Close encounters of the Hynek kind

JENNY RANDLES recalls the pioneering UFO investigations of Dr J Allen Hynek

This autumn marks the 40th anniversary of the most influential Hollywood movie in UFO history, and the only one named after our own terminology: Steven Spielberg’s Close

Encounters of the Third Kind (or CE3K). Its title was so baffling to cinemagoers back in 1977 they had to have it explained to them in a special promo trailing the blockbuster.

That advert was presented by Dr J Allen Hynek, whose book The UFO Experience was the source of Steven Spielberg’s decision to make a ‘true to life’ film about UFO experiences. It revealed how something extraordinary can transform the life of an ordinary person, and what science might do about it. The movie worked by teaming a brilliant young film-maker who’d loved science fiction as a kid with a respected space scientist who studied UFOs. This made CE3K into an unusually literate and intelligent science fiction film, and certainly the first big-budget cinema release to treat UFOs as a concept rather than a prop. Sadly, it was also one of the last.

I was lucky to know Allen during his last decade, when he had brought together serious investigators and scientists to work (quietly, as many feared it might harm their careers) in what was termed an ‘Invisible College’, brainstorming ideas and moving research forward after the US government closed the Air Force investigation team that Allen advised. Just after CE3K came out, I travelled across the US with this kind and generous man and his wife Mimi – visiting Boulder, Colorado, to meet scientists whose work ended with that USAF project but who knew they had not resolved the UFO mystery. I also later house sat for Allen in Evanston, Illinois, and saw just how many well-known figures from different fields respected him.

As a young astronomer in post-war Dayton, Ohio, Hynek had been invited to act as scientific consultant to the Air Force study at the local Wright Patterson base, where he reviewed their files up to 1969. He explained any reports he could and tried to dig deeper into more promising close encounters. He told me that he never had the opportunity to explore the best reports, as the scientist in him wanted to do, USAF bureaucracy and growing disillusion that UFOs were a military problem scuppering his attempts.

So in many respects he was happy to be free after the project closed and to embrace looser bonds with fellow scientists. One of these was Dr Jacques Vallée, who was encouraged to move from France to the computer hotbed of California with an eye to his unique insights helping establish scientific credibility for the field. Not a hard science man like Hynek, the highly intelligent Vallée was more interested in the cultural impact of the UFO phenomenon and how it manifests through the ages in different societies. He became the architect of a ‘new ufology’: this ‘psychosocial’ approach to ufology was established in France, and saw its flagship journal ( Magonia, named for one of Vallée’s books) published in the UK; it was less prominent in America, perhaps because, as a military world leader at the forefront of space exploration, the US tended to focus on the concept of UFOs as machines, not denizens of our collective unconscious. That the movie industry was based in the US was also relevant: it put ‘bums on seats’ by emphasising alien invasion rather than ‘softer’ ideas that would baffle audiences.

So, Close Encounters inevitably took many previously unknown cases based on Hynek’s book and employed trailblazing special effects to forge a US vision of alien UFOs. The movie builds from ‘first kind’ sightings at a distance to those with physical effects, and climaxes with an alien landing at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, in front of waiting scientists. But along the way there are unmistakable undertones of the new, Vallée-influenced ufology, with hidden psychological triggers driving disparate witnesses towards the secret rendezvous. The government science team in CE3K is headed by Lacombe, played by esteemed French director François Truffaut; cinemagoers at the time were baffled by a Frenchman running a UFO agency in the USA (though he’s actually a UN adviser) and why he delivered such baffling lines such as: “It is an event sociologique.” But in French ‘La Combe’ means ‘Valley’, and his musings reflect those of the real Vallée.

Few in the audience would have made such subtle connections; Hynek, though, was overtly present in the film’s climactic scenes, playing himself as child-like beings descend from the UFO and stand in front of awestruck scientists. He told me his scenes were cut short in the release, and he had filmed one in which the aliens are fascinated by his beard and come up to stroke it! Given that he turned down opportunities to film lucrative TV ads where aliens sold things like beer, it’s easy to forgive him this one indulgence. Indeed, such scenes are typical of both his modesty and quirky sense of humour. He impressed me on the road with his deep knowledge of Monty Python and his eye for a joke. One time at a Midwest truckstop, he took off his belt and threw it on the table in front of me. As I gaped, he made a call from a phone booth and delighted in handing me over to “someone you might know, as you took astronomy at college”. The man on the line was pioneer space scientist James Van Allen, who in 1958 discovered the radiation layers named after him. Van Allen and Allen Hynek were friends who discussed UFOs amicably. Allen smiled at me and pointed to his discarded belt on the table noting: “He discovered the Van Allen radiation belt. There is my own Allen belt.” Hynek never made a fortune out of Close

Encounters – although Spielberg funded some UFO research. Of course, the first two words in the film’s title – ‘close encounter’ – are now a common phrase, even if often far removed from its original meaning.

When CE3K was released in Britain in early 1978 I coordinated some promotional work and attended the premiere. A national newspaper ran a ‘UFO Bureau’, tying real British cases to the movie and setting up a ‘hotline’ for readers to report sightings. Hundreds of witnesses came forward, and I waded through hours of recorded calls and letters sent in by them. Investigators for BUFORA and Flying Saucer Review took these on, so some classic cases entered UFO history as a result of Close Encounters, the result of a unique interaction between the British UFO community and the media. I will look at some of this aftermath next month.

None of this would have happened but for the work of Dr J Allen Hynek, a true pioneer of UFO investigation, and, happily, a biography has recently been published: The

Close Encounters Man, by Mark O’Connell (Harper Collins, 2017). Allen once said that he sympathised with Mark Twain, who was born during an appearance of Halley’s Comet and always sensed that he would die on its return 76 years later. Twain’s intuition proved exactly correct. Allen told me that the same rule likely applied to him, his birth coinciding with this cycle of the comet in 1910 (days after Twain died), and he was also sadly right: He died at Halley’s next return in April 1986.