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April 17, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:09
Edition 444 - Project Blue Book

This time, the behind the scenes story of Project Blue Book astrophysicist/researcher J Allen Hynek - one of the biggest names in Ufology - told by his son Paul Hynek who is carrying forward his father's legacy...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet.
By webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, here I am, continuing in my isolation, sitting in my father's old TV watching leather chair, as I have done for all of these years doing podcasts and radio shows.
As I record this, it's a lot cooler than it was a few days ago, but the sun is still up.
It's early evening time.
It's beautifully bright.
And I'm looking out of my window, and there's absolutely no one there.
There are no cars on the road.
Every bus that goes past is empty.
And these are weird times.
I hope that you're getting through it.
I know I've said this before, but I hope you're getting through it.
And please feel free if you want to, you know, drop me an email and tell me how you're getting on.
I think this crisis, this international coronavirus crisis is bringing so many people together.
And as I have said before, and I'm sounding like a broken record, but I think that it's making a lot of us rethink our lives.
I've done in the dark hours when I can't sleep, and I spoke a couple of nights ago on my radio show with a psychologist about why people are not sleeping and why they're having weird dreams at this time.
But in those dark times when you think, how am I going to do things when this is done?
Which I believe that human ingenuity will find a solution to this and hopefully sooner rather than later.
When this is done, I don't honestly think that I'm going to continue doing things in the way that I've done them.
You know, I'm going to live whatever years remain to me for me.
Something I'd just like to note, around the time that I'm recording this, it is the second anniversary of the death of Art Bell.
Now, you will know that if you've listened to me enough over the years, I first discovered him when I bought my first computer.
I remember I spent about a year paying for that computer.
It was so expensive.
It was a really good Dell.
Well, good for its day.
I think it had a 3 gig hard drive.
Don't laugh.
But I was determined to get international radio.
So day one, I found a station in Paris.
Day two, I found a station in Los Angeles carrying coast-to-coast AM with Art Bell.
And it was daytime.
It was a Sunday morning.
And I was amazed at it.
And I had a little time, one of these little tiny pocket FM transmitter things.
I actually put the sound on FM, went back to bed with a coffee and some toast, and listened enthralled to this man talking about subjects that I've been doing interviews about and been interested in all my life and doing the whole thing from his own home.
He inspired me.
So it's two years on and he is much missed.
If you haven't heard of Art Bell, check him out because he leaves an enormous legacy and he will always be for me the standard by which all of us are judged.
Thank you very much to Adam from Creative Hotspot for his hard work on the website as ever.
Thank you, Adam.
Thank you to you.
If you've emailed recently, I'm not going to do shout-outs on this edition because we have a great guest.
If I say the name J. Alan Hynek, I'm guessing if you know anything about UFology, you will know this is the man behind Project Blue Book, a man who spent his life investigating UFOs, an astrophysicist who became a bit of a convert to it all, a man who was brought in because he would look at things rationally and skeptically, but he became convinced by many of the stories that he heard and investigated.
He was also the man who gave birth to the concept of the close encounters, most famously, of course, close encounters of a third kind.
It was Jalen Hynek who gave his name to the movie and who knew, as you will hear in this conversation, and worked with Steven Spielberg on that film more than 40 years ago that I've probably seen more than half a dozen times now.
So Paul Hynek, his son, is continuing his dad's legacy.
He's in Southern California.
We'll talk to him in just a moment.
A couple of things to do, just to say thank you very much for all of your emails.
When you get in touch through my website, theunexplained.tv, by following the link, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And thank you very much if you've done that.
And thank you if you've made a donation to the show recently.
If you haven't, I realize these are difficult times for so many people.
But if you're able to consider that, it would make an enormous difference to me.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
You'll find the entire archive of my online shows there, going back to 2006 when I started this.
And you can make a donation.
If you've made a donation recently, thank you very, very much for doing that.
Wherever you are in this world, please stay safe.
We will get through this, all of us.
And that, you know, sometimes I have down times, as you will have down times, and you think, what is going on with the world?
And then you look out of the window and you look at the trees and the sky and everything else.
And nature is out there.
It's like it's waiting for us.
And we'll be back every single way.
Every one of us, every man, Jack of us, every one of us, I'm sure.
All right, let's get to California now.
What I'm sure will be a really interesting conversation with Paul Hynek, son of J. Alan Hynek.
Paul, thank you very much for coming on my show.
My pleasure, Howard.
You're in Southern California, Paul.
How are things there?
You know, we have the lockdown going over much of Europe.
I'm not aware of your restrictions in California.
How's it being done there?
California's been pretty aggressive and ahead of the curve on the social distancing.
And so we've been on lockdown since mid-March.
And there are early signs that those aggressive efforts are starting to pay off.
Well, no, that's good news.
And most people, we've had a problem with some people, and it is a minority, disobeying the instructions, associating with other people in groups, maybe having barbecues and that kind of thing at times.
Are people generally law-abiding about it there?
I think so.
You know, in the early days, there was the first weekend of the lockdown.
The beaches were crowded, and that caused a big stir.
And I read this morning that seven people got together for a party, and they got fined $1,000 each.
So, yeah, so more or less, I think people here in California are heeding the seriousness of the situation.
Well, that's good, and let's hope we get out of this thing as quickly as is feasible, Is all I can say.
Certainly, looking at it from the London perspective, where probably like you, I'm doing my work from home.
That's good for a period, but it begins to wear after a time.
Now, the reason we are talking, Paul, you've had a great career.
I'm reading your biography here: decades in finance, technology, entertainment at a very high level.
You've been involved in all sorts of projects.
But we're actually here to talk about your father, who was one of the guiding lights, one of the key figures in all of ufology, even before the word ufology had been invented by Stanton T. Friedman, J. Alan Hynek, a name that comes up time and time again when I have conversations about UFOs, ufology, investigations, possible congressional hearings, all the rest of it.
Your dad's name comes up all the time.
It's quite a legacy, isn't it, to be carrying on?
Yeah, you know, if you think about it, there are a few questions that are the most important queries that we have.
