Project Blue Book has been sealed away in the proverbial Area 51 of cancelation by cable channel History after two seasons on the air.
History’s Project Blue Book cancelation, reported via Deadline, occurs a little over a month after its March 24 airing of the show’s Season 2 finale, which ended things with the renewal-entreating device of a cliffhanger regarding the fate of one of its two main characters. However, for reasons not yet known, the network didn’t bite, instead opting not to renew the series, which was a production of A+E Studios and Compari Entertainment. The network also confirmed the long-expected news of its cancelation of medieval series Knightfall.
The aforementioned Season 2 finale, “Operation Mainbrace,” utilized the backdrop of escalating Cold War tensions, to place our tenacious investigative duo—the biographically-based Dr. J. Allen Hynek (Aidan Gillen) and fictionalized fact-based representation U.S. Air Force Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey)—in a classic cliffhanger scenario, leaving the fate of the latter in flux—perhaps permanently. Indeed, Quinn—who’d just become a believer after spending the show’s entirety as a skeptic—was last seen venturing off in a mini-submarine to investigate a bioluminescent phenomenon amid a maritime standoff between the U.S. and Soviet Navy, when his vehicle—and the mysterious object—suddenly disappeared, leaving him presumed dead, much to Hynek’s incredulity.
The cancelation, especially after a cliffhanger like that, will obviously disappoint the fandom that Project Blue Book has accrued and held over the past few seasons, due to the show’s ability to cultivate actual reports and incidences investigated by the real-life Project Blue Book (which operated from 1952 to 1969), and distill those elements into dramatic form—albeit with A LOT of narrative liberties taken—to create a peak television quasi-history that was just educational enough about the history of UFO sightings in the 20th century. Moreover, Season 2, Episode 6 even saw the series venture past its own timeline, showing Dr. Hynek and wife Mimi (Laura Mennell) on the set of director Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, depicting Hynek’s real-life gig as a consultant for the film, having developed the scale from which the film’s title was derived.