Blue Sky Thinking
IF YOU’RE INTO THE LORE AND conspiracy theories surrounding ufo sightings, there’s been no shortage of films and TV series to satisfy your sky-watching itch. But one true life figure has become rather lost in the discourse over time: dr J allen hynek.
an american astronomer and professor – and the man who created the classification system for close encounters that inspired Spielberg’s 1977 movie – hynek officially worked with the US air force from 1947 to 1969 investigating civilian reports of ufo sightings. a man of science, he was an avowed debunker whose research and experiences over two decades eventually shifted to the believer camp. now his story is the spine of
Project Blue Book, starring aidan Gillen as the good doctor. the series dramatises hynek and the top-secret air force team’s work investigating thousands of first-person account cases, including such seminal reports as the lubbock lights, the Gorman dogfight and the flatwoods Monster.
dream team
executive producer/creator david o’leary wrote the spec script for the pilot which was subsequently read by Back To The Future director robert Zemeckis, who then signed up as an executive producer to get it picked up by america’s history Channel for a 10-episode debut season. Showrunning and executive producing is Sean Jablonski, who says when the pilot came across his desk it was described as “Mad Men meets X-Files” – a creative marriage made in heaven to his eyes. “With the study of ufos and that phenomenon, i was very well versed. i actually went to Machu Picchu because i wanted to see if aliens built it.”
the pair scoured the original Blue Book cases to build season one. Jablonski remembers, “i said, ‘you bring in yours. i’ll bring in mine.’ We sat in a room for about a week and we just started throwing stuff up on a board going, ‘oh my god, yes! that one.’
“We started with the Green fireballs because that was the nuclear aspect of things which was tying everything together. then we looked at it as a whole, starting with a single witness and then they become multiple witnesses, more credible witnesses, and then daytime [sightings]. So, we get to a place where it’s multiple witnesses and the government involved as well because there’s a mass panic. it felt like this nice overarching story where it just got more and more credible, and bigger and bigger and bigger and harder and harder for our guys to turn away from.”
at the centre of it all is the mild-mannered hynek, a brilliant scientist and a regular family man whose decision to join the government in these investigations created the kind of real-life drama tV writers live to tell. When it came to finding the right actor to embody him, Jablonski says aidan Gillen was always top of their casting wish list. “We knew he was coming off Game Of Thrones. you look at his body of work and it speaks for itself, but the thing we all responded to the most is that hynek’s brain is working a lot. he’s assessing things. So, you need to find somebody that when you put the camera on them, you can see them working without having them speaking all the time. and, it feels like every time you’re looking at aidan, you get that there’s a lot going on behind his eyes. it felt like a very natural fit. there’s a little bit of a resemblance there and look, you rarely get your first choice.”
better believe it
the casting of Gillen also ended up changing the trajectory for the series in an unexpected way. “originally, we wanted to have hynek feel like more of a sceptic at the beginning,” Jablonski explains. “and, as you work with [Gillen], you realise that sceptic felt a little narrowminded. this is a guy with an open mind. he needs to question everything and when you see that being delivered you realise this is not a guy who’s just like, ‘this stuff doesn’t exist.’”
instead, they appointed hynek’s air force colleague, Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey) as the cynic. “that freed everything up and then we were off to the races,” Jablonski enthuses. “and, it makes more sense for Quinn, who’s been tasked with closing cases. it’s almost like sceptic is what needs to be his Mo. But, i would say there’s a shade of him that’s not pure sceptic; it’s more like, following orders. it’s only hynek that allows him to come out and pull him out of his shell, in a way. So, that evolution was a little surprising. the whole pitch to [the series] was, it’s about hynek going from sceptic to believer. and i think it plays slightly different on screen now.”
if that feels a little real-life Scully and Mulder, Project Blue Book will also follow the
X-Files storytelling model, telling a variety of Blue Book cases of the week along with an overall mythology regarding hynek’s discoveries. Jablonski says deciding their narrative path really came out of the limitations of telling just ufo stories. “one of the things you find out early on is that you’re showing up after the fact, right? you’re not showing up to a body. you’re showing up to a person going, ‘i saw something.’ So, then how do we recreate that? how can we investigate? if it’s in the sky, there’s only so many things you can do. We had to vary what we were doing in terms of what they were seeing and how it connected to what’s going on with the ground and the characters. if you showed up every time and somebody’s like, ‘no, no, no. i saw this silver thing fly over the trees,’ you’re like, ‘Well, how interesting is that?’ that’s why we expanded on the fuller aspect of the cases for the first half of the season. you have everything from abduction to group sightings.”
now Jablonski and o’leary wait to see if audiences are ready to find out about the source of what’s become modern day ufo lore. and if the topics of russian interference, fake news and conspiracy theories feels a little on the nose for a ’50s period drama, Jablonski just laughs and says Project Blue Book did all of that first, illustrating that history indeed has a way of repeating itself. “i think we tried to tell the story that was going on at the time,” he says of the cultural parallels. “it’s inevitable that it’s going to relate to what’s going on today with russia and fake news, the paranoia. even the Korean War that was going on, you look at what’s happening with #Metoo and the women at home. it’s inevitable. it’s going to come through when you’re writing because writers are generally attentive anyway. they’re basically pulling stuff out of the air that’s there and putting it down. i don’t think you’ve got to try very hard and it’s just going to sort of show itself.”
as to how long Project Blue Book could be telling stories about hynek and his discoveries, Jablonski smiles and says, “there’s 12,000 cases and 700 are unexplained. the nature of conspiracies and cover ups is that, there’s always more layers. So i think this thing has an engine to run for a very long time.”
Project Blue Book is on History in the US from 8 January. UK broadcast TBC.