J. Allen Hynek

Josef Allen Hynek (1910–1986) was a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and later Northwestern University, and the scientific consultant retained by the U.S. Air Force from 1948 to 1969 to evaluate UAP reports collected under Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book. ^[1]

Hynek began his work skeptical of the field, and was responsible during the 1950s for proposing prosaic explanations for many sightings — most controversially attributing the 1966 Dexter, Michigan case to 'swamp gas,' a phrase that became a public-relations problem for the Air Force. ^[2] By the late 1960s, however, Hynek had revised his position. His 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry formalized the Close Encounter classification — CE1 (visual), CE2 (physical effects), CE3 (occupants) — that remains the lay vocabulary for the field. ^[3]

After Project Blue Book closed in 1969, Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in 1973 in Evanston, Illinois, with the explicit goal of conducting scientific evaluation of UAP reports outside the U.S. government chain. CUFOS holds the largest non-government UAP case-file archive in the United States and continues to publish a peer-reviewed journal. Hynek consulted on Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which takes its title from his classification scheme. ^[4]