Articles, J Allen Hynek, Project Bluebook, UFOs

J. ALLEN HYNEK

Meet J. Allen Hynek, the Astronomer Who First Classified UFO ‘Close Encounters’

https://www.history.com/news/j-allen-hynek-ufos-project-blue-book

When the U.S. government tapped the academic to help investigate UFOs, he was initially a skeptic. But not for long.

It’s September 1947, and the U.S. Air Force has a problem. A rash of reports about mysterious objects in the skies has the public on edge and the military baffled. The Air Force needs to figure out what’s going on—and fast. It launches an investigation it calls Project Sign.

By early 1948 the team realizes it needs some outside expertise to sift through the reports it’s receiving—specifically an astronomer who can determine which cases are easily explained by astronomical phenomena, such as planets, stars or meteors.

For J. Allen Hynek, then the 37-year-old director at Ohio State University’s McMillin Observatory, it would be a classic case of being in the right place at the right time—or, as he may have occasionally lamented, the wrong place at the wrong one. 

READ MORE: Interactive Map: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by the U.S. Government

The adventure begins

DR. J. ALLEN HYNEK WITH POLICE CHIEF ROBERT R. TAYLOR OF DEXTER, MICHIGAN, GOING OVER A COUNTY MAP SPOTTING WHERE THE FLYING OBJECTS WERE SEEN, 1966.

Hynek had worked for the government during the war, developing new defense technologies like the first radio-controlled fuse, so he already had a high-security clearance and was a natural go-to.

“One day, I had a visit from several men from the technical center at Wright-Patterson Air Force base, which was only 60 miles away in Dayton,” Hynek later wrote. “With some obvious embarrassment, the men eventually brought up the subject of ‘flying saucers’ and asked me if I would care to serve as consultant to the Air Force on the matter… The job didn’t seem as though it would take too much time, so I agreed.”

Little did Hynek realize that he was about to begin a lifelong odyssey that would make him one of the most famous and, at times, controversial scientists of the 20 century. Nor could he have guessed how much his own thinking about UFOs would change over that period as he persisted in bringing rigorous scientific inquiry to the subject.

“I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense,” he recalled.

Project Sign ran for a year, during which the team reviewed 237 cases. In Hynek’s final report, he noted that about 32 percent of incidents could be attributed to astronomical phenomena, while another 35 percent had other explanations, such as balloons, rockets, flares or birds. Of the remaining 33 percent, 13 percent didn’t offer enough evidence to yield an explanation. That left 20 percent that provided investigators with some evidence but still couldn’t be explained.

The Air Force was loath to use the term “unidentified flying object,” so the mysterious 20 percent were simply classified as “unidentified.”

In February 1949, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge. While Sign offered at least a pretense of scientific objectivity, Grudge seems to have been dismissive from the start, just as its angry-sounding name suggests. Hynek, who played no role in Project Grudge, said it “took as its premise that UFOs simply could not be.” Perhaps not surprisingly, its report, issued at the end of 1949, concluded that the phenomena posed no danger to the United States, having resulted from mass hysteria, deliberate hoaxes, mental illness or conventional objects that the witnesses had misinterpreted as otherworldly. It also suggested the subject wasn’t worth further study.

Project Blue Book is born

That might’ve been the end of it. But UFO incidents continued, including some puzzling reports from the Air Force’s own radar operators. The national media began treating the phenomenon more seriously; LIFE magazine did a 1952 cover story, and even the widely respected TV journalist Edward R. Murrow devoted a program to the topic, including an interview with Kenneth Arnold, a pilot whose 1947 sighting of mysterious objects over Mount Rainier in Washington state popularized the term “flying saucer.” The Air Force had little choice but to revive Project Grudge, which soon morphed into the more benignly named Project Blue Book.

Hynek joined Project Blue Book in 1952 and would remain with it until its demise in 1969. For him, it was a side gig as he continued to teach and to pursue other, non-UFO research, at Ohio State. In 1960 he moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to chair its astronomy department.

As before, Hynek’s role was to review the reports of UFO sightings and determine whether there was a logical astronomical explanation. Typically that involved a lot of unglamorous paperwork; but now and then, for an especially puzzling case, he had a chance to get out into the field.

