J. Allen Hynek was an academic and astronomer who served as the scientific consultant to the United States Air Force (USAF)’s Project Blue Book programme investigating Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) reports, a role he held through the 1970s.1 He had previously worked as an advisor to Project Sign, Blue Book’s predecessor.2 By his own account, he began the work deeply sceptical, writing in his first year on Project Sign that the whole subject “seems utterly ridiculous”.3 He was the USAF’s expert on UFO matters4 and served as Project Blue Book’s lead scientific investigator.5 He later observed that the air force could dismiss civilian UFO reports but could not so easily discount its own trained military witnesses.6 He said the USAF expected him to perform the role of debunker,7 and concluded that two schools of thought dominated the air force’s approach to UAP investigations: one holding that the phenomena should be taken seriously as probable extra-terrestrial craft, and a debunking view eventually embraced by officials in Washington DC.8 Of the resulting posture, he said the air force’s theorem was “It can’t be, therefore it isn’t”.9 He witnessed how the air force instructed investigators to “stall” off press inquiries with a “no-comment answer” regarding the Hanford sighting and other such cases.10
At Northwestern University, Hynek’s team had access to the files of Project Blue Book.11 Jacques Vallée was part of the Northwestern University team led by Hynek,12 and Hynek invited him to apply his background in computer science to a study of Blue Book’s statistical procedures, more than ten years before the book’s 1975 publication.13 As a young researcher, Vallée also worked with and organised Hynek’s papers from the project.14 According to Vallée, Hynek called the informal network of UFO researchers “the Invisible College”, referencing the secretive mid-seventeenth-century group of “natural philosophers” who fought the established dogmas of the church.15 According to American Cosmic, the term was Hynek’s name for a small group of researchers, scientists, and academics who studied the UFO phenomenon under cover of anonymity.16 Hynek said that in the “dark ages” of science, when scientists were suspected of being in league with the Devil, they had to meet privately to exchange views, and for this reason called themselves the Invisible College;17 he said the group remained invisible until its members gained respectability with the chartering of the Royal Society by Charles II in the early 1660s.18 A 1974 photograph of some Invisible College members was taken around Hynek in Colorado Boulder, including Douglass Price-Williams, David Saunders, Leo Sprinkle, Dick Henry, Jacques Vallée, Claude Poher, and Fred Beckman.19
Hynek found that the strangest UFO reports, such as landing cases involving occupants, did not always come from the least reliable sources, and that many reports in his files combined both high reliability and high strangeness.20 He said that he believed there is life and intelligence elsewhere in the universe — the subject of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) — though he regarded whether that intelligence was responsible for UFOs as the central open question,21 and said he considered it preposterous that humans could be such complete freaks as to be the only intelligence in the vast array of the universe.22
In March 1966, Vallée telephoned Hynek to alert him to a wave of UFO sightings in Michigan, and Hynek in turn called Project Blue Book in Ohio Dayton to propose an immediate investigation.23 According to Vallée, an officer at Blue Book initially told Hynek he was not interested in investigating because the case had not been reported officially to the air force,24 but called back half an hour later to ask how soon Hynek could be in Ann Arbor, saying the case had since been reported officially, by the Pentagon.25 Vallée said Hynek suggested he travel to Ann Arbor before reporters and curiosity-seekers destroyed the evidence.26 The following morning, Hynek travelled to Michigan to investigate.27 At the urging of Air Force public-relations staff, he released a statement calling for a thorough investigation but suggesting that some witnesses might have seen swamp gas;28 the press interpreted the statement as a final verdict and reacted with anger.29 At the insistence of Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, Project Blue Book went on to review the 1966 Michigan swamp gas UAP sightings and announced that witnesses had seen swamp gas.30
Hynek later concluded that the Robertson Panel’s primary role had been to debunk all UAP sightings and return control of investigations to the air force,31 and wrote that in convening the panel, the CIA was fearful not of UFOs, but of UFO reports.32 He and Vallée later travelled to Boulder, Colorado, to brief the Condon Committee,33 and Hynek was among the scientists who criticised the resulting Condon Report, prompting the National Academy of Sciences to convene a panel in late 1968 to examine its rigour, methodology, and conclusions.34 Vallée and Hynek later used air force data to verify that UFO landings tended to occur in desolate places.35
When Project Blue Book was terminated, Hynek said its end was the coup de grace to the UFO era — that science had spoken, meaning UFOs did not exist and that the thousands of people who had reported strange sightings could all be discounted as deluded, hoaxers, or mentally unbalanced.36 According to Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, Hynek later regretted the role he had played in suppressing evidence of UAP under the USAF.37 He also said that he, among others inside and outside the US government, believed the USAF’s key goal was to debunk or explain away UAP reports.38 In April 1964, Hynek visited Socorro, New Mexico, to investigate the 1964 Lonnie Zamora UAP encounter.39 Harry Turner met Hynek when Hynek visited Australia,40 and told his superiors that Hynek, along with many other reputable scientists, did not accept the US Air Force’s explanation of misidentification, hysteria, or hoax for UFO sightings.41 Don Schmitt trained as an investigator under Hynek.42 Robert Friend and Hynek held a piece of material from the 1958 Hartford, Connecticut crash retrieval.43 Hynek stated the essential facts of the UFO phenomenon in documents circulated before the 1978 Jacques Vallée United Nations UFO statement.44