In 1948, the United States Air Force was investigating reports of unidentified objects in American airspace and needed an astronomer to suggest possible explanations. They called the nearest one they could find: J. Allen Hynek, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University. He was a sceptic. Over the next two decades, consulting on Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book, he examined hundreds of reports by credible witnesses and concluded that he could not explain them. When the Air Force shut down Blue Book in 1969, Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies to continue the work the government had abandoned.
That organisation, renamed the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies after his death in 1986, still operates from Chicago. It holds the case files Hynek accumulated as the Air Force’s scientific consultant, publishes the historical record freely online, and maintains the classification system Hynek created in 1972, which gave the English language the phrase “close encounter.”
The Arc of a Career
Josef Allen Hynek was born on 1 May 1910 in Chicago to Czechoslovakian parents. He studied at the University of Chicago, earning his Bachelor of Science in 1931 and his doctorate in astrophysics in 1935. Ohio State University hired him as an instructor in 1936; by 1950 he was a full professor and director of the McMillin Observatory. During the war he worked on proximity fuse development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
His recruitment to Project Sign in 1948 was entirely pragmatic: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was in Dayton, Ohio, and Hynek was nearby. His task was narrow: determine whether a given sighting had an astronomical explanation. He expected to dispose of the question quickly. Mark Rodeghier, CUFOS’s current scientific director who was appointed by Hynek before his death, described his evolution in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2020: “He absolutely came into the subject as highly skeptical of the phenomenon, as almost every scientist was back then. He was a scientist dedicated to the data. He, over time, said, ‘Wait a minute, not only can I not explain this, this stuff can’t be explained.’”
The turning point came publicly in March 1966. Two mass sightings in Michigan, witnessed by dozens of people including law enforcement and a college dormitory of 87 residents, prompted the Air Force to send Hynek to investigate. At a press conference at the Detroit Press Club on 25 March 1966, attended by approximately sixty members of the press, he attributed the sightings to swamp gas, the natural combustion of methane from wetlands. The response was hostile. Then-Congressman Gerald Ford called for a formal congressional investigation. Hynek himself later wrote that “swamp gas became a household word and a standard humorous synonym for UFOs.”
The Condon Report of 1968, commissioned by the Air Force and conducted by the University of Colorado, concluded that further study of UFOs could not be justified. Hynek disagreed. In 1972 he published “The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,” his systematic treatment of the evidence. The book introduced the classification system that became his most enduring contribution: Close Encounter of the First Kind (visual sighting at close range), Close Encounter of the Second Kind (physical effects on the environment or witness), and Close Encounter of the Third Kind (entities observed). In 1977, Steven Spielberg drew the title of his film from Hynek’s third category; Hynek served as technical adviser and made a brief appearance in the closing scene.
In 1960 Hynek had moved to Northwestern University, where he chaired the Department of Astronomy, directed the Dearborn Observatory, and pioneered the integration of television technology into telescopes. At Northwestern he also worked closely with Jacques Vallee, then a graduate student, who would become one of the most influential researchers in the field. Hynek retired from Northwestern in 1980, moved to Arizona in 1985, and died in Scottsdale on 27 April 1986.
The Organisation
Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, the year after his landmark book and four years after Blue Book’s closure. It was, in the words of historian James Moseley, “the first real attempt to set up a private research group genuinely dedicated to scientific investigations and study of UFOs.” It was not a saucer club. Participation was initially restricted to scientists and professionals donating their time: Hynek’s “invisible college.”
CUFOS published two periodicals. The International UFO Reporter ran from 1976 to 2012, thirty-six years of news and analysis. The Journal of UFO Studies published twelve volumes of academic research between 1979 and 2006. Both are freely accessible online at cufos.org, the full run, every issue.
The archives hold Hynek’s personal papers: correspondence, topic files, case notes, and witness interviews. They also hold the records of NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the largest civilian UFO research group of the 1950s and 1960s, whose publications and documents are hosted on the CUFOS website. Hynek personally retained thousands of unsanitised Project Blue Book case files, including his 1968 in-house critique of the programme’s scientific methodology and his 1952 report on conferences with astronomers regarding unidentified objects, described as “the first comprehensive record of what scientists thought about UFOs in those early days.” In 2020, the physical case files were transferred to the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque for preservation; CUFOS retains organisational ownership.
CUFOS remains an all-volunteer nonprofit. It is not a membership organisation. Its board includes Mark Rodeghier (president and scientific director since 1986), George Eberhart (secretary), Jerome Clark, Thomas Bullard, Michael Swords, and David Marler (archivist). Its consultants include Richard Haines, the founder of NARCAP. Alexander Wendt, the political theorist on the Sol Foundation’s advisory board, is listed among CUFOS Friends.
From the Archive
Hynek’s photograph appears on the archive’s Ontological Shock page, where he is described as having “maintained scientific rigour across a four-decade career in the field.” His classification system remains the standard framework for organising UFO reports worldwide. GEIPAN, France’s government investigation programme, built its own A/B/C/D classification on Hynek’s foundation.
Related coverage:
- GEIPAN: France’s Government UAP Investigation Programme: adopted and adapted Hynek’s Close Encounters classification
- The Sol Foundation: Jacques Vallee, Hynek’s student at Northwestern, serves as Sol’s emeritus advisor
- Americans for Safe Aerospace: the pilot-reporting gap that Ryan Graves addresses in 2023 is the gap Hynek documented in the 1960s
- The Black Vault: Greenewald’s FOIA archive holds declassified Blue Book documents that Hynek consulted on as they were created
