J. Allen Hynek

Josef Allen Hynek was an astronomer at Ohio State University when the U.S. Air Force hired him in 1948 as scientific consultant to Project Sign, and later Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, tasked largely with explaining away sighting reports as misidentified stars, planes, and balloons. For nearly two decades he played the role of official skeptic, but the unexplained residue of cases he could not dismiss — Socorro, the 1966 Michigan 'swamp gas' fiasco that made him a punchline, and hundreds of credible witness reports — pushed him toward a public reversal. By the early 1970s Hynek had become the field's most credentialed advocate for taking UFOs seriously as a scientific problem, founding the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in 1973 to apply rigorous data collection where the Air Force had applied dismissal. His enduring contribution is the classification system still used today: Nocturnal Lights, Daylight Discs, and Radar-Visuals for distant sightings, and Close Encounters of the First, Second, and Third Kind for progressively intimate contact — a taxonomy borrowed directly by Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, on which Hynek served as technical consultant and made a cameo. Critics, including former Blue Book colleagues, argued he had gone too far from evidence toward advocacy; supporters counter that his trajectory from debunker to believer is precisely what makes his testimony credible. He died of a brain tumor in 1986, having done more than any other individual to make ufology resemble a scientific discipline.