Columbia Journalism Review is part of my daily breakfast reading. But this morning, when I clicked on the tab to take me to the CJR home page, I was amazed to see a familiar face completely out of context: a young Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer, astrophysicist, and — yes — pioneering UFO researcher. What was the man who coined the phrase “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” doing on the home page of CJR?

Apparently, serving as a stand-in for the stereotype of “The Expert” circa 1955 — the button-down brainiac with the goatee and the glasses. For Dr. Hynek’s visage accompanies an article titled “The Trouble With Experts” by Alissa Quart. (NOTE: Unfortunately, the photo no longer accompanies the story. I’ll try to find a copy somewhere else.) Decked “The Web allows us to question authority in new ways,” the article takes a look at how the web has propelled the rise of the “fauxpert” — people “who have emerged online because they write well and/or frequently on their subjects, rather than becoming an expert by acclamation of other experts or because of an affiliation with a venerated institution.” (It’s a thoughtful and well-written piece, BTW.)

In the photo, Hynek — who isn’t even mentioned in the article — certainly looks the part of an acclaimed product of a venerated institution: young yet wise, suitably straight-laced, seated at a table apparently shoulder-to-shoulder with other grandees, the inevitable stereographic-projection world map behind him subtly reinforcing the message that men of knowledge collectively possess mastery of the world. But Dr. Hynek is, in many ways, the antithesis of the quintessential “Expert” discussed in Quart’s article, because he is perhaps best known as an expert who came to question his own expertise.

In the 1950s, Dr. Hynek was an astronomy professor at Northwestern University when the Air Force invited him to be a consultant on a top-secret project. And accept he did, of course. Back then, the Air Force was in the vanguard of America’s stainless-steel, delta-winged, rocket-powered future; to be invited to join the national brain trust was a privilege as well as a career aspiration. This was, after all, the era when the macho nerds of the RAND Corporation were publicly divining their punch cards to herald a golden era of pure (pro-free-market, anti-communist, all-American) rationality.

Dr. Hynek’s top-secret job was to review selected reports of “flying saucers” to determine whether they might have been misinterpretations of astronomical phenomena. Dr. Hynek took to the job with gusto and soon became the Air Force’s public face of skepticism, holding forth on the illusory powers of swamp gas and temperature inversions for the dutiful press stenographers. For like every government consultant since the guy the Pharaoh hired to design the Pyramids, Dr. Hynek quickly learned that he would always get more yummy pellets pecking the “official line” button than the other one. And so for nearly two decades, Dr. Hynek served as the very model of an Establishment-sanctioned “expert” on flying saucers.

But Dr. Hynek was first and foremost a scientist — and a distinguished one at that — and so eventually he became disenchanted by the Air Force’s highly unscientific approach to “studying” the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects. As the program degenerated from a serious inquiry of a potential security threat into a rubber-stamp clearinghouse for debunked reports, Dr. Hynek changed his mind and decided maybe these reports deserved to be treated with some semblance of scientific objectivity.

That’s what Dr. Hynek was busy doing while I was a kid growing up in Santa Fe buying and utterly devouring every book on UFOs I could find. His two major books on the subject, The UFO Experience and The Hynek UFO Report, were still in print, and of course I devoured them, too. By then, of course, Dr. Hynek appeared to be playing the role of The Quintessential Expert again, but this time on the side of “the believers,” who could now claim they had their very own Man of Science on their side. There he is on the cover of The Hynek UFO Report, in front of a giant telescope, wearing the requisite White Lab Coat and sporting a pipe, his hair and beard now a suitably Wise Man shade of gray.

But even there, the image is misleading. In his books Dr. Hynek claimed that he was no “expert” on UFOs at all — simply because until anyone could figure out what, if anything, they were, no one could claim to know anything about them. In the meantime, all one could do was to toil away humbly, collecting stories, investigating sightings, and trying to find patterns amid the data from which the first tentative hypotheses could be made and tested — to lay the foundation that future researchers could build on, in order eventually to solve the mystery.

I consider it one of the great good fortunes of my intellectual life that the first scientist whom I “met” was a man who was so determined to never stop asking questions that he was willing to walk away from The Establishment and risk being labeled an apostate by his scientific peers in order to be able to keep on asking them. Dr. Hynek’s books are as much journeys of self-discovery as they are exciting behind-the-scenes narratives of the formative years of “flying saucers;” their candor imprinted on me at an impressionable age. It is fitting, I think, that this astronomer and thinker should have been born in a year that Halley’s Comet visited, and died the year of its next return. Just like Mark Twain.

I don’t have any real grand points to make here about expertise, or about the power of the Internet to influence people, or about the role of science in public policy. I just wanted to write about a man whose career I think exemplifies what real expertise looks like.

Also, I wanted publicly to thank his memory for the good influence he had on a young mind.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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