The subtitle to the book, The Close Encounters Man by Mark O’Connell, is “How one man made the world believe in UFO’s.” It is, I think, an overly-grand claim, but that one man, J. Allen Hyneck, is as close to ground zero as any one man has been in the past century as far as UFO’s are concerned. The fact that he is or was not a nut, or a New Age guru, or someone claiming to be the second messiah, is both telling and surprising; telling in that the phenomena must be considered as something other than hallucination, and surprising in that a scientist of impeccable credentials would be the one to lead the way.
Born during Haley’s comet in 1910, during which his parents took him to the rooftop of their apartment building in Chicago at age 5 days to have him take a look, seems to have predestined this man to be an astronomer, which he became. In fact, he was not just any old astronomer, but considered at various times to be one of the best in the nation, given his study of black holes and anomalous stars. But it was WW11 that got him into UFO’s. During the war, his work on a timer for explosions gave our bombs and missiles much greater impact, exploding them not on target, but near-target, where they would have a greater chance of destroying the chosen object. This device was finally used in the A-Bombs over Japan, to set them off well above ground for maximum destruction, making Hyneck an important person in the atomic bomb project. Surprisingly, it was also this work that propelled him into Project Bluebook, among other government investigations of the UFO phenomena.
Surprisingly, it may have been this work itself on the A-bomb that began the tremendous spate of UFO sightings around the world as well. As long-time readers of this blog might recall, my father was a gunner on the B-29’s that bombed Japan during the last year or so of the war. It was on one of his final flights that he, as well as all of his squadron, witnessed “cigar-shaped ships” that cruised by their planes for several minutes before whisking away at unheard-of speeds at unheard-of angles. Soon the A-bomb would be dropped. Could not the sightings have something to do with the development of man’s most destructive weapon? But such questions were never to be encouraged. When my dad and his fellows got back to Guam and informed the CO’s of their sighting, for instance, they were ridiculed and told to shut up – which they did, and which most pilots have done ever since.
But not all, and that was the problem after WWII. There were so many sightings all of a sudden that people demanded an answer, and thus study committees were formed. Because Hyneck was an astronomer and already had top security clearance, it was he who was chosen to work on one after another of the government committees – and it was this work for which he will always be remembered.
He was a scientist first, and at first he was extremely skeptical of the phenomena. Even years later, it was he who worked up the “swamp gas” explanation for a series of sightings that were so widely distributed that no one believed him. In fact, it was as much his fault as anyone else’s that many now believe the government is covering up a lot of information on UFOs. In all, however, he claimed that he was just trying to be an honest scientist, and from the things he wrote, I believe him. Further, and as proof, it was he who well-described just how the Air Force was trying to cover up UFO’s – not in hiding aliens or spacecraft, but in hiding reports of sightings and abductions and so on because they did not want to believe them. As Hyneck would find, many of the sightings did not conform to anything known by our society, and because of this, the hierarchy simply did not want to deal with them. Let them go back into the closet with ESP, ghosts, and Jesus impressions on waffles, they said. But real scientists don’t do this. They go where the phenomena take them, being as objective as possible.
It was because of his position and his take on science that he would become enemy #1 of Carl Sagan, whose theories on ET’s were different from Hyneck’s. Sagan did believe in intelligent ET’s, but thought that the light speed barrier would allow only one group to visit earth every 100,000 years or so. But Hyneck remained open about the whole phenomena – what the heck do we know? – and it was because of this openness that Sagan ridiculed Hyneck, equating his interest in the UFO phenomena with the belief in little green men. With such publicity, by the time of his death in the 1980’s (on the appearance of Halley ’s Comet 76 years after his birth) Hyneck had become Mr. UFO, even as his university cringed from the publicity despite his other outstanding scientific contributions, simply because he refused to not NOT believe. Instead, he would take the information as it was given and run with it as far as his knowledge would permit - regardless.
With his dogged interest in the subject, it would be Hyneck who brought in the more sophisticated, and more applicable, notion of the UFO: that it was not necessarily a spacecraft in the manner that we understand it, but rather an inter-subjective, perhaps inter-dimensional phenomena that is currently outside our normal cognitive models; and it was Hyneck who pointed out that an investigation of such phenomena might reveal much more about our reality matrix than we could possibly imagine, just as his study of black holes and supernovas had done for astronomy.
And so it is with this that I (almost) leave the reader: one can read about the strange stuff in this book or in others, but it should be acknowledged by all those who roll their eyes at such stuff that there have been sightings by hundreds and even thousands of reliable witnesses, not only in the US and Europe but around the world, sightings that have displayed shockingly similar patterns everywhere. Any scientist should be as open to this query as Hyneck was, but most are not, because who wants to be made a fool of? We might also see that the UFO phenomena is not the only thing that we deny because of our ignorance and our egos; rather, our biases also extend to the other spooky stuff that can include spiritual knowledge and religion itself. It is Hyneck who would tell us to not be afraid, but to go where the evidence takes you.