You know, are we alone?
Is there life after death?
What's the meaning of life?
And my father helped codify the search for one of those and push us tantalizingly closer to a possible answer.
Right.
Of course, we're still searching for that answer, but we seem to be clawing our way with every passing year closer to it.
And let's hope in my lifetime, your lifetime too, we get there.
I want to, we're talking about the man here, of course, and his achievements, the things that he will be remembered for.
How do you remember your dad?
What was he like?
Oh, yeah, my dad was a very, you know, he was a, he was born to Czech parents in Chicago, and he didn't speak English until he went to kindergarten.
And he was just a very warm man with an over-fondness for puns who got the bug for astronomy as a young kid and never thought about doing anything else.
And, you know, my siblings and I, we think of him as a scientist and an astronomer who had a side hustle with UFOs because we knew the other aspects of him.
And, you know, he viewed UFOs as something very interesting because from a young age, he wanted to go to sort of the dimly lit corners or edges of mainstream science and take a flashlight and create a little bit more order there and push the bounds of what we commonly accept.
And he found that challenge with UFOs.
Now, isn't that interesting?
So for him, it was an extension of the scientific method, the scientific challenge.
Yeah.
And, you know, and it started off, you know, people ask, why did he get involved with UFOs?
And, you know, when the Air Force approached him in the late 40s, I'm pretty sure he thought it would be a couple of weekends' work because he was a big skeptic of UFOs and thought it was post-war bunkum.
And the government asked him to help tamp down these reports and he was all too happy.
I'm sure he had no idea that some 50 years later, his Brady fourthborn son would be talking to you on the radio.
Right.
So his approach to UFOs, whenever he read stories about them, whenever people talked with him about them, he was, of course, around at a time when the whole thing was kind of in a firmament.
It was very, very hot topic from the time of Roswell and 1948 and all of the reports beyond that and the things that happened in the 50s.
So he was around them.
Whenever people talked with him about it, before he was approached to be involved in it, he was a skeptic.
Yeah, and you know, and that was even before they called them UFOs.
They were flying saucers, which, you know, is not a name that really encourages serious scientific investigation.
I've always wondered about your dad, how the approach was made.
You know, the Air Force was starting to get involved.
There were various projects, weren't there, that culminated in Project Blue Book, the one that he was heavily involved in.
But they started with other projects.
I think there were two or three before that, starting in the late 1940s.
So, you know, what was the call like?
When the call came, what were they asking him?
Yeah, so I've seen various conspiracy theories that hint at sort of a darker underbelly.
But I kind of follow the Occam's Razor notion that the Air Force and, you know, Project Blue Buck and the other projects were operating out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
And my father at that time was a professor at nearby Ohio State.
And I think they just wanted to have some scientific, you know, legitimacy, but they wanted probably the closest astronomer who'd fit the bill.
And my father had top secret clearance from having worked on the proximity fuse, which helped protect London in World War II.
Really?
And so I think he fit the bill nicely.
He was available.
He had clearance.
He had somewhat of a name in conventional astronomical circles.
And I think that that was probably enough for them to check off the list.
What did he think he was being asked to do?
Did he think that he was being asked to, as all scientists do, rationally investigate a thing, look at all sides and come up with an objective conclusion?
Or did he get the impression as some people writing later have given that he was being required to find against the idea of UFOs?
Yeah, you know, it's hard for me to know exactly, but I suspect that when the Air Force approached him and they said, look, I think they said something along the lines of, look, Dr. Hynek, we've got this problem.
People are believing in death rays and little green men, and we want a scientist to help quell public suspicion or public fears about that.
I think that's probably the attitude that they both had at the beginning.
And then, you know, life has a funny way of not turning out as you think.
And, you know, on his way to the UFO debunking ball, he found that there were things that he couldn't explain away.
And how did that process of discovering that actually maybe there's something in it, as far as he told you, as far as you know, how did that begin and develop?
Well, it was, I think it was slow.
It's kind of like the frog in the hot water who doesn't realize the water Is getting steadily but slowly hotter.
You know, he started noticing commonalities.
Well, one of the insights he had was that he was not studying UFOs per se, he was studying UFO reports.
And he didn't have a UFO and some gigantic Petri dish that he could look at.
So he was studying reports.
And so a large part of that is the credibility of the witness.
So he would assess the credibility of the witness, and he started noticing commonalities in what people reported, people that he felt had no way of being in contact with each other.
And that started to change his mind that, hey, there really is something here because I can't explain away everything, even with the resources of the Air Force and his background as an astrophysicist.
And he found that roughly 5% of the cases, and that held true throughout the whole of Blue Book, couldn't be explained.
And so seeing this growing number of cases reported by people who are very intelligent, who were in possession of their senses, who had nothing to gain, and sometimes had been trained by the very same Air Force that was debunking them, it became too much for him to look at it through the same sort of Air Force jaundiced eyes.
And yet, astrophysicist, your father was, you know, he was accomplished at doing that.
That's why they picked him.
But he was being asked to assess the credibility of witnesses.
And I'm guessing that, yes, you can look at scientific evidence and he's been trained to look at the credibility of reports and, you know, the veracity of reports, that sort of stuff.
But it must have been a new thing for him to actually go into the human side of it.
Basically, working out whether people were telling the truth.
That's right.
And, you know, he was asked to find answers, to find explanations.
And I think when he started meeting with people, you know, the hardcore quantitative scientist part, you know, got shaken a little bit by seeing the trauma that these people had experienced or that he felt they had experienced.
You know, one of the things people would ask him, hey, did this or that case actually happen?
And he would say, how the hell should I know?
I wasn't there, but those people, this person in particular, seems genuine to me.
And I believe that they believe they had an experience.
That's as far as a scientist could go.
But he did find many, many credible people whose cases also were consistent over time.
And he would ask them about the experience and he would sort of rephrase it slightly differently to notice if their story stayed consistent or if it got embellished or if some of the details got a little bit murky over time.
Yeah, sticking to your story, very important.
I noticed that with some of the people that I interview.