There he discovered something he might never have learned from simply reading the files: how normal the people who reported seeing UFOs tended to be. “The witnesses I interviewed could have been lying, could have been insane or could have been hallucinating collectively—but I do not think so,” he recalled in his 1977 book, The Hynek UFO Report.

“Their standing in the community, their lack of motive for perpetration of a hoax, their own puzzlement at the turn of events they believe they witnessed, and often their great reluctance to speak of the experience—all lend a subjective reality to their UFO experience.”

For the rest of his life Hynek would deplore the ridicule that people who reported a UFO sighting often had to endure—which, in turn, caused untold numbers of others to never come forward. It wasn’t just unfair to the individuals involved, but meant a loss of data that might be useful to researchers.

“Given the controversial nature of the subject, it’s understandable that both scientists and witnesses are reluctant to come forward,” says Jacques Vallee, co-author with Dr. Hynek of The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. “Because their life is going to change. There are cases where their house is broken into. People throw stones at their kids. There are family crises—divorce and so on… You become the person who has seen something that other people have not seen. And there is a lot of suspicion attached to that.”

READ MOREThe 5 Most Credible Modern UFO Sightings

Eyes on the skies—and the Soviets

In the late 1950s, the Air Force faced a more urgent problem than hypothetical UFOs. On October 4, 1957, the U.S.S.R. surprised the world by launching Sputnik, the first artificial space satellite—and a serious blow to Americans’ sense of technological superiority.

At that point, Hynek had taken leave from Ohio State to work on a satellite-tracking system at Harvard, notes Mark O’Connell in his 2017 biography, The Close Encounters Man. Suddenly Hynek was on TV and holding frequent press conferences to assure Americans that their scientists were closely monitoring the situation. On October 21, 1957, he appeared on the cover of LIFE with his boss, the Harvard astronomer Fred Whipple, and their colleague Don Lautman. It was his first taste of the national celebrity, but wouldn’t be the last.

With Sputnik circling the earth every 98 minutes, often visible to the naked eye, many Americans began looking skyward, and UFO sightings continued unabated.

From Dr. Hynek to Mr. UFO

DR. J. ALLEN HYNEK, TELLING NEWSMEN AT A PRESS CONFERENCE THAT THE PHOTOGRAPH HE IS HOLDING, <EM>WIDELY CIRCULATED IN THE NEWS MEDIA AS A UFO SPOTTED IN MICHIGAN,&IS A TIME EXPOSURE OF THE CRESCENT MOON AND THE PLANET VENUS.

By the 1960s, Hynek had emerged as the nation’s—perhaps the world’s—top expert on UFOs, quoted widely in his capacity as scientific consultant to Project Blue Book. But behind the scenes, he chafed at what he perceived as the project’s mandate to debunk UFO sightings. He was also critical of its procedures, judging the Blue Book staff “grossly inadequate,” its communication with outside scientists “appalling” and its statistical methods “nothing less than a travesty.”

The feeling, apparently, was mutual. In an unpublished manuscript unearthed by biographer O’Connell, Air Force Major Hector Quintanilla, who headed the project from 1963 to 1969, writes that he considered Hynek a “liability.”

Why did he stick around? Hynek offered a number of explanations. “But most importantly,” he wrote, “Blue Book had the store of data (as poor as they were), and my association with it gave me access to those data.”

If Hynek often angered UFO debunkers, like Quintanilla, he didn’t always please the believers, either.

In 1966, for example, he went to Michigan to investigate multiple reports of strange lights in the sky. When he offered the theory that it might have been an optical illusion involving swamp gas, he found himself widely derided in the press and “swamp gas” became a punchline for newspaper cartoonists. More seriously, two Michigan Congressmen, including Gerald R. Ford (who later became president), took umbrage at the apparent insult to their state’s citizenry and called for a Congressional hearing.

Testifying at the hearing, Hynek saw an opportunity to plead the case he’d been making to the Air Force for years, but with little success. “Specifically, it is my opinion that the body of data accumulated since 1948…deserves close scrutiny by a civilian panel of physical and social scientists…for the express purpose of determining whether a major problem really exists.”

Hynek would soon get his wish, or so it seemed. Now facing greater scrutiny in Congress, the Air Force established a civilian committee of scientists to investigate UFOs, chaired by a University of Colorado physicist, Dr. Edward U. Condon. Hynek, who would not be on the committee, was hopeful at first. But he lost faith two years later when the committee issued what came to be known as the Condon Report.

