American astronomer (1910-1986) who taught at Ohio State and later Northwestern, and who served as scientific consultant to the US Air Force’s UFO investigations through Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, a span of more than twenty years. He was hired to explain sightings away, did so for most of them, and ended his career arguing that a residue could not be explained and deserved study. He coined the classification of close encounters of the first, second and third kinds, and founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973.
His analysis of the Arnold Sighting 1947 shows both the strength and the weakness of the early work. In a technical memorandum of 5 June 1956 he argued that Arnold’s own figures were mutually contradictory: at the distance claimed, objects showing that much detail would have to be enormous; at a reasonable size they would have to be within a mile; and at a plausible limiting size they must have been under six miles away, which puts their speed near 400 mph and “definitely sub-sonic”. The instinct was defensible, but the route was not. The memo treats the file’s figure of 45 to 50 feet as Arnold’s own size estimate when it was actually the Air Force’s mistaken value for a DC-4’s outer-engine span; it reads Arnold’s “thickness about one twentieth of the width” as length twenty times the width and derives a three-foot object; and it applies a letter-reading acuity threshold as a detection limit. Edward J. Ruppelt records that the Air Technical Intelligence Center never adopted the conclusion in any case, because no suitable aircraft could be placed in the area.
Arnold himself remained annoyed about it for the rest of his life, complaining that Hynek had worked from an inaccurate Air Force summary rather than the original report. Hynek’s reported answer was that he had been working for the Air Force.
Connections
Kenneth Arnold · Arnold Sighting 1947 · Project Sign · Project Grudge · Project Blue Book