UFO, page 31
In the years ahead, Stringfield became infamous for his too-good-to-verify stories, which always seemed to emerge from anonymous sources through a game of telephone, like, as the newly formed Midwest UFO Network (MUFON) noted, one account of a UFO crash sourced to a reliable person in a technical position at a large General Electric plant who had heard the story from his brother in the air force. The tales were often long on detail, short on evidence, but created a new narrative. “More than any other single ufologist, Stringfield was responsible for restoring credibility to the notion that saucers from space had crashed and, along with the bodies of their crews—and maybe even a survivor or two—had been scooped up and secreted away by the U.S. Government,” James Moseley wrote in his memoir.
The theory laid the groundwork. In many ways for seemingly blockbuster reporting in 1980 by Stanton Friedman and William Moore that the US government had long covered up the truth about that 1947 crash in Roswell. That incident in New Mexico just weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s first sighting had been almost entirely forgotten when The Roswell Incident was published, mentioned only twice in all of the UFO books released in the intervening decades (one of which was an explicit mention in a 1967 book of the crash as a hoax and myth).
The Roswell Incident, authored by Moore and Charles Berlitz, with Friedman as a main source, was largely built around testimony Friedman had obtained from Jesse Marcel, the long-retired air force intelligence official who had retrieved the crash wreckage from the New Mexico ranch. Now, though, Marcel had a very different story to tell: what he’d taken from the ranch three decades before was no ordinary weather balloon, but exotic materials from outer space, dotted with hieroglyphs and possessing properties unlike anything known on Earth. The debris he’d posed with for news photographers back then had been a ruse.III
To bolster their argument, Friedman and Moore cited witness testimony from a long-dead civil engineer named Grady “Barney” Barnett, who had recounted stumbling upon the crashed disk in the desert, surrounded by archaeology students from an unnamed eastern university who had chanced upon the wreckage. Together, they had examined the alien bodies—hairless, with round heads and small, oddly spaced eyes.IV
The book sold widely, but the initial evidence Berlitz and Moore offered was thin (Jerome Clark called the book “premature and sketchy”), and the rise of Roswell as the ultimate deep-state conspiracy would continue in the years ahead.V Friedman, though, believed he was onto the biggest story in human history. He called it “Cosmic Watergate.” As he said, “The UFO Story is the most important story of the past millennium.”
* * *
When Richard Nixon finally resigned the presidency in August 1974, after months of controversy, a feeling of relief swept the nation, and a feeling of hope galvanized the UFO community, in particular—perhaps, some thought, this was the beginning of a new age, in which truth and transparency could take hold. The same month, APRO’s Jim Lorenzen announced in an interview in National Tattler that “a program has been undertaken that will over the next few months make it obvious that the government has reversed its position… [and] will release all its information [on UFOs] within the next three years.”
The shift came as the UFO movement—almost exactly a quarter-century old by the time the burglars entered the Watergate building in 1972—faced its own generational transition as two of its loudest and most influential voices fell silent. After more than a decade leading NICAP, Donald Keyhoe was ousted by its board in 1969; two years later, James McDonald died by suicide. With Blue Book and the air force officially out of the conversation, organizations like APRO and MUFON stepped in and took the lead—sightings were now filtered through them and the media, with little involvement from the government. MUFON had been founded in 1969 and managed to amass several hundred new members in the early years of the 1970s, thanks in large part to its magazine, Skylook, which had quickly become one of the most important reads for the country’s remaining ufologists, including Hynek, who felt an intellectual kinship among MUFON’s members in a way that he hadn’t been able to with NICAP or APRO.
At the time, the renowned astronomer was becoming something of a star in the community. The closure of Blue Book had been his final dance with the military on UFOs, and the Hynek now unleashed on the world was a far different man, thinker, and scientist than the one the air force had first approached in the 1940s.VI “He’s gone from initial hostility toward the subject to skepticism and misgivings, to cautious calls for more study, to muted criticism of the Air Force, and eventually to open hostility toward the Air Force and complete acceptance of the idea that UFOs represented potentially one of the most serious problems he had confronted,” historian David Jacobs related.
In 1972, he had published a groundbreaking book called The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, which was unlike anything the field had yet seen—three hundred pages outlining the intellectual and scientifically rigorous approach to the phenomenon that the author had long wished others would follow. Hynek’s open and questioning nature led him down paths that other scientists didn’t dare, even if they had felt odd to him—like the abductions and so-called “occupant” cases, a particularly vexing and long-standing logical challenge for the scientists in the ufology community. Written for a popular audience, and with an accessible and approachable tone, it solidified Hynek’s role as the nation’s unparalleled authorityVII on the subject in all its facets, the one consistent public and official presence across a quarter century of sightings, government efforts, and public controversies, despite his concession that “after more than twenty years’ association with the problem, I still have few answers and no viable hypothesis.”VIII
Comprehensive and rooted in deep, authoritative research, The UFO Experience stood in stark contrast to other books in the category authored by skeptics or conspiracy theorists and had a massive practical impact—fundamentally changing the classification framework for UFO sightings by organizing their commonalities into six levels of rising seriousness and witness proximity.