He called the report “rambling” and “poorly organized” and Condon’s introductory summary “singularly slanted.” Though the report cited numerous UFO incidents its researchers couldn’t explain, it concluded that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.” It was exactly what Hynek wouldn’t have wanted.

The following year, 1969, Project Blue Book shut down for good.

After Blue Book, a new chapter

UFO EXPERT DR. J. ALLEN HYNEK HOLDS A PIPE AND ONE OF HIS MAGAZINE EDITORIALS WHILE SERVING AS TECHNICAL ADVISOR FOR THE FILM, ‘CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.’

The end of Blue Book proved a turning point for Hynek. As O’Connell writes, he “found himself suddenly liberated from the frustrations, compromises and bullying of the U.S. Air Force. He was a free man.”

Meanwhile, sightings continued around the world—UFOs, Hynek later quipped, “apparently did not read the Condon Report”—and he went on with his research.

In 1972, he published his first book, The UFO Experience. Among its contributions to the field, it introduced Hynek’s classifications of UFO incidents he called Close Encounters.

Close Encounters of the First Kind meant UFOs seen at a close enough range to make out some details. In a Close Encounter of the Second Kind, the UFO had a physical effect, such as scorching trees, frightening animals or causing car motors to suddenly conk out. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, witnesses reported seeing occupants in or near a UFO.

Though less remembered now, Hynek also provided three classifications for more distant encounters. Those involved UFOs seen at night (“nocturnal lights”) during the day (“daylight discs”) or on radar screens (“radar/visual”).

The most dramatic of Hynek’s classifications, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, would, of course, become the title of a Steven Spielberg movie released in 1977. O’Connell reports that Hynek was paid $1,000 for the use of the title, another $1,000 for the rights to use stories from the book and $1,500 for three days of technical consulting—hardly a windfall by Hollywood standards. He also had a brief cameo in the film, playing an awestruck scientist when the alien craft comes into close view.

In 1978, Hynek retired from teaching, but he continued to collect and evaluate UFO reports under the auspices of the Center for UFO Studies, which he had founded in 1973. The organization continues to this day.

Hynek died in 1986 at age 75, the result of a brain tumor. He hadn’t solved the riddle of UFOs but, perhaps more than anyone else, he had made trying to solve that riddle a legitimate scientific pursuit.

“The main thing I got from my father in this whole thing was how important it was to keep an open mind,” says his son, Joel Hynek, who as a young ham-radio operator used to record many of his father’s witness interviews. “He kept saying, ‘You know, we don’t know still everything there is to know about the universe… There could be aspects of physics that we haven’t come upon yet.’”

WATCH: Full episodes of Project Blue Book online now.

The Hynek Classification System

Witnesses to UFOs report many different shapes and sizes. From discs to cigars to triangles and almost anything you could imagine. Despite the varied shapes and sizes, researchers have tried to organize these sightings into neat little boxes.

In reality, this can’t be done. However, there have been two systems developed which are as close as we can get to categorizing sighting reports. One is the Jacques Vallee system, which is quite extensive. The other is the Dr. J. Allen Hynek system, which is by far the most widely used, and from which the term, “close encounters” was coined.

According to Dr. Hynek:

This is the traditional method of describing an event as a distant or close encounter of the first, second, or third kind. The investigator should be aware that, unless the case report can reasonably rule out natural and man-made sources, the HYNEK rationale declares it to be a non-case, and so no value is given.

DE-1 – Nocturnal Light

DE-2 – Daylight Disc

DE-3 – Radar-visual

CE-1 – Light/object in Proximity

CE-2 – Physical Trace

CE-3 – Occupant

UFO reports differ in many details. But there are a number of similarities that recur in such features as shape, maneuverability, appearance, disappearance, sound, and color. There are several basic observational categories into which sighting reports may be classified.

A. Relatively Distant Sightings

1. Nocturnal Lights. These are sightings of well-defined lights in the night sky whose appearance and/or motion are not explainable in terms of conventional light sources. The lights appear most often as red, blue, orange, or white. They form the largest group of UFO reports.

See also Summary of Signature and Statistical Data RF, Unidentified Objects Observed During ICBM Missions

2. Daylight Discs. Daytime sightings are generally of oval or disc-shaped, metallic-appearing objects. They can appear high in the sky or close to the ground, and they are often reported to hover. They can seem to disappear with astounding speed.

