O’Connell: “I believe UFOs are a real phenomenon, but I don’t think we have any idea what they are.”
The Close Encounters Man is Mark O’Connell’s biography of the respected astronomer and infamous ufologist J. Allen Hynek. The book follows this extraordinary scientist from his grad-student days in Wisconsin, to his time working for the government on weapons technology in World War II, to the end of his life, when he became a prominent figure in the public UFO debate. Isthmus sat down with O’Connell, who has written episodes of Star Trek, to talk about the man who “got us to look at the sky in an entirely new way,” the state of ufology today, and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ notorious UFO encounter.
From your book I got the sense you land somewhere in between being a skeptic and believer. Do you consider yourself a ufologist?
In the years I was researching and writing the book I volunteered at the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). I thought it would be helpful to have experience dealing first hand with UFO witnesses. Is there a certain type of person who sees these things, and what makes them file a report? I wanted to learn answers to those questions so I could do a good job representing UFO witnesses in the book. So I suppose I’m a ufologist, especially because I still write about it.
Where do you land in the spectrum of belief in UFOs?
I believe that it’s a real phenomenon, but I don’t think we have any idea what it is. I’m comfortable with the idea that maybe we’ll never know what part of our reality UFOs represent. We may never know, or we may find out tomorrow. I’m not losing sleep over whether it happens or not. And whenever I give talks there's at least one person who asks me if I think disclosure will happen. Do you know what disclosure is?
Is that when there is official evidence of UFOs released?
It’s the government revealing to all of us that we've had contact with aliens. It’s a huge force in the UFO community, and people always try to get me to say that I think disclosure is going to happen. And the thing is, I don’t. If anyone is going to announce the presence of aliens, I think it would be the aliens.I don't think they’d leave it to the White House. So, there are these degrees of skepticism. But, something real is going on. There are too many sightings that are too consistent over too many years to just say that this is nothing. There’s clearly something to it in my opinion. Hynek, too, in the end was comfortable saying “I know they’re real but I don’t know what they are.”
What do you think of Aaron Rodgers’ alleged UFO encounter?
The thing I love about his story is that he’s so matter-of-fact. He’s not ashamed of it. He just saw something he didn’t understand. What I find really interesting is the second part of his story, when soon after seeing a strange object in the sky, he heard fighter jets fly by. Aaron immediately thought, oh, it must be a real UFO. The real head scratcher is that later they heard a siren from a nearby nuclear power plant. That’s the detail that doesn’t fit for me. How does anyone know what that sounds like and what it means? There’s no connection. I would need to talk to him to learn more about what he means.
It’s too bad he’s injured and probably can’t follow up with our questions.
On the other hand, he has a lot of time to be looking at the sky now.
Do you think Aaron Rodgers being a fan of the History Channel show Ancient Aliens predisposes him to see a UFO?
I don’t think it predisposes him to see a UFO, but it does predispose him to interpret what he sees in a certain way. He says that whatever he and his friend saw was hidden behind clouds, so he didn’t get a look at its shape, size or distance. He didn’t get any specific information about what he saw. He just saw something. Most people would shrug it off and say, “that was weird.” But he interprets it as something more.
Do you think anything changes when celebrities like Rodgers bring up UFOs? It seems like they don’t have much to gain.
Jimmy Carter is legendary in UFO lore. His story is similar to Aaron’s. He simply saw a bright light that moved across the sky and it wasn’t there anymore. He’s sort of reluctant to talk about it now, I think because he thinks people make too big a deal about it. But, that’s one of the things I wanted to learn when I was a volunteer ufologist. Why do people who have so much to lose make reports about UFOs? I found that all kinds of people simply wanted to learn more about what they saw. Also, they want to know if someone else saw the same thing, because then they know they’re not nuts.
Do you think it would be valuable for the UFO community to follow up with Rodgers story?
Researchers could try to find out if there was a military flight that night. And what is this nuclear power plant? Maybe investigators could find out if they did sound an alarm that night. That all hinges on Rodgers remembering the exact night he saw it. In his case, if we nailed it down, we would have Aaron Rodgers as a role model.
Did you find a certain type of person who reported on UFOs?
No, I found all kinds of people. One thing I did notice is that the cases that went back 20 or 30 years ago where always the most interesting. These people said they didn’t know what to do until they see some cable alien show or something and realized that that’s an explanation for what they saw. I found that these old cases are always more detailed and dramatic — I have no idea why.
It makes sense to me that stories would become more dramatic over time. That reminds me of a part of the book where a government official says they should have brought in a psychologist to study the UFO phenomenon instead of an astronomer like Hynek.
There isn’t a lot of psychological work in the UFO community, and there should be. When Hynek started he just went through these paper case reports. It wasn’t for years until they sent him into the field to investigate and talk to witnesses face to face. That added an element to his thinking. He could make note of their breathing or their faces, or see how fidgety they were and get a read on whether he thought this person was genuine. So psychology did enter into it for Hynek, and that gave a much fuller picture of UFO events, making it all the more real to him.
