CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH DR. J. ALLEN HYNEK

                              By Dennis Stacy

                      An Interview With The Dean 1985

                  Re-Edited for CUFON by Dale Goudie 1991

For over two decades, from 1948 to 1969, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a consultant

in astronomy to the United States Air Force. The subject of his advice,

however, was not the fledgling space program or even the moon and stars

above, but Unidentified Flying Objects.  In 1973 he founded the Center for

UFO Studies (CUFOS) and had serves as Director and editor of its journal,

"International UFO Reporter."

STACY: Dr. Hynek, as a scientist, you go back as far with UFO phenomenon as

probably anyone alive today. Exactly how did that relationship begin?

HYNEK: That's an easy story to tell. In the spring of 1948, I was teaching

astronomy at Ohio State University, in Columbus.  One day thee men, and they

weren't dressed in black, came over to see me from Wright Patterson Air

Force Base in nearby Dayton.  They started out by talking about the weather,

as I remember, and this and that, and then finally one of them asked me what

I thought about flying saucers. I told them I thought they were a lot of

junk and nonsense and that seemed to please them, so they got down to

business. They said they needed some astronomical consultation because it

was their job to find out what these flying saucer stories were all about.

Some were meteors, they thought, others stars and so on, so they could use

an astronomer.  What the hell, I said, it sounded like fun and besides, I

would be getting a top secret security clearance out of it, too. At that

time, it was called Project Sign, and some of the personnel at least were

taking the problem quite seriously. At the same time a big split was

occurring in the Air Force between two schools of thought.  The serious

school prepared an estimation of the situation which they sent to General

Vandenburg, but the other side eventually won out and the serious ones were

shipped off to other places. The negatives won the day, in other  words.

My own investigations for Project Sign added to that, too, I think,because

I was quite negative in most of my evaluations.  I stretched far to give

something a natural explanation, sometimes when it may not have really had

it. I remember one case from Snake River Canyon, I think it was, where a man

and his two sons saw a metallic object come swirling down the canyon which

caused the top of the trees to sway. In my attempt to find a natural

explanation for it, I said that it was some sort of atmospheric eddy. Of

course, I had never seen an eddy like that and had no real reason to believe

that one even existed. But I was so anxious to find a natural explanation

because I was convinced that it had to have one that, naturally, I did in

fact, it wasn't until quite some time had passed that I began to change my

mind.

STACY: Was there ever any direct pressure applied by the Air Force itself

for you to come up with a conventional explanation to these phenomena?

HYNEK: There was an implied pressure, yes, very definitely.

STACY: In other words, you found yourself caught, like most of us, in a

situation of trying to please your boss?

HYNEK: Yes, you might as well put it that way, although at the same time I

wasn't going against my scientific precepts. As an astronomer and physicist,

I simply felt a priori that everything had to have a natural explanation in

this world. There were no ifs, and or buts about it. The ones I couldn't

solve, I thought if we just tried harder, had a really proper investigation,

that we probably would find as answer for. My batting average was about 80

per cent and I figured that anytime you were hitting that high, you were

doing pretty good. That left about 20 per cent unsolved for me, but only

about three or four per cent for the Air Force, because they used statistics

in a way I would never have allowed for myself. For example, cases labeled

as insufficient information they would consider solved !  They also had some

other little tricks. If a light were seen, they would say, "aircraft have

lights, therefore, probable aircraft." Then, at the end of the year, when

the statistics were made up, they would drop the "possible" or "probable"

and simply call it aircraft.

STACY: What began to change your own perception of the phenomenon?

HYNEK: 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 as 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 something to all this.

The famous "swamp gas" case which came later on finally pushed me  over the

edge. From that point on, I began to look at reports from a different angle,

which was to say that some of them could be true UFOs.

STACY: As your own attitude changed, did the Air Force's attitude toward you

change, too?

HYNEK: It certainly did, quite a bit, as a matter of fact. By way of

background, I might add that the late Dr. James E. McDonald, a good friend

of mine who was then an atmospheric meteorologist at the University of

Arizona, and I had some fairly sharp words about it. He used to accuse me

very much, saying you're the scientific consultant to the Air Force, you

should be pounding on generals' doors and insisting on getting a better job

done. I said, Jim, I was there, you weren't you don't know the mindset.

