Ezekiel saw
the wheel.
This 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?
The United States Air Force began an investigation of this high strangeness in a
search for the truth.
What you are about to see is part of that 20 year search.
These were the
words, spoken by radio and television veteran, Jack Webb, that opened the
premiere episode of "Project: U.F.O.".
The above stanza was used for the first season of the series. It was
truncated somewhat for the second season.
This page is not
for profit and exists solely as a tribute
to a show that remains in my memory 30+ years after it left the network, as well
as a service to the fans of the series. I have searched far and wide on the web
and believe this to be the only detailed page on Project: U.F.O. that exists on
the internet. My deepest thanks go out to 2 wonderful ladies, one
in Australia and one in The United Kingdom, who provided me with copies of all
26 episodes! Take a look around the page and I hope you'll like what you
see. Please consider joining our Yahoo group (look for the banner towards
the bottom of the page) so we can all discuss the series.
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 (who had never had any
significant acting experience before landing the role) 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 was 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.
This series has not been aired since its original network
run. Mark VII had creative control over the series and originally held the
copyright, but the rights to this series are currently uncertain.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Worldvision distributed the
program overseas in the United Kingdom and Australia where it was run on The
Sci-Fi Channel (U.K.) and TV1 (Australia). I believe Lorimar Telepictures
distributed the series in the United States as I remember one episode (Sighting
4011 The Doll House Incident) being telecast a few years back on TV Land as part
of its Ultimate Fan Hour. It is unfortunate that the series has not been
run in the United States (with exception to the above mentioned airing of a
single episode) since its network run. Nor has it been
"officially" released on DVD despite the fact that most of Jack Webb's
television series' have seen an "official" DVD release.
