J. Allen Hynek

And they're based in some form on, you know, you touched on this in your book as well, but like Madame Blavatsky and the whole theosophy movement and, you know, everything is sort of derived there.

And even like You know, Jacques Vallée was famously, and so was J. Allen Hynek, Rosicrucian.

Right.

And so, you know, there is this tie to like hermeticism, to these ancient orders of, you know, science, if you will.

When you're

Spielberg, I would imagine that you'd have people coming out of the woodwork to tell you what's happened.

Well, so they had, you know, obviously J. Allen Hynek as a consultant for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

They had somebody play Jacques Vallée.

That's the real genuine way to go.

And if you look at historical, I mean, J. Allen Hynek is a prime example of this, isn't he? His role was to go and debunk the sightings.

And he said, I can't account for 1%.

And it's the 1% that spurred him on.

Uh, but we all learn, you know, as, as, as time goes by what, what we, uh, we're, we shouldn't say.

Um, but that, I think that's the, my first interest in Jacques was he was so well-placed with, uh, J. Allen Hynek.

And did you know him be- did you reach out to him and meet before you created NIDS-

I don't, uh-

a great ride and because i wanted to put money in my friend david's pocket i have bought it twice now on apple or i bought season one and season two on apple and really enjoyed re-watching it outside of the weekly play out so congratulations to him for that another thing if you think about it our dark skies lead john lowengard who is a fictional non-fictional character he's inspired by non-fiction characters, even though he is a fictional character.

And the Project Blue Book lead, who is J. Allen Hynek, is obviously based on a real guy, but then he's fictionalized in some things he says and does.

But both of those characters, Lone Guard and Hynek, are on surprisingly similar journeys because neither one starts out as a hardcore UFO believer.

They're just guys there doing a job, asking questions, and then things get a little weird.

It's time to bring him in here and let him defend himself.

Now, David is the creator, the writer, and the executive producer of Project Blue Book.

He did an enormous amount of research into the real J. Allen Hynek and the actual Air Force program and all the cases that surrounded it.

So he's got a big database up in his head to talk about.

And all balloons and instruments released at that time were fully accounted for.

Even if it had been a balloon, it would not explain the later January 7th reports, the simultaneous sightings mentioned by Professor Hynek in the Project Sossa report.

This includes the thing seen at Lockbourne Air Force Base two hours after Mantell's death.

Obviously, the saucer seen flying at five hundred miles per hour over Lockbourne Field could not have been a balloon.

I was almost positive of one other point, that the thing had been over thirty miles high during part of its flight.

I found that after Mantell's death, it was reported simultaneously from Madisonville, Elizabethtown, and Lexington over a distance of one hundred and seventy-five miles.

Professor Hynek's analysis later confirmed this.

How low it had been while hovering over Godman and during Mantell's chase, there was no way to determine.

So he heard about this sighting very early on, and Air Force investigators converged on the scene.

J. Allen Hynek also investigated the incident shortly after it happened, and he measured these landing marks, determining that the center of gravity of this object corresponded exactly to the location of the burned foliage.

At this time, Hynek was still somewhat skeptical of UFOs, but after investigating this case, he was baffled and later wrote that this incident was one of the, quote, major UFO sightings in the history of the Air Force's consideration of this subject.

So this object was not far away from the local Socorro airport, and Hynek was surprised it was not caught on their radar.

She found no evidence of radiation, but did say that the plants were scorched and that there were also two organic substances which she was unable to identify.

Afterwards, she was ordered to turn in her report, all the samples, and to, quote, keep quiet about the case.

Uh, J. Allen Hynek was very much impressed by the case, and as he later wrote, "The Socorro case was basically a single-witness sighting, although several other more distant wi- witnesses to the object were reported.

But the witness was a policeman whose character and record were unimpeachable.