Project Blue Book

What happens when the creators of two UFO television series compare notes on how to turn the phenomenon into drama? Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman welcome their friend David O’Leary, creator, writer and executive producer of History’s Project Blue Book, for a conversation about two shows that feel almost like secret-history bookends. Project Blue Book lives in the 1950s; Dark Skies begins in the 1960s. Both combine real people, authentic UFO cases and government secrecy with dramatic license—and, strangely enough, both produced exactly twenty hours of television. From J. Allen Hynek and Edward Ruppelt to Majestic-12, Roswell and the Washington UFO wave, three UFO TV creators finally get to talk shop. O’Leary also reveals just how personal his interest in the unexplained has always been. Long before creating Project Blue Book, he studied cognitive science at Vassar and conducted a sensory-deprivation telepathy experiment for his thesis. After selling the series, he had his own startling UFO sighting—a glowing green object moving through the trees above his Los Angeles neighborhood—and says strange synchronicities continued throughout production. He takes Bryce and Brent inside the making of the show: its balance between authenticity and accuracy, the decision to dramatize real cases without pretending to be a documentary, Robert Zemeckis’s involvement, Steven Spielberg’s notes on the Close Encounters episode, and the remarkable access O’Leary had to Hynek’s family and the last surviving director of the real Project Blue Book. Then the conversation moves from television history into the mystery itself. O’Leary discusses what he now believes the real Project Blue Book represented, why Roswell still convinces him, his views on Majestic-12, Foo Fighters and UFO interest in nuclear weapons, and why he suspects there may be several different intelligences or mechanisms behind the phenomenon—from extraterrestrials and artificial intelligence to interdimensional contact, time travel and consciousness itself. He also reveals where an unproduced third season would have gone: a global 1954 UFO wave, Stonehenge, Europe and the recovery of Michael Quinn after his extraordinary underwater encounter. It’s Project Blue Book and Dark Skiessharing the same table—and discovering just how much strange territory they have in common. To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.