They must not have syndicated the Jack Webb PBB where I lived in the 70s & 80s. I don't recall that at all. We only had 5 stations.
Spirits, ghosts, and that kind of stuff
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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Were you in the US? Project U.F.O. was an NBC prime-time show, not syndicated. And Wikipedia says it was never re-aired in the US. At only 26 episodes, it wouldn't have been a likely candidate for syndicated reruns.
Yes
You probably just weren't aware of it because it was scheduled against some other show that you watched instead. There were plenty of shows I missed for that reason, back before VCRs were common.
Curses, foiled again!
I watched that show as a kid and I would have sworn it was called Project Blue Book.
IMDb claims it was called that in Canada, and calls it an "alternative title" in the US, but I don't know their basis for the claim. The show was loosely based on the case files of the real Project Blue Book, whose name was prominently featured in the show, so it would be easy enough to misremember the show's title, but I never knew it to be officially called anything but Project U.F.O.. (There should probably be only one period at the end of that sentence, but it looks weird that way.)
I watched it when it originally aired, and I remember it as Project UFO. I think I was watching it on Canadian TV.
I definitely remember a show that aired occasionally on UK tv called Project Blue Book
I wouldn't be surprised if this were one of the many, many things IMDb gets wrong about older TV shows.
Yeah, it was about Project Blue Book and I think it mentioned Project Blue Book in the opening titles, but when you're trying to do a popular TV series in 1978, when the post-Star Wars science fiction boom is underway and UFO books and magazines are still selling, I doubt you'd go for a less obvious title. Unless,of course, you're Spielberg, but he was playing on a different level.
I dunno, I think the "Close Encounters of the nth Kind" scale was fairly prominently featured in UFO literature and media at the time, which is why Spielberg used the title.
But you're right -- "Blue Book" doesn't suggest UFOs to anyone not familiar with the program, so naturally they went with a title that said more explicitly what the show was about.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that as a kid, I was known to sing "Prooo-ject U-F-Ohh!" to the melody of the show's theme music (which I still remember to this day, roughly).
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Sure Fred.
I think that show is a big part of the reason I was familiar with the Blue Book references in Twin Peaks.
Around 1974-76, or from when I was 11 to 13, I read a lot of UFO books (and books about ancient astronauts, the Bermuda Triangle, etc) until I couldn't take any of it seriously any more, and I don't think I came across the "close encounters" thing until the hype for the movie. Wikipedia says Allen Hynek came up with it in a 1972 book, but I didn't have that one.
Okay, you may be right. I had basically the same experience, but I was 5 years younger than you at the time, so my memory is probably worse.
I do remember Hynek being a big name in UFO circles, and I understood that to be the reason Spielberg drew on his ideas as a foundation for the movie, but it's possible he was more of a niche figure before the movie raised his profile.
Ahh, the Bermuda Triangle. It was such a big deal when I was a kid that I assumed the lore had been around for centuries, and the fiction about it tended to assert as much. So I was surprised to learn a few years back that the name "Bermuda Triangle" was coined only 4 years before I was born. (The Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series erroneously asserted that the Bermuda Triangle had been known by that name during World War II.) It was hyped like crazy for a decade or so, and then kind of faded out. I guess it got eclipsed by the Roswell nonsense when that started to emerge in pop culture around 1980. The original 1947 weather-balloon crash was just one incident in a flurry of UFO hysteria at the time and was quickly debunked and forgotten, until a researcher dredged it up in the late '70s and wrote a book about it. That's why there's never any mention of Roswell in Close Encounters or Project U.F.O. or the like -- it just wasn't part of the lore back then. (The movie Hangar 18 is often misremembered as being about Roswell, but it's about a fictitious present-day UFO crash. However, it was released around the same time as the first book about Roswell, so it probably contributed to the spread of the myth in the culture.)
I remember reading about all those things (the 70s UFO fad was huge with many books at the library plus Natl Enquirer and Weekly World News always at the grocery) and Nessie and Sasquatch in the mid 70s. They were fun at the time for this 5th and 6th grade voracious reader but I never believed them.
I was very gullible as a kid and fell for all of it. Fortunately, I got into science and learned to think critically. I read Carl Sagan's book deconstructing UFO claims, and I watched episodes of NOVA and Scientific American Frontiers that set me straight on UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. No doubt on cryptids too, since I know I reacted negatively when The Greatest American Hero did an episode in February 1982 attributing the Triangle disappearances to a Nessie-like plesiosaur. Although I remember being somewhat more open-minded about Nessie until I learned some years later that Loch Ness is effectively barren and can barely support any life at all, let alone giant creatures.
The Loch Ness Monster is another of those myths that are far more recent than we assume, originating in 1933, the year my father was born. Yes, there's one carved image of a creature in the vicinity from Roman times or something, which people use to argue that the lore has been around for that long, but there's absolutely no record of it between that single image and the modern myth starting in '33, so it's just a case of believers in the modern myth co-opting something probably unrelated.
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