Ancillary Mercy полностью

The preceding passage raises other unanswered questions, such as how many other academics were receiving cutout money to hide their intelligence value. Hynek’s remarks implied that he knew a lot about this topic, but unfortunately the conversation appeared to stop dead at that point. One might also wonder, who was Sweeney? And, since Hynek was being funded through one cutout organization, why not two (not at all an unusual intelligence practice)? That is, was the air force itself a cutout for another organization? This is currently an unanswerable question, but well worth asking in light of the clear evidence that the CIA was a major—perhaps the major—player behind the scenes in the UFO mystery.

Another interesting and generally ignored fact about Hynek was the close relationship he had with Donald Menzel. The astronomical community has always been small, and of course it is not surprising that, aside from the issue of UFOs, the two men would know each other well. But this relationship was more than a simple professional acquaintance. From 1955 to 1960, for instance, Hynek was associate director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Astrophysics Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and headed its optical satellite tracking program. During this period he also lectured at Harvard University. Menzel, meanwhile, had been a full professor at Harvard since 1938 and was the most prestigious astrophysicist in North America. For all intents and purposes, Menzel was Harvard’s astronomy department. While Hynek was in town, Menzel was full director of the Harvard observatory, and (as Vallee noted in passing) was Hynek’s mentor. On one occasion, Hynek declined to write a foreword for Menzel’s book. One assumes, then, that Menzel asked in the first place.⁸⁶

When considering the public opposition the two occasionally had (such as their participation in a scientific debate on UFOs in late 1952), this closeness seems out of place. But the public view is often the misleading view. Menzel, of course, was not merely one of the world’s leading astronomers. He was a man tightly connected to the upper levels of the American national security community and personally close to Vannevar Bush. During the war, Menzel chaired the Radio Propagation Committee of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Section of Mathematical and Physical Research of U.S. Naval Communications. He was a top-level cryptologist who had a long-standing association with the National Security Agency, possessed a Navy Top Secret Ultra security clearance, consulted for thirty companies on classified projects, and worked for the CIA. Through the entire 1950s, Menzel was still a serving intelligence officer.

Revelations such as these are especially important when one considers how sanitized Hynek’s treatment continues to be at the hands of most writers in the UFO field. Indeed, even Menzel is sanitized. Jerome Clark, for instance, claimed that Menzel’s secret government work “does not significantly differentiate him from many other elite scientists of his generation.”⁸⁷ There is some truth in this statement, but the larger picture is missed. What matters is that the surface and undercurrent move in different directions. In the 1950s, as today, UFOs were a topic of great secrecy. They were important. In this context, the classified lives of men like Hynek and Menzel matter a very great deal. These were men strongly connected with the topic of UFOs, who by their outward appearance were at antipodes. Yet, below the surface, many commonalities existed.

Hynek’s defenders have remained at the surface, claiming that his position on UFOs evolved over the years from skeptic to believer. Such a simple transition is unlikely. For years, Hynek had access to classified air force UFO reports. Many of those reports were unusual and unconventional—as Hynek himself stated years after the fact—and the air force official explanations for many of these were clearly absurd. Yet, for year after year, he did nothing. Even followers in good faith might ask, what took him so long?

Hynek’s remarks and insights, provided years later, remain of value to the UFO researcher. But the careful reader must remain mindful of Hynek’s history in this subject. It is a history that, depending upon which character flaw was his correct one, leads any serious researcher into a stance of wariness regarding J. Allen Hynek.

1959 UNFOLDS

While Hynek played along with the air force’s UFO program, others spoke out more openly about UFOs. On January 1, 1959, Wernher von Braun, the greatest scientist in aerospace history, made this statement in reference to the deflection of the U.S. Juno 2 rocket from its orbit: