis, you know, alien sketch, you’ll see.

01:44:42:23 – 01:45:03:08
Rob Kristoffersen
You’ll come upon like this. There’s like, four small images on what looks like, you know, a piece of, like, white stationery. I think he ended up recreating it, but his testimony has been called into question, simply by the fact that they’ve never been able to confirm who this nurse was. At the Roswell Army airfield.

01:45:03:08 – 01:45:17:14
Rob Kristoffersen
So, Yeah, these, these are, this just attests to the reason why, Roswell is this, like, ambiguous mound of, testimony at this point, while.

01:45:17:14 – 01:45:38:17
Dan LeFebvre
Moving right along. We’re in episode number three now, and Project Blue Book has a case at area 51. It involves two soldiers, Willingham and Miller. And they were doing a routine patrol when Miller was abducted by a UFO. When Hynek and Quinn get to the site of where it happened, you can see the sand there was turned to glass.

01:45:38:20 – 01:45:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
Other than Roswell, of course, everyone knows about area 51 and how it relates to UFOs and top secret cover ups and things like that. But was Doctor Hynek ever there to investigate an abduction like we see in the show?

01:45:52:26 – 01:46:19:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Abductions were something that Project Blue Book tried to distance themselves from. And we really didn’t get, our first abduction account until 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill had their experience, you know, which we briefly talked about in episode 153. It was the inspiration for one of those episodes, and they tried to, explain away certain portions of their sighting.

01:46:19:02 – 01:46:42:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So, for instance, the only parts that they investigated were the sighting and the actual craft in the sky, which they claimed was, I believe, like an advertising search later, an advertising like plane or something like that flying at like midnight or whatever, which was a really ridiculous explanation. It’s a great time to realize.

01:46:42:22 – 01:46:45:03
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

01:46:45:06 – 01:46:52:06
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s a great, great time. Let’s advertise to that. That single folk, you know, the single couple that are just driving on the highway, they.

01:46:52:06 – 01:46:54:01
Dan LeFebvre
Call that targeted advertising. That’s that.

01:46:54:01 – 01:46:57:03
Sean Jablonski
One. Yeah.

01:46:57:06 – 01:47:51:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Absolutely, absolutely. But, the only abduction investigated through, like, the guise of Project Bluebook was the abduction of a police officer named Herbert Schirmer in 1967. And it wasn’t exactly investigated by Project Blue Book, personnel, but by an independent body that had been brought in to study the phenomenon called the Condon Committee. And, this arose this committee arose in 1966 after a series of sightings in Michigan to which, Doctor Hynek, probably made the biggest, what many would consider career suicide at that point by, labeling a UFO sighting as the, product of swamp gas, which is where that that term came from.

01:47:51:17 – 01:48:03:05
Rob Kristoffersen
These, sightings occurred in, Dexter Hillsdale in the Dexter Hillsdale region of, Michigan. But this,

01:48:03:08 – 01:48:33:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Shurmur’s case is, is kind of fascinating because he’s a, he’s a police officer with the a, Ashland, Nebraska police Department. He was fluent in multiple language. He was a very intelligent man. And, in this on December 3rd, 1967, he was on a routine patrol. He was, on a rural road when he saw a light, which he assumed to be, a vehicle having trouble.

01:48:33:21 – 01:49:04:06
Rob Kristoffersen
And when he drove up on it, it was a UFO. And he stopped his car. And in the next moment, he appeared to be missing time. But, through the Condon Committee, he was subjected to hypnosis. It was later revealed that he had, been taken on board this UFO been shown around by some really interesting looking aliens, and he was ultimately returned.

01:49:04:06 – 01:49:31:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But, this case, like, caused such an uproar to the point where, Sherman was driving to Colorado, the University of Colorado, where this project was being handled. And during one trip, a group of people actually ended up destroying his car for, no real reason. I still don’t understand it. To this day. It was, it caused it seemed to cause some kind of uproar.

01:49:31:09 – 01:50:03:16
Rob Kristoffersen
But, Shermer ended up serving for a little while longer in Ashland, Nebraska. And then he ultimately moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he, died in 2017. But, there’s actually a really cool graphic novel created about his sighting. It’s called December 3rd, 1967, an alien counter by a guy named Mike. Jessica, and Shermer claimed that, yeah, he he eventually read it before he died.

01:50:03:16 – 01:50:32:13
Rob Kristoffersen
And he claimed that, he had come to see his see his sighting in kind of a religious sense. So, that’s really the only abduction case that Project Blue Book ever gave the light of day. Most of them really went unreported, until the 80s, when, you know, more and more people started to come forward. Before then, you had scattered incidents.

01:50:32:13 – 01:51:02:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Most of them would be, you know, relegated to the, UFO journals and such. But, abductions just weren’t something that Project Blue Book wanted to handle. And really, any incidents involving sightings of alien beings, they would downplay, they would, only investigate certain portions of it, especially when it came to like the UFO sightings itself.

01:51:02:19 – 01:51:09:28
Rob Kristoffersen
But when it comes to animate beings, Project Blue Book said, no, we’re out. We’re done with this.

01:51:10:00 – 01:51:31:24
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it sounds like they’re almost the TV show is almost doing something similar to what they did with the autopsy footage, where they’re finding an excuse to, in this case, bring in area 51, because everybody knows what area 51 is. So we need to have a reason for Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn to to be there to basically have area 51 on the show because it’s a show about UFOs.

01:51:31:24 – 01:51:33:24
Dan LeFebvre
And so you have to have area 51, right?

01:51:33:27 – 01:52:00:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Area 51 is just kind of the hot gossip around town. And it wasn’t until a, journalist named George Knapp, he started talking to a guy named Bob Lazar and Bob Lazar. He his credentials have never fully been proven, but that has not stopped him from speaking on the record many times, saying that, he had, worked briefly for the government.

01:52:00:28 – 01:52:15:18
Rob Kristoffersen
He had worked like, maybe less than two months, 2 to 3 weeks or so. Reverse engineering. This, UFO, which he, affectionately called the sport model, which, it’s always been kind of funny.

01:52:15:18 – 01:52:19:24
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, cool. They have, like, SUVs and the sport coupe versions and.

01:52:19:24 – 01:52:20:23
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

01:52:20:25 – 01:52:27:23
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, I would assume so. You know, like, there’s got to be a caravan somewhere in there. And area 51, I was. Yes.

01:52:27:25 – 01:52:51:01
Dan LeFebvre
Of course you travel in style. I wanted to ask you about something with area 51, because the show kind of gives the indication that, there’s more than just the base there. I think there’s, there’s a scene where we see Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn. There’s like this massive, complex, massive doors opening in the side of a mountain.

01:52:51:01 – 01:53:06:01
Dan LeFebvre
And Quinn says something to the effect of what we saw back there at the base with just the cover. This is the real area 51. Is there any evidence to suggest that the base that everyone knows is at Cream Lake is just a cover for some sort of massive hidden base nearby?

01:53:06:03 – 01:53:45:15
Rob Kristoffersen
Bob Lazar claimed that he didn’t exactly work at area 51. He worked at a portion of Groom Lake nearby that they called S-4, and S-4 was supposedly this huge underground complex went down for miles, and that’s where they were storing all of these, UFOs that had crashed and that the government was trying to reverse engineer. And they also housed apparently aliens that worked with the US government in the evening, like there are many places, many bases that, people claim aliens work with the government on technology and stuff like that.

01:53:45:22 – 01:54:15:06
Rob Kristoffersen
So, really that extends from Bob Lazar and his claim to work at, S-4. And the interesting thing is, is that George Knapp, in the introduction to, Bob Lazar’s autobiography, which came out late last year, he claims that he called up Nellis Air Force Base and said, is there a nest for, anywhere out there? And the guy’s like, yeah, there is.

01:54:15:06 – 01:54:21:17
Rob Kristoffersen
So it’s like, well, if if George Knapp can call up and ask if there’s an S-4 out there, why can’t anybody do it?

01:54:21:18 – 01:54:23:24
Sean Jablonski
Like, come on.

01:54:23:26 – 01:54:27:02
Dan LeFebvre
I was going to say, is that all it took somebody just picking up the phone and making a.

01:54:27:02 – 01:54:29:19
Sean Jablonski
Call. So it just.

01:54:29:19 – 01:54:41:10
Rob Kristoffersen
Seems to be. That seems to be it like, all you need is a phone and, you know, some in some, you know, liquid courage. And they’ll tell you that S-4 does.

01:54:41:10 – 01:54:43:02
Sean Jablonski
Exist.

01:54:43:05 – 01:55:08:03
Dan LeFebvre
If we head back into the TV show. Episode number four covers an event in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. According to the show, Jimmy J. Shoemaker is in the woods near his house when he sees a UFO fly over and at the house, his entire family sees creatures in the woods. We can see a shot where, his family’s all lined up with rifles, and they’re shooting through through the walls of the house at the creatures outside.

01:55:08:05 – 01:55:30:18
Dan LeFebvre
Shoemaker tells Hynek and Quinn when they get there, that aliens landed there and tried to kill them all. And then later, we find that Shoemaker happens to run a circus. He has monkeys, he has costumes for them, and a green glaze to make it look like alien handprints on the trees we saw. So Project Bluebook determined that this was all a hoax, even though again, we have the same sort of theme.

01:55:30:18 – 01:55:44:06
Dan LeFebvre
Shoemaker is claiming that he was just recreating the things that actually happened. It’s similar to what we saw with Duncan Booker in the Alien Autopsy a couple episodes earlier. So how well did the show do depicting this event in Hopkinsville?

01:55:44:08 – 01:56:10:03
Rob Kristoffersen
The Kelly Hopkinsville incident is one of the most fascinating UFO related incidents. Since the 50s. It’s, kind of one of those cultural touchstones to the point where it inspired a, a character, a Pokemon. So I mean, it’s, it’s one of those cases that, you know, it perks up a lot of people’s ears.

01:56:10:03 – 01:56:36:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So, you know, they got, there’s there’s the bare bones there. It occurred in the hamlet of Kelly in Kentucky on August 21st, 1955, and it occurred on the farmstead of the Sutton family at 7 p.m. that evening. A friend of the family, the the guy’s real name was Billy Ray Taylor, claimed to see a UFO with this colorful exhaust.

01:56:36:03 – 01:57:01:11
Rob Kristoffersen
It passed over him. It hovered near some trees nearby and it came down. And this was as he was going outside to collect some water. Now, these folks, they did not have electricity. They didn’t have running water. They had an outhouse. You know, this is rural life to the fullest. So Billy Ray, he comes inside and he tells everybody, oh, I saw this UFO.

01:57:01:14 – 01:57:27:21
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, it came down, it’s out back. And, nobody believed him. But an hour later, he and, his friend, the one lady was there to visit Lucky Sutton. He lived in the house. They went outside when, their dogs just started to bark uncontrollably. And at first they saw what they believed to be a strange glow coming from behind their property.

01:57:27:24 – 01:57:53:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And as it moved closer, they were able to make out small humanoid creatures about 3.5ft tall. They claimed that its head was, it was oversize, it was round in it, and it had really large ears, which was one of the more curious features of this creature, because you don’t often see ears reported on aliens. But, in this case, we do.

01:57:53:24 – 01:58:21:09
Rob Kristoffersen
And their arms were almost as long as its entire body. They they hung really low and, its hands had talons on them, of all things. So this thing is scary as hell. They had eyes that glowed, pale yellow color. And the, the two men immediately went inside, grabbed firearms, and pointed it toward the this creature that was coming toward them.

01:58:21:11 – 01:58:53:08
Rob Kristoffersen
And this creature had its hands raised as if it’s saying, don’t shoot at me. But they fired anyway. This creature did a flip. It fled under the cover of darkness and disappeared. Now, mind you, there are 11 people living on this farmstead at this time, and it’s really in a small three room shack. So you have eight adults and three children, and many of them saw creatures appearing at the window after this.

01:58:53:08 – 01:59:18:03
Rob Kristoffersen
So it was about maybe a half hour to 45 minutes later that one of these creatures appeared at the window. They fired again and again. This creature just flipped and fled into the trees. So it fully escalated. After Billy Ray Taylor stepped out the front door and had his hair pulled by one of the creatures who had climbed up on top of the roof.

01:59:18:05 – 01:59:43:22
Rob Kristoffersen
So the family, they all packed inside their house. They holed up for a few hours, listening to the footsteps on the roof, until they eventually fled to their cars and drove to the police station. Now, the officer that accompanied them back, he claimed that these are not the kind of people that would go to the police to solve their problems.

01:59:43:24 – 02:00:14:10
Rob Kristoffersen
So they were really, scared. They were shook up, and they accompanied them back to their house, but all they found were some spent shell casings. There were holes in the, screen windows. But after the police left, the creatures actually came back, and it was so dead. Approximately 2:30 a.m., the matriarch of the household, miss, Glennie Lankford, saw one of the creatures near her bedside window, and it put a hand on the window screen.

02:00:14:10 – 02:00:18:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And I would be scarred for life if I saw it.

02:00:18:08 – 02:00:20:12
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I’ve seen horror movies that start this way.

02:00:20:12 – 02:00:22:10
Sean Jablonski
This is.

02:00:22:13 – 02:00:46:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, exactly. This. This is a horror movie movie in the making. It’s happening in real time. So it was about 530 when these creatures backed off and they were never seen again. And, the family’s ordeal made national news headlines. And because of the way this case was portrayed in the news, there were a lot of details that were blown out of proportion.

02:00:46:08 – 02:01:14:04
Rob Kristoffersen
Like they, a lot of papers said that there were like, up to 11 of these aliens when, the family claimed that they only saw three of them. But, it’s from this case that, the term little green men is something that, entered the vernacular. And it’s something that kind of exists still today because, if you look at many of the popular images of, alien heads, they’re usually green.

02:01:14:04 – 02:01:39:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s, because of this case, according to documents, Project Blue Book never took an official interest in this case, though Hynek did later write about it in one of his books. But, this, this is definitely, I would say the, the real true to life case is a little more interesting than the way it, was displayed in Project Blue Book.

02:01:39:27 – 02:02:00:00
Rob Kristoffersen
I think the the problem that, they have with Project Blue Book is, there really isn’t a lot of mystery left over when you start to explain everything away. And, you know, I think that’s, one of the fatal missteps of the second season is they just start to explain things more and more.

02:02:00:02 – 02:02:13:18
Dan LeFebvre
One thing they did mention in this episode was, program in the CIA called MK ultra, and they’re supposedly doing some work with precognition. Is there anything about MKUltra, like, was that an actual program?

02:02:13:20 – 02:02:51:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, yeah. Project MKUltra was a real project. It was a CIA funded study pertaining to mind control through the use of LSD and other psychological measures. MKUltra is a whole other can of worms, and like, you could probably do, I could go on for ever talking about it, but, I want to direct people to a few different resources because it is one of the more, it’s one of the darkest, kind of portions to the work the CIA has ever done.

02:02:51:28 – 02:03:22:29
Rob Kristoffersen
But our friends at the Not Alone podcast did a three part series back in 2019 on, MKUltra and just the, the, extent that, that project went to. There is another great podcast that just, made a five part series, on, a Canadian physicians part in that program. It’s called, madness. And that’s from the, the podcast Endless Thread.

02:03:22:29 – 02:03:39:24
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s a really great series. And, one book I’ll recommend to that just came out last year because more and more people are starting to take an interest in this case. And it’s, a lot of it has to do with the death of a man named Frank Olson, which was the subject of a Netflix series called Wormwood.

02:03:39:27 – 02:03:57:13
Rob Kristoffersen
But, there’s a book that came out last year called Poisoner in Chief by, Stephen Kinzer, which is a really fascinating book. So, yeah, if you really want to see, like, the dark end of some of the, CIA’s research, go check out those things.

02:03:57:16 – 02:04:20:17
Dan LeFebvre
We’ll we’ll leave those for there. And, after the show, if we head back to the TV show and episode number five happens at a place called Maury Island. And according to the show, it happened on June 21st, 1947, two weeks before the Roswell incident. A man, a fisherman by the name of Ernest Reed, was out on Puget Sound checking his traps.

02:04:20:20 – 02:04:41:29
Dan LeFebvre
After about an hour, something appeared overhead. He described it as round. There’s, silver craft with holes in the middle and there were bigger than his boat. There were multiples of them. We see kind of a recreation of it and on the show, and they’re hovering less than 100ft over his boat. But there’s no noise. And then something seemed to go wrong.

02:04:41:29 – 02:05:01:18
Dan LeFebvre
We couldn’t tell if one of the ships was breaking apart or if it was trying to bomb him on purpose. But there’s pieces falling all over hitting his boat. And that’s when he called in a mayday, claiming that he was under attack from alien ships. But then, soon after the event, Reed recanted his story and said he was just trying to get some insurance money for fire damage on his boat.

02:05:01:20 – 02:05:18:13
Dan LeFebvre
And then the show says that this was the first time that, quote unquote, men in black hats were reported. When they showed up to silence the town. How much of that happened? And was this the first time that anyone saw the Men in Black?

02:05:18:16 – 02:05:49:28
Rob Kristoffersen
So this is, the the Maury Island incident is, one of the more controversial UFO cases. But as the story goes, that the gentleman’s name was, Harold Dahl. He was recovering logs in the Puget Sound on June 21st, 1947. That’s when he noticed, six donut shaped objects that were heading in his direction. And one of the objects appeared to struggle maintaining altitude.

02:05:50:01 – 02:06:15:11
Rob Kristoffersen
It dropped to about 1500 feet, and it floated directly over Dahl’s boat. And it started to drop what he claimed was slag like metal down into the sound. And some of it ended up hitting his boat. The debris ended up hitting his son Charles, breaking his arm, and some of the slag actually killed their dog too. Dahl claimed to take a photo of the craft, though.

02:06:15:11 – 02:06:55:06
Rob Kristoffersen
No, it’s never surfaced. Nobody’s ever seen this thing. So, you know, that’s, sketchy, sketchy as hell. But, he showed it to his supervisor, which was a man named Fred Christman. Christman didn’t believe him, though, and he went to investigate it for himself and claimed to have seen a UFO while he was out there investigating. So the next morning, a man wearing a black suit showed up at doll’s house and escorted him to a diner, and he proceeded to recount Dahl’s experience the day before as proof that he knew all about his experience.

02:06:55:08 – 02:07:24:06
Rob Kristoffersen
So Dahl was told by this man, don’t ever speak of it. Don’t ever tell anybody. Otherwise bad things are going to happen to you. So eventually, I mean, Dahl ended up telling his story to to a lot of people, but he eventually recanted his story. But it was investigated by two people. Kenneth Arnold, who I, you know, previously mentioned he was kind of the first, like, independent UFO investigator.

02:07:24:06 – 02:08:01:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And I think people looked to him just because he had a sighting and he was accompanied by a number, another man named captain EJ Smith, who had witnessed a UFO while piloting a passenger plane, sometime in July. They didn’t believe Dahl or Christman, though. The alleged debris that they had, they they had, I believe it was Kenneth Arnold had talked to a couple of, Army intelligence officers who ended up coming down.

02:08:01:14 – 02:08:32:04
Rob Kristoffersen
They were going to escort some of this, debris back to have it analyzed. And shortly after takeoff, their plane actually did go down in the Pacific Northwest. And, there’s been a lot of conspiracies that have come up, because of that. But, the reason this story and the Men in Black Angle itself was popularized was because of a book written by a man named Gray Barker called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.

02:08:32:06 – 02:08:59:07
Rob Kristoffersen
The book featured the Murray Island case and a handful of and a handful of others in which individuals had contact with shady men wearing black suits, telling UFO witnesses not to talk about what they saw. And I think the interesting thing here is that after Dul kind of talked about his experience, he, his work, which was on the Puget Sound, kind of started to dry up.

02:08:59:07 – 02:09:45:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And his son went missing for a period of two weeks and was discovered working in a diner in Montana. And he had no clue how he got it, how he got there. And we know that portion of the story is true because there was an FBI file, opened on it. So there are some elements of this story, which are true, but, I think they’re used to fuel, like the more sensational aspects of this case because, I do believe at one point, Harold Dahl’s wife also attempted to stab him, because of all of the, controversy revolving around the case, you kind of just wanted to cut it out,

02:09:45:22 – 02:10:13:17
Rob Kristoffersen
but, yeah, almost stabbed him. But, this is like, one of the more controversial cases in that not a lot has been proven. And if I recall correctly, Fred Crispin was one of it was actually one of the people subpoenaed by the, Warren Commission when they were investigating, the assassination of JFK. And he has had ties to, the military and I think maybe the CIA.

02:10:13:17 – 02:10:23:23
Rob Kristoffersen
But, don’t don’t quote me on that. Exactly. But, yeah, it’s, it’s a kind of a whole can of worms. The the Maria Island incident.

02:10:23:25 – 02:10:42:13
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of can of worms, I want to ask you about something else. About the the men in Black, because during this episode, we learn more about someone from season one. And in that season, he was simply known as The Fixer. In this episode in particular, we find out that his name is William and he used to be part of a remote viewing program for the CIA.

02:10:42:18 – 02:11:10:02
Dan LeFebvre
But then he left that program and joined a group simply known as the Men in Black. The idea that I got from this show was that the Men in Black isn’t a part of the CIA or the military, but they still seem to have powerful resources. And after I watched the, the show, this episode and kind of how they explained it, I still really, really wasn’t sure if William left the CIA to start The Men in Black on his own, or if he just joined the already existing group.

02:11:10:02 – 02:11:23:18
Dan LeFebvre
Somehow. I’m sure Men in Black can be, again, entire series by itself, but how well do you think the show did? Just explaining kind of the men in black themselves and who they’re supposed to be.

02:11:23:21 – 02:11:53:00
Rob Kristoffersen
There are a lot of different theories when it comes to The Men in Black. That’s definitely one that these are kind of government agents. Some believe that they are, independent agents that work of their own accord. Some believe that they are actually aliens as, when, during the, Mothman, series of sightings which you’ve covered with, our good friend Sam Fredrickson.

02:11:53:03 – 02:12:18:18
Rob Kristoffersen
They the people had encounters with men in black, and they would act as if they didn’t know what random mundane items were like. Pens. Like, there was one, case in which, the, maid reporter of the town, her name was Mary Hier. She was kind of the woman who led the charge on, reporting the Mothman sightings in the paper, printing the the reports.

02:12:18:18 – 02:12:44:01
Rob Kristoffersen
And she ended up having an encounter with, the strange man who, when he came into her office, he started asking strange questions like, what do you think John Keel would do if I. If, they told him to stop talking about the Mothman and stuff like that. And, at one point he reached for a pen and he was holding it as if he didn’t know what it was.

02:12:44:03 – 02:12:51:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And, Mary Higher said that, you know, he could have the pen, at which point he turned around and laughed and ran out.

02:12:52:02 – 02:12:54:15
Sean Jablonski
So like that. Yeah.

02:12:54:15 – 02:13:21:23
Rob Kristoffersen
There’s a lot of weird stuff around the Men in Black. There is even one theory that, guy named Paul Cornell who wrote this, this comic series called Saucer Country. And in it, his, take on the Men in Black was that, they were actually Air Force agents that would, as part of a hazing ritual, go and harass UFO witnesses that, their reports ended up in the news.

02:13:21:26 – 02:13:45:08
Rob Kristoffersen
So they’d show up on their door, you know, pretending to act like government agents and stuff like that. It’s, you know, there’s a lot of takes on, the, Men in Black and, they never cease to amaze me. Here’s another interesting account from this woman who claimed to be a remote viewer who said, at one point she was going to review remote view.

02:13:45:10 – 02:14:21:18
Rob Kristoffersen
The, Men in Black. So, like, remote viewing is kind of like, it’s sending your, like, body or out into the world to like, kind of like, see things from a distance, you know? So, this woman claimed that, these beings were, extradimensional beings from a different dimension. They, they kind of kept balance, you know, making sure that, evil, aliens didn’t interfere in human affairs.

02:14:21:20 – 02:14:24:00
Rob Kristoffersen
And they also had a ton of paperwork to do.

02:14:24:00 – 02:14:30:18
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it sounds like at least the at least the show is going off one of those theories, even though there’s a lot of them.

02:14:30:20 – 02:14:58:16
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, there’s so many there’s so many angles that they, had to, work with on this and, they could, you know, go a million different places. And, you know, I’d say I’d say Project Blue Book went to the more mundane route. Now, I had a I had a conversation with, with my buddy Rich Hatem, the guy who wrote, the screenplay for The Mothman Prophecies.

02:14:58:23 – 02:15:21:13
Rob Kristoffersen
And he said that, when they were first, pitching this idea for Project Blue Book, he actually went in, and he was trying to, pitch himself as a showrunner for Project Blue Book. He didn’t get it, obviously, but, you know, it would have been it would have been fitting, seeing as how, you know, he’s, he’s well versed in this stuff.

02:15:21:16 – 02:15:46:25
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of the show, if we head back, we’re in episode six now, and this is where we learn about the Robertson pal, as well as someone named David Dabrowski. The storyline in the show suggests that there’s a battle between control over UFO investigations between the U.S. Air Force and the CIA. The CIA puts the Air Force on trial with the Robertson Panel, which looks into the validity of Project Blue Book’s work and the hearing.