If their narrative remains consistent, chances are they're not embellishing in any way.
So that's something that your father was very much into.
When he started realizing that there might be something in this, did that trouble him or excite him?
What a good question.
I think probably equal parts at first, because as a scientist, you've got a pretty established worldview.
And if all of a sudden this sort of lurid phenomena takes on a patina, a patina of accuracy or legitimacy, it must be really troubling.
But at the same point, very exciting because as an astronomer, as he was, you're always thinking sort of past the earthly confines and about life elsewhere.
So I imagine it must have been, you know, I can imagine that that first inkling he had that there was something there, it must have just been fascinating.
I can imagine it would have been, especially for a scientist.
Whatever the brief is, whatever your superiors, your masters, whatever they might be, whatever they're expecting of you, you've got to go with the evidence.
And it's amazing reading the accounts of the man that that is exactly what he did, even if the people that he was working for, and maybe you can talk to me about this, sometimes did not like the conclusions that he was coming to.
Yeah, you know, you know, the Air Force's job is to project power through the air, to defend against the projection of power from our adversaries against us, but also to create and maintain the perception among the populace that they have the ability to protect us.
So for them, UFOs, whether real or not, represented a threat to national security through the lenses in which they viewed the world.
So their job, and Project Blue Book in particular, was a PR exercise to tamp down public hysteria, find answers, make people, make John Q public feel comfortable.
That's not a scientist's job.
A scientist is to investigate something with as little bias as they can and follow where the evidence leads, even if it's against the current of your beliefs or the central thesis of the grant that you just received.
So my father felt it was very important to keep his mind open to a new phenomena, but also to not close the door prematurely by simply grabbing the best available answer to a phenomena, but remaining open that maybe you don't have all the answers yet, even if you do believe something is happening.
There are many stories in all of ufology, and I've read, as you will have read, an awful lot of them, of people being given briefings, presidents being given briefings behind closed doors, Jackie Gleason being called into a hangar, shown what they recovered at Roswell, all of those stories.
Was your father as far as he told you, and I'm not sure how much, how many conversations as you were growing up and coming into the world and establishing your place, but was he given any kind of briefing of that kind before he began this?
You know, there are some accounts, and I've talked to his dear friend and longtime colleague Jacques Vallet, about generals that said they're going to take them on a tour to show them something.
But there wasn't what I would consider a smoking gun briefing that I'm aware of by a high-level public official as to, you know, with some kind of a revelation.
Traditionally, and certainly it's the impression I get talking to people like Nick Pope about this today and various other investigators in the field.
I get the impression that through all of history, and when your father was active in all of this, the military, the government, echelons of it would be split on this.
Some people perhaps inclined to believe it, and a lot of people wanting just to rubbish it and say this has got to go away.
It's absolutely nothing and it's all a fake.
Was he aware of those conflicting tensions pulling either way?
Absolutely.
People have a tendency to think of a government acting in a coherent and monolithic manner, but it's not at all the case.
You've got all these various fiefdoms.
Even within the Air Force, they had different entities investigating UFOs.
I had Project Blue Book and the Air Intelligence Service Squadron, especially the 4602nd that was sort of a crash recovery team that may have been the genesis of the men in black.
And those two departments within the Air Force were at odds.
So just imagine the other branches of the military and other parts of the government, including the CIA, who don't trust each other, who don't like each other, and may have been actively working at cross purposes.
Wow.
And all the time he's got to carry on with his consultancy role, doing an impartial job, investigating the information and checking it all out.
That must have been, you know, you said that your dad had a great temperament, which I'm sure he did and a wonderful sense of humor.
I'm guessing he needed both of those things.
Yeah, you know, because my father, I think he felt that he had three main constituencies that he had to keep each slightly displeased so that he's doing a good job balancing.
One would be the military and the government.
The next would be mainstream science.
And the final one would be believers in the UFO phenomenon.
And, you know, he had his feet in each of these camps, and they're all very different with very different objectives.
And if he leaned too far in either direction, then I think he felt he wasn't doing a balanced job.
Are you able to talk with me about any of the investigations, any of those that he might have talked with you about?
Oh, sure.
So, I mean, if you'd like, which ones stick out in your mind?
I know there's the famous Swamp Gas case that actually quite convinced him, but are there any, you know, maybe two or three that are prominent in your mind?
Yeah, so one that comes to mind, well, there are two that come to mind right away.
One is the Pascagoula case in 1973 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, with Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker.
And I've now become friends with Calvin.
And so I've had many conversations with him.
And one of the interesting things about, there are a couple of interesting things about that case.
One is that when Calvin and Charlie and Charlie were in the police station, after the police left the room, the recorder was left on.
And it certainly seems like Calvin and Charlie did not know that it was on.
And they remained very consistent with their account when they thought they were alone.
And over time, more and more people are coming forward saying that they saw something that night also.
So that case gets more credible over time.
And Calvin is just, I don't know if you've had the chance to talk with him, but he just comes across as such a sincere guy who was troubled by this and is still trying to sort it out.
Now, that was, wasn't it beyond the period that your father was working with the official services?
That was later, wasn't it?
That's right.
Because Blue Book disbanded in late 1969.
And this was in 1973.
Right.
And after that, presumably, was it a clean break or did he keep contact with the people who'd employed him?
You know, I've seen documents now that there was still some kind of ongoing consultancy, that he still had some involvement with them.
So it was not a black and white, you know, net separation.
But did he feel, as the accounts that I've read suggest, that once he was not working for the man, once he was not working for the government, he was freer to express himself?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And, you know, he was criticized by some, including his friend James McDonald, for having stayed with Blue Book for so long and kind of having given it that legitimacy that a scientist would, because the Air Force really looked for sort of ground cover, as it were, from scientists to help them do things, like disband.
They use the Condon Committee.
But he felt that if he stayed with Blue Book, even though it wasn't an honest scientific exercise, he had the opportunity to not control things, but to influence things, such as which cases might be investigated, how the investigation might go, and have even greater influence as to how that investigation would be recorded.
