It's a worthwhile observation that years after a highly skeptical Al Chop had radically changed his mind and decided that UFOs were something real and extraordinary, perhaps of a source extraterrestrial, the Air Force's chief UFO consultant, astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, reached a similar conclusion.
However, in a
letter typed about a month after the release of "U.F.O." dated June
19, 1956, a still-cautious (perhaps "on the fence" is a better
description, as negativity toward the phenomenon's potentially incredible
origin was part and parcel of Hynek's early approach) Dr. Hynek addressed the
movie and a few other issues with veteran UFO researcher Alexander D. Mebane
(NY). At this time, Hynek had just moved
to Cambridge, MA to work with the Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical
Observatory. Among the subjects of
interest covered in the letter was this:
"Activity
at ATIC* has picked up considerably
recently, what with the UFO film, which I had an opportunity of previewing
before it hit the public theaters, and with Jessup's** UFO Annual . . .well, all of these things are having
their repercussions."
Hynek also noted
that ATIC's "Saucer Division" had recently acquired Capt. Gregory, a
name familiar to historians, as its chief.
Though
frequently seeming to tow the Air Force line regarding UFOs in the fifties,
Hynek nevertheless confessed to Mebane, "The Air Force still believes that
my services are of some value to them, even though lately I have been quite
critical of a number of things."
Finally, zeroing
in on the motion picture, Hynek stated:
"I enjoyed
the UFO film immensely even though it was over-dramatized and terribly
slanted. I suppose it's some sort of a
commentary that I found the most dramatic part of the picture to be the
bringing in of a plane through fog by radar.
This part at least was factual."
This part at
least was factual. One gets the impression that Hynek was still
securely locked away in his skeptical box as apparently, in his view, all the
other contents and components of "U.F.O." were based upon thin
air. Whatever he meant, this was a
curious statement, probably quite telling of Hynek's fifties UFO approach.
Of course, by
the time the mid-sixties, the Socorro encounter, the Michigan sightings and
then abduction reports of the seventies started to evolve, Dr. J. Allen Hynek
was no longer a skeptic, and in the seventies his J. Allen Hynek Center for
UFO Studies set out to be a repository and investigative source for reports
by police officers and what were envisioned as other qualified UFO
observers. In other words -- the version
of Dr. Hynek observed briefly during his walk-on in the film, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind was by that time (1977) both what we saw and
what we got.
Indeed, what a
metamorphosis had occurred, since Hynek in 1956 declined Mebane's invitation to
make a public appearance in NY City because he felt he could do more by
remaining in the background as a "catalyst."
(Thanks to
author and veteran UFO researcher Barry Greenwood
for bringing the Hynek letter to our attention.)
(* Air Technical
Intelligence Center)
(** Morris K.
Jessup's UFO Annual, appearing in hardcover, was basically a collection
of newspaper stories about UFO activity, and I recall an addendum here and
there afterwards, but any possibility of a continuing "annual" book
of monumental proportions was dashed due to Jessup's death -- which is another
story in itself, recounted elsewhere.)
