The Ufo Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (COLLECTOR'S LIBRARY OF THE UNKNOWN) Hardcover – 1 Nov. 1989

Good to see this classic book in Kindle format. Hynek was originally brought into USAF UFO investigations as a skeptic. His explanation for a 1966 wave of sightings as "Swamp Gas" made him a notorious figure at the time. He subsequently changed his point of view and became a "UFO Believer" which must have ruffled a few feathers in the military establishment and certainly made him quite a celebrity in the field. The TV drama series "Project Blue Book" recently brought Hynek to the attention of a new generation, and I think Aidan Gillen played him brilliantly.

Even for an old UFO nut who REALLY enjoys 70s UFO literature this kind-of-pivotal book turned out to be a joyless, humourless, uphill climb that I finally gave up at about 74 per cent.I have another (unread) book by Prof. Hynek in my collection but I’ve never been able to find a copy of this one, so kudos to Amazon and kindle unlimited for the chance to be mildly disappointed for free.It’s a great shame that it’s quickly obvious that this is a poor, un-proofread conversion to eBook that was probably OCR scanned from the UK Corgi paperback reprint copy whose sun-foxed cover has been hijacked back into service for the eBook.It’s riddled with OCR misreads and errors, so the year 1958 becomes 1,958 or the number 1 becomes capital “i”.I pushed on out of motivated interest and was disappointed to discover that “The UFO experience - A scientific inquiry” is not even, really, a great UFO book.It's a fatally earnest attempt to tackle the signal to noise ratio in early – which is to say, pretty much most of the significant – UFO sightings. There’s a noble but misguided attempt to underpin the credibility of UFO experiencers and collate UFO sightings under strict categories, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE3K) being the most famous.Sadly its only real, lasting UFO and pop culture legacy begins and ends with providing the title for Steven Spielberg’s film.The Book’s real achievement is to take the wealth of bizarre and colourful material available to early flying saucer investigators, before Whitley Strieber came on the scene and then the X-Files overworked it to death, and make UFOs dull.It deals mainly and monotonously with Prof. Hynek’s work on Project Blue Book, the US Air Force project set up notionally to assess officially recorded UFO sightings. The legend is that he entered Blue Book a sceptic and left a believer. If you’re prepared to wade through this material, you’ll find what seems to have been a more subtle shift.This book is clearly the work of a determined “debunker”, just not of the usual target.Prof. Hynek tries, endlessly, to debunk the blinkered attitude of the US establishment and its failure to investigate UFOs the way HE wanted.He side-lines raw data, like detailed sighting reports which he repeatedly states “can be found elsewhere”, in favour of lots and lots (and lots) of anonymised data tables.The huge flaw in trying to reduce the OG UFO experience to an academic-sounding white paper with respectably clinical statistics is that now we’ve moved such a long way away from the time the raw material was readily available on supermarket paperback carousels, the reader is completely cut off from the actual UFO experience, in context.Anyone who arrives here because of the current-at-time-of-reviewing TV show “Project Blue Book” is going to be REALLY disappointed. The series has more in common with the fantasy universe of the always regrettably short-lived X-Files imitator “Dark Skies” than the real-world beliefs or experiences found in this book.Prof. Hynek vigorously dismisses UFO abduction and has nothing but contempt for the pseudo-religious cult of what used to be called “contactees”, with the possible exception of Barney and Betty Hill. He writes off the idea that there’s a US Government UFO cover up, just laziness and general incompetence. He also works really hard to avoid the idea that flying saucers are visitors from space.

This seminal work of scientific enquiry was first published in 1972. It's still relevant today, and remains one of the deepest, most informed and convincing works ever published about the UFO phenomenon in all its various manifestations. The book was re-published in 1998 by Marlowe, and this later edition is reviewed here.J. Allen Hynek, the author, was Chair of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern University and Consultant to the US Air Force during its 25-year long investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects. Hynek died in 1986, two years before Donald Keyhoe, having gone through a complete 180-degree conversion from outspoken scepticism about the UFO issue to acceptance of the phenomenon as real and to voicing open criticism, even on national TV, of the debunking and cover-up tactics deployed by the USAF in its public-relations management of the issue.The author put forward some interesting and radical ideas about what the phenomenon might be, embracing but not necessarily restricted to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The fact that Jacques Vallee writes the foreword to this book should tell any reader right off the bat that here we are dealing with a serious enquiring mind, and what follows does not disappoint.At 234 pages the book is divided into three sections:1. The UFO Phenomenon - which subdivides into The laughter of science, The UFO experienced, The UFO reported, and On the strangeness of UFO reports2. The data and the problem - Nocturnal lights, Daylight sightings, Radar reports and then an explanation of Hynek's own first, second and third kind classification system3. Where do we go from here? - The problem with Blue Book, "Science is not always what scientists do" and finally, "The case before us"The book is scholarly, accurate, conservative and overall, excellent. Furthermore, it is well written in a literate style, completely free of typos, well annotated with interesting appendices, absorbing and occasionally (intentionally) humorous. Hynek had a great mind and was a true expert in his subject, and could write well. We're dealing with a real phenomenon, Hynek concludes, and scientists had better take it seriously and start to investigate. The fact this has not happened in the real world since Hynek's demise could be the subject of another (much larger) book - or several.Many millions of people who have watched Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" may be unaware that it was Hynek who originally postulated the term "Close Encounters" and divided them into those of the "First, Second and Third kind", and that Hynek actually had a cameo role in Spielberg's film.If you're interested in understanding this phenomenon, or the long history of informed public debate about it, you should read both this book and its companion "The Hynek UFO Report", analyzing cases from Blue Book. Consider also the 1975 book "The Edge of Reality", co-authored by Vallee and Hynek.Hynek's "UFO Experience" is right up there as one of the very best works about this phenomenon ever written, along with Edward Ruppelt's seminal 1956 "Report on Unidentified Flying Objects", Jerome Clark's 2-volume Encyclopedia (get the second edition), David Jacobs' 1975 doctoral thesis "The UFO Controversy in America", some of Jacques Vallee's books, and Timothy Good's "Above Top Secret" and its follow-ups "Beyond Top Secret" and "Need to Know".Every serious collection of UFO literature should contain all Allen Hynek's published work - especially this one, which is the best.

Hynek's book is the defining text of modern, serious UFOlogy and anyone who studies UFO phenomena but has not read this text is, in my opinion, distinctly lacking in their basic research. If you're looking for conclusive proof of aliens, conspiracies, paranoia, abductions or 'new age' revelations you won't find it here. What you will find is the careful, intellectual, scientific discussion of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a noted astronomer who worked on the USAF Project Blue Book. Hynek joined as a naive debunker from the scientific community, and left the project a changed man - founding the Center for UFO Studies. He brought much-needed credibility and scientific knowledge to the subject, and his legacy will live on. An ESSENTIAL book for anyone with even a passing interest in UFOs.