And he felt that doing that, he would have access to the data and that later he'd be able to sort of put it together.
And that's how he came up with the classification system of close encounters of the first, second, and third kind.
Right.
So he decided that I'm going to clean this up, but as we say in the UK and they probably say in the US as well, that it's better to be inside the tent spitting out than outside the tent spitting in.
Yes, that's right.
I did clean that up.
I just want to stick with Blue Book, though, for a little while.
Then we'll talk about the later cases, including Calvin Parker, who I found very credible indeed, the two occasions that I've spoken with him.
What do you think your father contributed to Blue Book then?
How did he help its conclusions if there were solid conclusions?
Well, you know, I mentioned earlier that Blue Book couldn't find explanations for about 5% of the cases.
They officially investigated over 12,000 cases and they threw their hands up in the air with 700.
And to me, that's fascinating because their goal was not, as I said, to get to the bottom of a scientific enigma.
Their goal was to find pat answers for every case and classify it as solved.
So you know that they would be hesitant to investigate a case that they didn't think they could find an answer to, and that even with all this huge impetus from the higher-ups to explain every case, they still couldn't do it with over 700 cases.
And to me, that's just absolutely incredible.
Can you recall, can you recount a case, maybe a couple of cases in the Blue Book era that really changed your father's perceptions?
Yeah, one case, and it wasn't in the U.S., but it was in the Blue Book era, was Father Gill, an Anglican priest in Papua New Guinea in 1959, which is one of my favorite cases as well.
And I met Father Gill.
He came to Chicago where I was living for an ecumenical conference sometime in the 70s.
And this was a man who was very intelligent and very cogent.
And while he and 500 other people are seeing the same thing, he is taking notes like trigonometry, et cetera, to try to determine how far away the craft is and how large it is.
And so he came to Chicago years later.
And because he knew my father, he came to our house for dinner.
And he was a very well-spoken, intelligent man, comfortable in his own skin, not involved in the UFO scene.
But if you come to the Hineck house for dinner and you've seen a UFO, you're going to have to start talking about it.
So my father is asking about it.
And I had the chance to see his reactions.
And, you know, like Calvin, just an entirely credible man who saw something amazing with such good backup evidence that that was one of the cases that really stood out, I think.
What about this case from the 60s, very close to the end of the blue book period, the Michigan swamp gas case, as they call it?
From what I read, that's the one that he really could not find a rational explanation for.
Yeah, and that's a case that was very frustrating for him because of the swamp gas, quote, taken somewhat out of context, but also he had a broken jaw at the time, and so he couldn't speak a whole lot.
So he wasn't able to say as much as he wanted.
But that case, you know, one of the interesting things about that case is that the local congressman, a guy by the name of Gerald Ford, became so incensed by how it is handled that he wrote a letter demanding a committee be impaneled to study, you know, to look at Project Blue Book.
And that was the Condon Committee, which was the sort of public excuse to disband Project Blue Book.
Right.
Isn't that astonishing?
And so that one goes all the way up the chain to a man who became the president.
That's right.
This particular case, though, was interesting in that there was physical evidence, well, apparent physical evidence, including higher radiation levels around the area where these events were said to have happened.
Yeah, and it's evidence like that that's just so compelling because, you know, if you ask five people who've seen a car accident what happened, you'll get six different versions, right?
And so eyewitness accounts are one thing, but when you have that kind of physical evidence that can be measured in more sort of a field laboratory setting, it adds so much credence to the report.
Absolutely.
And I suppose bit by bit, little by little, over the decades, he came to realize what were the building blocks of a good report.
Not only reports, as in this case, of a dome-shaped craft, but actual physical evidence that it's very hard to explain away.
You know, that was said to be a turn.
I don't know whether it was, but there was somebody I spoke with a while ago about your father who claimed that it was some kind of turning point for him.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, also in 1964, there was the Lanny Zamora case in Socorro, New Mexico.
Lanny Zamora was a policeman in Socorro, New Mexico, and he saw a sort of egg-shaped craft on the ground with entities around it.
And the overall case was just so compelling.
My father felt that that's a case in that sort of same timeframe that he pointed to as one that was a turning point for him.
What about the famous alien abduction cases, the Betty and Barney Hill, the mummy and daddy of all the cases?
Was he involved on any level in that?
Yes, he was.
He actively investigated.
He met Barney and Betty Hill several times.
And one of the things that's very interesting about that case is that Barney and Betty Hill were a biracial couple.
Barney was black and Betty was white.
And if you think about the United States in the 60s, there's really, you'd have to have a very strong constitution to want to garner publicity when you're in that situation.
So that's one of the parts that he found very compelling from a non-scientific point of view as to the credibility of the witnesses.
You know, I'd never thought of that.
Of course, we have to go back.
You know, we're living, thankfully, in very different times, but you have to see it in the backdrop of what was going on then.
I'd never thought of that case that way.
But he met them and clearly he found their story compelling.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Were there any other abduction cases?
I mean, we know about Betty and Barney Hill.
Were there any other abduction cases that spoke to him in that Blue Book period?
In the Blue Book period, there weren't many abduction cases that Blue Book investigated.
Another one that comes to mind after Blue Book is the Travis Walton case, which is a very interesting case.
And I know Travis pretty well, and he holds up consistently over the years as well.
I've spoken with Travis several times in the last 14 years.
I've always found him very compelling.
He doesn't sound like a man who is making it up.
He sticks to his story.
It's consistent.
You can ask him any question.
It brings you back to the narrative.
So I'm interested to know that.
And your father in the period after Blue Book met him, spoke with him?
Oh, yes, yes.
And he came to our house for dinner as well.
And after that experience of meeting Travis Walton, you know, I found myself having to sit down and have a cup of coffee after I'd spoken with him on one of the occasions and just mull it all over in my mind.
What were your father's thoughts?
If you have recollections of that, I'm not sure how old you'd have been then, but if you have recollections of what that was like, how was your father feeling after that encounter?
Well, by the time I met Travis, my father already met him, I think, several times.
And, you know, people ask, you know, like, what was it like?
