Project Blue Book: Green Fireballs light up the sky
Project Blue Book examines the real-life cases from the late 1940’s of green fireballs flying over military installations. In particular, Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories where top secret atomic weapons testing was going on.
Project Blue Book takes a look at the mysterious green fireballs that were lighting up the skies around the Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories in New Mexico in the late 40’s. From the promo for this week’s episode, we can see that a nuclear explosion might be imminent because a scientist from one of the test facilities (called White Forest but is clearly representing White Sands) exclaims that the “Launch sequence started on it’s own. We did not initiate it!”
Meanwhile, panic ensues at the test site because some military personnel are delivering equipment to the faux neighborhood that is set up to observe the effects of a nuclear blast. They are ordered to evacuate.
While the scientists fight to stop the impending disaster, suddenly the system resets itself. Relieved, the remaining officers on the ground are ready to go back to work when mysterious green orbs flying in formation buzz them overhead.
Of course, Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Captain Michael Quinn are called in to investigate the sighting. This time it appears the two men have flipped roles. While the professor is quick to dismiss the reports as a meteor, Quinn has his doubts.
The men end up witnessing the phenomenon known as the green fireballs. When they are spotted, they are flying in formation so that rules out the possibility of the objects being meteors. We see that the Man in Black shows up just in time to tell the professor that “You’re nearly ready.”
Hynek startled by this man’s presence in the shadows asks, “Ready for what?” At the time of the fireball sightings, we were in the midst of the Cold War. Speculation was rampant that they were Russian spy planes.
As for the meteor theory, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics, led a recovery group to the area where debris would have fallen based on the flight trajectory of the objects. Nothing was found.
Some also suggested that the fireballs were actually ball lightning. That could not be proven either.
However, it is interesting to note that sightings were heaviest during World War II and after particularly around nuclear facilities. Some UFO experts claim that the atomic bomb and the beginning of the tech boom piqued the interest of the extraterrestrials prompting them to see what we were doing.
It also appears that Allen will be going down another rabbit hole this week. Does the Man in Black give him another clue? Will they have to close this case by claiming it is a meteor? Watch Project Blue Book on Tuesday, Feb. 12 at 10 p.m. on the History Channel to find out the answers to these questions.
Have you been tuning into Project Blue Book? Let us know what you think in the comments.