William Jordan Bio & Filmography
William Jordan was born on October 13, 1937 in Milan, Indiana. In 1957 Bill played basketball on the state champion team that the movie Hoosiers was based on. He later attended the Indiana University. Bill served three and a half years in the Air Force, leaving with the rank of First Lieutenant. The last year and a half he spent recruiting in New York City and was involved the making of Country Music Time, a radio show that was aired across the country and on armed forces radio. This took him on many trips to Nashville where he worked with some of country music's greatest artists. Bill began his acting career in New York. He moved to California in 1972 where he lived until 1999. Bill now resides in Florida.
Visit the Official William Jordan Home Page at Celebrities-Home.com
Filmography
Additional Filmography
"Nightmares" (1983) ... as a cop who gets killed at the beginning. (Universal)
"Daktari" (1968) in
episode "The Outsider" (CBS)
"Griff"
(1973) in premiere episode (ABC)
"The Magician" (1973)
in episode "Lady In A Trap" (NBC)
"The
New Adventures Of Perry Mason" (1974) in episode "The Case Of The
Violent Valley" (CBS)
"The
Streets Of San Francisco" (1974) in episode "Winterkill"
(ABC)
"Lou
Grant" (1981) in episode "Obituary" (CBS)
"Heartbeat"
(1989) in episode "Prison" (ABC)
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
Some
information is from "The TV
Encyclopedia"
by David Inman
© 1991 Putnam Pub. Group
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Caskey Swaim Bio & Filmography:
Caskey Swaim was born in Lexington, North Carolina on Januray 11, 1949. Only six months prior to landing Project: U.F.O., Swaim was a starstruck bellboy at Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip. His first motion picture was a role in Henry Winkler and Harrison Ford's vehicle, Heroes. Acting was his dream since childhood; he saw his first play when he was seven years old, and by nine he was imitating Elvis Presley. After an 18-month tour of duty in the Army, including service in Okinawa, Swaim moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.
Filmography
Notable TV Guest Appearances
Additional TV Guest Appearances
"Battle Of The Network Stars" (1978) - he was on the NBC team.
(special # 5)(ABC)
"Sledge
Hammer" (1986) - in episode "Miss Of The Spider Woman" (ABC)
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
Some
information is from "Science
Fiction Television Series"
by Mark Phillips & Frank Garcia
© 1996 McFarland & Company Inc.
|
Edward Winter Bio and Filmography:
This
Ventura, California-born actor was born on June 3, 1937 and is most memorable as the crazed CIA agent Col.
Flagg in M*A*S*H. He made his Broadway debut in 1966 in the musical
"Cabaret". He was also featured in the Broadway hit "Promises,
Promises". He was nominated for a Tony award as Best Actor in a Featured
Role for both roles. His guest roles on television have been varied. TV movie
appearances include Eleanor and Franklin, Perry Mason: The Case Of The Notorious
Nun, Stranded and The Christmas Gift. Sadly, Edward Winter passed away on March
8, 2001 in Woodland Hills, California after suffering from Parkinson's disease.
Filmography
Notable TV Guest Appearances
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
Some
information is from " Science
Fiction Television Series"
by Mark Phillips & Frank Garcia
© 1996 McFarland & Company Inc.
|
Aldine King Bio & Filmography
Aldine King came to New York from Philadelphia to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Aldine's sister lived with her in New York City and worked two jobs to help Aldine with the tuition and living expenses. She studied hard at AADA and was asked to stay for the second year. This meant a lot to the students as it was an important endorsement by the Academy's teachers that the student had professional potential. A year later, Aldine graduated from AADA and went to Hollywood with a teacher's recommendation. She got a supporting actress role with Dionne Warwick and Stephen Boyd in "Slaves" a movie about slavery in the pre-Civil War South.
Filmography
Notable TV Guest Appearances
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
|
Supporting Cast Filmography
Click on a celebrity name for their filmography.
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
| Ackerman, Leslie |
| Albee, Josh |
| Aletter, Frank |
| Amsterdam, Morey |
| Anderson, John |
| Anderson, S. Newton |
| Aubuchon, Jacques |
| Baer, Parley |
| Bellini, Cal |
| Bissell, Whit |
| Blake, Michael Francis |
| Bogert, William |
| Braeden, Eric |
| Brandt, Hank |
| Brinegar, Paul |
| Brothers, Dr. Joyce |
| Brown, Peter |
| Burton, Normann |
| Cahill, Barry |
| Cameron. Rod |
| Case, Allen |
| Chester, Colby |
| Crosby, Gary |
| Culver, Howard |
| Davis, Jim |
| de Vargas, Val |
| Deemer, Ed |
| Dellgall, Bob |
| Derr, Richard |
| Devry, Elaine |
| Dexter, Brad |
| Donnelly, Deborah |
| Donnelly, Tim |
| Doran, Ann |
| Douglas, Donna |
| Dubbins, Don |
| Duggan, Andrew |
| Duralia, Darlene |
| Edwards, Sam |
| Eilbacher, Cynthia |
| Eisley, Anthony |
| Erickson, Leif |
| Ferdin, Pamelyn |
| Findlater, John |
| Foster, Linda |
| Franklin, Pamela |
| Freeman, Joan |
| Frizzel, Lou |
| Garrett, Scott |
| Geary, Anthony |
| Ging, Jack |
| Ginty, Robert |
| Gold, Missy |
| Greene, Bradley |
| Gregg, Virginia |
| Grimm, Maria |
| Hamilton, Kim |
| Hedison, David |
| Hogan, Jack |
| Holliday, Fred |
| Homier, Skip |
| Horton, Winter |
| House, Dana |
| Howell, Hoke |
| Hudis, Stephen |
| Hunter, Kim |
| Hylands, Scott |
| Jamison, Joyce |
| Johnson, Claude |
| Johnson, Melodie |
| Jones, Henry |
| Joyce, Elaine |
| Karen, Anna |
| Keach Sr., Stacy |
| King, Maggie |
| Kjellin, Alf |
| Kristen, Marta |
| Larson, Darrel |
| LaRussa, Adrienne |
| Lockhart, Anne |
| Luna, Barbara |
| Mantooth, Randolph |
| Mars, Kenneth |
| Martin, Jared |
| Mason, Marilyn |
| May, Donald |
| Mayo, Raymond |
| McCarthy, Linwood |
| McWilliams, Caroline |
| Meadows, Jayne |
| Mitchell, Cameron |
| Mulhern, Scott |
| Niven, Kip |
| Norris, Buckley |
| Olson, James |
| Part, Brian |
| Patrick, Steve |
| Patten, Robert |
| Pera, Radames |
| Perrin, Vic |
| Perry, Rod |
| Picerni, Paul |
| Reid, Frances |
| Renard, Ken |
| Reynolds, William |
| Richards, Kim |
| Ross, Don |
| Rudley, Herbert |
| Ruiz, Isaac |
| Ruskin, Joseph |
| Schedeen, Anne |
| Shearer, Mike |
| Sheldon, Jack |
| Sinutko, Shane |
| Slade, Mark |
| Smith, Jim B. |
| Soule, Olan |
| Spang, Laurette |
| Stevens, Craig |
| Stewart, Thomas A. |
| Stewart, Trish |
| Stone, Ezra |
| Stratton, W. K. |
| Strickland, Amzie |
| Strong, Michael |
| Sullivan, Jenny |
| Tampjoya, Sam |
| Thomas, Scott |
| Throne, Malachai |
| Tigar, Kenneth |
| Tuerpe, Paul |
| Watson, David |
| Watson, Mills |
| Wayland, Len |
| Webber, Peggy |
| Wiggins, Russell |
| Windsor, Marie |
| Winter, Edward (as guest player) |
| Woods, Christopher |
| Woodward, Morgan |
| Yanez, David |
| York, Rebecca |
| Young, Buck |
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
|
Project U.F.O.