3. Radar-Visual cases. Of special significance are unidentified “blips” on radar screens that coincide with and confirm simultaneous visual sightings by the same or other witnesses. These cases are infrequent.

B. Relatively Close Sightings (within 200 yards)

1. Close Encounters of the First Kind (CE-I). Though the witness observes a UFO nearby, there appears to be no interaction with either the witness or the environment.

2. Close Encounters of the Second Kind (CE-II). These encounters include details of the interaction between the UFO and the environment which may vary from interference with car ignition systems and electronic gear to imprints or burns on the ground and physical effects on plants, animals, and humans.

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE-III). In this category, occupants of a UFO – entities that are human-like (“humanoid”) or not humanlike in appearance – have been reported. There is usually no direct contact or communication with the witness. However, in recent years, reports of incidents involving very close contact – even detainment of witnesses – have increased.

4. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (CE-IV). This category has only recently been created, and is one step beyond Hynek’s “Third Kind.” This category deals with alien abduction, and/or direct communication with an alien being.

The Kinds of Evidence

See also Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland

In addition to eyewitness reports, scientific evidence for the presence of something very unusual falls in these categories:

1. Physical Traces. Compressed and dehydrated vegetation, broken tree branches, and imprints in the ground have all been reported. Sometimes a soil sample taken from an area where a UFO had been seen close to the ground will be determined, through laboratory analysis, to have undergone heating or other chemical changes not true of a control sample.

2. Medical Records. Medical verification of burns, eye inflammations, temporary blindness, and other physiological effects attributed to encounters with UFOs – even the healing of previous conditions – can also constitute evidence, especially when no other cause for the effect can be determined by the medical examiner.

3. Radarscope Photos. A tape of traces from a radar screen on which a “blip” of a UFO is appearing is a powerful adjunct to a visual sighting because it can be studied at leisure instead of during the heat of the moment of the actual sighting.

4. Photographs. While it might seem that photographs would be the best evidence for UFOs, this has not been the case. Hoaxes can be exposed very easily. But even those photos that pass the test of instrumented analysis and/or computer enhancement often show nothing more than an object of unknown nature, usually some distance from the camera, and very often out of focus.

For proper analysis of a photo, the negative must be available and the photographer, witnesses, and circumstances must be known. In a few exceptional cases, photos do exist that have been thoroughly examined and appear to show a structured craft.

J. Allen Hynek

From Wikipedia

Josef Allen Hynek
BornMay 1, 1910
ChicagoIllinois, U.S.
DiedApril 27, 1986 (aged 75)
ScottsdaleArizona, U.S.
OccupationAstrophysicistufologist
Spouse(s)Martha Doone Alexander​​(m. 1932; div. 1939)​Mimi Curtis
​​(m. 1942)​
ChildrenScottRoxaneJoelPaulRoss

Josef Allen Hynek (May 1, 1910 – April 27, 1986) was an American astronomerprofessor, and ufologist.[1] He is perhaps best remembered for his UFO research. Hynek acted as scientific advisor to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force under three projects: Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1951) and Project Blue Book (1952–1969).

In later years, he conducted his own independent UFO research, developing the “Close Encounter” classification system. He was among the first people to conduct scientific analysis of reports and especially of trace evidence purportedly left by UFOs.[2][third-party source needed]

Contents

Early life

Allen Hynek (left) and Jacques Vallée

Hynek was born in Chicago to Czech parents. In 1931, Hynek received a B.S. from the University of Chicago. In 1935, he completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics at Yerkes Observatory. He joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio State University in 1936. He specialized in the study of stellar evolution and in the identification of spectroscopic binary stars.

Career

During World War II, Hynek was a civilian scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he helped to develop the United States Navy‘s radio proximity fuze.

After the war, Hynek returned to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio State, rising to full professor in 1950. In 1953, Hynek submitted a report on the fluctuations in the brightness and color of starlight and daylight, with an emphasis on daytime observations.[3]

In 1956, he left to join Professor Fred Whipple, the Harvard astronomer, at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which had combined with the Harvard Observatory at Harvard. Hynek had the assignment of directing the tracking of an American space satellite, a project for the International Geophysical Year in 1956 and thereafter. In addition to over 200 teams of amateur scientists around the world that were part of Operation Moonwatch, there were also 12 photographic Baker-Nunn stations. A special camera was devised for the task and a prototype was built and tested and then stripped apart again when, on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched its first satellite, Sputnik 1.