I don't know a life without UFOs.
You know, one of my first memories is a flying saucer ornament on our Christmas tree.
So for us, it was, you know, Travis Walton over for dinner.
Well, that's just Tuesday night.
So this is part of the fabric of our lives that, you know, to be scientifically curious about the world and to have a working knowledge of the UFO field.
Right.
So other kids and other young people have the experience of having someone over for dinner tonight.
This is Peter.
He works with cars.
So, you know, this is Travis Walton.
He was abducted by aliens.
I get that.
It's quite an unusual upbringing that you had.
Yeah.
Although, you know, however you're raised, whether good or bad, is normal to you until you get older and view it in hindsight and compare it to others.
But it was fascinating.
And, you know, my friends thought it was, I'm asked sometimes if my friends teased us.
No, they all thought it was super cool that our dad was investigating UFOs.
Now, in the Travis Walton case, your father and I and you, we all found Travis Walton compelling and he came around to your house.
Your father wasn't working for the government then, but he was still in contact with them through the blue book period and on events like that, on occasions like that.
If he fed back to the people that he'd been working for or was working for, I think this person is telling the truth.
What kind of response was he used to getting?
Probably like, okay, Dr. Hynek, that's really nice.
Move on.
I don't think they were interested so much in hearing, especially afterwards, hearing his feedback as to the credibility of the witnesses.
So do you think that some of those people felt that he'd failed because his brief, which perhaps he knew what the brief was, but he was being a scientist, you know, his brief was to almost debunk and he wasn't doing that.
Did they feel that he'd failed them?
Yeah, I'm sure they had, you know, their frustrations with him, just as he had with them, because they wanted someone to come out and just explain everything away.
But at some point, you know, an honest scientist is just not going to do that.
So I'm sure there must have been a lot of conversations about, you know, Hynek going off their reservation, so to speak.
At the time when your father went independent freelance, there were people around who were coming up in the world of ufology.
The most famous Stanton T. Friedman, who sadly we lost last year, and I knew Stanton pretty well over the years.
He spoke his mind.
He was a scientist.
Did your father know all of these people?
Did he know Stanton?
Oh, yes, very well.
And how did he get on with people who were in the UFO community?
You know, my feeling is he got along with almost everybody very well.
Because, as I mentioned, he tried to keep the various constituents in balance.
You know, he had the street, the quad cred, as I call it, of a scientific professor from academia.
He had, you know, experience with the military, but he had an open mind.
You know, one of the things that struck me, and I saw him talking to various people who had reported UFOs, was, and you had mentioned this about his sort of transition from being a nuts and bolts scientist to going to the touchy-feely realm of people reporting things.
You know, he clearly understood the trauma that people seemed to believe they had experienced.
And so he was very understanding and very patient with people.
So, you know, my feeling, and I know most of the people in ufology now myself.
And I think my father was respected as a scientist who did the best job he could in pretty trying circumstances.
Did he ever talk to you about Area 51?
No.
No, he didn't.
So, and you know, a lot of this, like Roswell and Area 51 are things that really weren't in the public zeitgeist until fairly recently.
Like Roswell really wasn't talked about until the 70s.
Right.
I mean, Stanton Friedman was one of the first people to get that out there.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So things like we talk about Area 51 all the time now.
It's in the papers here in the UK.
You know, every week there's a story about Area 51.
Last week there was a guy, I think, who overflew or took aerial, God knows how he did it, took aerial photographs of Area 51.
So it's always there.
And the public are starting to believe that maybe there's something going on at Area 51 that we haven't been told about.
We have to put it into context, don't we?
When your dad was actively doing all of this.
The attitude that the media, the press, and especially the tabloid newspapers here in the UK, but the media everywhere, the attitude the media had was very different from the attitude now.
Yeah, I mean, especially during the Blue Book era, you know, people didn't have this sort of distrust of the government and were more patriotic.
And there was, you know, there was the Cold War and there was fears of the Russians more so than, you know, aliens beaming down with ray guns.
And, you know, David O'Leary, the creator of the current show Project Blue Book about my dad, he makes the point that the original Project Blue Book from the U.S. Air Force was one of the sort of first fake news operations because it was putting out disinformation at times and not being scientifically accurate.
Do you think that people today, and I'm just, this is just asking for your Opinion based on your dad's experience and yours.
Do you think that it would be as easy to cover things up if things had been covered up or to try to cover things up as easy today as it was then?
No, I don't.
And that's one of the things that makes it harder to just accept the notion that the government has all this data.
You know, they have the crash, the retrieved saucers and the alien bodies and all that, because it's just hard to understand how that information wouldn't have come out in a more compelling manner.
And yet at the same time, you know, we talk about disclosure.
Well, there are those like Jan Harzan of Mufon and others who believe that disclosure has happened with especially the New York Times article on the USS Nimitz and the overall Navy stance to the phenomenon, which is 180 degrees different than what the Air Force of my father's day evinced.
And that we're now, we're looking more for confirmation, that the government has already made overtures.
And again, through one branch, the Navy seems to have a sort of different agenda than other branches of the U.S. government.
And so that the government has already disclosed and we're now looking for confirmation.
But something that I've thought about a lot in terms of disclosure is, you know, we've always talked about in ufology about, okay, we need the signal event of a flying saucer landing on the lawn of the White House at noon in the middle of a news cycle, and that's it.
That will put it to bed.
But now with the sort of fractured society and distrust of the media and the government, what percentage of the world would simply not believe seeing a live news conference with video of a flying saucer landing, you know, in the wherever you want, outside Buckingham Palace or the White House?
The government has a challenge now, if there is information to disclose, on actually getting people to believe what they say.
And maybe the media, and this is, you know, I've been in the news media all my life, but maybe the media has a problem too, because it strikes me that both sides of the Atlantic, there are not the Cronkites anymore.
There are not the Dan rappers anymore.
There aren't those big figures.
Yeah, that's right.
There aren't sort of these, and part of it is because of cable news.
You don't have the sort of focused on large networks anymore.
So it's much more fractured.