02:15:46:25 – 02:16:15:18
Dan LeFebvre
It seems no one is interested in really diving into the reports from Blue Book. They pretty much just skim them and then close them as if they already have the answer that they want. And this is just a formality. But that’s when David Dabrowski comes to the story. He convinces Hynek and Queen to let him talk to the panel, where he says that he was directed to be there by beings from another planet, planet Ventus, which is two galaxies beyond ours, and he leaves the room.

02:16:15:18 – 02:16:29:22
Dan LeFebvre
And then Quinn says, we’re doing our part by stopping people like Dabrowski from inciting panic around the nation, from people who might actually believe that they’re telling the truth. How well did the show do depicting this? Did any of that happen?

02:16:29:24 – 02:17:02:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So, the Robertson panel was a real panel. It was led by the CIA. And that did, in fact change Project Blue Book’s mission from, like, an open minded investigation to skeptical debunking. But it didn’t really happen. It didn’t really go down like this. Robertson panel was led, by the head of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, and they saw the potential hysteria that these sightings could cause.

02:17:02:09 – 02:17:46:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Life magazine at the time was claiming that, the evidence of alien life was around the corner. They were, you know, pretty, they they believe that alien life was going to show up at any second. And, and in the last episode that I was on, there was a pair of, dramatic sightings, during two consecutive weeks over Washington, DC, that I talked about, that, really got the government a little worried, to the point where they, the CIA felt like they needed to step in and kind of gauge Project Blue Book and dictate its mission.

02:17:47:00 – 02:18:17:01
Rob Kristoffersen
The, number of UFO reports in 1952, right before the Robertson panel came in, went up dramatically. Most years after 1947, they would get like maybe 30 reports a year, 30 to 50. That year they got over 130. So they saw this as a huge concern. And they thought it could be used as, kind of like psychological warfare tactics.

02:18:17:03 – 02:18:45:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So they recommended educating the public on debunking sightings. And, and, you know, this isn’t to say that Dabrowski s character didn’t exist in the UFO, world. In the UFO culture, there were a number of people that were dubbed the contacts who claimed to have contact with Venusian aliens, who wanted mankind to basically get rid of its nuclear weapons to protect the environment.

02:18:45:11 – 02:19:01:24
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, it’s, didn’t really go down the way it did on the show, but it’s, it’s close. I mean, the Robertson panel’s there, but, I as far as I know, there were no contacts that were led in front of the Robertson panel to testify at any one point.

02:19:01:26 – 02:19:28:11
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, well, that was I want to ask you about that, because in the show, the Borowski character, he is claiming that aliens directed him to go help prove the validity of Project Bluebook. But if aliens wanted to prove the validity, couldn’t they just like, show up to the hearings themselves? I think there is even a line in an earlier episode where Captain Quinn says something like, why are all these sightings happening way out in the woods?

02:19:28:11 – 02:19:39:20
Dan LeFebvre
Couldn’t they just come to like, Times Square? Why? Why do they have to be so cloak and dagger about everything? Are there any examples of stories where the the logic like that just kind of doesn’t make sense?

02:19:39:22 – 02:20:10:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So many contacts, especially in the 1950s, had stories like this, and they would also use that kind of similar logic to, in fact, pretty much all of them did. When it comes to these stories, like they’re never truly about going to the government with, this information, it’s usually about like, proving the validity of their own sightings.

02:20:10:01 – 02:20:45:03
Rob Kristoffersen
But I pretty much every single one of them, the Georgia Dembski, who was one of the most well known, contacts of the 1950s, basically, you know, reported the same things. There was George Van Tassel or Lucci, even during the the the Mothman stuff. Woodrow Darren Burger was that type of individual. And, despite the fact that Woodrow wasn’t coming to the government to say, you know, to kind of with the nuclear stuff.

02:20:45:06 – 02:21:07:04
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot of them did, a lot of them did, and a lot of them faked evidence to bolster their claims. And a lot of them made money doing it. So, in the 50s, that seemed to be the contact kind of thing, you know, make money claiming that you had contact with the aliens, that they’re peaceful, but they just want us to cut it with the nuclear crap.

02:21:07:06 – 02:21:28:29
Dan LeFebvre
Back in the show where it episode number seven now, and it is the Curse of the skinwalker. This case takes place at a ranch in Utah owned by the Chapman family. One night, their son, Billy is sleepwalking outside when three orbs of light fly over. And then they fly into the ground, forming a creepy sort of shadow monster or something of some sort.

02:21:29:02 – 02:21:48:18
Dan LeFebvre
The family runs away, of course, because that’s creepy. And, Bluebook is called to investigate. Our heroes are looking at the case. Hynek and coin are told the story of the skinwalker. As legend goes, the Ute nation used to abduct Navajo and sell them on the New Mexico slave market. So the Navajo put a curse on them.

02:21:48:18 – 02:22:14:04
Dan LeFebvre
And the land. And that land happens to be where the Chapman’s ranch is now. Skinwalker is the name of the that the Navajo gave to a medicine man who’s chosen to take the form of an animal in order to inflict pain and suffering on others. The explanation that the show gives for all of this is that the scientists at an Air Force base some ten miles east of the Chapman Ranch, are drilling down in the caverns under their ranch.

02:22:14:06 – 02:22:39:15
Dan LeFebvre
They’re using a high powered water mixture into the fault line, and these release pockets of ethylene gas that can give people oral and visual hallucinations. So it’s quite a connection from the skinwalker to just being a hallucination. But was Bluebook involved in Skinwalkers and this idea that they’re just a hallucination like the show indicates?

02:22:39:18 – 02:23:15:08
Rob Kristoffersen
The basis for this episode is an actual ranch in the Ute Valley of Utah. And, it’s it’s called Skinwalker Ranch. It was owned by a couple named Terry and Glenn Sherman, and they claim to have experienced rather large wolves, strange UFOs, portals, poltergeist like phenomenon, and a variety of other phenomenon on their property. The skinwalker, has kind of become this concept appropriated by from like Native American culture.

02:23:15:08 – 02:23:41:28
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s largely because of a book called hunt for the skinwalker, which was, chronicled the Sherman’s time on the ranch. It’s safe to say that Project Bluebook never investigated this case and never really would have, either. It wouldn’t be in their wheelhouse at all. They were really more concerned with investigating, like single sightings as opposed to like long term areas and stuff like that.

02:23:41:28 – 02:24:13:16
Rob Kristoffersen
But, yeah, in many ways, this episode seems like a plug for the new show that they had started that was airing after Project Blue Book. The season finale. It was called, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. It’s a Brandon Fugal show. It’s, it’s definitely a moment to cash in. That sighting didn’t come. Well, the property didn’t really come to the forefront until, the mid 90s.

02:24:13:16 – 02:24:28:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And really, it didn’t come to the public conscious until about 2006, ten years later. But, yeah, it definitely seemed like more of a money grab. And, Project Blue Book wouldn’t be, investigating a place like this.

02:24:28:19 – 02:24:29:21
Sean Jablonski
Yeah, yeah.

02:24:29:23 – 02:24:52:09
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we head back to the show, we’re on episode number eight, and it introduces another concept that is familiar with, UFOs. And that would be hangar 18. Hynek and Quinn are told about it by a mechanical engineer named John. He explains that hangar 18 looks more like a storage building than a hangar, but the real lab is six floors deep.

02:24:52:12 – 02:25:09:03
Dan LeFebvre
That’s where they reverse engineer Soviet technology. But this time, John says they have something that’s not Soviet. The suggestion they’re being that it’s extraterrestrial. What is hangar 18? And are there reports of reverse engineering UFOs there?

02:25:09:06 – 02:25:41:02
Rob Kristoffersen
The idea of hangar 18 is actually connected to the Roswell crash, and in particular to a few pilots who claim to have flown wreckage and alien bodies to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. One of them is a man named, Oliver Henderson, who, told his story to a number of, Roswell investigators, claimed that, he actually flew the, the child sized coffins, all the way to, Wright-Patterson.

02:25:41:04 – 02:26:08:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And there’s a World War two flying ace named Marion Black. Mack Magruder, who, also claimed to actually see living alien beings walking around in this, fictional hangar. There is really no hangar 18. It’s just kind of been this myth that has been propagated ever since, like the Roswell investigation. But, I mean, it did inspire a megadeth song, so I that’s that’s got to be worth something.

02:26:08:05 – 02:26:11:01
Dan LeFebvre
It’s gotta be worth something. Yeah.

02:26:11:03 – 02:26:11:12
Sean Jablonski
There you.

02:26:11:12 – 02:26:26:11
Dan LeFebvre
Go. What about the idea that Hynek was there? Because we see in the show that Hynek actually gets there. Is there anything to suggest that Hynek himself was at any place like that?

02:26:26:13 – 02:26:47:03
Rob Kristoffersen
No, no, there’s, Yeah. There’s nothing. It’s, Hynek was really close with his secretary, and he seemed to tell his secretary pretty much everything. There might have been some secrets that Hynek, you know, kept to himself, but, Yeah, I don’t think Hynek visited any kind of facility like that.

02:26:47:05 – 02:27:07:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, back in the show now we’re at episode number nine, and this case is a Soviet bomber carrying a nuclear bomb that gets cut into by a UFO over Canadian airspace. And Bluebook is called in because the Canadian Air Force doesn’t have a UFO program. So Hynek and Quinn make their way to a small logging community in a place called Hartley Bay.

02:27:07:23 – 02:27:25:26
Dan LeFebvre
Way out in the middle of nowhere, they find the plane along with the two pilots that survived. One is just called Alex, but the other pilots given a full name, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Alinsky. And that makes me think that maybe Alex is made up, but maybe Yuri is real. How much of this case really happened?

02:27:25:28 – 02:27:55:24
Rob Kristoffersen
So the the actual case that this episode is based on is, it’s a little, it’s honestly a little more terrifying than, than the one on, this, this particular episode. So, on the night of November 23rd, 1953, the U.S Air Defense Command near the US Canadian border detected a blip on radar over Ristic and over restricted airspace above Lake Superior.

02:27:55:26 – 02:28:26:26
Rob Kristoffersen
The Air Force scrambled an F 89 C Scorpion jet from Kinross Air Force Base, piloted by First Lieutenant Felix Moncler and Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson, and from the start, Robert Wilson had trouble tracking this thing once he got in the air and it kept changing course, like, really quick. But with the aid of, ground control, they were eventually able to kind of get a lock on this object, and they pursued it for over 30 minutes, getting closer and closer.

02:28:26:29 – 02:29:03:21
Rob Kristoffersen
Eventually, Michael and Wilson were guided down from 25,000ft to about 7000ft. They watched, the radar operators watched as the, you know, one radar blip chased the other, and a short while later they lost radio contact with Montclair and Wilson, and the witnesses there claimed to see on radar. These two objects merge into one and fly off. Now, Monreal and Wilson have never been seen again.

02:29:03:24 – 02:29:28:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Nobody knows what happened to them. Wreckage from their plane has never been found. They just disappeared. And, you know, there have been some like hoaxers coming forward. There was 1 in 2006. He claimed to be from a company called the Great Lakes Diving Company. They claim that, they walked up, they found something like, you know, a plane in Lake Superior.

02:29:28:27 – 02:29:48:03
Rob Kristoffersen
There was never it was ruled a hoax. But like Moncler and Wilson have never been seen since. And if you look at, McCullough’s, tombstone, his memorial, it’s, it’s explicitly states that he died while in pursuit of a UFO.

02:29:48:06 – 02:29:54:29
Dan LeFebvre
What about the idea? In this episode, we see Doctor Hynek actually neutralize an atomic bomb. Did he ever actually do anything like that?

02:29:55:01 – 02:29:57:10
Sean Jablonski
Probably not.

02:29:57:12 – 02:30:18:06
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, he was, he had worked with rocketry, but I don’t think he had worked with the atomic bomb specifically. And, you know, maybe in a situation, he’d be able to know how to disarm it. But I don’t know. What I love about this show is like, they they kind of treat JL and Hynek as if he’s like a jack of all trades.

02:30:18:09 – 02:30:22:18
Dan LeFebvre
He’s the hero of the show. So of course he’s going to save the day no matter what.

02:30:22:21 – 02:30:23:06
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

02:30:23:06 – 02:30:25:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, absolutely.

02:30:25:16 – 02:30:56:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well at the end of that episode, episode nine, Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn get to meet Senator John F Kennedy when he stops by the Project Bluebook office. And the case from Kennedy takes place during Operation Main Breaks. This goes into episode number ten. There’s, massive multinational military exercise. It involves some 200 ships, 80,000 men. And if anything happens during a war exercise that size near Russian territory, it could spark World War three.