Article from
SF TV Superheroes & Space Fantasy
Color Poster Book # 1
During a season when television science-fiction seemed doomed, when both Logan's Run and Man From Atlantis tried valiantly and failed, an unexpected mid-season replacement caught the attention of multi-millions. It was Project U.F.O., and for at least one crucial week it was the highest-rated NBC show.
U.F.O. is an exciting mixture of fact and fancy, documentary and science-fiction. Based upon actual investigations by the U.S. Air Force, the stories tell of sightings - usually by ordinary but credible citizens - of unexplained events in the sky. The Air Force (through Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book) investigated more than 13,000 such sightings and finally disbanded its U.F.O. research department - concluding that there was insufficient evidence even to proceed.
The public was not so easily satisfied that there was nothing up there. After the Blue Book files were made available, it was noted by J. Allen Hynek (consultant for Close Encounters) and others that in a good percentage of cases there were conflicting data or myriad circumstances that had been inefficiently investigated. It is largely this group of puzzling cases which forms the basis for Project U.F.O. Creator Jack Webb and producer William T. Coleman refer to these as cases of "high strangeness."
Coleman explains: "We have a device. It's a simple right triangle with the vertical line divided into six levels of strangeness, and the bottom line lettered A through D, for six degrees of credibility. We look for a 6-D - a case with highest strangeness and highest credibility."
The 6-D cases are assigned to script writers, who turn them into episodes of Project U.F.O.
Coleman - a retired Air Force Colonel who headed Project Blue Book for a number of years - claims that even with the show's buzzing, rumbling flying saucers, its robots and extraterrestrials, Project U.F.O. is faithful to the spirit of the original Air Force investigations:
"Very definitely. Jack Webb would do it no other way. But of course it's a dramatization. What we see is what the witnesses say they saw."
Invariably, what they say they saw involves some evidence of superior technological accomplishment. Thus the human drama is very much earthbound and documentary, while the science is, by necessity, fictionalized. Apparently a high percentage of the TV viewing audience finds this unusual mixture appealing.
By definition, the U.F.O. stories can never end with a positive discovery of extraterrestrial involvement on Earth - since they must remain true to the Air Force's non-findings. This leaves only two possibilities for endings: either the U.F.O. is shown to be not what it was claimed to be, or the matter is left unresolved.
What does producer Coleman see as the theme of the series?
"Detective work, on the part of our two leads, and the various laboratories and exacting disciplines they use. Now some of the cases will be solved quickly, and others will not."
One case from the Blue Book files that remains unexplained is that of Coleman's own U.F.O. sighting. And since the case was rated 6-D, it did indeed become a part of a first-season episode. Senior officer Jake Gatlin (played by William Jordan) tells his partner, Harry Fitz (played by Caskey Swaim) about his only sighting. . . .
Coleman and a full crew chased a saucer-shaped flying object over the green meadows of Alabama, in 1954. The object seemed to be about 60 feet in diameter and about 10 feet thick. It did not behave like any craft any of the experienced fliers had seen before.
"What did I see? I don't know," Coleman says today. "If I had let faith enter the picture, I might have said I was obviously looking at a vehicle from another world - because I knew the technology of what I was looking at didn't exist on this planet. But I don't go that far."
The TV show does not go that far, either. And it is just that dedication to accuracy, its policy of drawing no unwarranted conclusions, that makes Project U.F.O. unique among science-fiction adventures.
That Project U.F.O. is one of NBC's top rated shows is due in no small measure to the show's exciting use of special visual effects. The UFOs are individually hand crafted by Brick Price Miniatures.
PROJECT
U.F.O.
A BANANAS TV EXCLUSIVE!
Article from
"Bananas"
TV4401, number 23, 1978
written by Peggy Herz
These Cases Aren't Science-Fiction - Just Ask the Air Force! BANANAS Goes Behind the Scenes at this Unique TV Show that Couldn't Be Made until Congress Passed A Special Law!
Early one morning an Air Force lieutenant was driving along a deserted highway in the Nevada desert. Suddenly his car stalled. When he got out to see what had happened, he looked up and saw four glowing disk-shaped objects hanging in space. As he watched, the objects took off in different directions, followed by what appeared to be a huge spaceship.
What exactly had he just seen? The Air Force lieutenant didn't know. He reported his sighting, only to be greeted with skepticism and disbelief. It was the morning sun playing tricks on his eyes, some said. Or low flying aircraft. Or heat rising from the desert. Or nothing at all.
The Air Force lieutenant was not convinced. He had seen something. Those glowing disks were not the sun or the heat or his imagination. They were unidentified flying objects. he had joined the ranks of millions of others who believed they had actually seen UFOs.
For many years now, similar sightings have been reported by people around the world. Finally, last spring, NBC came up with a new TV series of dramas based on some of those actual reportings of UFO sightings. The show's major asset is authenticity. It's stories are based on actual cases reported in the files of the Air Force's Project Blue Book.
