Project Blue Book S1-2

Update: Project Blue Book is no longer on Showmax. Browse the best series here.

“The probability of us being alone in the universe is zero.” That’s the central tenet of Project Blue Book, a series that, although it’s all about searching for aliens and UFOs, is actually based on true events. In the 1950s and 60s, UFO fever gripped the USA, so much that the US Air Force carried out a series of studies to ascertain whether there truly were alien forces behind series of strange events and lights in the sky. In the midst of the Cold War, unidentified aircraft presented a real national security threat: were they incredibly advanced Russian planes, aliens, or just the product of over-active imaginations?

Project Blue Book was real, and so too was Dr J Allen Hynek, the astronomer given the task of investigating the possibility of alien life.

Dr Hynek is assisted by US Air Force Captain Michael Quinn, a sceptical pilot. The pair try to account for the weird phenomena using science, but soon find that not everything can be neatly explained away. And sinister forces in their own government make things even more complicated.

The second season kicks off with the team investigating probably the most famous UFO-related event of them all: the crash-landing at Roswell, New Mexico.

Hynek is played by Aidan Gillen, probably best known as Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones, and Tommy Carcetti in The Wire.