What do you see as the state of ufology? It seems like the field is in trouble, as much of the work is done by amateurs and volunteers.
That is definitely an element, and keep in mind that I was one of those volunteers. MUFON claimed to be very scientific. I’m not scientific; I’m just a writer. But the whole field is multi-pronged. There are people out there who are tired of these same old myths and methods, who want to try new approaches. For example, there’s this guy Tom DeLonge from the band Blink-182. He’s pitching himself as a new breed of ufologist. He says he has a team of former CIA analysts and aeronautical engineers, and they started a Kickstarter to create a new paradigm in UFO research. Last I looked they made more than $300,000. And no one knows what they’re going to spend this money on, but they have it. And DeLonge is already rich.
The book profiles ufologist J. Allen Hynek, who studied at UW-Madison.
What kind of paradigm shift does DeLonge propose?
They haven’t backed it up yet, but they’re claiming that they’ve found people in the government who will admit that they use alien technology that can create endless energy resources. They make a lot of claims, but haven't backed it up yet. It sounds to me like a philosopher’s stone-type myth, and a lot of the UFO community is like that now. But there are people I’ve mostly corresponded with over the internet who are tired of this stuff. For me, I’m less interested in finding out what UFOs are as opposed to what they mean. I write in the book that I think maybe UFOs are preparing us for something, I don’t know what, but it’s as plausible as anything else. But there are still so many UFO conferences where people cough up money to see the same old speeches. These conferences only reinforce the fact that these people have made no progress.
What would progress look like to you?
Well, at MUFON, we didn’t really investigate sightings. We would interview people, and they would basically repeat what they'd already conveyed in their report. For most of the cases, that’s more than adequate, because that’s all the information there is. There are a few of those cases that really were fascinating, and deserve a little more study. If the resources were available there could be deeper investigation into the reports that Hynek would’ve said had a “high strangeness factor,” with many witnesses. For instance, in one of those historical cases, an old military guy was stationed at Fort McCoy here in Wisconsin in 1980. It was during the Cuban flotilla, when Castro sent Cuban prisoners to Florida, and we had to find room for thousands of refugees. Some of them were stationed at Fort McCoy until the government could figure out what to do with them. This witness, Jeff, was stationed in Wisconsin to help with guard duty, and one night some of the refugees, who thought they were being imprisoned, broke down a section of fence and escaped. So the infantrymen had to go round them up, and they had to go unarmed, because the refugees hadn’t really done anything wrong. Then, while the fence was being rebuilt, the soldiers had to form a human fence. So one night, on guard duty, Jeff is about to head to bed when he sees this rectangular object with little wings moving between the trees. There was some sort of opening where he saw humanoid figures, and his perception was that their heads moved as they moved past him. He says a lot of guys in the human fence saw too, and took pictures. So I asked if he was in contact with any of those guys, and he said no. Of course the next morning it all got covered up and he got shut down when he tried to talk about it. I told him it would be really fantastic if we could contact some of those other soldiers. And he told me he was the duty officer that night, and he sent me his copy of the roster. So I have this list of 50 guys who were there that night, but we don’t have the resources to contact all of them. Some of them might be on Facebook. So what if we could go through that list until we found people who also saw that? Then you would have something of value, and that’s just one example.
I got the sense from your book, especially the way you opened it with a hoax that started in a newspaper in 1890, that you took an anthropological view of the UFO phenomenon, and separated the assumption that they are aliens from the fact that people see strange things in the sky. Did you intend to separate the assumption of aliens from the wider phenomenon?
Yes, I would agree with that, I think that’s a good way to look at it. With that opening scene, I wanted to show that belief in life on other planets is as old as the hills. The second thing I wanted to show that the birth of Hynek is just one event in a continuum. On the subject of how I portray the events though, I got a bad review recently on Goodreads, and the person complained that I portrayed the UFO events as if they really happened. And I was thinking, why wouldn’t I? I utilized three forms of evidence to portray what happened — the witnesses’ statements to the press and investigators, the Blue Book files, and Hynek’s conclusions. So it made sense to me to talk about them as if these events happened, because why else would there be this huge paper trail?
A major theme of Hynek’s life is that we shouldn’t start from a position of disbelief. How instead should we approach a phenomenon like UFOs?
My favorite Hynek quote, delivered to the Optical Society of America in 1952 was, “Ridicule is not a part of the scientific method, and the public should not be taught that it is.” I’ve tried to live by those words. I have found through the writing of this book, that whenever you treat UFO sightings as if they actually happened, you will not believe how many people open up and tell you things they saw. As soon as you remove the stigma of ridicule, their truth comes out and you hear some amazing stories.