02:30:56:10 – 02:31:23:13
Dan LeFebvre
So Heineken, Quinn, investigate aboard USS Wisconsin in the North Atlantic near Norway. They find out that this UFO experience that this, sighting that’s happened, it’s not coming from the sky like all the others, but it’s actually coming from under water. But there’s something else about this. There’s a fishing trawler that was there. It left Shanghai some 11,000 miles away just two days ago, and the fuel tank is still almost full.

02:31:23:15 – 02:31:44:02
Dan LeFebvre
Needless to say, that’s impossible. And at the end of the episode, Quinn takes a mini sub underwater to where the flying crafts are coming from. But the admiral orders depth charges dropped anyway, and the last we see of him is a massive explosion outside his sub. We assume he’s dead, except Doctor Hynek believes maybe he’s not. Maybe he was transported somehow.

02:31:44:02 – 02:31:49:21
Dan LeFebvre
Like that boat from Shanghai. Did any of that happen?

02:31:49:24 – 02:32:18:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Operation Main Brace itself was a real operation. Like the sensational part, you know, definitely didn’t didn’t happen. But, Operation Main Brace at the time, was composed of dozens of NATO organizations that, had sent ships to participate. At the time, it was the largest peacetime military exercise since World War two. And it was meant to, simulate a mock attack on Europe.

02:32:18:09 – 02:32:57:12
Rob Kristoffersen
It was involved, 200 ships, a thousand planes and over 80,000 men. And during this exercise, UFOs were spotted. The first sighting came on September 13th, 1952. The crew of a Danish destroyer spotted a triangular shaped object with blue lights on it, moving through the night sky at high rates of speed. Seven days later, aboard the USS Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a reporter named Wallace Litwin claimed that several pilots and flight crew members saw a silver colored sphere in the sky.

02:32:57:14 – 02:33:23:11
Rob Kristoffersen
Following behind the fleet. There is an actual photo of this object as well, though. Many have tried to debunk it as a weather balloon. It doesn’t appear to be a weather balloon. And, the only, places that it could have been launched from have, denied launching weather balloons around this time. It was also moving way, way too fast to be a weather balloon.

02:33:23:13 – 02:34:03:08
Rob Kristoffersen
An object had been seen the day before of that sighting, on September 19th, as a British meteor jet was returning to an airfield after conducting exercises in the North Sea. And, the pilot of that flight claimed to see a strange silver circular craft following the meteor. They described its movements as that of a falling leaf from a tree, which, is a common, thing reported in a lot of UFO sightings, is that some of these objects appear to be like, doing this slow, the slow falling pattern at times.

02:34:03:10 – 02:34:24:19
Rob Kristoffersen
The objects stopped in mid-air, rotated, and then took off fast away from everybody else. But, yeah, maybe this was a real exercise. They saw some UFOs. I don’t know that Kennedy really played a part in it, but, it is, pretty fascinating. Set of sightings.

02:34:24:21 – 02:34:28:15
Dan LeFebvre
Was Kennedy associated with Project Blue Book at all?

02:34:28:17 – 02:34:54:21
Rob Kristoffersen
No, he was not. There have been, theories that people have suggested, claiming that Kennedy knew alien secrets that he had told them to Marilyn Monroe and that that’s why the both of them were assassinated. But there’s really no, truth behind those statements at all. It’s just, conspiracy theory.

02:34:54:24 – 02:35:16:18
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I think the this show kind of alludes that it was, I think at the end of episode number eight, there was a brief line of dialog with Daniel Baker in the CIA talking to General Harding, saying, when it comes to the CIA, no one is untouchable, right? It kind of tie in my mind ties. Okay. It’s something with the JFK assassination as a CIA plot somehow tied to Blue Book.

02:35:16:20 – 02:35:51:05
Rob Kristoffersen
Right? Right. And that’s the thing. And that’s also like the ambiguity that the, assassination of John, John F Kennedy is kind of, lended itself to the Warren Commission, really didn’t do a good job explaining themselves and explaining, everything that happened. But, yeah, it’s just it seems like with some conspiracy theories, and the longer that they are around, the more they get added to and the more people come out of the woodwork saying, well, you know, this happened or that happened.

02:35:51:07 – 02:35:59:10
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. It’s always it’s always interesting to read them sometimes, but, yeah. So I don’t put a lot of stuck.

02:35:59:12 – 02:36:17:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that makes sense. I did want to ask about, I think was in episode three, there was a scene where we saw Heinecke and Queen in a Jeep and a big UFO flies over light, shine down. And then by the time the camera focuses on the Jeep again, Heinicke and Queen are gone, giving the impression that they were both abducted.

02:36:17:12 – 02:36:20:13
Dan LeFebvre
Was Doctor Hynek ever abducted himself?

02:36:20:15 – 02:36:54:18
Rob Kristoffersen
No. You. He was never abducted. He, He. When he came to, present his theories and stuff like that, he was very guarded. He was always very, skeptical. He was never rash to point to one thing. He had his theories and and he had his leanings. But when it came to a case by case basis, he, he would never he would never go there, per se and say, you know, that this is true or that is true.

02:36:54:18 – 02:37:11:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And, given that, Hynek even disputed the one UFO sighting that he claimed to have while looking through a telescope. So, yeah, he’s always been that skeptical kind of guy. But, as far as I could tell, and through all the research, he has never been abducted.

02:37:11:23 – 02:37:34:14
Dan LeFebvre
But we have talked about a lot of different concepts and things that they put into the show, things like area 51 and, and Skinwalker Ranch and these other elements. If you were in charge of this season of Project Bluebook, was there anything that you wish would have made it onto the show that they left out? I think there.

02:37:34:14 – 02:38:03:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Are a lot of other interesting sightings that they could have really gone to. And and like I say with, especially with the Skinwalker Ranch episode, you look at that and you see that it’s, you know, just, kind of a walking advertisement for another show that’s, that’s coming out. But, I’m glad that they included things like the the Kelly Hopkinsville incident.

02:38:03:28 – 02:38:07:18
Rob Kristoffersen
If I could,

02:38:07:21 – 02:38:52:05
Rob Kristoffersen
Trying to think, what would I have them include? I think the Herbert Shermer sighting is fascinating in the fact that we’re talking about a police officer that, claims to have been abducted by aliens. I think that would have been a more interesting case to present. In. That means there’s a case known as the, RV 47 case, and it’s kind of a the one case that many have put up as, like, the best scientific evidence for a UFO because it it literally involved a UFO following a, radar plane in the sky over, like, hundreds of miles.

02:38:52:06 – 02:39:11:25
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s, it’s a pretty fascinating case. Really, I think they did the best that they could with the season, but, Yeah, the. I can’t think of any other cases off the top of my head right now, but, those two are, I think would have made for interesting episodes.

02:39:11:28 – 02:39:18:18
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for your time to come on to chat about Project Blue Book season two. I’ve learned a lot. It’s been it’s been a fun chat. Yeah.

02:39:18:18 – 02:39:29:26
Rob Kristoffersen
Thank you again for having me on this. Been so fun.

02:39:29:29 – 02:39:48:19
Dan LeFebvre
And that brings us to an end of the two seasons of the History Channel’s Project Blue Book. But stick around because we still have the chat with Project Blue Book’s creator, David O’Leary and showrunner Sean John Belinski to get another angle of the whole show that’s coming up right on the other side of our Two Truths and a lie game for season two.

02:39:48:23 – 02:40:16:08
Dan LeFebvre
And as a quick refresher, here are they two truths and a lie for season two of Project Blue Book number one. In the 1950s, the U.S. government illegally experimented with LSD, an unwitting U.S. citizens. Number two, the phrase little green men comes from a close encounter in Kentucky. Number three, Project Blue Book was commissioned by JFK. Did you figure out which one is a lie?

02:40:16:10 – 02:40:38:00
Dan LeFebvre
Again, I’ve got the answer in the envelope, so let’s open that up. And the lie this time is number three. As rat pointed out, President Kennedy was not associated with Project Blue Book at all. There has been some speculation that maybe he knew about alien secrets, but there really hasn’t been any proof of that. Okay, now I’ve got one more remastered episode for you today about Project Blue Book.

02:40:38:00 – 02:41:00:04
Dan LeFebvre
Coming up soon will be my chat from 2021 with the creator of Project Blue Book, David O’Leary, along with the showrunner, a Project Blue Book, Sean Job Lynskey. But first, let’s set up one final game of Two Truths and a lie for that episode. Number one, they wrote a season three, a Project Blue Book telling stories beyond the United States.

02:41:00:07 – 02:41:26:11
Dan LeFebvre
Number two, the Roswell Incident was made famous by Project Blue Book number three. David and Sean have both had unexplained experiences. Okay, now let’s hear from David O’Leary and Sandra Belinsky about creating Project Blue Book.

02:41:26:13 – 02:41:49:03
Dan LeFebvre
Or UFO mention either they just won’t believe what you say, or they’ll simply watch it to find a way to tell you that you’re wrong. I can only imagine how difficult that is when you layer that on to the normal difficulties of trying to pitch and create a show that’s based on UFOs. So my first question is simply why Project Blue Book?

02:41:49:09 – 02:41:59:13
Dan LeFebvre
Why did you decide to create a show around UFOs when you could create a show that doesn’t have nearly as much controversy surrounding it? David, as the creator, want to start with you?

02:41:59:15 – 02:42:23:25
David O’Leary
Yeah. Sure thing. And, hey, everybody’s there. And, Dan, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us on. Yeah. You know, I mean, listen, for me, and for Sean as well, I, I, we like UFOs have been sort of a life long obsession interest. I’ve always, always had a deep interest in the subject matter going all the way back to when I was a kid.

02:42:23:28 – 02:42:45:15
David O’Leary
I’m not sure why, but I just, like, was always. You know, fascinated with the unknown. And it always rang true to me. I would watch, you know, Unsolved Mysteries in the 1980s or scare the hell you know, scare the crap out of myself and read Whitley Strivers Communion when I was like 9 or 10 years old. And it just it always felt authentic and true.

02:42:45:15 – 02:43:08:24
David O’Leary
So like especially, you know, some of the more famous cases in terms of, in terms of bluebook, you know, I, I, you know, as I became an adult and moved out to LA and pursued a career in writing and all that kind of stuff, I wanted, you know, this was sort of right before I, you know, to enter 2017 and, like, UFOs kind of really hit the news again.

02:43:09:01 – 02:43:48:01
David O’Leary
And there wasn’t actually, frankly, a lot of UFO stuff on TV. X-Files had sort of come to its end and I become a bit of, of, of a UFO history buff. And Project Blue Book always just felt like such an interesting, ripe sort of world for TV in that it was period. You know, it had all these other interesting elements in the 1950s in terms of the Cold War and the rise of the atomic age and all that kind of stuff, and then just a plethora of like incredible pieces and then really just a focus on the characters who who sort of led that effort with doctor J and Hynek and, Captain

02:43:48:01 – 02:44:10:10
David O’Leary
Ed Peltz, sort of the first director of Project Bluebook boat who basically shifted sides and, and, and became these, you know, adamant believers that there was something worthy of rigorous scientific study here. So, I think it began with that idea of, of could retell, could we tell a story, you know, sort of historical drama through the lens of these characters?

02:44:10:13 – 02:44:34:22
David O’Leary
And, I was fortunate that, like, I guess there wasn’t a lot of UFO stuff at the time. And, I think Project Bluebook presented a certain, certain natural engine with sort of a, a kind of a different case every week with a really interesting sort of backdrop of getting to kind of tell it in this sort of noir 1950s, sort of shadowy sort of way.

02:44:34:22 – 02:44:46:21
David O’Leary
And, and we were just very, very fortunate that, you know, it took some time, but that eventually, it found a home, with eight studios and, and and history.

02:44:46:24 – 02:44:48:04
Dan LeFebvre
How about you? How did you.

02:44:48:09 – 02:45:16:28
David O’Leary
Kind of get involved in this? So I came a little later. You know, once David had, you know, sort of researched and written the script and had connected with, Robert Zemeckis, and I think they had had a series order by that point. And, you know, I’ve been in the television business for it’s like 25 years plus at this point, I think, and so I’ve, you know, every TV show needs to have a showrunner at some point.

02:45:16:28 – 02:45:38:11
David O’Leary
And David is talented as he is. Had not been in that position before. And so if you’re going to start any business, you’re generally going to want somebody who has that experience to sort of be in there and help help guide the process and understand what’s coming up in front of you and how to run a writer’s room and just, just all of the things you’re not going to know if you haven’t done it.