And yeah, you're right.
There isn't a sort of a singular person who, where they come out and say, hey, UFOs exist, that everybody would believe them.
We're sometimes told that certain presidents were more UFO friendly than others.
We're always told whenever a new president comes in and gets the keys to the Oval Office, that they're given a sit-down briefing about all of this and they're told where the bodies are buried.
Now, whether that's true or not, you and I probably will never really get to know.
I suspect it probably is.
Was your father, I mean, for a start off, did your father meet any presidents?
And was he aware that some were more interested and partial to this phenomenon than others?
Yeah, you know, I'm not sure.
I've seen sort of inklings that he had meetings with several presidents, but I'm not sure.
And, you know, I don't know, you know, if there is a really deep conspiracy that's been around for years for this phenomenon, I think the last person they may tell is the president.
I think they would have this stuff so cordoned off because the president is just a political, you know, a functionary who comes in for several years.
And if you've really got, if you know the secret to anti-gravity and faster than light travel, you know, I think that gets cordoned off so securely that for the secret not have come out.
I mean, you asked about, you talked about secrets coming out and harder to keep secrets these days.
I think if this secret is being kept, it's being kept from a lot of people inside the government.
Right.
And you go to events.
You're carrying on your father's work to a great extent.
Do you have people coming up to you and telling you things that are explosive, you know, astonishing, but at the moment you cannot reveal them?
Do you get people confiding in you?
Yes, I do.
And when I first started doing various events and conferences, the first one I did was an Alien Con, which is organized by the History Channel.
And after our panel discussion, five, 10 people came rushing up to me and wanting me to sign one of my father's books and saying, I need to tell you something.
I need to tell you something.
Do you have the best sphere?
I need to tell you about my account.
And I was taken aback because at that point, I hadn't done much in ufology myself.
And I'm just the son of a guy who had.
But I saw, I could see what my father went through to some degree, the earnestness of these people to unburden themselves of this secret that maybe they've kept from everybody for many years or this traumatic experience that they believe they've gone through.
And they're seeking validation.
They're seeking answers.
They're looking for the meaning behind it and why it happened to them.
And they want somebody who understands to listen.
Yeah, yeah, just to accept them.
And, you know, they assume rightly because of my last name that I will be understanding and somewhat knowledgeable about what they're saying.
And it's become gratifying to me in talking with a lot of people and giving presentations that they've said at times that I'm able to help them sort of put this into context a little bit more.
I don't expect you to break any confidences, but can you recount any of those stories that you were told yourself that maybe were revelatory to you?
What a good question.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mentioned the Betts sphere, and I don't know if you've heard about that, but there's a case in Florida with a perfect metal sphere, and it disappeared.
And there was an account in the press that it had been given to my father.
And after I talked about sort of in passing at a conference, the fact that, you know, people asked, what was it actually like in our house.
And I remember, well, my father once gave us this big metal sphere.
And we were just sort of kicking around on the floor in the basement.
We didn't have any idea where it came from.
And we just had fun with it.
And, you know, I thought, well, if you've got this sort of secret UFO artifact, giving it to your teenage sons and having play within the basement is a great way to hide it sort of out in the open.
And so I'm still, I don't know what happened with that sphere.
And I'm trying to track it down with my siblings as to what happened.
But that was an interesting case to me where somebody had heard that my father had that.
And after hearing me talk about a sphere like that, I found it very compelling.
Right.
So somebody, was this somebody who was involved in the case or just somebody who'd read about it, heard about this?
Yeah, they were related to the people who had reported the case.
Wow.
Wow.
So, well, that's amazing.
I mean, those experiences for you must send a great big cold shiver down your spine, I guess.
Yeah, when you think of some, you know, innocent object in your childhood as maybe being the linchpin to a celebrated UFO case.
Yeah.
Your father wrote a very important book, The High Neck Report, in 1977.
Why did he do that?
Well, it was a follow-up to the UFO experience in 1973, and he just had more information to get out.
And the 70s, you alluded to this earlier, was really a hotbed of UFO, both hysteria and awareness at the same time.
And, you know, he'd been shackled down by Project Blue Book for so long that he really wanted to get people to take an honest look at an emerging phenomenon.
And so another book was necessary.
And he wrote, you know, there were other books he wrote, one with Jacques Valley, and participated in other books as well, because there was just so much sort of white noise out there that he wanted to pierce and get a good, level-headed voice of clarity into the discussion.
And when he was writing, was he driven?
Yeah, I remember one time he was writing when he was working on the Hynek UFO report at our vacation cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada.
My friend and I kept trying to get him to do things.
And he had this little study up in the woods.
He would just go up there and we wouldn't see him almost for days at a time while he was in a writing spurt.
And did he have time for you then?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
You know, he was a devoted family man, and he just loved people.
And I mentioned he had an over-fondness for puns and just a very humorous, gregarious person.
So if you didn't know anything about UFOs or care about them, you'd find him to be a very pleasant companion because he loved to learn about people and to share experiences from around the world and just and just enjoy himself.
You know, it's a wonderful thing.
You hear about people who are passionate about what they do and committed to it and end up being bad fathers.
Sounds like your father was dedicated to his work, but also a great dad.
Yeah, he was a great dad.
And my mother was a great mom as well.
We were very lucky.
We were very fortunate to be brought up in that household.
And, you know, people have a tendency to think of scientists as these sort of spock-like logical thinkers.
But, you know, and they're just like a breed apart.
You know, like, you know, like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind portraying John Nash.
Scientists aren't a different breed of people.
They're just, in some cases, smart people who found their passion in life early on and focused on that with the diligence of an engineer and just stuck with it and are able to get a little bit further in a field because they had such a lifelong focus on it.
But outside of the lab or wherever that scientist may work, they may not, they're not necessarily autistic and looking for logic behind every corner.
Your father came up with the close encounters definitions.
Of course, close encounters of the third kind being taken over by Mr. Spielberg, and that's why we all know about it.
How did he come up with that?
Well, you know, I mentioned that he had the nuanced insight that he wasn't studying UFOs, but UFO reports.
