Project UFO

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Caskey Swain and Edward Winter in Project UFO

Project UFO was an NBC television series which lasted two seasons, from 1978 to 1979. Based loosely on the real-life Project Blue Book, the show was created by Dragnet veteran Jack Webb, who pored through Air Force files looking for episode ideas.

The show featured two U.S. Air Force investigators charged with investigating UFO sightings. The first season starred William Jordan (as "Maj. Jake Gatlin") and Caskey Swaim (as "Staff Sgt. Harry Fitz"). Jordan was a rather nondescript leading man, while Swain added diversity as a Southerner with a pronounced accent. In season two, Jordan was replaced by Edward Winter (as "Capt. Ben Ryan"). Aldine King ("Libby") was another regular. Dr. Joyce Brothers appeared in two episodes.

In the pilot episode, Gatlin informed the newly-assigned Fitz that, since it is impossible to prove a negative, their job was to prove that each UFO sighting were real, by researching and disproving possible alternate explanations. Gatlin also told Fitz that he himself had once seen "something I can't explain" while flying as an Air Force pilot, which led to his interest in Blue Book.

In retrospect, "Project UFO" anticipated many of the themes of the X-Files, though of course without that show's romantic subtext or anti-government (or for that matter, anti-alien) paranoia. As with Blue Book, many of the UFO sightings on "Project UFO" turned out to have conventional explanations. Some, however, were left unexplained, and suggestive of alien contact. By the second season, the investigators had themselves experienced a UFO sighting.

In an odd reversal of the Scooby-Doo dynamic, the series eventually settled into a pattern in which the investigators would spend most of the hour uncovering some conventional explanation for a UFO sighting, only for the last five minutes to reveal that UFOs (or some similarly unexplained phenomena) were involved after all.

[edit] Opening credits

The opening montage showed flying saucer diagrams and schematics, while a minor-key version of "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" played. A voice-over (narrated by Webb) then spoke:

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This [UFO diagrams] is the wheel he said he saw. These are Unidentified Flying Objects that people say they are seeing now. Are they proof that we are being visited by civilizations from other stars? Or just what are they? What you are about to see is part of that 20-year search."

Incidentally, the business about Ezekiel is more suggestive of the ancient astronauts theories propounded by Chariots of the Gods or The Bible and Flying Saucers than anything the Air Force ever did.

Notable was the extensive use of miniatures for the UFOs by Brick Price Movie Miniatures (now Wonderworks), usually cobbled together from off-the-shelf model kits.