They were under instruction from the Pentagon, following the Robertson Panel

of 1953, that the whole subject had to be debunked, period, no question

about it.  That was the prevailing attitude. The panel was convened by the

CIA, and I sat in on it, but I was not asked to sign the resolution.  Had I

been asked, I would not have signed it, because they took a completely

negative attitude about everything. So when Jim McDonald used to accuse me

of a sort of miscarriage of scientific justice, I had to tell him that had I

done what he wanted, the generals would not have listened to me.  They were

already listening to Dr. Donald Menzel and the other boys over at the

Harvard Astronomy Department as it was.

STACY: Did you think you would have been shown the front door and asked not

to come back?

HYNEK: Inside of two weeks I imagine. You're familiar with the case of Tycho

Brahe and Johannes Kepler from the history of astronomy? Brahe had  the

observations and didn't know what to do with them, and Kepler,who was

nearsighted and couldn't make the observations, did. So essentially, I

played Kepler to the Air Force's Tycho Brahe. I knew the Air Force was

getting the data and I wanted a look at it, so I made very full use of the

copying machines at Wright-Patterson. I kept practically a duplicate set of

records because I knew that someday that data would be worth something.

Toward the end, however, I was barely speaking with Major Quintanilla who

was in charge.  We had started as really good friends and then things got

very bad because he had one lieutenant who was such a nincompoop, it seemed

to me.  Everything had to be "Jupiter or Venus" or this or that.  You have

no idea what a closed mind, what a closed attitude it was. I kept doggedly

on, but I can safely say that the whole time I was with the Air Force we

never had anything that resembled a really good scientific dialogue on the

subject.

STACY: They weren't really interested in an actual investigation of the

subject then?

HYNEK: They said they were, of course, but they would turn handsprings to

keep a good case from getting to the "attention of the media". Any case they

solved, they had no trouble talking to the media about. It was really very

sad.... I think their greatest mistake in the early days, however, was not

turning it over to the universities or some academic group. They regarded it

as an intelligence matter and it became increasingly more and more

embarrassing to them. After all, we paid good tax dollars to have the Air

Force guard our skies and it would have been bad public relations for them

to say, yes there's something up there, but we're helpless. They just

couldn't do that, so they took the very human action of protecting their own

interests. What they said was that we solved 96 per cent of the cases and

that we could have solved the other four per cent if we had just tried

harder.

STACY: Was it the famous Michigan sightings of 1966, explained away as

"swamp gas" that finally did lead the Air Force to bring in a reputable

university?

HYNEK: Yes, that, as you know, became something of a national joke and

Michigan was soon being known as the "Swamp Gas State." Eventually,it

resulted in a Congressional Hearing called for by then state Congressman,

Gerald Ford, who of course later went on to become President.  The

investigation was turned over to the Brian O'Brien Committee who did a very

good job. Had their recommendations been carried out, things might have

turned out much better than they did. The recommended that UFOs be taken

away from the Air Force and given to a group of universities, to study the

thing in a as wide a way as possible.  Well, they didn't go to a group, they

went to a university and a man they were certain would be very hard-nosed

about it, namely, Dr. Edward Condon at the University of Colorado.  That was

how the Condon Committee and eventually the Report came to be.

STACY: Were you ever called on to testify before, or advise the Committee?

HYNEK: In the early days they called on me to talk to them, to  brief them,

but that was the extent of it. They certainly didn't take any of my advice.

STACY: By 1968, the generally negative Condon Report was made public and the

Air Force used its conclusions to get out of the UFO business. Were you

still an official advisor or consultant at that time?

HYNEK: Oh, yes, I was with the Air Force right up until the very end, but it

was just on paper. No one had cut the chicken's head off yet, but the

chicken was dead.  The last days at Blue Book were just a perfunctory

shuffling of papers.

STACY: In terms of the UFO phenomenon itself, what was going on  about this

time?

HYNEK: Well, as you know, the Condon Report said that a group of scientists

had looked at UFOs and that the subject was dead. The UFOs, of course,

didn't bother to read the report and during the Flap of 1973, they came back

in force.