One last thing: we all know Hyneck whether we think we do or not. It was he who came up with the “close encounters” terminology, including “close encounters of the third kind.” He advised Spielberg on the set of the movie, and had a very short but very famous cameo in the film: he was the scientist with the goatee who first dared to walk towards the ETs on Devil’s Tower. Even in film, he was the one always open and unafraid to go where the information led him. FK
Born during Haley’s comet in 1910, during which his parents took him to the rooftop of their apartment building in Chicago at age 5 days to have him take a look, seems to have predestined this man to be an astronomer, which he became. In fact, he was not just any old astronomer, but considered at various times to be one of the best in the nation, given his study of black holes and anomalous stars. But it was WW11 that got him into UFO’s. During the war, his work on a timer for explosions gave our bombs and missiles much greater impact, exploding them not on target, but near-target, where they would have a greater chance of destroying the chosen object. This device was finally used in the A-Bombs over Japan, to set them off well above ground for maximum destruction, making Hyneck an important person in the atomic bomb project. Surprisingly, it was also this work that propelled him into Project Bluebook, among other government investigations of the UFO phenomena.
Surprisingly, it may have been this work itself on the A-bomb that began the tremendous spate of UFO sightings around the world as well. As long-time readers of this blog might recall, my father was a gunner on the B-29’s that bombed Japan during the last year or so of the war. It was on one of his final flights that he, as well as all of his squadron, witnessed “cigar-shaped ships” that cruised by their planes for several minutes before whisking away at unheard-of speeds at unheard-of angles. Soon the A-bomb would be dropped. Could not the sightings have something to do with the development of man’s most destructive weapon? But such questions were never to be encouraged. When my dad and his fellows got back to Guam and informed the CO’s of their sighting, for instance, they were ridiculed and told to shut up – which they did, and which most pilots have done ever since.
But not all, and that was the problem after WWII. There were so many sightings all of a sudden that people demanded an answer, and thus study committees were formed. Because Hyneck was an astronomer and already had top security clearance, it was he who was chosen to work on one after another of the government committees – and it was this work for which he will always be remembered.
He was a scientist first, and at first he was extremely skeptical of the phenomena. Even years later, it was he who worked up the “swamp gas” explanation for a series of sightings that were so widely distributed that no one believed him. In fact, it was as much his fault as anyone else’s that many now believe the government is covering up a lot of information on UFOs. In all, however, he claimed that he was just trying to be an honest scientist, and from the things he wrote, I believe him. Further, and as proof, it was he who well-described just how the Air Force was trying to cover up UFO’s – not in hiding aliens or spacecraft, but in hiding reports of sightings and abductions and so on because they did not want to believe them. As Hyneck would find, many of the sightings did not conform to anything known by our society, and because of this, the hierarchy simply did not want to deal with them. Let them go back into the closet with ESP, ghosts, and Jesus impressions on waffles, they said. But real scientists don’t do this. They go where the phenomena take them, being as objective as possible.
It was because of his position and his take on science that he would become enemy #1 of Carl Sagan, whose theories on ET’s were different from Hyneck’s. Sagan did believe in intelligent ET’s, but thought that the light speed barrier would allow only one group to visit earth every 100,000 years or so. But Hyneck remained open about the whole phenomena – what the heck do we know? – and it was because of this openness that Sagan ridiculed Hyneck, equating his interest in the UFO phenomena with the belief in little green men. With such publicity, by the time of his death in the 1980’s (on the appearance of Halley ’s Comet 76 years after his birth) Hyneck had become Mr. UFO, even as his university cringed from the publicity despite his other outstanding scientific contributions, simply because he refused to not NOT believe. Instead, he would take the information as it was given and run with it as far as his knowledge would permit - regardless.
With his dogged interest in the subject, it would be Hyneck who brought in the more sophisticated, and more applicable, notion of the UFO: that it was not necessarily a spacecraft in the manner that we understand it, but rather an inter-subjective, perhaps inter-dimensional phenomena that is currently outside our normal cognitive models; and it was Hyneck who pointed out that an investigation of such phenomena might reveal much more about our reality matrix than we could possibly imagine, just as his study of black holes and supernovas had done for astronomy.
And so it is with this that I (almost) leave the reader: one can read about the strange stuff in this book or in others, but it should be acknowledged by all those who roll their eyes at such stuff that there have been sightings by hundreds and even thousands of reliable witnesses, not only in the US and Europe but around the world, sightings that have displayed shockingly similar patterns everywhere. Any scientist should be as open to this query as Hyneck was, but most are not, because who wants to be made a fool of? We might also see that the UFO phenomena is not the only thing that we deny because of our ignorance and our egos; rather, our biases also extend to the other spooky stuff that can include spiritual knowledge and religion itself. It is Hyneck who would tell us to not be afraid, but to go where the evidence takes you.
One last thing: we all know Hyneck whether we think we do or not. It was he who came up with the “close encounters” terminology, including “close encounters of the third kind.” He advised Spielberg on the set of the movie, and had a very short but very famous cameo in the film: he was the scientist with the goatee who first dared to walk towards the ETs on Devil’s Tower. Even in film, he was the one always open and unafraid to go where the information led him. FK
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