BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY

The UFO Experience THE HIEROPHANT’S APPRENTICE

In the good old days, anyone who wanted an informed opinion about UFOs went to J Allen Hynek. True, he could behave like an absent-minded, over-thoughtful professor at times (most of the time, according to his wife), but this was a public virtue. He was a professor – of astronomy, deemed an appropriate expertise for ufology, and chair of his department to boot. And crucially he’d worked for the USAF’s Project Blue Book as an ‘official’ investigator. He became underwhelmed by Blue Book’s ways of working, and was even less impressed by the Condon Report’s, and the conclusions drawn by its titular head. But over the years he had come to believe there was something about some UFO reports that justified thorough, objective, scientific investigation. So when Blue Book closed down in 1969, following the Condon Report, Hynek found the funding to set up the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and maintain it for several years. He had no hesitation in admitting that he did not know what the phenomenon truly represented. At the same time, he tended to take witness accounts of strange events at face value; honest and straightforward himself, he seemed unable to digest the idea that others might be less scrupulous or more mischievous or simply misled by misperceptions. His two books, discussed here, explain all this and what he thought should be done about it.

Hynek opens The UFO Experience with the remark that he’d often been asked to recommend “a good book about UFOs” and found himself unable to provide a title, even though by the early 1970s there were hundreds of volumes on UFOs in print. Like many another who’s muttered “If you want to get anything done around here, you’ve got to do it yourself”, he – by then free of any obligation of discretion toward the US Air Force – sat down to write one himself. His definition of such a book: it “should, I think, be honest, without prejudgment; it should be factual and as well documented as possible. It should not be, however, a book that retails – or retells – UFO stories for the sake of their story value; rather it should attempt to portray the kinds of things that people – real everyday human beings with jobs and families – say they have actually experienced.” Being far from daft, Hynek of course featured plenty of good, boggling stories among his illustrative examples.

Hynek was invited to join the USAF’s UFO-investigation team because he worked near Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, and was suitably qualified and senior. At the time, he says, “I felt, as did virtually all my colleagues, that the subject was nonsensical, and I had little inclination to give it serious study” and, he continues, “It was thus almost in a sense of sport that I accepted the invitation to have a look at the flying saucer reports... they were called ‘flying saucers’ then. I also had a feeling that I might be doing a service by helping to clear away ‘nonscience’. After all, wasn’t this a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the public how the scientific method works, how the application of the impersonal and unbiased logic of the scientific method (I conveniently forgot my own bias for the moment) could be used to show that flying saucers were figments of the imagination?” In this he was to be disappointed. And there was a bit more to it: “The scientific world has surely not been ‘eager to find out’ about the UFO phenomenon and has expressed no inclination to astonishment. The almost universal attitude of scientists has been militantly negative. Indeed, it would seem that the reaction has been grossly out of proportion to the stimulus. The emotionally loaded, highly exaggerated reaction that has generally been exhibited by scientists to any mention of UFOs might be of considerable interest to psychologists… It has seemed to me that such exhibitions by mature scientists are more than expressions of pity for the uninformed. Perhaps they are expressions of deepseated uncertainty or fear… The phenomenon of this modern witchhunt, the antithesis of what the scientific attitude stands for, is itself a phenomenon worthy of study.” Plus ça change – even if ‘witchhunt’ seems overstated, since no scientist’s career ever actually suffered from an interest in UFOs, least of all Hynek’s. ‘Jaded indifference’ is probably nearer the mark these post- X-Files days.

But what is a ‘UFO’ anyway? Hynek initially says it’s “simply… the reported perception of an object or light seen in the sky or upon the land the appearance, trajectory, and general dynamic and luminescent behaviour of which do not suggest a logical, conventional explanation and which is not only mystifying to the original percipients but remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making a common

sense identification, if one is possible.” This last bit (our italics) is crucial. In broad terms, Hynek thought that the USAF failed to call in expertise (including his own) where they could and should have, while Condon’s team, having decided on an eclectic sample of reports to investigate, applied no common-sense filters to them at all. “The UFO was defined by Condon as merely something that puzzled a given observer. The ‘Condon UFO’ was not required to undergo a screening process before being admitted for study as a UFO: a report that remained unexplained after severe screening by technically aware persons. The committee thus really addressed itself to the problem of finding a natural explanation to fit the report. It is my contention that this should have been done in the original screening process. The fact that more than 25 per cent of the cases studied were not assignable to natural causes simply means that only 25 per cent of the cases studied were eligible for study as UFOs.”