You had never heard of Project Blue Book? Neither had many other people. But for 22 years Air Force personnel assigned to this project investigated UFO reports. The information they uncovered was filed away and forgotten. Almost.
Several years ago, Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act. This act opened up certain governmental files to any private citizens interested in seeing them. TV producer Jack Webb was quick to respond. He wanted to know what was in the files of Project Blue Book. The fascinating information he found is the basis of the stories on Project U.F.O.
TRUE UNKNOWNS!
Webb obtained microfilm or more than 400,000 documents covering some 13,000 sightings. "Roughly 70 percent of the cases were explained satisfactorily as natural phenomena such as balloons or clouds," Webb said. "There were hoaxes, too - people sailing hubcaps in the air and photographing them. That kind of thing. But about 12 to 15 percent are true unknowns."
Webb was the perfect person to dramatize these cases. Two of his more popular shows, Dragnet and Adam-12, were both based on actual cases taken from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department. Webb believes viewers want authenticity, and he gives it to them.
He has tried to do the same thing in Project U.F.O. He picked as his producer a retired Air Force colonel named William Coleman, who headed the Blue Book project in the early 1960's. And he helped pick the two actors who would play the Air Force investigators - Caskey Swaim and Edward Winter.
FROM BELLHOP TO STAR!
BANANAS talked to Caskey Swaim recently and discovered that Project U.F.O. marks a big first for him. It is the first television role he has ever played! That is not what you would call starting at the bottom! And it isn't at all bad for someone who was a starstruck kid in Lexington, North Carolina. Or for someone who, until about a year ago, was a bellhop at a hotel in Hollywood!
"I'd had no acting training when I arrived in Los Angeles," Caskey told BANANAS. "in the first grade I did imitations of Andy Griffith and Elvis Presley in local talent shows, but that was all!"
Nonetheless, Caskey was determined to be an actor. First he had to get a job. He worked as an orderly at a convalescent home. Then he got the job of a bellhop at a hotel on Sunset Boulevard. "A friend there told me about a group doing the play, Of Mice and Men," Caskey said. "The director of the play was a man from Georgia. He became my agent."
Caskey got his first film role in March, 1977. "It was a small part in Henry Winkler's film, Heroes," he recalled. "Then my agent met Jack Webb's casting director, and that led to my getting the part in Project U.F.O."
The southern boy has gone big-time in his first TV role, but he has no intention of getting carried away with the money and glamour and excitement of it all. "I carried too many bags as a bellhop to get carried away with myself now," he said with a smile. "I worked at that hotel for five years and I still keep in touch with the people there."
And does he believe in UFOs? Caskey nodded. "The government set up Project Blue Book because they were receiving so many reports of UFO sightings," he replied. "The Air Force wanted to find out what these things were and whether they posed any threat to national security. Some they could explain; others they couldn't."
"Sure, I believe UFOs may exist. I started believing in them after we put a man on the moon. If we can do that, how can we discount the possibility that there are such things as UFO's? I don't believe we can - or should."
CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS WITH AN OPEN MIND
An Interview with Project: UFO's Producer
COLONEL WILLIAM T. COLEMAN
Article from
"Starlog Magazine"
# 14, June, 1978
Written by David Houston
Executive Producer Jack Webb, famed for the authentic look and feel of his TV productions, has done it again. To produce his new show, Project: UFO, Webb has hired the former head of Project Blue Book - the government's official UFO investigation.
If ever a TV detective show had an air of authenticity, it was Jack Webb's legendary Dragnet series. Webb created it, based its stories on actual police work and played the unflappable Sergeant Friday himself: "Just give me the facts, ma'am."
Project: UFO, Webb's latest series on NBC, is a detective drama of a different kind. But Webb insisted on the same kind of factual documentation and back grounding for UFO as he provided for Dragnet. So he turned to the encyclopedia of UFO sightings - the Air Force's recently declassified Project Blue Book files. (Blue Book contains over 13,000 investigations of alleged sightings.) And to insure the series' air of authenticity, Webb hired Colonel William T. Coleman as his line producer.
Coleman was in charge of Project Blue Book from 1961 to 1964, and his own bizarre experience with a UFO is one of those puzzling, unexplained sightings contained within its pages.
But to what extent are those volumes of intriguing reports - the Blue Book files themselves - being used for the series? Colonel Coleman replies calmly but quickly.
"We are basing all of our stories on actual cases from the files. When I came out here (to California) last July, we sat down and began to isolate the cases we wanted to use. Some cases contain as many as 900 or 1000 pages .... We pull the files that interest us, and assign them to writers."
How are the cases chosen?
"We have a device. It's a simple right triangle with the vertical line divided into six levels of 'strangeness', and the bottom line lettered 'A' through 'D', for degrees of credibility. We look for a '6-D' - a case with highest 'strangeness' also possessing highest credibility."
Coleman has an easy confidence about his ability to handle the TV series. Although his life has given him the air of an adventurer - one who might be happiest pursuing the unknown with a gun and a camera - he is a natural as a Hollywood producer. In fact, so many aspects of Coleman's background converge on Project: UFO that his selection as its producer seems almost to have been fated.
He enlisted in the Air Force in April, 1942, and was a flight instructor, and saw combat in the South Pacific during World War II. After preparing a jet-fighter training program in Alaska, he left the Air Force in 1948 to run a family-owned resort in Florida - during which time he studied broadcasting at the University of Florida. In 1953, he taught that school's first course in television news production - while directing continuity at radio station WRUF in his off hours.
He was recalled to active duty for the Korea conflict. This involved his participation in nuclear testing in Nevada. He remembers it vividly:
"I was out there as an observer. It was to be the largest weapon ever detonated in the atmosphere in the U.S. We were only about 3,000 yards from ground zero in a regular war-type trench. I remember asking Dr. Gray, chief scientist of the Manhattan Project, 'How loud is this bang we're going to hear?' He said, 'I'm glad you asked that question. It will be many times louder than the loudest thing you've ever heard.' He warned us not to put our fingers in our ears, or cotton or anything, because the sound pressure would be so great. He said we should keep everything open. I'm sure my mouth was wide open - probably yelling, 'Help!'"
"The first thing that happened was the light. I was down in the trench squatting with a GI blanket folded lengthwise - which gave me about 8 layers - and wrapped several times around me eyes. I had almost 30 folds of GI blanket over my eyes, and I was sitting at the bottom of a trench - and still I saw the brightest light I have ever seen in my life."