And so what he realized was after seeing sort of a commonality of reports from around the world, but there wasn't sort of an easy way for people to compare them because they're all sort of handled in different ways.
So he reckoned that if he were to contribute some type of classification system that would allow people to compare things in a much more apples to apples way and make some headway with gleaning through this increasingly large mountain of data.
Of course, the one that fascinates us all and the one that made the movie is Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Did he talk to many people over his career who'd claim to have had close encounters of the third kind?
Oh, hundreds, if not thousands.
Yes, absolutely.
And what were the ones that made the biggest impact on him?
Maybe the one or two?
Well, we've talked about several of them.
You know, Travis Walton and Charlie Parker.
Calvin Parker, right?
And Charlie Hickson, Father Gill and Barney Bed Hill.
These are all ones that stood out for a variety of reasons as having what he called high strangeness, but also very good credibility of the witnesses.
And in many cases, very good corroborating evidence as well.
Did your dad wish that he'd have an encounter?
You know, I think as an individual, yes.
I mean, if you're studying a phenomena, you'd absolutely want to have that personal experience.
And yet, from a dispassionate scientific point of view, you know, he saw two things in his life that he thought were interesting.
And He actually photographed an object from a plane, but he didn't want to talk about them too much because he was a single witness.
And if he approached the field from, hey, I've, you know, been chosen or I saw something, that tended to weaken his standing as a serious scientist investigating phenomena and letting the chips fall where they may.
So that's interesting, isn't it?
So he applied the most rigorous criteria to himself.
Oh, yeah, right.
Absolutely.
And so, you know, being able to say, look, I don't have a horse in this race.
I'm a scientist.
This is an important question.
And there's a lot of evidence out there.
Let's sort through it.
Let's categorize it and see where the dust settles so we know how to proceed.
That's a much different attitude than I've seen one of these.
I know they're real.
Why can't you believe me?
But was seeing believing for him?
You know, they say seeing is believing?
Yeah.
And I don't know if belief is a great word for a scientist.
People say that he went from a skeptic to a believer.
I think he'd be more comfortable if people said he went from a skeptic to an acceptor of the data.
Because belief is just not something that scientists traffic with that much.
Right.
Do you remember much about the contact with Steven Spielberg?
Yes, and I met Steven Spielberg during the filming of Close Encounters.
What was that like?
Well, at the time, I was a Braddy 14-year-old, and he wasn't that well known.
He had just done Jaws.
He had done a few other projects, but Jaws sort of catapulted him into national prominence.
But he wasn't a household name at the time.
And I was used to meeting all kinds of media people on TV and newspapers, interviewing my father.
So it wasn't that much different.
And I remember my father, but I remember seeing him with my father.
And if you search Heineken Spielberg, you'll find a really interesting video of Spielberg and other people involved with Close Encounters talking about my dad.
They loved him.
He was this jolly, avuncular fellow who had so much experience in the phenomena.
And so Spielberg really looked up to my dad and he thought he was a very big help for the film.
And I remember my father being very hesitant about the project because when you think of Hollywood coming to treat a subject, you don't often think about scientific method.
So he was very hesitant about it at first, but he was very pleased with the end result that he felt that, and it had a lot of actual incidents, well, reports, actual reports that were layered into the film.
And he felt that it really helped open the tent, as you talked about, for people to have and move the needle on public discourse for people to feel more comfortable talking about this phenomena because it had been portrayed in a really even-handed and accepting manner in the film.
It was a great movie.
I still watch it today.
I think I've probably seen it six times.
I think I probably know some of the dialogue as well, which makes me very sad.
But was your father an advisor?
Did they actually take his advice?
Yes.
Yeah.
So they bought the rights to the title from him.
He was a technical advisor in the movie and has a cameo role.
So a lot of the things that are reported that happened in the movie are things from reports that he told them about.
Well, that's incredible.
Was he proud of that?
Yes, he was.
That had those bits of verisimilitude.
And, you know, one of the funnier incidents in the movie is where the UFOs go through the toll booths.
And of course, one of the control cars goes off the cliff.
Well, that actually is from a report on the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Really?
That there were UFOs zooming through toll booths.
Really?
I mean, that's the kind of, you watch that as a moviegoer and maybe somebody who's interested in UFOs.
If you didn't know and you hadn't read about that case, you would just assume that's a little bit of, you know, a little bit of creative license by Hollywood.
But that's based on something real.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, the reports like Richard Dreyfus gets burned on his face.
Those are things that happened.
And one of the reasons that my father called his first book the UFO Experience is because of the totality of what people report.
You know, we tend to focus on, oh, they saw a craft or they saw, you know, beings.
Well, for many of these cases, seeing a craft is but one part of the overall experience that they had.
They will often report some type of feeling of communication and sometimes both before or before, during, and after the visual sighting.
So my father called it a UFO experience.
And I think that kind of feeling of this extra dimension is portrayed really well in the movie Clause Encounters.
Because there are people, and I've spoken to many of them, and the phenomenon really hadn't impacted upon me.
But there are people who will tell you, well, this was the main event.
But then they'll tell you, when I was a kid, something came into my bedroom.
And they'd had experiences that had go.
So for a lot of people who have these experiences, and it's interesting that this impacted so forcefully on your father, those experiences start young for many, culminate in something big, and then just continue through their lives and become part of the normal for them.
Right.
Whitley Streeber is a great example of that.
Yeah, no, totally.
I know Wit as well, and he's very compelling too.
Now, I would have thought, I always assumed that because your father was involved in close encounters of the third kind, that it probably made him a millionaire, probably a couple of times over.
But it didn't, did it?
It absolutely didn't.
Yeah, there was no close encounters with millions.
Is it true that the total payments for the rights that he, you know, he granted them only amounted to a couple of thousand dollars?
Yeah, and you know, yes, for the, there were, there were, you know, he was a technical advisor, so he received a consulting fee for that, and there was a fee for the title.
But yeah, as a consultant on a project, you're not going to get, you know, buy a small island in the South Pacific.
