Thursday, November 13,
2014
It is quite the understatement that when it comes to
UFOs there is rift between skeptics and ufologists. Very rarely do these
opposing sides meet in the middle or concede to one another. However, when
these two factions do meet in the middle or cross so-called enemy lines, UFO
research reaps the greatest benefit.
This is exactly what happened when J. Allen Hynek, a once UFO skeptic, began
classifying the most compelling and promising scientific cases of UFO sightings and
alien encounters.
As he studied and categorized the various UFO/Alien cases, Hynek began to
become less of a skeptic. It his research and expertise that led to the movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is considered to be one of the most
accurate portrayals of alien/UFO eyewitness accounts in a fictional movie. (1)
Moreover, the more complex or traumatic an event is,
the more difficult it is to rely on these accounts. Additionally, it is even
more difficult to categorize and organize these accounts into a coherent
fashion which would allow others to study these accounts. This difficulty in
categorization definitely holds true for eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings
and alien encounters.
The difficulty lies in how different each eyewitness
account is from one another. As the UFO CaseBook put it:
Such varying accounts make it almost impossible to categorize them into any
sort of neat classification system. However, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a UFO skeptic,
set out to do so. According to Hynek, even though UFO sightings and alien
encounters vastly differ from one another, there is usually some common thread
that can tie various sightings/encounters together, such as distance, time of
day, shape of object, etc. From this theory, the Hynek Rationale was born.
In all honesty, Hynek was not a true believer when he began his research into
UFO sightings as a scientific consultant for the U.S. Air Force’s Project Sign
(Sign would later become what is now known as Project Blue Book).
It was Hynek’s job to basically debunk the eyewitness accounts by labeling them as either natural phenomena or man-made objects. When he was brought onto the project, Hynek described the entire idea of a UFO eyewitness as, “the whole subject seems utterly ridiculous”.
However, as he continued to study these eyewitness accounts and implemented his
own classification system, Hynek’s overall views toward the subject began to
change. As About.com stated, Hynek found that “The UFO enigma could not be
explained away so easily…” (3)
Hynek said, “And once you open the gates to the possibility that all these
people can’t possibly be mistaken, then you see a lot of other cases in a
totally different light.” (4)
He began looking at eyewitness accounts under a new light. Once he made his
break with the Air Force, the former skeptic began to study these various
accounts on his own; still categorizing them in his home-grown classification
system. To date, the Hynek system is the most widely used UFO/Alien sighting
classification system. Hynek, because of his classification system and the
validity he brought to the subject, is considered to be the father of modern
Ufology.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek was brought in as a consultant on the 1977 movie Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. His expertise on what actual eyewitness accounts
entailed gave the movie a sense of realism concerning UFO eyewitness claims
that was unheard of in fictional films of the time. Hynek even went as far as
appearing in the film for an eight-second cameo. (4)
There is no doubt that Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a former UFO skeptic and government
UFO debunker, and his UFO classification system brought a certain amount of
credibility to the field of Ufology.
Source
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