The three lowest categories dealt with most common and least reliable distant sightings: nocturnal lights (odd lights, moving or stationary, spotted in the night sky); daylight disks (oval- and saucer-shaped objects spotted during daytime hours); and radar-visual (UFO sightings that are confirmed both visually and by radar; seemingly more trustworthy sightings that indicated a solid object). The second grouping gathered the so-called “close encounters,” in which a UFO or flying saucer was spotted less than five hundred feet away and the witness was able to provide considerable detail, and could be further sorted into three sublevels: “Close Encounters of the First Kind” were up close but noninteractive visual sightings where witnesses could perceive shape and describe movement, and other various details; “Close Encounters of the Second Kind” were sightings that also came with physical effects—changing environments, agitated livestock or animals, electrical interference with nearby vehicles, or trace impressions on the ground, like burn marks, indentations, or scorched vegetation; and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” were “the most bizarre and seemingly incredible aspect of the entire UFO phenomenon,” the cases where the witness actually reported seeing “the presence of animated creatures,” e.g., occupants, humanoids, alien beings, “UFOnauts,” or “UFOsapiens.”IX It was a category that Hynek admitted to struggling with—as a scientist, he explained, he would gladly have omitted it entirely from his research were it not for the “offense to scientific integrity” it would create. Even in the face of doubt or dismissal, he wrote, “we must study the entire phenomenon or none of it.”
“It is in Close Encounter cases that we come to grips with the ‘misperception’ hypothesis of UFO reports,” he further explained, adding that while all of the first three categories could often be attributed to planes, balloons, astronomical, atmospheric, or meteorological phenomena, simply writing off more detailed “close encounters” was “virtually untenable”—“My own opinion, and I believe the reader will agree is that accepted logical limits of misperception are in these cases exceeded by so great a margin that one must assume that the observers either truly had the experience as reported or were bereft of their reason and senses,” he said.
Acknowledging these cases was also important, it was noted, because a surprisingly high number of sightings were of the “third kind,” including those at military bases and many that Project Blue Book had either failed to ever hear or catalog—“clearly it is not only kooks who report humanoids.” In fact, drawing on a semi-comprehensive catalog that Jacques Vallée kept of “close encounter” cases, Hynek estimated that about 300 of 1,247 tracked cases involved a report of a humanoid-type creature, and about a third of those were multiple-witness sightings. These were, he emphasized, the cases that most confounded investigators and that the government preferred to pretend didn’t happen at all,X but “when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I believe that it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science but a mighty and totally unexpected quantum jump.”
To keep pushing for that jump, Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies in Illinois in 1973, an almost entirely volunteer-run effort comprised of engineers and scientists who simply wanted to see the kind of in-depth study Hynek had long advocated for. Its five major areas of research were, according to its founder, (1) analyzing soil and plants disturbed by UFOs (so-called “trace cases”); (2) physical examinations of animals and people who had contact with UFOs, as well as (3) witness credibility studies; (4) photographic and spectrographic analysis of UFO sightings; and (5) theoretical physics research about reported movement and luminescent properties of UFOs.
“The interdisciplinary nature of the UFO problem is clearly apparent,” the MUFON newsletter explained in an article about the new organization. “There are aspects of the problem which are of interest to psychologists, sociologists, medical practitioners and others.” The center launched with a toll-free number for “UFO Central” that Hynek distributed to local police nationwide, promising “a ridicule-free avenue for the natural desire on the part of the witnesses to communicate their experience to someone in authority.”
The incredible admission, reading between the lines of his book and his new center, was that, a quarter century into his work on the subject, not only did Hynek still have unanswered questions about the entire UFO phenomenon but that his questions were bigger and more fundamental than when he’d started the work in the 1940s. In fact, given the rise of abduction stories, the UFO phenomenon was actually even weirder than when he’d started.
* * *
Though sightings, encounters, and even telekinetic conversations had become a widely accepted and expected part of UFO lore, the question of alien abductions had remained largely underexamined. The first real significant spotlight was cast on the rare occurrence in 1967, when a new book by John Fuller, called The Interrupted Journey, publicized the story of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple who claimed they’d been taken by aliens during a drive home through the New Hampshire mountains on September 19, 1961. A bright light following them for miles, seeming to grow larger, until Betty—a social worker for the state—could see double rows of windows through her binoculars. The couple stopped the car abruptly and Barney, a postal worker, got out and walked toward the saucer-shaped craft. When he saw humanoids inside, he ran back to the car, screaming, and tried to drive away, but suddenly, neither of them could see the stars above them. A strange beeping filled the car.
The next thing they knew, they were home, in Portsmouth, about two hours later than they had anticipated.