"I've been standing next to 150 mm howitzers when they exploded. They were cap pistols. After the sound, the shock waves came. First the ground dropped vertically and I fell seven or eight inches; then the ground began to move laterally. We had a dummy dressed just like us right behind the trench: it completely disintegrated from the heat. One guy had stuck an ace of spades in the sand facing the shot; it looked like an eye surgeon had removed the spots. The white portions were scorched but reflective enough to survive. If you're near a blast, cover yourself with white and get below the shock waves."
"There was an unexpected wind shift - and we were trapped in that trench. We caught the brunt of the fallout and had to meander around there for some hours because it was too hot for vehicles to come and pick us up. We had to follow the constant radiation level to where it was weakest, and we ended up almost at ground zero - wearing nothing but battle fatigues and steel helmets."
"When they finally picked us up, we were red all over. They got us right to the showers, and burned our clothing. That weapon had been 97 megatons - almost double what they thought it would be. I kicked myself for volunteering, and I wouldn't go through that again. But I'm glad I did it."
After witnessing this most awesome and sanity-taxing of explainable phenomena, he furthered his two lines of development - military science and engineering, and broadcasting and public information - by setting up, from scratch and on a shoestring, a fully operational TV station in the Philippines.
Coleman - who had been an occasional consultant during the earlier administrations of Blue Book's precursors, Project Sign and Project Grudge(*) - was appointed head of Project Blue Book in 1961. "When they wanted to make me head of Blue Book, I said, 'Wait a minute, you had better hear my story.' They listened to the story of my own UFO sighting (more on this later). I remained objective and their conclusion was that I'd be ideal for the job."
Blue Book had been underway since 1952 and, when Coleman took over, all results reported were conspicuously negative. The press had dutifully followed the official line that flying saucer reports were being made by crackpots and careless observers - until around 1960, around the time Coleman entered the picture. At that time, numerous UFO reports made by highly credible witnesses - such as entire crews aboard aircrafts, ministers, and whole towns of reputable citizens - began to appear in newspapers. Blue Book personnel remained noncommittal or worse. Coleman's first task, therefore, was to try to remove suspicion that the Air Force was engaged in a massive conspiratorial cover-up of dire truths.
"I was assigned as Executive Officer in Public Information, under the Secretary of the Air Force. One of the first things I did was to try to open up the files to newsmen. Now, some of the reports had to remain classified for very good reasons. If we had developed a weapon system and didn't want anybody to know about it, we classified it. If one of these test weapons is sighted by, say, the crew of an airliner, and they report it as a UFO, we're not going to enlighten them. That would enlighten the Soviet Union and everybody else. The trouble with declassifying is that it can take years. To down-grade a file, it has to go back through everybody who ever received a copy of the initial report. There are specific Congressional laws regulating the procedure."
Why was so much classified in the beginning?
"It wasn't - not in the beginning. In 1947, if you'll recall, our relationships with certain allies had cooled a bit. But in '48 and '49 we began to approach the Korean War, and geo-politically we began to see things. Also, everybody was a bit concerned there at the beginning of the space age. I remember people laughing at the idea of putting a satellite in Earth orbit. In the beginning, we were concerned about two things: was our national security being threatened, and were we about to be surprised technologically - whether terrestrially or extra-terrestrially? But of course the mood of the country caught up with us after the Arnold sighting in Washington(**), and people wanted to know everything we knew."
In 1964, Coleman was sent to Cape Canaveral.
"I went to the Cape as Chief Public Affairs Manager of space flights for Gemini and Apollo. All of the network pictures you saw were fed through my system." Coleman is credited with originating the idea: let's see the astronauts in pictures coming back from space, in real time. "Everybody thought I was crazy. I ended up having to go all the way to the Secretary of Defense to get approval for it. My last obstacle was the Navy. The Admiral didn't want any 30-foot (antenna) dishes on his aircraft carrier. I showed him where it could be located with no problems."
Coleman was then made Co-Chairman of the Air Force audio/visual committee - which was responsible for approving support for commercial motion pictures, plus production on the many films put out by the military. "I learned a lot about the business there."
Coleman appeared in the film UFOs Past, Present And Future - narrated by Rod Serling and others - and so made a name for himself as something of an authority on the subject. he has written two books on the use of animals in space experimentation and currently has a dramatic screenplay for which he is seeking a producer.
It's difficult to imagine who else Jack Webb might have approached last year, when Project: UFO was in need of a producer.
And how does Coleman feel about the series - is he satisfied that the TV show is true to the spirit of the Blue Book project?
"Very definitely. Jack would do it no other way. But of course it's a dramatization. What we see is what the witnesses say they saw."
Are either of the two leading characters an incarnation of himself?
"No. The two characters typify the investigators we had on Blue Book. When we created the characters, we actually went all the way back to their births, to keep them accurate. Our Sergeant (played by Caskey Swaim), for instance, is a young lad who got a couple years of junior college under his belt and then joined the Air Force. On the Air Force 'bootstrap' program, he got his Bachelor's degree. He's pretty sharp. He tested out well, so they sent him off to intelligence school. So that's how he got into Blue Book. In fact, in every case, all of the people in Blue Book have to have a background in intelligence."
What does Coleman see as the theme of Project: UFO?
"Detective work, on the part of our two leads, and the various laboratories and exacting disciplines they use. Now some of the cases will be solved quickly, and others will not. But it's more than a detective story, more than a documentary, more than entertainment."
Is his own UFO sighting likely to turn up as a script?
"I wouldn't be surprised. It would qualify as a '6-D.'"
Our close encounter with Col. Coleman was almost over. It ended with a lengthy, detailed, dramatic recounting of his experience with a flying saucer - an experience that would challenge the most aloof scientists and journalists to remain objective.
"I went down to Miami International Airport, in 1954, with a crew, to pick up an overhauled attack bomber - to test it out and deliver it to the air base in Greenville, Mississippi. It was Sunday afternoon with clear skies, unusual visibility - I'd say up to 40 miles. Flying over central Florida, we could see both the Atlantic and the Gulf."
"Just South of Montgomery, Alabama, North of the Florida Line, I reached over and punched my co-pilot and said, 'Hey, take it; I'm going to relax for a minute.' I had my parachute up, had slid back on the track, and was just starting to drop my head back ...."
