Project U.F.O.

Does no one else remember this show? I used to watch it when I was in 2nd grade. It lasted for one season and was about these two Air Force guys assigned to investigate UFO sightings. Sometimes they would prove it a hoax and other times it would turn out to be real. From what I can remember (and it has been awhile - I have NEVER seen this show in reruns) the acting and the scripts were not too good. And unlike the X Files, the U.S. governement in this show was truthful and honest.

The creator of X-Files credits Kolcheck: The Night Stalker for inspiration but I am wondering if he saw a few episodes of this somewhere along the way and just forgot it like the rest of the world.

UFO investigations by the US military.

I remember watching this in my 70s youth and I found it reasonably entertaining. However, I think I was a bit turned off by the formal nature of the two leads. Not saying their acting was unrealistic or anything like that but in this period there was another investigation-into-the-weird series going on - Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) - and when I was a kid I warmed to that more light hearted approach to lead characters.

I always liked the footage of the actual UFO encounters. When watching today I think I heard a sound effect from Star Trek Original Series (1966) and at one point I almost thought I was looking at stock footage from This Island Earth (1955) - today it looks very retro!

Not sure if I would ever bother getting this show on DVD (if it is available?) but I would suggest a few screenings on Youtube if you have time to kill.

Jack Webb's DRAGNET, ADAM 12 and EMERGENCY were such big hits that his Mark VII productions always had a few other series on the networks (mostly NBC) with various success. Project UFO was definately Jack Webb's baby and he was the one who did the talk show circuit to promote it. Besides his narration, the show followed Webb's trademark of stiff, unemotional acting that gave all his shows a semi-documentary look. His earlier shows introduced the day-to-day realities of police work, paramedics and emergency rooms long before Hill Street Blues and E.R. and without the soap opera scripts. Project U.F.O. was Webb's attempt to bring the then current hit film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND to television via a straight forward telling of the real people who investigated UFO sightings (known as Project Bluebook, that title was eventually changed to PROJECT UFO because it sounded more interesting). A typical episode would open with a discovery of a burnt out portion of field where a UFO appeared to have landed and took off and the two investigators gathering evidence to support or dispute the premise that a UFO had actually landed. Sometimes the evidence pointed to fraud and sometimes there were no answers and sometimes it was left to the audience to come to their own conclusions. Since there wasn't an attempt to conclude that there actually were aliens the series was a bit dull, there was never any big payoffs. Think of M. Night Shyamalan's SIGNS if it had ended a half hour sooner and that would pretty much sum up Project UFO. Perhaps M. Night Shyamalan was a fan of the series and wanted to do a better version and that's where SIGNS came from.

This series was called Project Bluebook when it aired back in the late 70's.

I always kind of felt sorry for Jack Webb, he created a cultural icon like Dragnet, first as a sensational radio series and then in two long running tv shows. How could he possibly top that? He spent the rest of his life trying to top Dragnet and couldn't do it. Project UFO was his last series before his death in 1982. Webb brought the same approach to this show that he used with Dragnet. He believed that viewers wanted realism and "just the facts". He used actual material from the files of "Project Blue Book". This was the study the United States Air Force did about unidentified flying objects and the reports of people who claimed they saw one. The study revealed that most of these reports were people being mistaken about what they saw or hoaxes. BUT there were about 10% of the case that COULD NOT be explained. These were the cases that interested Mister Webb and he brought them to life in this fascinating series that was cancelled far too soon. The two actors who were the investigating Air Force Officers were like Friday and Gannon in Dragnet, only they were investigating an "out of this world" mystery. The one I remember most was a young actor named Caskey Swaim. He had never really acted before and landed a starring role in this show. He did an amazing job as did Edward Winter. Do you believe in UFO's or life on other planets? If you did or not, this series was really interesting and entertaining. I wish they would put it back in syndication. One case I wish that they would have profiled was a case in Austrailia in 1978, interestingly this case happened when this series was on the air. It involved a young pilot named Frederick Vallentich who was flying a private plane over Bass Strait. He disappeared without a trace and no trace of him or his aircraft was ever found. Shortly before, he had radioed that he was being followed by a UFO and then he said that it was right on top of him! The ground controllers heard a strange metallic grinding sound and then silence! Vallentich's father said that he believed that his son had been abducted by aliens from another planet.