Hynek, J. Allen (Joseph Allen), 1910-1986

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek led Northwestern’s Astronomy Department into the Space Age and became the nation’s foremost expert on unidentified flying objects (UFOs). He oversaw the significant expansion of Northwestern’s Astronomy Department and made important contributions to his field, most notably by successfully incorporating television technology into telescopes for the first time. However, he was best known for his work on UFOs. First as an Air Force investigator and then as a lonely voice in the scientific community calling for more serious study of UFOs, he became the most important advocate of UFO research and inspired the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Like Mark Twain, Hynek was born and died as Halley’s Comet passed overhead. The coincidence was particularly appropriate. In an undated lecture, Hynek wrote: “There is one comet that connects the Age of Superstition with our present Age of Science–and that is Halley’s Comet.” He saw himself as a prophet preaching science to an age still too mired in superstition to tolerate the unexplainable. Halley’s Comet was therefore the perfect metaphor for Hynek. At the bottom of the page he scrawled a few lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

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