02:45:38:12 – 02:45:59:02
David O’Leary
So, I essentially interviewed for the job, which began with, meeting with David at a diner. And we realized very quickly that, like him, I, I’ve kind of been obsessed with UFOs my whole life. It’s been something that since I was a kid, I remember seeing one when I was ten years old that. Swear to God.

02:45:59:04 – 02:46:17:04
David O’Leary
And so it’s just something I’ve always been fascinated with. So we were trading stories to the point where we stayed so long. I got a parking ticket. And then, of course, you got to go. You got to go through the gantlet of meeting the studio and the producers and the network and all that stuff, and it just felt like such a very sort of natural, match.

02:46:17:06 – 02:46:47:15
David O’Leary
And then we just sort of move forward from there that, you know, we really connected on having the same passion, you know, in terms of that. But, so I’m just happy to have had the opportunity, to meet, you know, someone who shares that, and, you know, in terms of how I look at just even the phenomenon and want to tell those stories, I feel like, I mean, it’s very much in vogue right now for, for people to be talking about UFOs in a very serious way.

02:46:47:18 – 02:47:11:21
David O’Leary
And I think, like any new science and it is a bit of a science now because we’re just starting to discover it, because we have sort of the minds that are being applied to it and the science and the technology, and the, credibility of the people who’ve come forward. But for people to go back to your earlier point, for people who can, you know, when you talk about is there controversy around UFOs or why stir that up?

02:47:11:21 – 02:47:28:19
David O’Leary
Or when people say that, you know, my first question is like, well, what do you know about UFOs? I would ask, like, what do you know about the history of UFOs? Because a lot of people want to throw it off as something, you know, tinfoil hat wearing silly. Like, if they were here, they’d be landing on the front lawn of the white House and blah, blah, blah.

02:47:28:20 – 02:47:52:01
David O’Leary
But when you really understand the history, and the amount of cases and the amount of credible people that have come forward, physical evidence, you know, visual evidence, all of this, it is without a doubt something that exists. And I count myself as a true believer. And the second question I would ask somebody is, what do you believe about it?

02:47:52:08 – 02:48:11:16
David O’Leary
What do you have to believe to believe that it doesn’t exist? You know, and oftentimes people will sort of stumble and go, well, I just think that this would happen if there would be this, that the aliens would have said something by now. And then when you dig into that, you realize it’s just sort of a, a belief people have that sort of based on an like on a feeling.

02:48:11:19 – 02:48:28:23
David O’Leary
Right? Which is just like, oh, I don’t know. I just feel like it wouldn’t happen this way, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like when you sort of dig into that, it’s, I would imagine the way people would have felt before, I don’t know. We discovered bacteria when we didn’t have a microscope. You know, it’s demons inside your body.

02:48:28:24 – 02:48:45:29
David O’Leary
You know, that’s what it’s got to be. And then when the science caught up and we were able to see what was actually going on, there’s still a bridge that has to happen where people have to get on board and understand that the facts that are there and the people that are studying it are not crazy, and then all of this stuff gets borne out.

02:48:45:29 – 02:49:13:22
David O’Leary
So I feel like that’s a very important, pursuit right now, especially in a world where truth is such a, malleable concept. And so I love the idea that David and I, you know, again, I think found, a path and the passion towards wanting to get those ideas out there that it’s, it’s it’s be part of that notion of getting the truth out to an audience.

02:49:13:24 – 02:49:22:10
Dan LeFebvre
What was your interest kind of starting with that? You said you had an experience that at ten, it was that kind of when your interest in UFO started?

02:49:22:12 – 02:49:43:05
David O’Leary
100%, I, I was in, I was in New York City, which, where I grew up and saw lights in the sky moving, you know, silently information. There were these long sort of hexagonal type lights. And I remember very clearly, I can still see it very clearly. The moment where you look up and I’m like, am I seeing what I’m seeing?

02:49:43:07 – 02:49:58:28
David O’Leary
Could it be what I think it is? It has to be something like just this. You go through this whole range of emotions and, and of course, I was a kid, you know, but I still remember it very clearly to this day. So. Yeah, I mean, that’s where it had to start for sure.

02:49:59:01 – 02:50:01:27
Dan LeFebvre
David, have you ever had an experience?

02:50:01:29 – 02:50:25:21
David O’Leary
So I so I had something weird happened to me much later. And it was actually after I sold the, the show, but before the show got picked up to series and I actually, like, didn’t share it for a while, except with like, my wife and like basically I was walking home. It was I was walking home, I lived, I lived, then I lived, kind of near the grove for people living in Los Angeles.

02:50:25:24 – 02:50:40:28
David O’Leary
I was walking home through my neighborhood, and I was weirdly, I had a park a couple blocks away because of street parking, which was sort of a rare thing, and it was a quiet night. It was kind of late. And then the other strange thing was I was actually on the phone at the time, late with a friend of mine, which was also kind of just not use it.

02:50:40:28 – 02:51:04:11
David O’Leary
But I’m so glad I was that I wasn’t by myself, because I think I would have freaked out even more. And I saw what looked like a teardrop shaped sort of self luminescent, almost like a green kind of Chinese lantern emerge from out of the trees, like 25, 30ft above me. And I stopped and I did exactly what Sean does.

02:51:04:11 – 02:51:29:27
David O’Leary
And with so many UFO witnesses do and sort of be like, is that a drone? What is that? I’m not hearing anything like worrying, then I don’t know if this happened or not, but it felt like it started. It sort of stopped and it was kind of flickering and it sort of started to move towards me. And, I panicked and I, I’m on the phone with a friend of mine, and he sort of black, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

02:51:29:27 – 02:51:49:05
David O’Leary
I’m like, dude, I’m like. And I duck under it. And then it just sort of like continued on, kind of floating over the, sort of the, like the air I lived in in a sort of two storey house. So it’s just like, you know, like 30, 40ft in the air just over the houses and continued behind, behind, you know, some line of trees and stuff.

02:51:49:07 – 02:52:09:18
David O’Leary
Other than, like, talking to my wife about it, I didn’t share it for like a year. Because I, I don’t know, like, I, I, I like, didn’t want to be the guy with, like, a UFO show who, like, suddenly had this weird UFO variant, but, I eventually, did sort of talk about it because I also realized served to Sean’s point, too.

02:52:09:18 – 02:52:27:13
David O’Leary
And just like in terms of getting the truth out, like, I don’t know exactly what it was. And hey, maybe it was a drone and I was just like, I freaked myself out or something, but it was very oddly shaped, and it was very weird and sort of how it moved. It was sort of like a balloon, like a lit up balloon.

02:52:27:16 – 02:52:49:22
David O’Leary
But, you know, so that that was sort of the, that’s the only time I think I’ve seen something where I really couldn’t identify it, you know? And then I think so much about UFOs is sort of how it makes you feel. It definitely felt strange. Like it felt. It felt like something as opposed to just like, oh, that’s, you know, I just I couldn’t place what that would be.

02:52:49:24 – 02:53:06:23
David O’Leary
Especially because it was like, in the branches of trees and sort of like, you know, and then later on, like, actually when we were doing the show, like we found out there are like, you know, these cases of green fireballs, we even did an episode on them. And that’s a little bit of what it I didn’t actually know that at the time.

02:53:06:23 – 02:53:13:29
David O’Leary
And that’s sort of like what it came out like to me. So I don’t know. I don’t know what that was. Yeah.

02:53:14:00 – 02:53:17:06
Dan LeFebvre
You don’t usually don’t try to fly a drone through the trees.

02:53:17:10 – 02:53:27:27
David O’Leary
Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was very weird. It almost looks like it came out of the tree. Like it was very like I saw it in the branches and kind of emerged from, like. It was very sad. Wow.

02:53:28:01 – 02:53:44:23
Dan LeFebvre
That’s weird. Well, go back to the show. You’ve both worked on shows that are not based on true events as well as, of course, Project Bluebook, which is what are some of the differences in the ways that you approach a show when it’s based on true events compared to a completely fictional story? Sean, me let’s start with you this time.

02:53:45:00 – 02:54:03:29
David O’Leary
Sure. I, I’m going to steal a quote, and I don’t know who to credit it to, but, I you know what I think it was? Mark Twain is like, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And I think you find that out right away. Now, I’ve had the the the. I tend to love historical pieces.

02:54:03:29 – 02:54:27:03
David O’Leary
I’ve done a few development wise, you know, over the years, Tesla and Edison, the Bonaparte’s. There’s been a couple other in there, and it’s been a bit of a learning curve trying to apply storytelling to what actually happened. And, whether it is the network exec saying, I don’t care, we need better television. And what exactly happened in that moment?

02:54:27:05 – 02:54:31:28
David O’Leary
Or just an instinct from a storytelling point of view? You know, look.

02:54:32:01 – 02:54:33:18
Sean Jablonski
It.

02:54:33:20 – 02:54:56:11
David O’Leary
Taking history and making a story of it. You can do a documentary right there. That’s why they exist. Because and a lot of times there’s great history that you couldn’t write this stuff. But when you’re trying to make a television show and you need to sort of hit your brakes and you need to engage an audience and you want to give your characters an emotional arc, you kind of have to.

02:54:56:11 – 02:55:16:24
David O’Leary
And it sounds like simple, but it’s actually kind of hard. You have to sort of really give yourself permission to, expand on it. Because otherwise you’re sort of I, I remember feeling almost, you know, I definitely had a lot of deference to the history and the people, and you never want to mess with that.

02:55:16:24 – 02:55:38:09
David O’Leary
But at the same time, you have to again, do your job and and sell it to an audience. So, I feel like I’m rambling a little bit, but I just think you have to have the courage to kind of get out there and really tell the story that you’re wanting to tell and have respect for the people in the material.

02:55:38:12 – 02:55:57:28
David O’Leary
But be a little fearless in how you do it. Otherwise, you know, you’re never going to you never going to cross the boundary and just say, nobody’s ever going to say what? What a really wonderfully factually accurate television show. Do you know what I mean? And get you get yourself ratings and an audience. And I even know, like, something like the Queen.

02:55:57:28 – 02:56:21:23
David O’Leary
I mean, how much can they have been in those rooms where those people were talking and understand what was said? And, lastly, I had a really good mentor. I grew up under basically Tom Fontana, who was sort of my mentor into the business, and he said, if you’re going to do something historical, look for those, look at the history, and then find the moments in between that might not necessarily even be written about.

02:56:21:26 – 02:56:45:00
David O’Leary
Get in there and use your writing ability to figure out what could have happened, what could have connected those dots, how could have, though? How could those characters have moved from point A to point B? That’s not being written about, you know? And thankfully, audiences are very forgiving these days. And I, I have to say like, Quentin Tarantino was a big inspiration in a weird way.

02:56:45:00 – 02:57:03:05
David O’Leary
When I saw Inglorious Bastards, I went, wait, you can’t kill Hitler in a theater? That never happened. And yet at the same time, I remember as an audience thinking, this is the most exhilarating thing I’ve seen because it felt like he was having the courage to go. I want to tell the story that’s going to get people excited.

02:57:03:05 – 02:57:27:05
David O’Leary
And I think if you set the table for your audience that way and say, look, this is inspired by true events, we are not telling that, you know, accurately. We’re inspired. You know, we’re inspired by it and doing it. I think you’re okay. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we, we we quickly realized is exactly what Sean said, that we needed to put entertainment and emotion first.

02:57:27:12 – 02:57:46:02
David O’Leary
You know what I mean? Like, people are going to tune. Otherwise you’re you’re just going to watch a documentary on Project Blue Book. If you just want to know the facts, you know it’s all there. You can read. There’s wonderful books we have. We’ve read them. What? You know who we need to tell a story that about about people, about human beings going through these events.

02:57:46:05 – 02:58:04:22
David O’Leary
You know, we kind of quickly realize the heart and this, you know, the heart and soul of the show was Hynek and Quinn. That relationship, along with all of our other, you know, sort of six primary leads, the generals, you know, Susie and Mimi, all that stuff. Mimi and Hynek. So, but you know what?

02:58:04:22 – 02:58:33:09
David O’Leary
You what we found a way to do, I think rather hopefully rather well, was take those kernels of truth and, you know, and and put them into and then and then weed them into a narrative yarn that was hopefully enjoyable, entertaining, emotionally evocative, while while having but but also encouraging people to be like, hey, like that. Like every week was a case that really happened, within within an episode, we we’d have little Easter eggs of things that were really going on at the time.

02:58:33:09 – 02:58:59:08
David O’Leary
We’d explore other things that were sort of in the social fabric of the 1950s, bomb shelters and, and, you know, paranoia. And, and you know, this. Yeah. You know, like, people tapping your phones and all that stuff. Russia’s interest, interest in UFOs, all that stuff. So, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. One other quick thing to we also had Paul Hynek, who was, you know, Jalen Hynek son, as a consulting, producer on the show.

