Publisher's Synopsis
No-one could have been more sceptical about UFOs that astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek when he first became Scientific Consultant to the US Air Force in 1948. What happened, in the late 1960s, to cause this staunch enemy of the UFO cult to have a complete change of heart? What led him to make a now famous statement that rocked the scientific world, exposed high-level cover-ups, relegated the authorities and advanced the march of science? It's all in this astonishing book, a distillation of more than 12,000 sightings and 140,000 pages of 'evidence' from the US Air Force's Project Blue Book. As Dr Jacques Vallee writes in his illuminating foreword, specially written for this edition: "The book you are about to read highlights a startling proposition: UFO reports cannot be explained in conventional terms, no matter how loudly official science claims that the observations are merely hallucinations, mirages and hoaxes. Such debunking does not belie the mountain of reliable testimony presented in these pages." The Hynek UFO Report explains the mission of Project Blue Book and its predecessors, reveals the US Government's policy of denial and records sightings which the US Air Force claimed to have identified but actually had not. It presents eye-witness accounts that cannot be dismissed as mad ravings and analyses phenomena that Hynek was the first to describe as close encounters of the First, Second and Third kinds. This unique casebook remains as startling as when it was first published. It is still the most complete, consistent record available of the findings logged by Project Blue Book and an essential testimony in the UFO debate.