After completing his work on the satellite program, Hynek went back to teaching, taking the position of professor and chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University in 1960.

Evolution of opinion on UFOs

Skepticism

In response to numerous reports of “flying saucers”, the United States Air Force established Project Sign in 1948 to examine sightings of unidentified flying objects. Hynek was contacted to act as a scientific consultant to Project Sign. He studied UFO reports and decided whether the phenomena described therein suggested known astronomical objects.

When Project Sign hired Hynek, he was skeptical of UFO reports. Hynek suspected that they were made by unreliable witnesses, or by persons who had misidentified man-made or natural objects. In 1948, Hynek said that “the whole subject seems utterly ridiculous,” and described it as a fad that would soon pass.[4]

In his 1977 book, Hynek said that he enjoyed his role as a debunker for the Air Force. He also said that debunking was what the Air Force expected of him.

Change of opinion

In April 1953, Hynek wrote a report for the Journal of the Optical Society of America titled “Unusual Aerial Phenomena,” which contained one of his best-known statements:

Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and people should not be taught that it is. The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility. Is there … any residue that is worthy of scientific attention? Or, if there isn’t, does not an obligation exist to say so to the public—not in words of open ridicule but seriously, to keep faith with the trust the public places in science and scientists?[5]

In 1953, Hynek was an associate member of the Robertson Panel, which concluded that there was nothing anomalous about UFOs and that a public relations campaign should be undertaken to debunk the subject and reduce public interest. Hynek would later lament that the Robertson Panel had helped make UFOs a disreputable field of study.

As UFO reports continued to be made, some of the testimonies, especially by military pilots and police officers, were deeply puzzling to Hynek. He once said, “As a scientist, I must be mindful of the lessons of the past; all too often it has happened that matters of great value to science were overlooked because the new phenomenon did not fit the accepted scientific outlook of the time.”[6]

In a 1985 interview, when asked what caused his change of opinion, Hynek responded, “Two things, really. One was the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. They wouldn’t give UFOs the chance of existing, even if they were flying up and down the street in broad daylight. Everything had to have an explanation. I began to resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, because I still thought they weren’t going about it in the right way. You can’t assume that everything is black no matter what. Secondly, the caliber of the witnesses began to trouble me. Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and I knew them to be fairly well-trained, so this is when I first began to think that, well, maybe there was something to all this.”

Hynek remained with Project Sign after it became Project Grudge (though he was far less involved in Grudge than he had been in Sign). Project Grudge was replaced with Project Blue Book in early 1952, and Hynek remained as scientific consultant. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, Blue Book’s first director, held Hynek in high regard: “Dr. Hynek was one of the most impressive scientists I met while working on the UFO project, and I met a good many. He didn’t do two things that some of them did: give you the answer before he knew the question; or immediately begin to expound on his accomplishments in the field of science.”[7]

Though Hynek thought Ruppelt was a capable director who steered Project Blue Book in the right direction, Ruppelt headed Blue Book for only a few years. Hynek has also stated his opinion that after Ruppelt’s departure, Project Blue Book was little more than a public relations exercise, further noting that little or no research was undertaken using the scientific method.

Turnaround[edit]

Hynek began occasionally disagreeing publicly with the conclusions of Blue Book. By the early 1960s—after about a decade and a half of study—Clark writes that “Hynek’s apparent turnaround on the UFO question was an open secret.”[5] Only after Blue Book was formally dissolved did Hynek speak more openly about his “turnaround”.

Hynek speculated that his personality was a factor in the Air Force keeping him on as a consultant for over two decades.

Some other ufologists thought that Hynek was being disingenuous or even duplicitous in his turnaround. Physicist James E. McDonald, for example, wrote to Hynek in 1970, castigating him for what McDonald saw as his lapses, and suggesting that, when evaluated by later generations, retired Marine Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe would be regarded as a more objective, honest, and scientific ufologist.[8]

It was during the late stages of Blue Book in the 1960s that Hynek began speaking openly about his disagreements and disappointments with the Air Force. Among the cases about which he openly dissented with the Air Force were the highly publicized Portage County UFO chase, in which several police officers chased a UFO for half an hour, and the encounter of Lonnie Zamora, a police officer who reported an encounter with a metallic, egg-shaped aircraft near Socorro, New Mexico.

