Mark O’Connell - The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs

This book was born in a basement in Chicago, amid a ring of overfull bookshelves and dented, dilapidated file cabinets. The assemblage of obscure journals, redacted government documents, and plaintive correspondence packing these shelves and drawers was nearly all that was left of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), a UFO research center that had been founded in a Chicago suburb in 1973 by astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

I had been visiting the archives in search of interesting material for my UFO blog, and on one visit, Dr. Mark Rodeghier, who now stores these antiquated remnants of Hyneks work in his Chicago home, invited me to make use of these ramshackle memory banks to write the definitive account of Dr. Hyneks remarkable dual careers. This was to be the first telling of Hyneks significant accomplishments as an astronomer who pioneered the science of celestial imaging and as a researcher who was on the scene at many of the most amazing UFO encounters in history, and made serious discussions of the UFO phenomenon scientificallyand sociallyacceptable.

From a lifetime of studying the UFO phenomenon, I knew of Hyneks pioneering research through his writings, media appearances, and short but notable movie career during his heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s, but when I started to delve deeper into the CUFOS archives, I realized that I understood very little about the man. Hynek had spent nearly twenty years debunking UFO reports for the U.S. Air Force and was considered a sellout, a dupe, and a coward by many Americans for helping the air force cover up what they believed the government knew about the UFO mystery. For this sin, he was hated in UFO circles. But he was also ultimately disowned by the air force, because over time his views about UFOs changed dramatically and he began to demand that the government and the scientific establishment conduct a scientific study of the phenomenon, to find out what was really going on. What kind of man, I wondered, could calmly stand at the center of a decades-long conflict and be equally despised by both sides? This is what I wanted to find out.

That drama alone made Hynek a fascinating character to want to write about, but then there was his other historyhis brilliant yet largely ignored career as an astrophysicist. This was a man who helped win World War II with science, who discovered how and why stars twinkle (not a small thing), and who helped determine the landing sites for the Apollo moon missions. Along the way, he pioneered crowdsourcing, developed the worlds first global satellite tracking network, discovered a record number of supernovae, and paved the way for the Hubble Space Telescope. If Hyneks career as a UFO researcher was universally misunderstood and misjudged, his career in astronomy seemed to have been swept under the rug in its entirety. When I discovered that the records of Hyneks scientific triumphs and failures were housed at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago (in significantly better shape than the CUFOS files), and within a few miles of my home, it seemed that the true, complete story of his life and work was demanding to be told. And it came to me as mystically as any of Hyneks career pursuits.

In very little time, I realized that Hyneks two careers informed each other in fascinating ways. Had he not been an astronomer, he would never have found himself at the epicenter of the UFO phenomenon, and had he not been at the center of the UFO furor, he might never have risen to prominence as an astronomer (nowhere was the overlap between Hyneks two careers more dramatic than in his very public, decades-long battle for scientific respectability against astronomer and UFO mocker Dr. Carl Sagan). Furthermore, had his life not followed the exact trajectory that it did, he might never have had an unforgettable cameo in Steven Spielbergs Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the research for which was borrowed from Hyneks professional findings. In fact, Hynek and Spielberg corresponded through letters leading up to the production of the film, evidence that not only UFO enthusiasts held Hynek in high regard.

This book, then, is an attempt to rectify Dr. Hyneks story, to find the heroism, humor, and humanity in a man whose name has been relegated to a basement full of file cabinets when it should rightly be written in the stars.