Sunday, November 4, 2018

Sunday Fun: Project U.F.O. Opening




A "mid-season replacement" series, Project U.F.O. satiated those viewers who were into tales of space visitors. The NBC series premiered in February of 1978 to some fanfare, and I was there.

Project U.F.O. was a Jack Webb production, and to make sure there was no mistake who was behind this series, the man himself narrated the opening titles with his trademarked voice and authoritative, and dry as toast, diction.

A typical episode featured stars William Jordan and Caskey Swaim (or the second season's Edward Winter) investigating a UFO sighting. Over the television hour the U.S. Air Force's intrepid special team would interview each individual, who in turn, would recount their story of the event; in Rashomon-like fashion, but without outright contradiction (they did witness something not of this Earth, after all), we'd see essentially the same sequence but with variations based on that person's perspective.

Now that I think about it, the show could be dull at times, even if stories of Unidentified Flying Objects were "in" back then. (Keep in mind that Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been released just a few months before Project hit the airwaves....hoping to catch the wave.)

The final episode of Project U.F.O. landed in July of 1979.

2 comments:

Jon said...

Sounds like SCTV's "U.F.O. Sharkey" is a better bet.

Simon St. Laurent said...

Brilliant.