And for him, it wasn't really about money.
It was about, hey, you know, this is going to really open up the discussion on the phenomena.
I have a chance to influence how this is done.
So I want to be involved.
What was it like when you went to see the movie?
Oh, it was amazing.
And I saw it.
I've seen it, as you can imagine, many times.
But going to see it with my father and seeing, you know, because at that point, I'd been involved and I'd seen and heard about so many reports, but to see them visualized and things that I had actually known about specific incidents visualized on the large screen with such wonderful visual and special effects.
Oh, it was just fantastic.
And of course, we know that that movie has persisted 40 years now or more.
You know, people are still watching it.
In later years, did your father have any reflections on the movie?
Did he think differently about it?
No, he felt very positive about the movie, that it did a service to the phenomena.
And that's one of the things that pieces of fiction do, is that, you know, if you have a documentary or a book about UFOs, it's going to provide some nuance for those who already believe, but it may not be enough to bring other people along.
But with a movie like Close Encounters or the show now Project Blue Book, you can have some, and Project Blue Book is not all fictional.
It's based on a lot of real events and real people, and then it's somewhat dramatized on top of that, which is a very interesting idea.
When you have a project like that, you know, a movie or a TV show, imagine a family where one of them is an ardent follower of the UFO phenomena and the others aren't, don't care about it or don't believe in it at all.
Well, hey, you know, take a look at this show and it stands up or the movie stands up on its own two feet as really, really compelling entertainment.
And then you can have that discussion in the family afterwards about, oh, I didn't know that.
Or if you watch Project Blue Book and you see this sort of character arc of a scientist who's pretty sympathetic, who doesn't believe, and then over the course of seeing these things, comes to believe there's something is there, that sort of takes the public along for that ride.
So I think things like Close Encounters, especially back in the 70s, my father felt really did a good service to the phenomenon in making it, you know, in sort of destigmatizing it and showing, you know, an everyday Joe who has no idea about UFOs, has no interest and is caught up and now becomes an all-consuming part of his life.
Talking about the new, the new Project Blue Books series, if your father was here now, how do you think he'd have handled the fame?
You know, he was well known for UFOs for a long time.
So I think my father would have liked the show very much.
I can imagine him putting on his slippers and his robe and sitting in his comfortable chair with a big bowl of popcorn saying, oh, that's a mighty good show.
I think he really very much enjoyed it.
You know, it's the broad strokes are, you know, his character arc of being a skeptic and then coming to accept this phenomenon.
And it portrays, you know, it's interesting because in the first season, there's a very good structure of each show is based on a specific case.
And that's carried on in the second season, although there's even more depth added to it.
So you have this level of these are real reported cases, some real people and some close amalgamations of people on the Air Force side.
And then so you have these real cases, and then you sort of visualize what people reported, and then you add on some more drama on top of that.
But then after, you know, at the end of each episode, they say, here's more information to find out.
And the History Channel tells you more about the actual cases themselves.
So it's really bringing a lot of attention to specific cases and to the overall phenomena, but doing it in a really fun, dramatic way.
This is vital, isn't it?
Because I was talking to Peter Davenport a few days ago at the National UFO Reporting Center, who I'm sure you know well.
We were discussing who is going to carry this work on because the great UFO investigators, the great proponents of it all, we don't have so many of them now.
You know, Stan Friedman's left us.
Your dad's not around anymore.
So many of them have left us.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, much like we were talking about TV, things are more fractured now.
So there's a lot of different entities out there.
I'm doing my small part.
I can't fill my father's shoes, but I'm carrying on a bit of the torch.
And I'm now the chairman of the advisory council for MUFON, which is the largest UFO reporting investigative body, working closely with Jan Harzen, the director.
And I found that it's just too compelling for me not to do what I can.
Now, I'm not a scientist like my father, so I don't have the ability to investigate as he did, but I find that I can communicate his overall message and that of others like Stanton Friedman to the overall population.
You know, fathers and sons, it's an interesting relationship.
It is one, of course, that endures.
And when we lose our fathers, sometimes the impact that they made on our lives becomes even more focused.
It certainly has for me, and I'm guessing it was for you.
At the moment, I'm sitting recording this, and it's almost like a superstition.
I'm sitting in my father's battered old TV watching leather chair, right?
I always do that.
There is so much of my father I now realize in me.
I'm guessing I know he had a massive influence on you.
If you were asked to sum it up, how will you remember him?
I remember him as Joey, the little Czech boy from Chicago, who never worked a day in his life because he found his passion when he was seven years old in astronomy, and who stumbled upon one of the biggest phenomena there is and did yeoman's work in bringing humanity that much closer to understanding what was going on.
Wow.
That's wonderful.
Paul, thank you.
I've so enjoyed this.
Is there anything I haven't talked about I should have?
No, I think you've encapsulated the entire phenomenon in just this 45 minutes.
Well, no, I don't think it's possible to do that, but I hope I've done your father justice.
I've read so much about him over the years.
It's marvelous for me to be able to speak to you in California about him.
I wish you well in everything that you do.
If people want to read about you and the legacy continuing, is there a place online they can go?
Not really.
That's something I need to work on.
Well, no, you absolutely damn well do.
No, I've got a great webmaster.
He could help you.
But look, you need to have that resource going on out there.
Paul, thank you so much for speaking with me.
My pleasure, Howard.
Wow.
Well, I really enjoyed that.
I hope you did too.
Paul Hyneck, the son of J. Alan Hynek, and maybe that will stimulate you to go and read a little bit more about Blue Book and all of that, and maybe watch the series as well, the History Channel series that he talked about.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
The website, of course, don't forget to check in with that, www.theunexplained.tv.
And please be part of my Facebook group, the official The Unexplained with Howard Hughes Facebook place.
It's vital that we build that location.
Thank you for supporting that, too.
Right, well, that's it then as the sun...
It's going to be going down soon enough, but not just now.
So I'm just going to enjoy looking out at the sunset in the next half hour, hour or so.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And especially now, please, wherever you are, stay safe, stay home, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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