Having opened the door wide to all manner of reports, Condon & Co then severely limited their own scope by framing their problem in terms of popular conception: “The committee chose to

consider only the problem of whether UFO reports (and far many more non-UFO reports) supported the hypothesis that the Earth was being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences [ETI]. UFO = ETI was the defining equation. It did not try to establish whether UFOs really constituted a problem for the scientist, whether physical or social.” Throughout, Hynek himself fails to address the social aspect of UFOs – still less ufology – in any depth, and one wonders what, were he alive today, he would make of the now large literature expounding and exploring the several facets of the psychosocial hypothesis (PSH). As an instance of his neglect, consider this: “A critic of the UFO scene once remarked, ‘… unexplained sightings do not constitute evidence in favour of flying saucers any more than they constitute evidence in favour of flying pink elephants’. What he failed to realise was that the strangeness spectrum of UFO reports is so narrow that not only have flying pink elephants never been reported but a definite pattern of strange ‘craft’ has. If UFOs are figments of the imagination, it is strange that the imaginations of those who report UFOs from over the world should be so restricted.” This is an odd blind spot, given the plethora of (remarkably consistent) imagery infesting movies, TV, comic books, newspapers – the media – before as well as after Kenneth Arnold’s seminal 1947 sighting. On the other hand, one can guess that Hynek would have despaired at the tropical growth and bizarre ramifications of the ETI/ETH approach, given his eagerness to explain, to anyone who asked, why he thought it a non-starter.

In The UFO Experience Hynek set out his classification system for UFOs, now generally accepted as a standard: Nocturnal Lights, Daylight Disks, RadarVisuals, and Close Encounters of the First, Second and Third Kinds. The last of these did not impress him but, as he wrote, “we cannot subdivide the UFO phenomenon, accepting some parts and rejecting others. We must study the entire phenomenon or none of it. Encounters of the Third Kind must in all fairness be included in this book”, even though “To be frank, I would gladly omit this part if I could without offence to scientific integrity: [cases] in which the presence of animated creatures [who interact with witnesses] is reported.” He considered CE-IIIs only as ‘contactee’ events, which he fairly if sourly described as “characterised by a ‘favoured’ human intermediary, an almost always solitary ‘contact man’ who somehow has the special attribute of being able to see UFOs and to communicate with their crew almost at will (often by mental telepathy). Such persons not only frequently turn out to be pseudoreligious fanatics but also invariably have a low credibility value, bringing us regular messages from the ‘space men’ with singularly little content. The messages are usually addressed to all of humanity to ‘be good, stop fighting, live in love and brotherhood, ban the bomb, stop polluting the atmosphere’ and other worthy platitudes.” This (mis)led him into calling Betty Hill a contactee. She’s now, of course, counted as an early abductee, and abductions are classed as Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.

CE-IIs, however, did intrigue him. In these, he comments, UFO occupants “almost never make an attempt to communicate; in contrast, they invariably are reported to scamper away or back into their craft and fly out of sight. They do not seem to have any ‘messages’ for mankind – except ‘Don’t bother me’”; and he recounts the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville, 1959 Papua New Guinea (‘Father Gill’), and 1964 Zamora/Socorro events in some detail. The first of these, he notes, “had only one witness as far as the UFO itself was concerned, even though 11 people witnessed the occupants.” Hynek seriously misses a trick here. Some time elapsed between the UFO sighting and the appearance of the flying-goblin-like ‘occupants’, which didn’t ‘scamper away’ at all, and consequently were set upon with a hail of gunfire, to no apparent effect. It’s subsequently been suggested, not altogether plausibly, that the ‘aliens’ were actually a flock of owls (it is difficult to believe that a family of rural Kentuckians were such terrible shots that not one corpse resulted from their barrage). But whatever really happened that night the point, surely, is that other than the proximity in time, there’s really nothing to connect the UFO sighting and the later siege by the weird avians. To call them ‘UFO occupants’ is a stretch in logic that Hynek should have seen and avoided.

Be warned, too, that Hynek devotes many pages to his ideal UFO investigatory project. Worthy (even sensible) as this is, it isn’t the world’s most exciting read. There is a certain ironic contemporary echo here though, if one calls to mind the recent attempt by Robert Bigelow and MUFON to do something faintly similar. That seems to have ended in tears, and one suspects that the bureaucratic barnacles Hynek’s ideal would have attracted would eventually have suffocated it.

Hynek couldn’t avoid mentioning the possibility of a cover-up in the conduct of Blue Book. All he can say is that “At no time… did I encounter any evidence that could be presented as valid proof that Blue Book was indeed a cover-up operation.” On the other hand, “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’.” But that, note, was in one case only. Understaffing, lack of assiduity, and mild incompetence seem to have been Blue Book’s overriding sins.

None of this dimmed Hynek’s optimism. If, he said, “there is indeed ‘paydirt’ in the ore of UFO data, it might well represent a scientific breakthrough of major magnitude. It might call for reassignment and rearrangement of many of our established concepts of the physical world, far greater even than the rearrangements that were necessary when relativity and quantum mechanics demanded entrance into our formerly cosy picture of the world.” Many entertain the same hope to this day. Hynek’s follow-up, The Hynek UFO

Report, covers much the same ground, but with fresh case histories and more detail on Blue Book and Condon. And it contains Hynek’s essential first question à propos a UFO report: Unidentified to

whom? A poacher or cab driver may not recognise Sirius rising, low on the horizon, dancing about because of atmospheric and autokinetic effects, but an astronomer will. Read both books, then, but it might be an idea to put a summer of trout-fishing in Kashmir between the two.

J Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry, Henry Regnery Company (USA); Abelard-Schuman 1972, Sphere Books 1974 (UK)

J Allen Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report, Dell Publishing Co 1977 (USA); Sphere Books 1978 (UK)

“EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD EXISTS IN ORDER TO END UP AS A BOOK.” Stéphane Mallarmé