This article is about J. Allen Hynek, the noted UFO investigator, so naturally I’m going to open it with a story about Bigfoot.
In my capacity as the host of Skeptoid, I’ve done a number of shows on Bigfoot, and it’s probably no great surprise that I’m a Bigfoot skeptic. I recently had lunch and a beer or three with Cliff Barackman, one of the stars of Finding Bigfoot, and proprietor of the excellent North American Bigfoot Center museum in Boring, OR. It is a small museum yet one could easily spend several hours with its excellent, well designed, and attractive exhibits. Whatever your thoughts on Bigfoot, you will get far more than you expected. And if you’re a student of the history of Bigfoot, as I am, you will even get to see some original stuff that you’d always heard about it. It is top notch and I highly recommend a visit if you’re in the area.
Cliff does not disappoint either. Cliff is a very nice man, energetic and enthusiastic, and was not in the slightest bit judgmental of my being a skeptic. We found plenty to talk about. Cliff has seen enough that he has no doubts of the reality of Bigfoot, and is happy to share as much of that with you as you like. And if you don’t like, that’s fine too. At my request, he shared his experiences with me and they were very cool — experiences I would love to have myself. Cliff does not remotely fit the cynic’s description of a Bigfoot promoter, that of a liar or a hoaxer or someone mired in cognitive dissonance. He’s honest, and I’ve met enough other Bigfooters to have found them the same.
So that’s the story of a skeptic meeting an honest believer in something the skeptic was himself not persuaded of. Like most meetings of people with the same basic interests, it was positive all around. I hope Cliff came away with a positive impression of a skeptic.
So this is where we bring this conversation back to J. Allen Hynek, subject of a recent Skeptoid podcast episode, who fell into being the Air Force’s go-to guy on UFOs way back in 1948, due to nothing more than geography. He happened to be the astronomer working closest to Wright-Patterson AFB when they needed someone. From his voluminous writings, it’s clear that he was no believer in Little Green Men — in fact he could hardly have been further from it. His job was to provide as astronomer’s natural explanations for some of these reports the Air Force was receiving, a task which he took to with great personal interest.
Over his subsequent career, the Air Force sent him on location on countless occasions, to go and interview witnesses and collect as much information on these cases as he could. Long story short, over the course of about four decades, Hynek went from a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic to someone who truly believed there was something unexplained in our skies. He did not go so far as to declare them aliens, but he felt they were being wrongly dismissed as “anecdotes” when they deserved the full attention of the Air Force. He got his start as an author entirely in pursuit of this goal, advocating for investigation, not dismissal.
And yet, many people in the sciences have read his books, and to the extent I might speak for some, our reaction has been “Huh?” On the strength of evidence, the stories Hynek recounts do not persuade. He cites volumes of anecdotal evidence. He emphasizes the most fallible aspects of human memory and perception. The sheer volume of bad evidence that Hynek found so persuasive has often been described as evidence that no good evidence exists.
Yet Hynek’s skills as a scientists were never in question. He was thorough and methodical, and made many significant contributions to astronomy. Hynek knew people, he knew evidence, he knew the scientific method. And so where did he go wrong — if he did?