Review: The UFO Experience
Book: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry by J. Allen Hynek (1972)
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
I was sixteen miles from home and nobody in sight
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
And what's it gonna take to be back home tonight?
Sneaky Sound System, UFO
Hynek (who died in 1986) is one of the key figures in scientific UFO investigation. An astronomer employed as science consultant for the US Air Force Sign / Grudge / Blue Book investigations, he started out as a debunker but by the end of the 1960s had become a believer in the reality of UFOs as a 'real' phenomenon. This book, his first after the end of Blue Book, is the origin of the term 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' later made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie - as well as 'high strangeness' which often occurs in discussions of UFOs and the paranormal.
The book is probably one of the best of the genre in my opinion. It is basically a statistical analysis of the Blue Book case data (UFO observations from the 1940s-1960s) and breaks them down into categories: Nocturnal Lights (moving points of light at night), Daylight Discs (saucer-shaped objects seen in the daylight), and the three types of Close Encounter (objects seen at less than a couple hundred feet, interference with vehicle ignitions, and 'occupants'). Hynek also assigns a simple two-axis scale of 'probability' (based on number and character of witnesses) and 'strangeness' (number of elements not consistent with known science) for each of these typical cases.
Regardless what you think of the UFO phenomenon itself, Hynek's approach is very careful and instructive for any kind of paranormal investigation. He confines himself to the data, he focuses on the most solid and interesting cases rather than the noise, and he does a minimum of speculation as to causes, merely reporting *what* he believes the phenomenon to be - which is hardly talked about today, compared to the deluge of popular science-fiction *interpretations* of UFOs, and the 'Majestic' and 'Roswell' mythologies. Hynek does not appear to believe there is evidence for any particular 'conspiracy' theory - rather he feels that the US military staff he dealt with were simply psychologically unprepared to deal with a phenomenon that they could not understand, could not control, and wished would disappear - but he is also rather precise in how he uses words, leaving the impression that there is evidence that *could* support the existence of a separate, more highly secret UFO investigation unit than the Blue Book team. He merely says that as far as he knows, *he* wasn't aware of any such unit.
At no time, however, did I encounter any evidence that could be presented as valid proof that Blue Book was indeed a cover-up operation. However, many indications, bits of information, and scraps of conversation could be force-fitted into a yes for the cover-up thesis. Thus, for instance, one time when I inquired into the specifics of a certain case, I was told by the Pentagon's chief scientist that he had been advised by those at a much higher level to tell me 'not to pursue the matter further'. One can make of that what one will.
Hynek however does describe the existence of several 'factions' within Sign - the believers and the skeptics - and he also points at the shift from Sign to Grudge (February 11, 1949) as being the point where he believed the project moved into full-on debunking mode. If one were to speculate about the 'UFO believers' within USAF setting up a shadow group, it would seem that the interesting decisions would have been made in 1948. (But of course even if there *were* classified UFO investigations, it does not follow that they necessarily were any more successful at making sense of the puzzle.)
I was interested to notice that Hynek also outright admits that there were 'UFO simulation' exercises conducted in order to track public UFO reports; he considers the failure of these to generate large number of false UFO reports very strong evidence for the UFO.
It is interesting to note, as substantiation of the theory of the credibility of reliable witnesses, that in those instances in which 'fake' UFOs have been deliberately contrived to test public reaction - hot air balloons and flares dropped from airplanes are examples - the resulting UFO reports were not only invariably far fewer than the experimenter expected but of interest more for what they did not report than what they did. Occasionally a fanciful UFO report is generated as a result of such a test, but it fails to meet the test of acceptance because it does not square with what others have reported about the same event - often solely because of its internal inconsistency and incoherence.
This seems to be something confirmed by Jacques Valee's 1993 'Pentacle Memorandum', but I don't see why he is so angry with Hynek about this given the admission above - Hynek gives the impression of always being careful about what he discusses, and respectful of confidentiality agreements, but doesn't ever seem to outright lie or even wilfully misdirect. On the whole, of the whole UFO scene, Hynek still comes out as being the most honest, up-front and frankly scientific of anyone, and I think the attitude of a particular researcher toward him is a good touchstone for how sane they are (or whether they have a hidden agenda).