"The crew was myself, the co-pilot, and the flight engineer. And I had two technical representatives, one from Lockheed Aircraft Company and one from the Jet Engine Division of General Motors Corporation. They were both engineers."
"Anyway, I was looking around and noticed an object well above me, up to about 10,000 feet above me, going in the same direction I was. It was at about 2 o'clock position. We seemed to be gaining on it. I thought, 'it really ought to be drawing a contrail at that altitude.' I turned to my co-pilot and said, 'Look at 2 o'clock; what do you see? A shiny white object?' He looked and said, 'Yeah, it's just a reflection in the upper windshield.' I said maybe."
"I rolled my seat back up on the track and took the airplane again. I started to turn. Now when you do that, the reflection should either disappear or fall off to the side. But I made the turn, and it didn't clear up. The co-pilot said, 'Yeah, there is something.' Then he said, 'We shouldn't be gaining on it.'"
"I said it was descending. I came back to my original heading. We were about four miles from it when it crossed my altitude. I said, 'That's an odd looking thing. I don't see a vertical stabilizer, and I don't see any sign of the wings.' We thought it was probably a test vehicle out of Elgin Air Force Base. I said, 'Let's see what it is.'"
"I started descending with it. We were closing in with it all the time - about two miles now. One mile. It was getting right down on top of the trees pretty fast. Still no sight of vertical stabilizer or wings. I called the two engineers to come up. 'Did you see that?' They said, 'Yes, what is it?' I said we didn't know, but we were going to find out."
"I asked the flight engineer to go into the bombardier's compartment, where he'd have a different perspective. He went through the crawlway under the flight deck floor, and when he got up there, he checked in. 'What do you see?' I asked him. he said, 'Same thing I saw when I was with you.'"
"I told everybody, 'Don't discuss this thing, but just look at it; capture every detail you can see. Size, speed, all your own impressions.'"
"When we were within half-a-mile we could see that it was a circular object. It was about 60 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, tapering from the center. No join lines, no rivet lines - just a solid disc. It had no lights. It wasn't painted. It was a dull gray color - like titanium. If it was titanium, I don't need to tell you the engineering problems of making a 60 foot titanium disc."
"We were close, but I purposefully kept my distance because I didn't want to get into the vortex of it, not that low on the ground; you could lose control of your aircraft. I had no idea what sort of vortex it might be generating."
"Finally when we were within an eighth of a mile, I said, 'Okay, keep your heads cool; we're going to overtake it, and I want you to capture every detail that you can. Has anybody got a camera?' There wasn't a camera among us."
"I made a hard four or five second pitch to come alongside him so that he would have to look into the sun, not us. In that time, suddenly, it was gone. We had seen its shadow on the ground; it had passed over a barn, so we had a pretty good idea of the size of it. I said, 'It's gone somewhere.' I pulled up hard to see if it had dropped back and was following me. It wasn't. I leveled off at about 2,000 feet. We were all looking back - and we saw it. And we saw its shadow moving across a freshly plowed field. It was bearing right down on the ground and leaving a dust trail in its vortex."
"I ran what I thought would be an intercept course - based on my judgment of its speed. But by the time I got to the end of the field - about two-and-a-half miles - it was gone. The dust was still lingering. That time, we lost it altogether."
"I told the guys not to discuss it - not even with their wives - and to go home and write up a report, a complete report in chronological order, A to Z."
"They turned then in the next morning. All five reports agreed, which is a rare thing, and that was the end of it."
"Now what did I see? I don't know. If I had let faith enter the picture, I might have said I was obviously looking at a vehicle from another world - because I knew the technology of what I was looking at didn't exist on this planet ... but I don't go that far. Were we the subjects of mass hypnosis? I discussed that with some experts in the field. They said no, that there was nothing that would have promulgated it on that flight. We checked for a fume leak in the flight deck. Nothing. There were no other sightings of it reported. No other aircraft within a hundred miles. As we had passed over the fields, I asked the guys to see if they could spot any people outside looking. No. If you could have interviewed the cows or horses, we might have gotten something."
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(*)For a concise history of the Air Force activities concerning UFOs throughout Project Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, see The Hynek UFO Report, by Dr. J. Allen Hynek - a current Dell paperback.
(**)The first major UFO report that was widely publicized and that "caught on" with the public was a sighting by Kenneth Arnold, a salesman flying his own plane, near Mt. Rainier, in Washington State. He reported sighting nine crescent-shaped "discs" flying near the mountain. Press reports of the incident popularized the term "flying saucer."
PROJECT: U.F.O.
Article from
"Starlog Magazine"
# 17, October, 1978
THE
MAGICAL TECHNIQUES OF MOVIE & TV SPECIAL EFFECTS
SFX
PART XV: BRICK PRICE -
THE MODEL MAN
Article from
"Starlog Magazine"
# 20, March, 1979
Series Edited by David Hutchison
Written by David Houston
View the photos with captions from this article below:
Brick Price hurries into his shop apologizing for being an hour late; he has been stuck at Paramount discussing a space-helmet design with Gene Roddenberry and Richard Taylor.
He needn't apologize. During that hour his second-in-command, Darryl Anka, has shown me around the overcrowded shop where the intriguing projects in progress include building the miniatures for NBC's Project U.F.O., fabricating the hand props (hidden from view) for the Star Trek movie, pre-production sketches for Martin Landau's forthcoming high-budget SF epic, models for the Canadian remake of Things To Come, props for The Incredible Shrinking Woman, dinosaurs, machinery to be stop-motion animated, storyboards of a spectacular attraction for a space theme park (till now kept secret) and much more - all of it of interest to science-fiction enthusiasts.
It's sunset; the workday is officially over, but someone's still running a noisy compressor; so we've taken chairs to the cool parking lot where we will talk about this young entrepreneur's new company and its current and projected projects. Meanwhile, an employee is winding down by sending a radio-controlled miniature racing car careening around the lot at 35 mph.
"It goes back to around 1963," says Price, "when my father told me that if I didn't quit fooling around with motorcycles, cars, women and model planes, I'd never make anything of myself." The fact that he had won a Revel Model Car contest at the age of 15 failed to impress his father - a physicist from CalTech working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But the prize got Price a job with Revel. He made models that were later photographed and printed on the boxes of new model kits. "I thought the pay was terrific - around $25 per model."
