A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

NICAP focused on pressuring the U.S. government to release its supposed secret files on the
UFO presence. Such a focus made it easy to dismiss the efforts of the organization as driven by
a conspiratorial mindset and an idée fixe. APRO focused on close encounters of the third kind,
instances where witnesses have viewed animate occupants aboard sighted craft. Of course, any
mention of space aliens immediately put researchers into the camp of the contactees, none of
whom were taken seriously by mainstream science.
One civilian organization that emerged following the collapse of government sponsored
research was founded and led by a figure long associated with large scale, government sponsored
investigations into UFO activity. J. Allen Hynek had been involved in the study of UFO’s from
early on. As director of the McMillan Observatory at Ohio State, he had been invited to consult
on the Air Force’s examination of UFO reports, Project Grudge, in 1948 and continued as
scientific consultant to Project Blue Book. Hynek later became an outspoken proponent on
UFO’s as a subject worthy of sustained scientific inquiry, founding the Center for UFO Studies
(CUFOS) in 1973. He is probably best known for a classificatory scheme first proposed in his
1972 book, The UFO Experience, a scheme that organized UFO sightings into a series of graded
“close encounters.” 206 This scheme is especially important in our discussion of UFO’s. To
understand the encounters that makeup the content of ufology—encounters that stop short of
actual contact between human and extraterrestrial—we must adopt a different approach than
when examining cases of direct contact. Hynek’s research agenda provides an approach to
understanding UFO activity that stops short of the concerns so central to the displaced utopian
imaginary as we have come to understand it. In cases of direct contact such as the successful
spiritualist séance or the encounters described by Pelley, the Ballards or Adamski, the
206 See King-Hele in Nature (October 27,1972) and Murray in Science (August 25, 1972) for favorable reviews in
mainstream scientific journals.
131