A flawed UFO classic

A new edition of Hynek’s famous report on Project Blue Book is an interesting historical artefact, says Eric Hoffmann

The Hynek UFO Report

The Authoritative Account of the Project Blue Book Cover-Up

J Allen Hynek

Red Wheel 2020

Pb, 308pp, $19.95, illus, appx, bib, ISBN 9781590033036

J Allen Hynek, a Dayton, Ohio, based astronomer, was in 1947 enlisted by the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to provide a professional, scientific review of some of the very first official UFO reports.

He went on to take part in the United States Air Force’s various study projects and panels. Project Blue Book, the final, longest and best-known of these projects, lasted nearly two decades (1952-1969).

The project, headed by a small staff of low-level military officers, apportioned a minuscule budget and dependent on a non-existent filing system, rarely conducted any in-depth investigations of UFO reports, largely due to a constant lack of manpower and resources [see FT392:57].

Hynek readily acknowledged his frustrations with the Project’s limitations, which were more than just budgetary.

According to Hynek, the Project’s unofficial mandate, as with its predecessors, was to disprove the existence of UFOs; to quote Hynek, “if it can’t be real, it doesn’t exist”.

With Blue Book, the Air Force, which had long before the Project’s inception already concluded that UFOs did not present a threat to national security – their foremost concern from the start – essentially ran a public relations clearing house, the mission of which was to explain away UFO sightings with an over-reliance on mundane explanations.

Indeed, project directors encouraged, if not required, investigators to provide conventional explanations for witnesses’ anomalous experiences, such as clouds, birds, weather balloons, atmospheric phenomena or the planet Venus.

Initially a sceptic, Hynek at first relished debunking UFO reports, and his responses helped to set the parameters of Air Force investigations for the next several decades.

Yet as reports began to proliferate in number and intricacy, it became increasingly apparent to Hynek that the

Air Force was too quick to dismiss evidence and too ready to propose solutions to various sightings without a careful weighing of the evidence.

As a result, Hynek’s scepticism wavered, and he gradually came to view UFOs as a complex phenomenon deserving of scientific analysis.

Unlike Hynek’s previous work, the classic

The UFO Experience: A Scientific Report (1972), in which he provides a comprehensive scientific overview of the phenomenon and introduces the now-famous classification system of close encounters of the first, second and third kind, his second effort, The Hynek UFO Report (1977), is a rather more didactic work.

Indeed, several chapters in the Report are given over to a case-by-case examination of several hundred of the over 12,000 sightings (roughly 144,000 document pages) in the Blue Book files, some of them classic cases (Socorro, Kelly-Hopkinsville, Exeter, the Father Gill sighting), including strange lights, flying discs, radar contacts and close encounters of various kinds.

It is these analyses that, some 43 years later, are perhaps of greatest interest to today’s readers.

Hynek’s preliminary historical analysis and critique of the US Government’s investigations, while necessary to frame his subsequent analysis, is a jargonfree if somewhat dry summary of the official investigations conducted up to that point.

Furthermore, there are significant limitations to the scope of Hynek’s work: as a scientist he deals primarily with solid, “objective” physical and perceptual evidence, largely taken at face value, and he fails to delve into deeper metaphysical or psychological considerations.

The Hynek UFO Report was first published in 1977 to coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Hynek-inspired blockbuster film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and is now back in print to accompany the recent television programme Project Blue Book , in which a fictional Hynek is protagonist. (A Hynek-inspired character also appears in the Spielberg film.)

Hynek “didn’t come to the UFO field looking for answers to something he already believed”, Hynek’s children explain in a brief yet insightful foreword new to this edition. “He didn’t ‘believe’ in UFOs, he accepted the validity of a growing number of UFO reports.”

This new edition reproduces Hynek’s helpful charts, graphs and illustrations, yet regrettably omits the photo reproductions of the original; it also does not correct the original’s omission of an index.

Given its vintage, Hynek’s report is perhaps best enjoyed as an historical artefact. It provides an opportunity to relive a moment in ufological history, as well as a stark reminder of the inherent limitations of bureaucratic, linear and rational responses to a bafflingly elusive phenomenon that almost by design resists simple explanation.

★★★

Swanson

The Life and Times of a Victorian Detective

Adam Wood Mango Books 2020 Pb, 741pp, £23.81, illus, notes, ind, ISBN 9781911273868 Superintendent Donald Swanson (1848-1924) was an obscure Victorian police detective, who enjoyed a long and worthy career at Scotland Yard until his retirement in 1903.

Swanson’s major claim to fame is the “Swanson Marginalia”: some annotations he made to a book of memoirs by his contemporary Sir Robert Anderson, claiming that Jack the Ripper had been identified by a Jewish witness at an unnamed “seaside home”, and incarcerated at Colney Hatch asylum, where he died shortly after. Swanson named his Ripper suspect as “Kosminski”. When the leading Ripper expert Paul Begg published the Swanson Marginalia in the 1980s, there was immediate enthusiasm among the Ripperologist community, and speculation that the mysterious “Kosminski”, for whom the careless Swanson had not provided a Christian name, was identical to the bona fide Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski. The problem is that this mentally ill Polish Jew actually lived on until 1919, as an inmate in Leavesden Asylum. Had Swanson made a mistake, or was there another “Kosminski” in Colney Hatch? Ripperologists have kept on debating this mystery for many years, without much worthwhile being concluded, in this book or elsewhere.

Wood obsessively lists obscure primary sources on Swanson’s old cases but unaccountably omits newer and more valuable secondary accounts, some of which would have been only a mouse click away. As he traces Swanson’s every movement throughout his long career, he swiftly loses his readers’ attention. This is an over-long, bloated monstrosity of a book, badly written and poorly edited, which a competent publisher would have reduced to 200 pages or so. Jan Bondeson

★★