Some years later, Brick Price worked at Hughes Aircraft as a technical designer and illustrator. "I worked on Surveyor and ComSat, and I really enjoyed all the space things. I've been a science-fiction buff all my life. My father has a collection of science-fiction magazines which dates back to the turn of the century."
"When I was drafted in 1966, I went to electronics school because of my background at Hughes. For some reason, they assigned me to Vietnam to be a gunner on a helicopter, but I had a temporary layover in San Pedro - where they discovered I had artistic ability and could fabricate things."
The temporary layover became permanent. "I started doing signs for people, and that led me to the film department, where they were doing some crude animation. But I have always been a Disney fanatic, so I got them into real animation, and told them there were interesting effects they could get by using models. That was my introduction into movie work, but it wasn't until some years later that I got involved in it again."
" In '68 I won a model-building contest at the L.A. Sports Arena, and a fellow by the name of Ray Hoyn said he wanted to write a story about it for Model Car Science magazine. I said I thought I could do my own story. It took a considerable amount of time because I had never written an article before, but he liked it and he ran it as a cover story. He hired me as a technical editor, and I started answering all the model questions that came in from readers. I went from there to another magazine, where I was the editor, and a couple of years later I bought International Modeler magazine - which I have been publishing ever since."
"It's only natural that when people are looking for model builders they go to the magazines first." From this natural contact, Price was contracted to supply models for commercials, "including an entire freeway system for Exxon and the spaceship for a new Ford Futura ad," and models for magazine ads through an agency which hired him as a creative director.
"I kept just a skeleton crew at my own shop and whenever a big job would come in, I'd staff up to meet the demand."
Also during these years of miscellaneous jobs, Price worked for Clymer Publications "filling in holes around other jobs." He wrote 33 books on how-to-do-it subjects.
"Then a couple of years ago I saw Star Wars. I got the feeling that there was going to be a sudden push in this direction. I went to see Grant McCune (chief model builder for Star Wars) and interviewed him for International Modeler. Grant and I became good friends."
Our talk is interrupted by the radio-controlled missile on wheels which skids through a water puddle and bangs into a steel post. After seeing that no damage has been done, Price laughs and recalls, "Almost every time I'd go to Industrial Light and Magic (John Dykstra's company, which is now known as Apogee, where Star Wars effects were done), the crew would be out in the parking lot racing their R-C cars. Unless you knew those people had been working day and night, it would look like they never did anything but play with their toys. I started going down to race with them. This irked them - they couldn't often beat me." Price is, among many other things, a designer of the bodies and mechanisms of the R-C cars, which sell for around $250.
"I was at ILM one day when Jack Webb called Grant and asked him to do some model work. ILM was too busy, and it looked like the work would have to be delivered on too tight a schedule. So Grant recommended me. I talked to Webb. He said, 'How fast can you get to my office?' I said, 'As fast as my car will carry me.'"
"Fortunately I had a couple of models in the car, and I walked into Webb's office carrying them. The next morning , at 9 a.m., he put me on contract, and I was working on the first model by noon." Webb's show, of course, is Project U.F.O.
"At first I thought I could do all the models myself, because I had a fair amount of lead time. I started on November 18 and he wasn't going to begin filming until February. But they stepped up the number of models they wanted for each show and began to demand more activity in the models. They wanted things to open and close, lights - and that meant special circuitry. I started trying to find people to hire."
"One of the people who came in was Darryl Anka, who had accidentally locked himself out of his car and had to borrow my phone to call for help. If I had relied on strictly first impressions, I suppose I'd be in trouble. One thing about him that impressed me tremendously was his ability to comprehend mechanical shapes and then draw them quickly. He was the first person I hired, and he has proved to be a great asset to the company. The second to come along was Cory Faucher, who had won several model building contests. Cory brought in his brother, Alan." The company now consists of these three plus Brick's wife, Laura, Ken Swenson (who worked with Douglas Trumbull on Close Encounters), Ron Pusich, Mike Jones, Bruce MacRae, Dale King, Pete Parros, Tracy Faucher, Paul Laxineta and Robin Leyland.
A Good percentage of this crew - the youngest of them 18, the oldest 36 - is well over six feet tall. Price, not what you'd call a tall man, refers to his shop on occasion as The Land of the Giants.
Frequent moves and expansions of crew and workload have led the company to spread out from the 200 square feet they occupied a year and a half ago to the 3000 of their new facility. The company's income has climbed from $50,000 to $500,000 a year.
"If that sounds like a lot of money, I'd better tell you I lost $28,000 last month because of the expense of gearing up for additional work."
The mainstay of Brick Price Movie Miniatures is currently Project U.F.O. (Price only builds the miniatures; they are photographed elsewhere, sometimes with less than satisfactory results.) "I can give you pros and cons about the show, about any TV show, really, because the budgets are so low and time is too short. The only show with a budget worth a damn is Galactica, and even theirs is limited. I think they're doing a tremendous job, though, with what they've got."
"Webb has given us a better budget this season, so we're building bigger and better models. Last season, all of the models were under 20 inches long; this year, so far, our smallest is 24 inches long and our largest is four feet long."
Star Trek - The Motion Picture is taking almost as much of the company's time as U.F.O. "Originally we talked to Star Trek about doing miniatures. There turned out to be some problems with that, but we may yet supply some." (The principle miniatures are being built by Magicam, a Paramount subsidiary.) "Part of the work we have calls for us to build belt buckles, hand props, phasers by the hundreds. We're also making the new tricorders - which have more functions than the TV version - space helmets and special props that require lights and computer circuitry."
A problem has arisen with the belt buckles. They're made of plastic and are hollow (some have operational lights); they're supposed to be medical monitors that constantly register the wearer's state of health. Fine. But as it happens, the railing on the bridge hits most of the Star Trek regulars right at their waists, and during shooting, boxes of crushed belt buckles arrive daily at Price Miniatures for repair.
The new phasers and tricorders are smaller, more miniaturized and sleeker than the old TV versions. They contain complex micro-circuitry that operates tiny bright lights sequentially to give a much more functional look than before. "We wanted to be absolutely sure that none of it looks like it came from Radio Shack," says Darryl Anka. "To my eye, that mission was accomplished. The new hardware all looks unmistakably Star Trek, only more detailed and futuristic than previous designs."