02:58:59:08 – 02:59:18:21
David O’Leary
And, you know, that felt like any time we were, you know, doing something that made us a little squeamish or whatever he was, he would always say, which is wonderful. He’d say, I think my dad would love this, you know? And so that really gave us a lot of, you know, permission. It felt like to kind of run with it and get a blessing.

02:59:18:24 – 02:59:19:05
David O’Leary
Yeah.

02:59:19:12 – 02:59:22:21
Dan LeFebvre
Just for that, that topic. Are you talking about UFO? Was it, you know.

02:59:22:24 – 02:59:23:09
Sean Jablonski

02:59:23:12 – 02:59:31:17
Dan LeFebvre
Unexplained. Right. And then government cover ups where obviously we don’t know a lot of stuff that’s going on there. Did you find.

02:59:31:19 – 02:59:32:03
David O’Leary
Bluebook.

02:59:32:03 – 02:59:40:13
Dan LeFebvre
To be more challenging to fill in some of those gaps, then completely fictional? Because there is just a lot of it that we don’t know.

02:59:40:15 – 03:00:01:28
David O’Leary
Did SAR de. I’ll jump in. Yeah. The thing we talked about very early on was that it’s we’re riding a line between we can never say they exist or the show goes away because the whole idea is they’re searching for the truth. Right. So that was always a hard line to kind of kind of deal with. And something we were very aware of every episode.

03:00:02:01 – 03:00:25:11
David O’Leary
And one of the challenges too, is like, you realize it’s not a, it’s not a cop show where you show up and there’s a body, our guys show up and somebody’s saying, no, no, no, I saw it in the sky. You know what it’s like. So how do you how do you tell those stories? In, in, in give it all of that sort of energy and interest and, and, you know, a revelation, every act kind of thing.

03:00:25:11 – 03:00:48:20
David O’Leary
So that’s right. And, and the thing we realized was that we had to thrust our leads and our audience into the case, you know, we had to thrust them into these events to some degree. So things would happen to Clinic and Quinn as they would investigate a case that would often not start with, you know, a civilian witness or a military witness or multiple witnesses seeing something they couldn’t explain.

03:00:48:20 – 03:01:10:11
David O’Leary
It wouldn’t the case wouldn’t be over. It would lead down a rabbit hole of of more revelations. But as Sean said, it’s exactly right. We would always want to walk that line like we’d always have, like a plausible other, answer, no matter how deep. And we went. I mean, there’s an episode early on where we go to, you know, Operation Paperclip.

03:01:10:11 – 03:01:44:12
David O’Leary
We go into, like, the sin base and there looks that it’s like they’re staring at what looks like an alien. An alien in a tank, you know, but there’s an alternate explanation there that’s given as well, so that there was always this sense of like, you know, am I am I seeing you know, which you know, which truth are you going to are you going to believe, you know, because I think one of our goals, too, was obviously we wanted to attract audience members who were interested in this subject matter, but we also wanted to, you know, we were also very cognizant that, like, half the population, you know, you know, doesn’t

03:01:44:12 – 03:02:06:25
David O’Leary
think there is much to UFOs. And we wanted to make sure that we we presented an interesting sort of like dilemma where both sides could be like, oh, maybe, maybe it was maybe, maybe the, you know, the Lubbock lights were plovers, you know, or like, or maybe it was temperature over inversions. In episode 2 in 110, you know, at the in the season one finale or things of that nature.

03:02:06:25 – 03:02:19:18
David O’Leary
So, so that there was always this balance because like, yeah, as soon as you just say it’s, it’s real definitively it’s the mystery is gone. The truth is, you know, that the quest is, is is Oak.

03:02:19:21 – 03:02:20:27
Dan LeFebvre
Park part of.

03:02:21:00 – 03:02:21:21
David O’Leary
Blue Book like.

03:02:21:27 – 03:02:35:18
Dan LeFebvre
From from history was to come up with some of those stories, some of, some of the plausible explanations for that. Was it can you give an example, maybe of a plot point in there where you, you did depart from the history that they.

03:02:35:21 – 03:02:36:04
Sean Jablonski
That.

03:02:36:07 – 03:02:41:06
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe the example that Blue Book gave and had to kind of come up with your own?

03:02:41:09 – 03:03:15:18
David O’Leary
Oh, God. I mean, listen, you know, I mean, well, there were certain threads that we, you know, as far as we know, the high necks were never infiltrated by a Russian. A Russian email a Russian spy, as Claude would say, I don’t know. I don’t think that ever happened. But, you know, you know, so certainly we were adding certain narrative drama, but but like, what is well documented was that Russia was very interested in, in not only their own UFO programs at that time, but in what America knew about UFOs at that time because they were like, is this top secret, you know, technology, things of that nature, that, you know, that

03:03:15:18 – 03:03:45:13
David O’Leary
we have yet to release and we, we always were excited by the idea that, like, oh, the Hynek family could be a soft target into sort of an intelligence gathering mission from Russia about that. And then things obviously complicated from there because even our, even our sort of Russian spy character is sort of become sort of morally torn about like which side she should be fighting for and all those, all those wonderful things, I think from a case standpoint, though, I think we always tried to reverse engineer what became the official explanation.

03:03:45:13 – 03:04:12:27
David O’Leary
You know, like the plovers, like temperature inversions with the stuff over DC. Even, you know, Hopkinsville where, you know, as crazy as it scene with the there was like a monkey that was dressed up in the space outfit that that’s all based on fact. Actually, they’re one of the got one of the guys in the family worked at a circus, and there was, like, monkey trained monkeys there, like, because in a way that’s almost too absurd to make up.

03:04:12:29 – 03:04:46:12
David O’Leary
I would be embarrassed to like bits that in a room. So I think we always started with something, you know, that, you know, we’d kind of reverse engineer it. And again, to go back to your very first question and try to sort of honor what was the initial, you know, truth of the actual story. Yeah. One of the joys of the, of the show for me was like, when we would air, I would like live tweet the show, and I would beforehand kind of put together the list of all the things, all the cool little, like, you know, truth nuggets that we had, we had sort of pulled from here and there and

03:04:46:12 – 03:05:06:28
David O’Leary
maybe turn them in a bit of a blender to tell a cohesive, compelling drama. But so that but really to invite audience audiences to go like, research this, like, hey, this really was a real thing, or like you wanted this case based off this event, so that there was always these sort of like footings that audiences could had and like, oh, okay, great.

03:05:06:28 – 03:05:26:11
David O’Leary
And then they can go off, they can go off and see the case. And then even at the end of every episode, if you watched it on history, there was like a 2 or 3 minute documentary piece about the case that inspired this week’s episode of Bluebook, and that was sort of conceived from the very beginning. Once we landed at history, to draw a line in the sand so that we could clearly be like, listen, we’re not trying to deceive.

03:05:26:18 – 03:05:46:03
David O’Leary
We want to like, tell a cool story, compelling, compelling narrative. But here’s here and then here’s the route of of where this comes from. Now go off and like, you know, do your own research and come to your own your own conclusions. So it was nice to have that other sort of piece that would help plant it in historical context.

03:05:46:06 – 03:05:48:18
Dan LeFebvre
I like what you said, John, about the, the monkeys.

03:05:48:18 – 03:05:50:20
Sean Jablonski
Being that I mean.

03:05:50:22 – 03:06:03:02
Dan LeFebvre
There and that’s one of the things I love about the, the show that I do, being able to dig into some of that, because knowing that that’s based on fact, like that’s, that’s something that somebody could easily look at and be like, oh, what?

03:06:03:07 – 03:06:05:21
David O’Leary
I mean, that’s that’s kind of happened, but well, yeah.

03:06:05:21 – 03:06:07:23
Dan LeFebvre
Actually some of the crazy stuff does.

03:06:07:23 – 03:06:09:03
Sean Jablonski
Happen.

03:06:09:05 – 03:06:34:25
David O’Leary
Yeah. It’s it’s a yeah. And it’s, it’s you know, I think Chernobyl is probably what like the gold standard in terms of trying to sort of tell like an accurate story based on a historical event. And, you know, we again, had to sort of decide early on that we, you know, there’s there is, there’s got to be a slightly different version of the show and, and also just we knew too, that, you know, and David had put it in there.

03:06:34:25 – 03:06:39:09
David O’Leary
There’s so much family. And so going on to that, we could also sort of lean on that.

03:06:39:11 – 03:06:54:28
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned a couple of them earlier, some of the, stories that you got to cover, like the Lubbock Lights and Operation Paperclip, area 51 even got, high involvement in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What was your favorite episode in the series?

03:06:55:00 – 03:07:17:14
David O’Leary
Oh, gosh. I mean, I would say, I would say I’m torn between three. I think both Sean and I share deep, deep love of the Close Encounters upset, which in many ways, in some ways feels almost like the culmination of the show. Like you could almost like, like end it there because like, we end we, you know, we end obviously in a very different way.

03:07:17:16 – 03:07:36:13
David O’Leary
But and I was thinking about that actually this morning. Why that that episode registers so much, I think, for all of us. I mean, some of it was just, you know, the magic of it all coming together, intercutting between two different time periods. But I think one of the things for us, too, is it was one of the one of the clearest departures in tone for us.

03:07:36:13 – 03:08:03:09
David O’Leary
We were a rather conspiratorial, dark, noir tone, which is like, I love that tone, like most of the things I write are like sci fi mysteries, supernatural mysteries, like, I, I can’t get enough of that. But this episode, the case is ultimately has this wonderful sort of positive spin, you know what I mean? Like, it’s so much captures a sense of wonder instead of a sense of of fear.

03:08:03:11 – 03:08:20:22
David O’Leary
It sort of it stands out because that’s the other side of this thing. Like, we don’t want to forget that it’s not just about conspiracies and being deceived and and public denial and disinformation, misinformation, all that stuff. But it is about the wonder of what’s out there. And I think that that episode in some ways encapsulated that, that wonder.

03:08:20:24 – 03:08:41:19
David O’Leary
And then and then the other two episodes, I’m really, I really love I love our like, big finale episode. So like, like one town into town for me also stand out as just like cinematic, like movies. You know what I mean? Like, I think I think Sean and I are both really proud of how those episodes turned out as well.

03:08:41:21 – 03:08:59:05
David O’Leary
But I don’t know. I mean, like, I could go on like, we did two quote unquote bottle episodes. I think Sean wrote them both, which are also some of my favorites. That was abduction in season one. And, I forget where we oh, what lies beneath in in season two, in season two, sort of the revelation of who Susie really is and all that kind of stuff.

03:08:59:07 – 03:09:19:00
David O’Leary
And that’s like, that’s we put all our characters just in a room, essentially, and had to tell it, tell an amazing story there. So, I don’t know, it’s hard. I yeah, I love all of them. I definitely the bottle episodes are fun because it’s so character based and, you know, the challenge of we’re a show that has to go out and look at UFOs.

03:09:19:00 – 03:09:47:22
David O’Leary
How do you actually how do you keep people in the house in order to tell the same show? So yeah, those bottle episodes are great close encounters. Yeah, I mean that and and do exactly what David said. The finale’s just there’s so much fun and and and happened you know, that’s the other thing everyone yet like the the Close Encounters based on George Adamski, who was a guy who was just like that character, who we sort of had in the show, which was so much fun.

03:09:47:22 – 03:10:11:02
David O’Leary
And then, you know, Paul Hynek makes a little cameo as a camera operator in the Close Encounters scene, which was so nice as a way, you know, to sort of in homage to his father. And he was saying just even being on that set was meant so much to him. And and yeah, as David put it perfectly with it, it took a break from the usual town and showed the wonder of it, which was wonderful.

03:10:11:04 – 03:10:31:18
David O’Leary
Paul Heinrich’s cameo in an episode about his father serving as a like. There are so many meta parallels because Paul was a consultant for us on the show, and then we did an episode about his father being a consultant for Steven Spielberg, who’s like, Zemeckis’s close friend. It was just like that for me. I’m just like, oh, wow.

03:10:31:18 – 03:10:42:06
David O’Leary
Like, that’s just like some incredible, incredible miracle that that that we were, like, somehow able to, like, pay that, pay that all off and then do it, do its injustice.

03:10:42:09 – 03:10:45:01
Dan LeFebvre
And I’ll just fits perfectly together. Just.

03:10:45:03 – 03:10:45:13
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

03:10:45:14 – 03:10:46:15
Dan LeFebvre
Almost right itself there. Yeah.

03:10:46:15 – 03:10:47:28
Sean Jablonski
Wow. Okay.

