Review of Ancient Aliens S21E09: “The Legacy of J. Allen Hynek”

​Sigh. We’re back again—if you can say that, since Ancient Aliens has only aired two original (non-clip-show) episodes this entire calendar year. Ancient Aliens returns from a five-month hiatus with a new episode devoted to the life and legacy of J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who became the face of Project Blue Book’s UFO debunking efforts before veering off into the weeds to become a UFO advocate. Regular reader will remember that Hynek was close friends with Jacques Vallée and with him developed the hypothesis that UFOs were interdimensional poltergeists. While this was no secret—Hynek stated it in a speech and published it with Vallée in a book—Hynek publicly downplayed this conclusion in order to seem more credible and serious when he claimed UFOs were real and extraterrestrial, so it is no surprise that Ancient Aliens prefers the public image to the actual man. 

​Segment 1
The first segment begins our hour-long, mostly dull, mostly straightforward biography of Hynek, including his transition from skeptic to believer. In format, it’s basically the same as last year’s biographical profile of Jacques Vallée. The segment features commentary from Lue Elizondo, Travis Taylor, and Paul, Roxanne, and Joel Hynek (J. Allen’s children) among others. UFO and djinn investigator Philip Imbrogno tells us that Hynek was intrigued by Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, but the show goes no further in exploring this. We also get a potted history of Project Blue Book and its predecessors, and it’s all very familiar from the many times the show has covered this material in the past. David Childress says that Hynek was working to cover up UFOs with fake explanations, a claim that is partly true and mostly false. The government sought prosaic explanations where possible and did falsify some explanations to protect secret aircraft and military operations.
 
Segment 2
The second segment continues to follow Hynek’s work with Project Bluebook, in the context of the great 1950s UFO scare. Mark O’Connell, the author of a Hynek biography, is a talking head in this segment but is not allowed to say much. Michio Kaku comes very close to recognizing the UFOs were in part a projection of Americans’ fears about the Soviet Union and nuclear obliteration into the sky, but stops short of making that connection because this is Ancient Aliens. Some of the greatest hits of 1950s ufology are rehearsed, including the 1952 D.C. flying saucer flap, and the segment emphasizes Hynek’s growing doubts about the Air Force’s efforts to debunk UFOs. Again, not much of value gets said.
 
An on-screen graphic tells us that the History Channel is now selling a “season pass” to Ancient Aliens on Amazon Prime Video, which seems like a bad deal considering how little content they produce nowadays.
 
Segment 3
The third segment covers Hynek’s friendship with the much younger Jacques Vallée, which began in 1963, and it frankly reads like a folie à deux where two people who think they are the smartest men in the room inadvertently radicalize each other by encouraging and confirming the other’s most radical beliefs. In this case, both became enamored of computer analysis of UFOs without really considering whether applying computer analysis to subjective, biased, self-reported UFO stories really produced objective scientific conclusions. Would a database of Marian apparitions produce objective truths about God? The Zamora case is discussed, as it has been many times on this show, this time because Hynek investigated it and was persuaded because he fell into the trap of assuming that certain types of witnesses—cops, military men, etc.—had a degree of rationality and credibility that elevated their claims. The Lonnie Zamora case was, as most of you know, likely a student prank that Zamora stumbled into. Witnesses, as ufologists like Hynek never quite understood, can be credible, report accurately what they perceived, and still misunderstand or misinterpret what they saw.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment discusses the southern Michigan UFO sightings of 1966 that led to the infamous conclusion that the sightings were “marsh gas,” a claim considered so laughable by the media that then-congressman Gerald Ford called for a congressional hearing to get to the bottom of it and to find out if Hynek was lying under government orders. Hynek was so humiliated by the affair that he publicly broke with the Air Force and started embracing UFOs publicly. But, again, there is nothing here that hasn’t been covered before on this show.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment covers Hynek’s later years, after the publication of The UFO Experience in 1972 (which introduced the “close encounters” categories). This was the time when Steven Spielberg sought him out to consult on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as the show puts it. In real life, as Mark O’Connell reported, Hynek wrote to Spielberg to complain that he had stolen his “Close Encounters” terminology from his copyrighted book and that he would have liked Spielberg to have sought his permission. Spielberg scrambled with the studio’s lawyers, and they settled what they must have perceived as a potential lawsuit by paying off Hynek with $1,000 for the Close Encounters title, $1,000 for the rights to his book, and $1,500 in consulting fees for three days’ work. Ancient Aliens omits the details and instead presents Spielberg as a generous patron who popularized Hynek and generously helped promoted his UFO organization. Spielberg is a noted UFO nut, but he didn’t do those things out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted the Close Encounters of the Third Kind Name and negotiated a rather stingy deal with a naïve Hynek to get it.
 
Segment 6
The final segment skips through Hynek’s last years, to his death from a brain tumor in 1986. Hynek’s children say that he was an important figure because he legitimized ufology and made it acceptable for scientists to research “silly” subjects.
 
Overall, this was a dull hour with little to recommend it. This show might have been an episode of Biography since it was almost pedantically biographical (obvious and odd omissions aside) with virtually no connection to any of the outré content we usually associate with Ancient Aliens.