"We were pulled into Star Trek kind of late," Price explains. "We started work only three weeks prior to the first day of shooting. There were times when we'd start to work at seven o'clock in the morning and work through till three the next afternoon. I wouldn't want to do that again, but this is probably the only kind of job where I'd be willing to work those kind of hours."
The special-effects facility for Star Wars II has begun work in the San Francisco area. "They contacted us recently, and it seems a good possibility that we'll be doing some work on Star Wars. They're going to be working on two, maybe three, sequels at the same time, and they'll need to subcontract out some of the work."
It's been a sort of open secret that Martin Landau has been seeking financing for a high-budget science fiction film. He hoped originally, according to various reports, to make the space epic in 3-D, but it now seems likely that that has proved impractical. "We have been doing pre-production drawings of ships and aliens for Landau," Price says. "With his background in science-fiction, his interest in it and the funding he has, I think this could very well be one of the better space films, right in there with Star Wars and Star Trek."
Reversing their usual method of creating things in miniature, the Price shop is supplying some oversized items for Universal's The Incredible Shrinking Woman. At one stage of her shrinkage, the film's star, Lily Tomlin, wears Barbie Doll clothes. Price is making the buttons, among other things. "This is actually harder than miniaturizing; it goes against all out instincts. When you make things grossly oversized, they have to be sloppy as hell. When you blow up a Barbie Doll purse, made of hot pink plastic, you see the mold marks, flashing, all the ragged edges."
Not all of Brick Price's science-fiction work is being done for films. "A company in the San Fernando Valley contacted us. They want us to design a space theme restaurant. It's going to be situated on a mountaintop and will be somewhat saucerish in shape. It will revolve, about once an hour, and is to be mounted on what will appear to be a beam of light - in reality the elevator shafts. We'll be supplying special effects, some miniatures and possibly some 3-D films for backgrounds."
Surely the most ambitious of events begins with Price and Anka's development of an idea for a space-flight simulation chamber - a two-man booth. "People would pay maybe $5 and experience the ride of their lives. It should be profitable enough and small enough to fit into any shopping mall or amusement park."
Inside the booth there's a wide-screen on which is projected; a true (Polaroid) 3-D color image of attacking spaceships; a hit on "your" ship; a screaming power-dive down through the atmosphere of an alien planet to a near crash; a last-minute recovery; and, finally, defeat of the alien ship. At one point, after your ship has sustained a hit, a mist enters the booth, out of which emerges a holographic image of the taunting alien out to destroy you. The sound comes from a noise-free computer storage system that can produce rumblings below the range of human hearing - rumblings you only feel.
"From the tests, the effect gives the viewer true vertigo. In fact, we're building in some fail-safe measures so you can choose the intensity of the experience. Each booth's computer will have a variety of programs, so you can enjoy it a number of times, a different experience each time."
Through acquaintances involved in feasibility studies for Disneyland, Magic Mountain and other parks, Price made contact with a Japanese company interested in buying 100 of these units. "Then they wanted us to develop essentially the same thing for a 200-seat theater. That led us to another Japanese company and a company in Munich, Germany, which is interested in our doing some designs for parks based entirely on science-fiction themes. There are plans for space parks in Munich and Detroit."
In addition to projects mentioned so far, Movie Miniatures is developing 1/20th scale dinosaurs for museum dioramas, designing book jackets using photographed models, doing cartoons to advertise "Kryptonite" (another Superman spin-off), working with Carl Sagan on his Man of the Cosmos PBS-TV series, supplying props for One Knight Stand (a new George Burns movie), continuing to make models for the kit companies (Revell, Bolink and AMT), supplying animation and models for various commercials ... and designing the facade of their own new plant, which will look like an entire city block miniaturized to 1/12th scale.
The radio-controlled race car screeches to a halt in front of him, and Price takes the controls. "I love toys," he says, laughing. "The way I look at business is that if you don't love it, you have no right working at it. I see too many people on the freeways, guys who are falling asleep at the wheel or enshrouded in cigar smoke - people who work at boring 9-to-5 jobs and generally look pretty miserable. I'd much rather be happy and poor than work at something I don't enjoy."
From all indications, sticking to that conviction is leading Brick Price to the enviable position of being both happy and rich. The one-time writer and editor has come a long way since he saw Star Wars.
"REJECT
UFO'S"
A Mad Magazine TV
Satire
from
"Mad Magazine"
Issue # 207 - June, 1979
© 1979 E.C. Publications, Inc.
Artist: Angelo Torres
Writer: Dick De Bartolo
Click any of the above thumbnails for larger views of the cover and full pages.
You can also view the entire satire one panel at a time by clicking HERE.
OFFICIAL SITE
PROJECT: U.F.O.
Review from
"Variety Television Reviews"
1978-1982 Vol. 12
© 1989 Garland Pub. Group
Jack Webb is using Air Force reports of thousands of investigations into UFO sightings over the past two decades as source material for his new series. "Project: U.F.O." is the title, and judging by the premiere episode, Webb will be walking a tightrope between, on the one hand, winding up each hour with a logical, prosaic explanation for what appear to be other-worldly visitations and, on the other, keeping the doors open to the millions of true believers who are convinced that "We Are Not Alone." Reflected light from a temperature inversion was the interpretation of a few of the sightings in the kickoff episode, and the rare occurrence of ball lightning in a violent thunderstorm explained a truck driver's particularly convincing close encounter. But Webb winked at the audience by allowing the series leads, two Air Force investigators played by William Jordan and Caskey Swaim, to deliver these official reports with something less than rock-hard conviction. Beyond the interesting schizophrenia over flying saucers, though, "Project: U.F.O." has very little going for it. Webb is still in the grip of a blazing love affair with the institutions of the U.S. Government, so the Air Force and the Pentagon are treated with the totemic reverence. And just as in the old "Dragnet" series, Webb's portentous off-screen voice tries to whip up some spurious documentary authenticity by pointlessly intoning the exact time and place of each new scene, no matter how trivial. Then there's the gallery of quirky, offbeat characters that shuffle on to inject a little drab realism. These eccentrics turn up so predictably in Jack Webb series that they're more tedious than out-and-out stereotypes would be. Finally, Webb's special effects people, feeding at the skimpy trough of a tv series budget, could conjure up nothing more than some flashing lights, a space ship that looked like a bargain-basement version of the one in "2001: A Space Odyssey", and a shadowy, skeletal, robot-like object that appeared as though it might collapse in a heap if someone sneezed at it. NBC probably made a mistake in selling a 30-second spot on "Project: U.F.O." to Columbia Pictures for a "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" trailer. The ad could only invite invidious comparisons between the truly astonishing optical effects of "Close Encounters" and the tackiness of the ones in "Project: U.F.O.".---Demp.
