Indiana UFO Sighting (1983)

Indiana UFO Sighting (1983)

UFOS' STAR NEEDS CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH MONEY

By Howard Witt

THE WHITE House called J. Allen Hynek a few weeks ago to tell him about three space creatures in Indiana hovering a few feet off the ground.

It seems a Michigan City man and his two sons were out walking one evening when they came upon three aliens with large heads and carp-like eyes, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the E.T. family. Realizing they had been discovered, the extraterrestrial trio promptly grabbed onto a glowing rod not unlike some cosmic nine-iron and zipped into the clouds, presumably toward a waiting spaceship.

Not knowing whom else to call, the bewildered father phoned the White House to report his close encounter. The White House, checking the national index under "unidentified flying objects," called Hynek.

Dr. Josef Allen Hynek -- noted astronomer, Northwestern University professor emeritus and once a household name as the nation's leading UFO guru. You don't hear much about him these days, a decade after he founded the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston after a wave of UFO sightings in the southwestern United States.

"STAR WARS," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.," even video games and satellite TV -- they've all conspired to bump UFOs out of the realm of the mysterious, the unknown, the romantic.

But for Hynek, who actually coined the term "close encounter" and served as scientific adviser to director Steven Spielberg for the blockbuster movie, the mystery never has faded.

"Maybe these UFOs are telling us something," Hynek philosophizes, ever-present pipe clenched between his teeth. "Maybe we can't solve the mystery now. Maybe we'll have to wait for a few more centuries of science to develop. But we've got to keep the embers of interest burning?"

At 72, Hynek still works tirelessly to collect, analyze and catalogue the 80 reports of UFO sightings that come into his master-bedroom-turned-UFO-nerve-center each month. In fact, he's the only scientist studying UFOs in the country today, the Air Force having lost official interest years ago.

BUT HARD times have hit the UFO business. Two years ago, high rents forced Hynek to close his Evanston office and move a spaceship's worth of documents into his two-story Evanston home. Last year he was forced to disconnect a toll-free UFO hotline, but at least the White House still has his home number on file.

Piles of UFO reports from Finland, Japan and Portugal lie unread on his desk for lack of funds to translate them.

What Hynek needs more than ever right now is money. An annual budget of $40,000 collected from the UFO center's 2,000 die-hard members around the world won't buy much credibility in today's scientific world.

"SCIENTISTS will say to me, 'Where's your hard evidence?' I say, if we had the hard cash, it would not be difficult to get the hard evidence. We could respond to UFO sightings immediately, we could interview witnesses scientifically."

Hynek has sought research grants from the National Science Foundation, from NASA, from private foundations, each time drawing polite smiles but no cash. So a legion of 100 volunteer investigators continues to work part-time on a shoestring budget.

Hynek's academic credentials are impeccable -- an asset he considers crucial to maintaining credibility for the infant science of "ufology." He worked on top-secret missile guidance systems during World War II; he headed the U.S. optical satellite tracking program in the late 1950s. Most important, he was asked by the Air Force in 1948 to sort through a growing number of postwar UFO sightings.

"I'D GO through the Air Force reports and I enjoyed knocking down the stories -- this one was clearly an aircraft, that one an atmospheric reflection. I'd always operated on the idea that it can't be, therefore it isn't. But one day I thought, how can I justify calling all of these people lunatics?"

There are a lot of lunatics out there, of course, and Hynek has grown adept at weeding out the pink elephant stories from the truly inexplicable phenonema.

"The greatest problem is that people think 'UFO' is synonomous with little green men from outer space," Hynek says. "In fact, only 5 percent of the 70,000 reports in our files are 'close encounters of the third kind' (actual encounters with alien beings)."

Hynek smiles at the recent Indiana report, conceding it may well have had its origins in an overly fertile imagination fed by a trip to the local movie theater. But other sightings, like the one in northwest suburban Palatine, aren't so easy to discount.

EARLY ON the morning of Nov. 27, 1982, three Palatine police officers in separate cars saw a strange, high-intensity light that appeared to be flying low in the sky. Low-flying lights are not particularly unusual in a suburb lying on the flight path to O'Hare Airport. But the officers checked with air traffic controllers at both O'Hare and the Glenview Naval Air Station, all of whom assured them there were no aircraft of any type in the area.

They followed the hovering light for a full 12 minutes before it disappeared behind the tree line of the Busse Woods Forest Preserve.

Enigmatic stories like that, virtually in his own backyard, are what drive this astronomer, who has never seen a UFO himself, to press on with his work.

Photo caption: Dr. J. Allen Hynek: "The greatest problem is that people think 'UFO' is synonymous with little green men from outer space." (Tribune photo by Michael Budrys)

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Source: Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1983, Page 32.

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