In late March 1966 in Dexter, Michigan, two days of mass UFO sightings were reported, and received significant publicity. After studying the reports, Hynek offered a provisional hypothesis for some of the sightings: a few of about 100 witnesses had mistaken swamp gas for something more spectacular. At the press conference where he made his announcement, Hynek repeatedly and strenuously stated that swamp gas was a plausible explanation for only a portion of the Michigan UFO reports, and certainly not for UFO reports in general. But much to his chagrin, Hynek’s qualifications of his hypothesis were largely overlooked, and the term swamp gas was repeated ad infinitum in relation to UFO reports. The explanation was subject to national derision.

In his reply dated October 7, 1968, to a request for scientific recommendations regarding Blue Book from Colonel Raymond Sleeper, commander of the USAF Foreign Technology Division, Hynek noted that Blue Book suffered from numerous procedural problems and a lack of resources, which rendered its efforts “totally inadequate”. Hynek also noted that one wag had bestowed upon Blue Book the epithet of “Society for the Explanation of the Uninvestigated”.[9]

Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS)[edit]

Main article: Center for UFO Studies

Hynek was the founder and first head of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). Founded in 1973 in EvanstonIllinois (but now based in Chicago), CUFOS advocates for scientific analysis of UFO cases. CUFOS’s extensive archives include valuable files from civilian research groups such as NICAP, one of the most popular UFO research groups of the 1950s and 1960s.

Speech before the United Nations[edit]

In November 1978, Hynek presented a statement on UFOs before the United Nations General Assembly‘s Special Political Committee on behalf of himself, Jacques Vallée, and Claude Poher. The speech was prepared and approved by the three authors.[10] Their objective was to initiate a centralized, United Nations authority on UFOs.

UFO origin hypotheses[edit]

At the MUFON annual symposium in 1973, held in Akron, Ohio, Hynek first expressed his doubts regarding the extraterrestrial (formerly interplanetary or intergalactic) hypothesis, in a speech titled “The Embarrassment of the Riches”. He was aware that the number of UFO sightings was much higher than was reflected in the Project Blue Book statistics. “A few good sightings a year, over the world, would bolster the extraterrestrial hypothesis—but many thousands every year? From remote regions of space? And to what purpose? To scare us by stopping cars, and disturbing animals, and puzzling us with their seemingly pointless antics?”[11]

In a paper presented to the Joint Symposium of the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics in Los Angeles in 1975, he wrote, “If you object, I ask you to explain—quantitatively, not qualitatively—the reported phenomena of materialization and dematerialization, of shape changes, of the noiseless hovering in the Earth’s gravitational field, accelerations that—for an appreciable mass—require energy sources far beyond present capabilities—even theoretical capabilities, the well-known and often reported E-M (electro-magnetic interference) effect, the psychic effects on percipients, including purported telepathic communications.”[12]

In 1977, at the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, Hynek presented his thoughts in his speech “What I Really Believe About UFOs”. “I do believe”, he said, “that the UFO phenomenon as a whole is real, but I do not mean necessarily that it’s just one thing. We must ask whether the diversity of observed UFOs … all spring from the same basic source, as do weather phenomena, which all originate in the atmosphere”, or whether they differ “as a rain shower differs from a meteor, which in turn differs from a cosmic-ray shower.” We must not ask, Hynek said, simply which hypothesis can explain the most facts, but rather which hypothesis can explain the most puzzling facts.[13]

Regarding hypotheses of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and extradimensional intelligence (EDI), Hynek continued, “There is sufficient evidence to defend both”. As evidence for the ETI hypothesis, he mentioned the cases involving radar as good evidence of something solid, as well as the cases of physical evidence. Then he turned to defending the EDI hypothesis: in addition to the observations of materialization and dematerialization, he cited the “poltergeist” phenomenon experienced by some people after a close encounter; the photographs of UFOs, sometimes in only one frame, and not seen by witnesses; the changing of form in front of witnesses; the puzzling question of telepathic communication; that in close encounters of the third kind, the creatures seem to be at home in Earth’s gravity and atmosphere; the sudden stillness in the presence of the craft; levitation of cars or people; and the development by some of psychic abilities after an encounter. “Do we have two aspects of one phenomenon or two different sets of phenomena?” Hynek asked.[14]

