J. Allen Hynek
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.030956
It’s the birthday of J. Allen Hynek, who was born in 1910 in Chicago. Hynek earned a PhD in astronomy in 1936 at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory. During World War II he worked on the US Navy’s radar-equipped proximity fuse. Hynek returned to academia to become an astronomy professor at Ohio State and then at Northwestern. He his best known, however, for his scientific studies of UFOs. Initially skeptical, he came to believe that some accounts represented evidence of events that could not be explained by natural phenomena and were in fact sightings of alien spacecraft. In his 1972 book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, he presented his “close encounter” classification scheme, which Steven Spielberg adopted in his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Date in History: 1 May 1910
