Weird old title sequences: Project UFO

Scary titles, silly series

8th September 2009 Rob Buckley Classic TV, US TV, Weird old title sequences 3 Comments

UFOs. What the hell are they? Well, as Chris Moyles recently pointed out to Robbie Williams, they’re Unidentified Flying Objects. That’s right, by definition, if we knew what they were, they wouldn’t be UFOs, so stop pretending you, like, know anything about them, right.

Back in the distant past (the 50s, 60s, and 70s), when everyone who looked up into the sky and saw something they didn’t recognise (eg a planet, a star, a plane, another plane, yet another plane) and seemed to think

  1. They’d seen a flying saucer
  2. We’d want to know they’d seen a flying saucer

the US air force decided to investigate the reports everyone filed – at great cost to the US taxpayer. The investigation was called Project Bluebook and after years of work, found absolutely nothing to prove that UFOs=flying saucers from beyond the seventh galaxy.

Presumably to reassure the US taxpayer that all the effort and money spent on looking for aliens during those heady days of gas crises and stagflation wasn’t wasted, the USAF agreed to help produce a TV series dramatising some of these investigations. It was called Project UFO.

The basic format was as follows:

  1. Some dweeb out in the backwoods somewhere sees something that looks like a spaceship
  2. He or she reports it to USAF
  3. Two USAF officers (different depending on the show’s season) turn up at the scene of the sighting
  4. They find strange stuff
  5. They ask around town to find out what kind of dweeb they’re dealing with
  6. An entirely plausible rational explanation for the sighting presents itself
  7. They go back to their base and report their inconclusive results
  8. In a major sop by the producers to wacko UFO believers, the USAF officers suddenly realise they’d overlooked something and it was probably a flying saucer from beyond the seventh galaxy after all

And that’s basically every episode for two seasons. Nevertheless, to impressionable people like seven-year old MediumRob, it was absolutely terrifying and convincing since it was "based on real events". Now? Not so much.

Anyway, the show, to give itself an air of verisimilitude, had a lengthy, wordy intro title sequence explaining its ‘truthful’ origins. But the titles were creepy arsed construction diagrams of UFOs that people HAD DEFINITELY SEEN. DEFINITELY. OH YES. YES, THE ALIENS DID HAVE THE FACES OF HORSES. IT’S TRUE.

Behold then, the weird old title sequence for Project UFO. Don’t have nightmares.

Author

  • I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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