by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
From the very beginning of the flying saucer/UFO mystery, Joseph Allen Hynek played a huge role as an investigator. According to him in his 1972 book, The UFO Experience, in 1947 he was asked to be a scientific consultant for the Air Force’s investigation program (which was then called Project Sign) based at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. He explains he was “then director of Ohio State University’s McMillan Observatory and, as such, the closest professional astronomer at hand.” He remained a scientific consultant for what operated as Project Sign, Project Grudge, and then Project Blue Book as of 1952, up until its termination in 1969. He went on with his own investigations, formed the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, and continued as its director until his death in 1986. In his almost 40 years of involvement with the mystery, Hynek’s beliefs and public stance evolved quite a bit.
Hynek went through his biggest changes throughout the 1960s. He began his work with the Air Force as a skeptic and was useful as a debunker, but by the time the Condon Report came out in 1969, he was open to the idea that some of the reports he’d dealt with might have involved some kind of “other,” be it extraterrestrial or from some sort of mysterious realm. Not only that, he became more outspoken in the press about his beliefs, and this put him at odds with Blue Book’s last director, Hector Quintanilla.
During this time, Jacques Vallée, a renowned UFO researcher in his own right, was a colleague of Hynek’s at Northwestern University where Hynek was then chair of the astronomy department. Vallée kept a diary and made entries that provide some insight into Hynek’s transition. These were published in the 1992 book Forbidden Science 1 which covers the period from 1957-1969. According to him in his September 18, 1963, entry, he was looking for a job in Chicago, and Hynek told him there was an opening at Northwestern for a computer systems programmer. He wrote that one of the reasons he took the job was to be able to work more closely with Hynek and that “There was an immediate bond between us.”
In entries written from June 8, 1966, to July 1966, Vallée talks about Hynek’s meeting with atmospheric physicist, James McDonald, who’d been investigating UFOs since 1958 according to Ann Druffel in her 2003 biography on McDonald, Firestorm. McDonald had started speaking publicly in the press about his belief that the UFO mystery was worthy of scientific study in the wake of the formation of the Condon Committee and took issue with the fact that Hynek had signed off on Blue Book reports that had explanations McDonald found absurd.
McDonald made arrangements with Hynek over the phone to visit him at Northwestern on June 6, 1966, and when they met, according to Vallée, McDonald quickly went on the attack against Hynek, asking how Hynek could have remained silent for so long. Vallée says he jumped in to defend Hynek saying “If Allen had taken a strong position last year, the Air Force would have dropped him as a consultant, and we wouldn’t be here talking about the phenomenon.”
According to Vallée, McDonald explained he didn’t mean last year and said “It’s in 1953 that Allen should have spoken out! The public was ready for serious study.” Allen replied that he was “a negligible quantity for the Air Force” at that time. At the end of the discussion, Hynek is said to have conceded that he had been “a little timid.”
It seems that Hynek had been moved by McDonald to take a stronger public stance as, according to Druffel, he spoke out a few days later at a meeting of the American Optical Society in Stamford, Connecticut. The meeting was put together to promote John G. Fuller’s latest book, Incident at Exeter, which was about a series of sightings involving police witnesses in Exeter, New Hampshire. Hynek was invited to speak, and 150 people showed up where there would normally be about 50.
Hynek told the audience that a “leading scientist” had “berated him” for not announcing that UFOs were extraterrestrial. The central message of his speech was that UFOs deserved serious scientific study.
Hynek continued to be an outspoken advocate for scientific UFO study and spoke, along with McDonald, at a UFO symposium held as part of the 134th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on December 27, 1969. Hynek became well-known for his advocacy, and when Blue Book was terminated, he was featured in many newspaper articles covering speeches he gave throughout the country.
In the January 23, 1970, St. Louis Post-Dispatch there is an article (page 7 of the pdf) by Jerome P. Curry headlined “Ex-Consultant To Air Force Criticizes UFO Study Methods.” According to Curry, “500 persons jammed the 400-seat lecture hall of the McDonnell Planetarium” to hear Hynek speak. Hynek is said to have pointed out flaws in the Condon Report. He is quoted as saying, “They investigated the sightings on an individual basis. A more scientific approach would have been to do that but in addition to research for commonalities involved.” He is said to have “called for the establishment of an independent scientific institute to continue investigation of unidentified flying objects.”
While Hynek enjoyed a reputation as a respected scientist, there was another side to him. According to his biography on the CUFOS website, “Hynek was also taken with the writings of the Rosicrucians and of hermetic writer Rudolph Steiner, who believed that there was a separate, “supersensible” realm close to our own reality, and that, with effort, one could study that realm as concretely as one could study our own.”
Hynek’s open-mindedness sometimes caused concern among his friends. Vallée wrote in his December 17, 1966, entry “Allen dabbles in too many things. A few months ago he was fascinated with psychic surgery. Now he is publicly quoted as supporting an even shakier affair, the alleged “psychic photography” of Ted Serios, a beer-drinking “psychic” who stares into a Polaroid camera and produces pictures of the leaning tower of Pisa and other monuments.”
In the introduction to Part III of The UFO Experience, Hynek introduces the concept of “the invisible college” after explaining that the UFO problem belongs at that moment “exclusively to the physicist, the sociologist, the psychologist, and even to the student of the occult.” He says he has “positive evidence from personal correspondence and conversations with scientists that their interest is increasing but that it is still, in most cases, anonymous.” This “growing” invisible college, he explains, stands ready to undertake serious UFO study if “provided with opportunity, time, and facilities . . .”
Hynek took it upon himself to provide the above, and in late 1973, the year in which he’d personally investigated the Pascagoula, Mississippi, case involving Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, and the Coyne Helicopter Incident, he announced the formation of the Center for UFO Studies, described by Irv Kupcinet in his column in the December 27, 1973, Chicago Sun-Times as “the only academic-oriented, non-government body involved in this study.” Of course, Coral and Jim Lorenzen, founder directors of the then active Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (in operation since 1952 and boasting a long list of PhDs who acted as consultants and field investigators for most of its existence) might have had something to say about that.