Ancillary Mercy полностью

By 1959, President Eisenhower himself had many suspicions over the motives and activities of this sprawling national security apparatus. In February, he expressed his reservations about American nuclear strategy to Gordon Gray, his national security assistant and alleged MJ-12 member. If we blow up the Soviet Union, said Ike, “there just might be nothing left of the Northern Hemisphere.” Eisenhower’s qualms aside, he did little or nothing to stop the train, which received a strong push on January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro led his triumphant procession into Havana. Just hours before, American-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled into exile with $300 million in cash, mainly bribes from Havana’s Mafia-run gambling casinos. Castro soon made himself America’s Public Enemy No. 1 by expropriating about $1 billion in American assets, possibly the single most popular act in Cuban history, but the one which earned him decades of assassination attempts by the CIA. With a communist amid America’s longtime realm of control, there was no way on earth Eisenhower could consider slowing down America’s national security locomotive.⁸²

Back to the matter of UFOs. The recent air force successes had prompted its hope of cleansing itself once and for all of this issue and eliminating the UFO from public consideration. One noteworthy civilian UFO organization, Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York, folded in 1959. In February 1959, the air force held several policy meetings to review the UFO situation and ATIC’s overall approach. Hynek brought together several ATIC and Blue Book staffers in a series of meetings. They agreed to phase out the phrase “unidentified flying objects” and to reevaluate their older cases “in light of greater scientific knowledge.” Of course, this simply meant retroactively debunking previously unexplained sightings. The group met at various intervals during the year and trailed off in 1960.⁸³

SOME THOUGHTS ON J. ALLEN HYNEK⁸⁴

Considering Hynek’s later reputation as the “Galileo” of UFO research, his complicity in publicly debunking UFOs for years cannot be ignored. Hynek’s own justification is well known: in order to retain access to official UFO reports, he could not afford to risk an open confrontation with the air force. Hynek made these claims as a matter of self-defense, years after the fact in the 1970s, after he had been criticized by nearly everyone in the UFO field as an air force lackey. That this was Hynek’s reputation in the 1950s and 1960s seems all but forgotten today.

Jacques Vallee worked very closely with Hynek for years during the 1960s and eventually concluded that “the air force kept Hynek around only as long as he was silent.” This is certainly true. The question is, why did Hynek keep silent? Was it because he was an unassertive type of person—that is, because of a feature of his personality? Nearly all UFO researchers who have written about Hynek say, in effect, yes, for all of his scientific virtues, he was not a fighter—an unfortunate but all too human weakness.

A detached analysis of the historical record does not justify this conclusion.

Generally speaking, Hynek was a genial man who did not seek out open confrontations. This, in fact, was one of the important traits that made him valuable to national security interests. In the first place, Hynek was much more than a mere civilian scientist who “helped out” the air force. From 1942 to 1946, Hynek took a leave of absence from Ohio State University to work at the Johns Hopkins University in Silver Springs, Maryland. While there, he was in charge of document security for the highly classified project sponsored by the navy to develop a radio proximity fuse. Along with radar and the atomic bomb, this is often considered one of the three great scientific developments of the war. The device was a radio-operated fuse designed to screw into the nose of a shell and timed to explode at any desired distance from target.⁸⁵

Many scientists, of course, performed work for the defense establishment during World War Two. But Hynek’s project was of considerable importance, and it does not appear that his main contribution was scientific: after all, he was an astrophysicist. Rather, one of his main efforts was in a security-related area.

Vallee kept a diary during the period that he worked with Hynek. It was published in 1992 as Forbidden Science, long after Hynek was dead and enshrined as the “father of scientific ufology.” When read with care, Vallee’s observations make it clear that there was much more to J. Allen Hynek than initially met the eye. And yet, the UFO research community has continued to ignore the implications, and even the plain facts, that Vallee related.