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Project: U.F.O.
Review from
"Written Out Of Television"
by Steven Lance
© 1995 [unknown] Press Inc.
Jack Webb, the talented no-nonsense actor and highly successful producer of fact-based series such as Dragnet, Adam-12 and Mobile One, looked to the stars for his next inspiration. Not the stars living in Hollywood, mind you, but the stars of the universe. The series, which investigated the sightings of U.F.O.'s was based on actual cases documented in the declassified files of the United States Air Force's Project Blue Book. Each of the twenty-six episodes opened with the following explanatory narration by Jack Webb: "Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw. [Shot of a drawing which resembled a twin wheel-shaped space station]. 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 twenty year search." Heading up the investigative team during the first season were U.S.A.F. Major Jake Gatlin and his assistant, U.S.A.F. Staff Sergeant Harry Fitz. Fitz was played by Caskey Swaim. The good Major was played by William Jordan, who went on to play Joseph Oppenheimer, a scientist working for the Delos Corporation in Beyond Westworld. This was an even shorter-lived series than Project: U.F.O., with a total of five episodes produced and only three airing between march 5 and March 19, 1980. Fitz's superior officer for the last thirteen investigations was Captain Ben Ryan, played by Edward Winter, who may be more familiar to television audiences as Barkley Foods Vice President William "Bud" Coleman, from the television adaptation of the hit motion picture 9 To 5. The television sitcom aired on ABC from March 25, 1982 to October 27, 1983. Winter is also familiar to tv viewers as the off-the-wall Cnl. Flagg, a recurring role he had on the hit series M*A*S*H.
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Project: U.F.O.
Review from
"Science Fiction Television Series"
by Mark Phillips & Frank Garcia
© 1996 McFarland & Company Inc.
Hollywood likes trends. When Star Wars blasted across film screens in 1977, "Battlestar: Galactica" was television's answer. When Superman flew through the theaters of America in 1978, the three tv networks answered with their own superhero programs in "The Greatest American Hero", "The Powers Of Matthew Star", "Spiderman", "Wonder Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk". But, when "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" made us look to the skies in 1977, Jack Webb, a producer most famous for "Dragnet", was clever to recognize that Project Blue Book's declassification by an act of Congress was an opportunity to dramatize the cases in a one-hour television format. Actor William Jordan, who played Major Jake Gatlin on the show's first season, recalls that "Project: U.F.O." was not the show he hoped it would be. "What was unfortunate was Jack was a very bright, innovative mind, but he was unable to go in any other direction other than his success with "Dragnet", explains Jordan. "Most of his storytelling cramped in terms of his dimensions. My character, Major Jake Gatlin, had no other life than just being with his Sergeant and traveling around and interviewing people. He had no family life, he had no dimension. I think that was the fault of the show. There was never any further dimension. It made them out to be cardboard characters". "We were the number one rated show for a season. This was about the same time that 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind' came out. It was very timely, and people were very curious. The first several shows were very promising of what might be revealed that the Air Force perhaps covered up for years. Jack, even though he was a very talented man ... didn't want input into his ideas". Jordan candidly reveals that, "Jack and I parted in that series after about a year, because he was intolerant, not wanting suggestions. What about showing that we have a life of some kind other than just Air Force staff? Don't I have friends? If you give people the same thing every week, in that same tone of voice like Dragnet, for two, three or four years, that's pretty boring stuff". Jordan is kinder to his co-star on the show, Caskey Swaim. "Caskey was a very pleasant, cooperative actor ... He did a very nice character that he developed, and he had a very nice quality". To properly adapt casefiles for a prime-time tv series, it was necessary to "dramatize" the events and structure them to be entertaining and accessible. As Jordan explains, "It's not so much fictionalized as Jack chose to put them together in a fashion that fit his purposes at the time. There were some liberties taken. The way they compiled, so to speak, the story construction. It's part of television to be aware of the constraints of time and the needs for the hour to fill. I never got to be a contributor in the sense of seeing the original "Project Blue Book" stories. I was never given that opportunity". Jordan laments that if the producers had been more creative and allowed the show wider parameters, "we would have been a much more profound experience for everyone". Jordan also wanted stories that were more pointed about the phenomenon of UFO's. "I felt there was more to be learned had we sought the direction of trying to be bold in storytelling. In the outcome of the episodes, a lot of the resolutions were very matter-of-fact and there were no abstractions. In my way of thinking, it would have been better had there been more mysterious stories rather than the indirect reference to balloons and gases. In many cases, we had open-and-shut cases". As to his own thoughts about UFO's, Jordan wonders if Air Force personnel know more than they are revealing, "and don't quite know how to disseminate to people. I think they don't know how to make them palatable". Lots of viewers thought Jordan did know all about the "Project Blue Book". He reports that fans assumed he knew much more than he ever revealed on the show, and they would write to him asking for more information". If I wrote back and told them I didn't know, a lot of them would be disappointed or be angry that I would not be forthcoming with information. There was a resentment sometimes that I would not be able to answer their questions about the phenomena. Because I'm on television playing an Air Force officer doing this, I must have knowledge of a lot more than I would be able to tell them". If Jordan looked official and well cast in the role of Major Jake Gatlin, it was because he did serve in the Air Force and served time in the Korean War in 1959. "It was not like I needed training to be an Air Force officer", he says. "I spent three years and nine months as an officer". As a result of Jordan's background, he rightly could call himself an authority in the portrayal of such military men. "I used to have a lot of differences [with Webb] about military bearing and behavior I would have as an Air Force officer, as opposed to nuts-and-bolts, stilted kind of Dragnet qualities that were sometimes imposed on me. I felt I had a beam on the character and what this character might think as opposed to military bearing imposed on certain projects like this. After all, these characters are people first". When Jordan left the show at the end of its first year, actor Edward Winter took over as Captain Ben Ryan, while Caskey Swaim carried on. The show was cancelled after 13 episodes of the second season. In the end, Jordan remarks that "Every time I run into someone who was at NBC and knew the show, they would say, 'We're sorry we didn't listen to you more closely, and that we let Mr. Webb influence us so drastically.'"
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