Finally, he introduced a third hypothesis. “I hold it entirely possible”, he said, “that a technology exists, which encompasses both the physical and the psychic, the material and the mental. There are stars that are millions of years older than the sun. There may be a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than man’s. We have gone from Kitty Hawk to the moon in some seventy years, but it’s possible that a million-year-old civilization may know something that we don’t … I hypothesize an ‘M&M’ technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology.”[15]

In Hynek and Vallee’s 1975 book The Edge of Reality, Hynek published a stereoscopic photograph of a UFO he took during a flight. According to the book, the object stayed in sight long enough for Hynek to unpack his camera from his luggage and take two exposures.[16] UFO researcher Robert Sheaffer writes in his book Psychic Vibrations that Hynek seemed to have forgotten the photographs when he later told a reporter for The Globe and Mail that he had never seen a UFO.[17] The article states that in all the years he had been looking upward, Hynek “has never seen ‘what I would so dearly love to see. Oh, the subject has been so ridiculed that I would never report a UFO even if I did see one—not without a witness'”.[18]

Close encounter[edit]

In his first book, Hynek published the “Close Encounter” scale that he had developed to better catalog UFO reports. Hynek was later a consultant to Columbia Pictures and Steven Spielberg for the popular 1977 UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, named after a level of Hynek’s scale. He made a cameo appearance in the film.[19] At the end of the film, after the aliens disembark from the “mother ship”, he can be seen, bearded and with pipe in mouth, stepping forward to view the spectacle.

Personal life[edit]

Hynek and his wife, Miriam (Curtis) had five children. Hynek’s son Joel is an Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor. He oversaw the design of the camouflage effect for the movie Predator, and won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for his work on What Dreams May Come.

DocuSeries based on his life[edit]

In 2019, The History Channel created and aired a highly-fictionalized TV show based on his UFO research and the organization he worked for dubbed Project Blue Book.

Death[edit]

On April 27, 1986, Hynek died of a malignant brain tumor, at Memorial Hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona.[20] He was 75 years old, and was survived by his wife Mimi, children Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul, and Ross, and his grandchildren.[20]

Books[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ “The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies”. Retrieved February 10, 2008.
  2. ^ J. Allen Hynek (1972). The UFO Experience: A scientific inquiry. Henry Regnery Company. ISBN 0-8094-8054-9.
  3. ^ Starlight Fluctuation Studies – The Defense Technical Information Center
  4. ^ Schneidman and Daniels, 1987, p. 110
  5. Jump up to:a b Clark, Jerome (1998). The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Visible Ink. pp. 305ISBN 1-57859-029-9. Emphasis in source.
  6. ^ Schneidman and Daniels, 110
  7. ^ “Chapter Three: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects”NICAP. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  8. ^ Druffel, Ann (2003). Firestorm: James E. McDonald’s Fight for UFO Science. Wildflower Press. p. 155. ISBN 0-926524-58-5.
  9. ^ Hynek, 1972, pp. 167-180
  10. ^ “Dr. J. Allen Hynek Speaking at the United Nations, Nov. 27th 1978”. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  11. ^ Stringfield, 1977, pp. 40–42
  12. ^ Stringfield, 1977, p. 44
  13. ^ Fuller, 1980, pp. 156–157
  14. ^ Fuller, 1980, pp. 157–163
  15. ^ Fuller, 1980, pp. 164–165
  16. ^ Hynek and Vallee (1975). The Edge of Reality. Chicago: Henry Regnery. p. 125.
  17. ^ Sheaffer, Robert (2011). Psychic Vibrations. Charleston: Create Space. p. 39.
  18. ^ Michael Tenszen (July 5, 1982). “Close Encounter Still up in Air for UFO Expert” (PDF). The Globe and Mail. Retrieved October 19, 2011.
  19. ^ Daugherty, Greg. “Meet J. Allen Hynek, the Astronomer Who First Classified UFO ‘Close Encounters'”History.com. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  20. Jump up to:a b “J. Allen Hynek (1910–1986) Papers”Archival and Manuscript Collections. Northwestern University Library. Retrieved May 9, 2016.

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