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"The end result was a series which fell into a sort of niche a la Scooby Doo, only for adults. Someone would come up with this wacky UFO hoax and in comes the series' lead stars to say, Jinkies, the whole thing was a scam. Zoinks!"

---from the article

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"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This [diagram] is [based on] the wheel he said he saw. These [photos]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 20 year search." Cool opening narrative, eh? Too bad the series itself was so boring.

To be fair: the series concept must've sounded nifty on paper: make a series based on the actual reports of what is now nicknamed "Project Blue Book." The problem is: this "project" was mostly used just to curb mass hysteria. We're not trying to make conspiracy theories here; just reality checks. It wasn't like an official report was going to say, "Yes, people of Earth; there are spaceships that might abduct you at any time. Have a nice day." So the majority of the Project Blue Book reports are of false UFO reports, to help people to understand how this or that natural phenomenon was mistakenly reported as a UFO. As a series, these false reports were about as exciting as a magician who shows you a trick in the first five minutes, then spends 55 whole minutes to explain how he did the trick. While this sounds like a good mystery series; no. If anything it was 5 minutes of fun sci-fi and 55 minutes of techno-babble boredom.

The end result was a series which fell into a sort of niche a la Scooby Doo, only for adults. Someone would come up with this wacky UFO hoax and in comes the series' lead stars to say, Jinkies, the whole thing was a scam. Zoinks! The bigger problem? 1978 was the year after Star Wars. Nobody wanted to have some scientist in the back room insist that Star Wars was bunk, because there's "no life in outer space." The series tried to appease such sci-fi fans, with some sort of blurb or plot twist as if to say, "It was a hoax...or was it?" at the very end. Yet for the most part the series shot itself in its own foot, making every UFO story sound like a scam. Even the premiere had a newspaper headline insisting that "UFOs Fail To Appear." Ironic, since that was the series' problem.

It's fair enough to say that this series lasted the longest of any one-season wonder on this Worst Of List. Indeed: UFO fans kept this series on the air for 26 episodes, as they waited in vain for an episode about an FBI report that "proved" aliens exist. As soon as they found out that wasn't going to happen, Project UFO was dishonorably discharged.

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