03:10:48:00 – 03:11:10:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if there is one UFO related incident and pretty much everyone is heard of, it is the Roswell incident, and that’s the case. You started season two with with, two episodes covering it. Did you feel it? Because that is so popular. Roswell is so popular that it was more difficult to cover than some of the others on the show, like you had to be more accurate to the story.

03:11:10:03 – 03:11:16:09
David O’Leary
And in a way, it was it was hard to do because Bluebook didn’t investigate Roswell.

03:11:16:11 – 03:11:16:26
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

03:11:16:28 – 03:11:57:12
David O’Leary
That was our biggest challenge at first. You know, was having to go back and you go, well, how can we tell Roswell when it happened, you know, five years before the book was even born? And so we kind of had to have a Roswell 2.0, but you had to take all the facts from the original, and sort of make it feel current, you know, and so that probably more ironically, more than any other episode had the most kind of, I guess, would you say fiction to it because they never investigated it going back and sort of interviewing those witnesses well, after the fact and then sort of making it feel current.

03:11:57:15 – 03:12:18:15
David O’Leary
You know, it was it was intimidating. But, you know, because we’re such research fans and loved the story so much, we knew right away it was a two parter just because there’s so much information in there and, you know, you’ve added with it’s opening season two, you want to be, you know, a big sort of, you know, a way to sort of come back in which, you know, interesting story.

03:12:18:15 – 03:12:39:04
David O’Leary
We, you know, wasn’t our initial impulse to put Roswell as a season opener and that, you know, gradually true, you know, breaking of story and then input from the network, we got to, a place where it was like, nope, we’re doing Roswell to open season two, which was ultimately the smartest choice. Yeah, as a way to sort of bring the show back.

03:12:39:07 – 03:12:55:07
David O’Leary
Yeah. That’s right. At one point and for a while, actually, we would we really wanted to do more island as, as as our, as our opener. I remember that which we eventually, you know, but it all sort of works out like it sort of reveals itself as you break it. Like we found a much better way to do it.

03:12:55:07 – 03:13:19:14
David O’Leary
You know, ultimately down the line, you know, I think that episode was like, I it’s six or something like that. I think 2 or 5. Yeah. Or 205. Yeah. And, but yeah, I think for us, I cracking the case on Roswell just became about, well, you know, we, we done a bunch of research on Roswell and it just became, well, okay, if a town was really, you know, silenced.

03:13:19:16 – 03:13:42:02
David O’Leary
Yeah. And traumatized in this way, what would be the symptoms of that six years later? And once we saw a real. Well, what if somebody was trying to get the truth out of Roswell and staged, like, you know, like this crazy event in the desert where this where, where a saucer allegedly went down and sort of, you know, held the held the US government kind of hostage, like, I’m going to unleash the truth.

03:13:42:04 – 03:14:06:01
David O’Leary
It created a way for like, our guys to go back in there and then, and then the other thing we sort of had the revelation of it was like, oh, what a great character. A journey we can take with no on his character. And as a general returning to a scene of a crime, something that he’s never fully been able to square, and also delineating, you know, for those who watched the episode between Valentine and.

03:14:06:07 – 03:14:07:29
Rob Kristoffersen

03:14:08:02 – 03:14:32:03
David O’Leary
Oh, I’m like, yeah, thank you. Hardy. In terms of like, who knows what and who might really be in control because for season one we play, you know, we we need to sort of be, you know, the face of it a little bit more. But but then we sort of flipped the script a little bit like, oh, perhaps Valentine, who’s more the veteran, more of the senior is actually sort of hiding some things from, from, from Harding as well.

03:14:32:03 – 03:14:43:14
David O’Leary
So is, you know, it just it gradually reveals itself to us as we find, as we found a way to do it, you know, of like, oh, here’s a way to do it that really is interesting.

03:14:43:16 – 03:14:49:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. It was really interesting that, I because I think a lot of people, when they think of the government cover up, it’s like.

03:14:49:25 – 03:14:51:07
David O’Leary
The government and they’re.

03:14:51:07 – 03:14:52:10
Sean Jablonski
All in it.

03:14:52:16 – 03:14:58:21
Dan LeFebvre
In it together. And as I was watching it, yeah, I definitely got the sense that even these two generals, they don’t even.

03:14:58:25 – 03:15:02:06
Sean Jablonski
They don’t know everything that the other one knows.

03:15:02:09 – 03:15:08:07
Dan LeFebvre
And so you start to get that sense in there as well. Just really, really, really well done to put that together.

03:15:08:10 – 03:15:32:29
David O’Leary
And so what’s not you know, the general that wound up going into Roswell from outside was Twining, who Harding is based on and was credited a lot with, you know, some of those strong arm tactics that were used in and the idea of when Brazel gets brought onto the base, you know, the idea of somebody who had been in charge of terrorizing an entire town.

03:15:32:29 – 03:15:58:07
David O’Leary
And there’s, again, I’d encourage anybody who has even an inkling of curiosity to go to look at it. There are plenty of firsthand accounts of people who were there. And then you know, are you going to choose to believe somebody saying, I was there? My life was threatened by a military official, and I was told if I spoke, I would be killed and go, okay, there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of those witnesses who came forward and said the exact same thing.

03:15:58:07 – 03:16:22:15
David O’Leary
So you have to ask yourself, am I going to choose to believe they’re all crazy? You know, they’re all making this up for the sake of, you know, a story? You know, it’s fascinating. And also with, you know, Valentine, who was based on Hoyt Vandenberg, you know, ultimately, he went on to be part of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was like an ultra super secret, you know, in charge of our nuclear program.

03:16:22:15 – 03:16:39:13
David O’Leary
And I think he was that did he become head of CIA or was brought into the CIA or something? So it again, it felt like we were fortunate enough to find this truth in the history and really try to bring it out in the in the storytelling. Yeah.

03:16:39:19 – 03:16:57:16
Dan LeFebvre
There is a petition going now to bring the show back for a third season. I’ll make sure to add a link to it in the show notes. If anybody wants to sign it. But let’s say that petition is successful and you’re able to make a third season of Project Blue Book. Have you thought about some other stories that you might like to cover that you didn’t get to in the first two?

03:16:57:18 – 03:17:00:04
Sean Jablonski
David, go.

03:17:00:07 – 03:17:28:17
David O’Leary
Okay, only a little bit right here. Well, some of the fans been murdered, but other listeners may not. We actually had a third season writers room that, ended where we basically broke, all of season three. So for us, it’s been particularly hard, I think, to, you know, and then and then basically Covid hit and I mean, literally like the last day of our writers room was like the day like kind of the world world shut down like it was lockdown.

03:17:28:19 – 03:17:50:20
David O’Leary
In 20th March or 2020, mid-March of 2020. So, yes, I mean, we have, you know, listen, we, we, we would love nothing more than to then to continue that journey. So especially because for us it we for in a weird way, the show lives in our heads. Like a season at the end of season, like we kind of knew where we were going.

03:17:50:23 – 03:18:19:00
David O’Leary
We we mapped out a whole past, and that makes it hard to because I know how, excited we, Sean and I are about that season. I mean, that season, that season is like some of our favorite stuff. And like, we the guys to do it like, so. And I mean, we can tease it a little bit too, because it’s, you know, it felt that, it felt like such a natural progression again.

03:18:19:00 – 03:18:48:02
David O’Leary
Also history on our side. There was the great UFO wave of 1953 54 in Europe. Yeah. And so we decided to go, you know, as you know, to sort of make it bigger and, you know, it a lot of it takes place over in Europe. Because that’s where, that’s that’s where the sightings were. It was it went from like, you know, a handful of sightings in Europe to thousands a day.

03:18:48:02 – 03:19:07:24
David O’Leary
All of a sudden it was like off the charts. And when you dig into the history of Europe and the history of some of those cases, again, it for us it felt like this is what the show is. It is about the phenomenon. And it’s not just an American phenomenon, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And so we we got to explore some seminal cases.

03:19:07:24 – 03:19:31:02
David O’Leary
And, it really I mean, like anything, it felt like we were hitting our stride and we we broke every single episode. So. Yeah, but there’s some wonderful. Yeah, England, France, Italy, Italy, Russia. Roswell. Yeah. Like it was just like we. Yeah, we it was, it was, you know, heartbreaking. Yeah. It was heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking. I don’t really.

03:19:31:02 – 03:19:31:25
Sean Jablonski
Heartbreaking.

03:19:31:27 – 03:19:55:19
Dan LeFebvre
Well I hope hopefully we’ll get to see some of that in the future. But, I wanted to ask you about, Doctor Heinrichs perspective on UFOs, because in the real Project Blue Book, he kind of started pretty skeptical. And then his position changed as he was investigating these. So as you were researching and writing and putting together this, did your opinions change at all?

03:19:55:19 – 03:20:01:22
Dan LeFebvre
I know you were both big into UFOs beforehand, but did it change at all as you were creating the show?

03:20:01:24 – 03:20:41:03
David O’Leary
What changed for me was doing research on Hynek and realizing how smart he was in terms of hypothesizing the multitude of answers that might exist. Right? Even in like, his book, you know, I think, like, you know, the UFO experience or, you know, his numerous books, he, he would hypothesize, you know, like, especially with some of these cases that delve into, like, you know, Close Encounters of the Third kind or, you know, seeing, seeing actual occupants or entities or whatever you want to call them, you know, I mean, he he Hynek entertained every theory under the sun from the day, you know, interdimensional in some way, like the planet is also theirs.

03:20:41:03 – 03:21:21:09
David O’Leary
Somehow today, our interplanetary spacecraft do. They are us in the future today are like I. I remember like you spoke a little bit about sort of the robotic nature of that of the how these creatures are described. Like, are we dealing with artificial extraterrestrial artificial intelligence, right. Like, on and on. And I think that that, that, I mean, I, you know, you know, just I always love that the notion that, like, maybe, you know, the answers could be as complicated, complicated as the questions we could be dealing with a multitude of, sort of phenomena happening simultaneously.

03:21:21:09 – 03:21:43:17
David O’Leary
We’re just not we’re just not sure, you know, what what sort of the answers are. But, that was the shift for me. Was like, you know, don’t hang your hat on. Really? Any one theory, because it could be. It could be something else. It could appear one way, but actually, I actually did something else. I always love that, you know, I would say of anything to that.

03:21:43:19 – 03:22:04:29
David O’Leary
To that end, there’s like it only expanded. I mean, I was already having had knowledge of it sort of, you know, believed in the phenomenon. And, you know, I, I couldn’t profess to have the answers, but had certainly done the research. But if anything, it just expanded it expanded the scope of what was possible, like, especially with interdimensional beings.

03:22:04:29 – 03:22:33:25
David O’Leary
AI from alien civilizations. Are they even here? You know, old that stuff. The biggest thing for me that I found doing this was the, sort of how the sightings ticked up right after an around the time of our, you know, us basically getting nuclear capabilities. There are so many incidents of UFOs in and around nuclear missile sites turning the missiles on and off.

03:22:33:27 – 03:22:57:20
David O’Leary
And, you know, in and around Los Alamos at once. We got the bomb. This. That’s when everything shut up. That’s really when that’s what really when Roswell happened. And that is one of the most fascinating stories to me, because to me, it’s the clearest evidence yet. And this is coming from high ranking military officials who’ve testified in front of Congress about this.

03:22:57:20 – 03:23:21:20
David O’Leary
Again, this this stuff is all available to go. You can watch it, you know, and decide for yourself. Yeah, yeah, decide for yourself if like the, you know, the high ranking colonel who said I was in the missile bunker when the this, you know, object came and basically cut the power then turned it back on said our missiles to launch and we couldn’t do anything, then took it away.

03:23:21:22 – 03:23:48:14
David O’Leary
Yeah. And you can decide if this guy just decided to make it up and ruined his entire career. But to me, that’s the clearest evidence. It’s one thing for a civilian to see something dark across the sky and go, I saw something I can’t explain. It’s another thing for military personnel who are overseeing our nuclear weapons to have these objects come in and around and and basically control them, because to me, that’s communication, right?

03:23:48:14 – 03:24:06:18
David O’Leary
I know what that is like. It’s it’s them saying, we can do this to you. And now it’s up to us to go. Are they benevolent? Are they they or are they saying they can destroy us or they trying to start a war? Like what is happening? It’s not just like, oh, I saw something. I don’t understand it.

03:24:06:18 – 03:24:30:02
David O’Leary
They’re communicating in a way and have the ability to affect our world. That phenomenon blew my mind. And if you go down that rabbit hole and look at all the instances not just in America, but in Russia at the same time, it’s it’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. And it goes all the way back, all the way back to the beginning of this, of this phenomena.

