CUFOS has preserved a portion of J. Allen Hynek’s archives, including correspondence, topic files, case notes, and witness interviews.
Topic files
This Excel file contains a listing of topic and correspondence files (e.g., Swamp Gas, book reviews, mirages, National Enquirer panel) contained in Cabinet 16-2, one of the original file cabinets from the Hynek collection.
General correspondence
This Excel file contains a listing of Hynek’s correspondence, by correspondent. Some correspondence is also from CUFOS board members.
Air Force/Blue Book correspondence
In the summer of 1952 Allen Hynek was asked by Blue Book to conduct an informal survey of astronomers for their attitudes about UFOs, whether they had their own sighting, and any opinion about the Air Force UFO project. Hynek conducted interviews at the the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Vancouver, BC, in June 1952, and also visited a number of observatories and spoke to astronomers there. This document is his report on these interviews and it is the first comprehensive record of what scientists thought about UFOs in those early days.
Conferences with astronomers on unidentified aerial objects
In the mid- to late 1960s, Allen Hynek was increasingly dissatisfied with the Air Force UFO investigation, and pushed to improve the program, and even receive resources to do his own independent study. This 1968 exchange with Col. Raymond Sleeper, the Commander of the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson AFB, is Hynek’s most in-depth, in-house critique of Project Blue Book.
The Scientific Methodology of Project Blue Book
Correspondence with Dr. James McDonald
James McDonald was a physicist at the University of Arizona who conducted some of the most thorough investigations of UFO reports and applied physics to UFO data. He and Allen Hynek didn’t agree on how Hynek had handled his Air Force consulting work, although they both understood the magnitude of the scientific problem posed by UFO reports. This is a small sample of correspondence between these two important figures in UFO history.
Newspaper and magazine articles about J. Allen Hynek
Dr. Hynek often garnered press attention for his work on UFOs, but also from his professional career in astronomy, . Collected here are copies of articles about Hynek from 1956 to his death in 1986.