The experience left them feeling strange, but confident they had seen a UFO. To better understand what may have occurred, Betty sought out one of Keyhoe’s books at the local library, and began to try to reconstruct the evening’s events. She and Barney spoke publicly about their terrifying journey in some groups during the spring of 1963, but as the couple’s anxiety worsened, they sought treatment with Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Boston-based psychiatrist who used hypnosis on his patients. During a session, Barney—weeping and writhing—described a memory of a strange humanoid with wraparound eyes appearing in the road and pulling him from the car. In the minutes—perhaps hours—that followed, the beings, who spoke English, had poked and prodded the Hills aboard their craft; he and Betty were attached to examining machines, one of which inserted a long needle into Betty for what she was told was a pregnancy test. Betty was also able to converse telepathically with one of the beings, who seemed to be the leader. At one point, she asked them for proof of their existence, saying no one would believe their story without it. She was shown a star chart that the beings had evidently used to navigate themselves from their home to Earth.
The tale astounded Simon. As far as he could tell, it was unlike any other ever documented by another human, and far outside the realm of what other “contactees” had described during the 1950s. The Hills were not willing participants, had received no message for mankind, and seemed traumatized by their encounter—desperate, even, to avoid the memory of it. There were some apparent physical traces of an interaction, including scuff marks on Barney’s shoes and a tear and pink substance on Betty’s dress, but none of it was conclusive or even seemingly out of the ordinary. Simon put great stock in his patients’ perspectives and feelings, and after evaluating the situation, saw four possible explanations before him: “Betty and Barney were lying (unlikely); it was a dual hallucination (improbable); it was a dream or illusion, some kind of experience enhanced by fantasy (conceivable); or it actually happened (unthinkable).” While the case, Simon decided, “could not be settled in an absolute sense,” he did come to the conclusion that Betty and Barney’s experience, “was a dream.… The abduction did not happen.”
The couple, the world’s first and, to this day, most famous abductees, sat uncomfortably with their fame as the years passed by.XI Barney died in 1969, and Betty later reported that, beginning in the early 1970s, she’d frequently journeyed to a spot about twenty miles from their home in Portsmouth, where she could see UFOs almost any night she visited. (When a UFO investigator from Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies joined her, he gently informed her that she was simply looking at planes.)
Over the years, believers like Keyhoe tried to keep the couple at arm’s length, dubious about the plausibility of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while others, like the NICAP team, offered a bit more flexibility, suggesting that the couple may have suffered a true UFO sighting that then triggered “subconscious fears of what might have happened,” which then worked their way into subsequent nightmares and hypnosis sessions—but on a larger scale, many came to believe that the Hills were telling the truth. In the mid-1970s, Astronomy magazine reported that an Ohio schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish identified a sketch Betty had drawn from memory of the star map shown to her by the aliens as Zeta Reticuli, a southern constellation about forty light-years from Earth,XII implying that the aliens had come from the double-star system. The article nearly demolished the credibility of the then-year-and-a-half-old magazine when Carl Sagan, among others, blasted the conclusion, saying that the Hills’ star map was little more than randomly placed dots on a piece of paper, and that its alignment with Zeta Reticuli was random chance—the sky, after all, was so full of stars that if you randomly drew dots on a piece of paper you could probably line it up with some constellation somewhere, he argued. Fish, presented with later evidence, eventually recanted her own hypothesis.
Whatever the truth was, it would likely be a while before it was found. As UFO expert Jerome Clark concluded in his own study of the case, “The resolution of the Hill case awaits the resolution of the UFO question itself. If UFOs do not exist, then Barney and Betty did not meet with aliens. If UFOs do exist, they probably did. The evidence available to us from this incident alone provides no answers surer than these.”
* * *
Cases like the Hills were rare, but they occurred all over the world. For Hynek, getting to the truth of such abduction narratives seemed likely to yield larger insights about the whole world of ufology, and intrigued to learn more, he journeyed to Papua New Guinea in 1973 to study one of the oddest foreign cases ever recorded, involving an Anglican minister, Father William Gill, and dozens of parishioners in a remote town called Boianai.XIII The lengthy saucer sighting had unfolded over the course of two nights, and featured both smaller crafts and a larger “mother ship,” all seemingly populated by humanoid figures; at one point, Gill recounted that when he had waved, a figure had waved back. The sighting lasted so long that Gill at one point went inside for dinner even as the craft stayed in the sky. Over the years, no convincing explanation had ever emerged for the reports (“Efforts to explain Gill’s experience conventionally have not been notably successful,” Jerome Clark wrote dryly), and so they fell into what Hynek had come to call “the Festival of Absurdities,” a term first coined by French UFO researcher Aimé Michel to describe all the strange effects reported amid UFO sightings—electronic interference with car engines, panicked livestock, and other bizarre occurrences that didn’t make any logical sense. The Gill case intrigued him, in part because, over a long correspondence with Menzel, the Harvard professor had remained convinced that the case could be explained by normal causes. Perhaps even that the entire sighting was a mystical invention on the part of the minister to influence the native islanders, he suggested. But Hynek was dubious the case was really that simple, and “wanted to check his theories.”