03:24:30:05 – 03:24:53:04
David O’Leary
I mean, Ed repels in his book, talks about it, how they would expect to see UFO sightings over like, like, atomic detonations in the South Pacific on top secret military, sort of weapons testing programs in the 40s and then late 40s and the 50. So it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s a fascinating, sort of aspects of this.

03:24:53:12 – 03:25:02:16
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. That’s a really interesting point to bring up, because if you put it kind of in a historical context, World War Two had just happened. So there was a lot of.

03:25:02:19 – 03:25:03:18
Sean Jablonski
Explosions.

03:25:03:21 – 03:25:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
Going on, you know, and that didn’t.

03:25:06:09 – 03:25:08:07
David O’Leary
Bring anything out.

03:25:08:10 – 03:25:14:23
Dan LeFebvre
But it but the nuclear side of it does it just interesting that World War Two didn’t seem to really.

03:25:14:25 – 03:25:40:18
David O’Leary
You had the Foo Fighters in World War Two really that, that, that that, that was a very a sort of a big thing back then. All the pilots describing what these objects were. And we touched on that, I think a little bit in the first season. And historically, it’s not like UFOs began right then they you Columbus talked about UFOs, you know, so but there was a clear, like explosion of sightings, you know.

03:25:40:21 – 03:26:05:14
David O’Leary
Well, maybe pun intended. Right around the time we got the bomb, that is when the wave just took off. And it’s also where the military, you know, had really, you know, gotten involved. And again, you know, the really it began with, you know, why am I forgetting his name? The sort of, you know, first thing, flying saucers in Oregon.

03:26:05:16 – 03:26:06:16
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

03:26:06:18 – 03:26:28:06
David O’Leary
And the army. Arnold. Yeah. In 1947, which happened literally three weeks before Roswell. And one of the things in Roswell that that, is interesting. They did nuclear tests in and around there, but that was also the Roswell was the home of the final ninth Bomb Squadron, which was the squadron that dropped the Enola Gay was in Roswell.

03:26:28:08 – 03:26:46:06
David O’Leary
That’s what dropped the bomb on, you know, Hiroshima and all those all in and around their the White Sands missile base, the Allen Knoll, I can’t remember the other one, but all those nuclear testing things were around there, and the the amount and saucer sightings were just off the charts.

03:26:46:08 – 03:26:52:09
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. That’s fascinating. I, I guess I never had put it together that the Enola Gay was there in Roswell.

03:26:52:11 – 03:27:13:24
David O’Leary
When people think of Roswell, they always think of it as a kind of a sleepy desert town, kind of random, small thing. It’s got it had huge Roswell Army Air Force airfield had huge, huge sort of, military significance at that time. It was very important. And in that whole area, that was it was a massive testing ground for for top secret weaponry and stuff like that.

03:27:13:24 – 03:27:22:12
David O’Leary
So it’s not a I don’t think it’s at all, you know, for shrines to transport in any way a coincidence that this was a hub of sort of UFO activity at the time?

03:27:22:15 – 03:27:30:25
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I know I asked you about your your favorite episode. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but do you do you have a favorite story from the set as you are creating the show?

03:27:30:27 – 03:27:46:28
David O’Leary
I have to, and I’ll tell I’m really briefly. One is in abduction, which Shawn wrote, but he unfortunately was, for whatever reason, not able to be on set for. But I got, I got to be up for like nine and ten or maybe he, he was up for a little bit, but I don’t think he was up there for this part.

03:27:47:01 – 03:28:07:27
David O’Leary
When the character is recalling his sort of abduction experience, because it was what’s called a bottle episode, we had to do it. We couldn’t rely fully on VFX as we were trying to keep the but the budget down. That’s what a bottle episode is. And our director, Alex Graves, had this brilliant idea of like, he’s supposed to be levitating in a ship, right?

03:28:07:27 – 03:28:31:01
David O’Leary
And like, sort of finds himself in this alien environment. So they really strung up, the actor’s name, I think, is Malcolm. Good, good, win or good will forgive me if I. It’s. Yeah. And they strong him up and they shined all these shimmery lights on on him in the background on a screen and they, they blasted the entire sort of soundstage with, with, with smoke.

03:28:31:04 – 03:28:50:03
David O’Leary
And it was this magical alien kind of like experience come to life. But you could not see in front of you. The camera guys are like, you know, all the crew was so quiet and it was it just it looked incredible. You’re like it felt like you’re watching a VFX shot happen in front of your eyes. You know, it was like a portal open to another dimension.

03:28:50:07 – 03:29:16:12
David O’Leary
If you are looking at what we were actually filming. So that was incredible. And then I, you know, I mean, obviously all the like, fun kind of anecdotal moments with the cast are amazing too. But the other thing was in 110 we blew up a car and that was that was up just like we we all sat around and like literally had popcorn and like blew it up on our wound up in a, in a sort of an outside in an amphitheater, kind of an environment against a green screen.

03:29:16:15 – 03:29:42:21
David O’Leary
And, that was that. It blew up a nice 1950s car to boot. And that was just a fun, a fun, a fun day to see all that happened to. I have a zillion photographs that I’ll just say briefly. I think it was literally day one of episode 101. We showed up on set and it was the, you know, it was, the farm that what played for the farm house in the, in the first episode.

03:29:42:21 – 03:30:08:12
David O’Leary
And it was early morning cold Canada, and there was this fog that had just blanketed the entire area. And with this sun piercing through, it was some of the most dramatic looking landscape I’d ever seen. And it was the arrival of our characters through this fog. You know, up to this farmhouse, I it’s like, I don’t think we could have gotten we couldn’t have wished for anything better.

03:30:08:12 – 03:30:24:13
David O’Leary
And it was day one. So it’s just basically everybody’s connecting, everybody’s, you know, come in with their A-game. And so excited to be there. And it felt like, you know, felt like the gods were smiling on us saying this is the right way to begin. So we talked a.

03:30:24:13 – 03:30:35:16
Dan LeFebvre
Little bit about, potential season three. But in the first two seasons, was there anything that you wanted to add in there but you couldn’t for one reason or another?

03:30:35:19 – 03:31:12:10
David O’Leary
Oh, gosh. Well, we had like whole episode ideas that for one reason or another, we had we had to scrap, you know, I mean, there was all all kinds of like, you know, periods where I mean, there were sort of like UFO cold spots popping up in there in the early 1950s. And like, we thought about doing an episode that sort of explored that idea about sort of like how people how people might sort of use this arrival of this sort of new phenomena into the public consciousness, towards their own sort of self-serving ends and how people could get kind of roped into that to that kind of thing with, you know, gosh,

03:31:12:10 – 03:31:43:05
David O’Leary
I mean, there was all, you know, there’s always things there’s even within episodes, there’s scenes we had to kind of course, or little moments like for what timing purposes? We’re like, we just can’t. We can’t. We got to pick and choose. I’d say to David, you know, you’re his very first, his early draft of the script, you know, and it was always described as, you know, X-Files meets madmen because he had a really wonderful touch with the soap that was in there and is in it again, it was as much about personal life.

03:31:43:05 – 03:32:01:06
David O’Leary
And Joel, who was the kid, there was even a storyline with him. And, you know, it’s through the natural process of any TV show creation, development, you know, where the rubber meets the road. You got to start leaving, pushing things aside in favor of, you know, the engine of the series, which is our two guys in the cases.

03:32:01:06 – 03:32:17:21
David O’Leary
And I think we tried hard to make sure that we, you know, with like Susie and, and, Mimi and all of that to kind of create, you know, another world that we could go into that reflected the Cold War era times. But, I mean, for me, you know, I, I, I loved as much the character stuff as anything.

03:32:17:21 – 03:32:37:02
David O’Leary
And I thought there was certainly more stories to tell with, you know, me, me and Susie, and to have a female perspective as well as a home perspective, and to see what’s really going on, you know, during the Cold War, back home, you know, we tried a little of that with the bomb shelter early on in season one, you know, which was a real thing.

03:32:37:05 – 03:33:03:02
David O’Leary
You know, they would put ads in the newspapers for that stuff and how the kids would feel at school and bomb shelter. Yeah. Buy your own bomb shelter. Reminded me of we. Yeah, we had it. We came up with this whole storyline with Joel as, like, this 1950s boy kind of stand by me as sort of storyline with, like, he had a crush on his, like, neighbor, either on the radio or and then like, but then they and you get to sort of explore the fear of Russia and the Cold War through the lens of children.

03:33:03:04 – 03:33:23:24
David O’Leary
The irony being, of course, that they’re like while they’re like sitting while Joel’s at his neighbor’s, there really is a Russian spy next door having dinner at his house like all this, like wonderful stuff that like a just, you know, you got to pick and choose or a UFO show. So it was like, you got gotta, you know, but it would have been nice to, you know, to do some of those things as well, you know.

03:33:23:25 – 03:33:27:26
Sean Jablonski
Yeah, I forgot about all that.

03:33:27:28 – 03:33:37:25
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you guys so much for coming on to chat about Project Bluebook. I know until there’s a season three, hopefully there’ll be a season three, but until then, can you share a little bit about what you guys are working on?

03:33:37:27 – 03:34:04:27
David O’Leary
Sure. Well, I mean, you know, again, it’s it’s a you know, the world is such a passion for us. David and I are working on something right now that we’re we’re, you know, don’t want to say too much because we’re, in the early stages of, let’s say, negotiations. But, it’s back in the UFO worlds, and, we look forward to bringing, you know, those stories back to television, hopefully in the, in the coming, in the coming year, I should say.

03:34:04:27 – 03:34:23:10
David O’Leary
So, you know, if Blue book. What? Our appetite. We’re excited to serve it. Another meal coming up soon. Yeah. We just wanted to also give, you know, in regards to the safe Blue Book campaign, you know, a huge shout out to Carson who has led that effort. I know we created a website called Save Blue Book Comm, which is amazing.

03:34:23:17 – 03:34:46:08
David O’Leary
And just a wonderful way that he’s collected so many, you know, artifacts from the show and imagery from the show and, and all of our fans who, you know, remind us that the show mattered to them because that that is the most important thing. And that’s why we that’s why we did it. So we’re forever grateful we we never give up hope.

03:34:46:10 – 03:34:56:19
David O’Leary
You just never know. You just never know what’s going to happen. So we have a season three ready when, When? When? As soon as someone’s ready to take it on, so, you know. Thank you to all the fans.

03:34:56:21 – 03:34:59:21
Dan LeFebvre
And thanks again so much for your time, guys.

03:34:59:23 – 03:35:20:10
David O’Leary
Yeah. Thanks. You’re wonderful. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks, everybody.

03:35:20:12 – 03:35:41:24
Dan LeFebvre
This episode of based On a True Story was produced by me, Dan Lafayette. What did you think of this huge mega episode about the History Channel’s Project Blue Book? Let me know if you’d like to see more of these style longer episodes in the future. We’ve got one more answer for teachers and allies to uncover. And as a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one life from my chat with David and Sean.

03:35:41:27 – 03:36:08:28
Dan LeFebvre
Number one, they wrote a season three of Project Blue Book, telling stories beyond the United States. Number two, the Roswell Incident was made famous by Project Blue Book number three. David and Sean have both had unexplained experiences. Did you figure out which one is a lie? Here’s the answer in the envelope. So let’s open that up. And the lie this time is number two.

03:36:09:03 – 03:36:30:01
Dan LeFebvre
Even though the History Channel’s Project Blue Book starts off season two with the Roswell incident in The True Story, the US government’s Project Blue Book did not investigate the Roswell incident like we see in the TV series, and that’s mostly because of the timeline. The Roswell incident occurred in 1947, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that Project Blue Book itself became a thing.

03:36:30:01 – 03:36:58:27
Dan LeFebvre
Remember, there was Project Sign and Project Grudge, and then really, it wasn’t until the 1970s, I believe it was 1978, that Roswell started to get popular after an interview with ufologist Stanton Friedman, and he interviewed a then retired U.S. Air Force officer named Jesse Marcel. Marcel was one of the soldiers who helped take the debris from the ranch in Roswell, and then he stated that the official explanation that it was a weather balloon was a cover story, and he actually believed it was extraterrestrial.

03:36:58:29 – 03:37:21:02
Dan LeFebvre
From there, the stories and theories started to swirl. So throughout the three episodes today, we played three separate games of two tours in A lie and the lies were one, three, and two respectively. How’d you do? Did you get all three correct? Head on over to based on a True Story podcast.com/discord and let me know how you did.

03:37:21:04 – 03:37:40:09
Dan LeFebvre
As always, you’ll find that link in the show notes with all of the other links for this episode, as well as on the show. Is home on the web over at. Based on a True Story podcast.com/376. Until next time, thanks so much for spending your time with Rob and David and Sean and me today, and I’ll chat with you again really soon.