UFOs

arrayed with colored lights that sometimes blinked on and off when approaching people. Witnesses were left to handle these events on their own, encounters that were disturbing to some, frightening to others, and awe-inspiring to almost everyone; but no official guidance was offered as to what to do. Police departments in New York and Connecticut were flooded with calls, but how were the small units to respond? They were simply not prepared or equipped to handle something like this, beyond making records of these witness accounts, some from their own officers. Traffic jams occurred on Route 84, a major thoroughfare, as drivers stared at the sky. And the local airports simply told callers that they had nothing on radar and could not confirm the sightings. Communities were left unassisted in trying to make sense of these absolutely staggering events, and most of the U.S. public never heard anything about them.

How could something as momentous as these Hudson Valley sightings, repeated year after year, be ignored by our government and swept under the rug? This indifference is so stunning that one could justify questioning whether these events actually took place at all. Many would ask, how could this really have happened if I never heard anything about it? And why didn’t I hear about the wave in Belgium for that matter, or other very credible UFO sightings, if, in fact, thousands of witnesses were involved? This puzzling situation, prompting legitimate questions about whether UFOs actually exist, represents one of the primary reasons intelligent, well-informed Americans don’t “believe in” UFOs. And for good reason. A rational conclusion would be that if this were really happening, we would all know about it.

If the Air Force Project Blue Book were still in effect at the time of these sightings in New York State, they would have been officially investigated, even if not at the level many of us would have liked. It would have been harder for the Air Force to offer quick, dubious explanations for these events, which happened repeatedly and at very close range. Fortunately, the key scientist with Blue Book throughout its twenty years was still actively investigating UFO cases in the mid-1980s, and was paying attention to the sightings in upstate New York. Although no longer formally associated with the U.S. government, Dr. J. Allen Hynek began investigating the Hudson Valley wave in 1984. By that time he was widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on UFOs as well as an eloquent spokesman on the subject to the American public. These sightings were the final focus of Dr. Hynek’s life—he died in 1986—and he poured a great deal of energy into confronting the shocking indifference of U.S. government officials in the face of the repeated, well-documented visits by some kind of phenomenon.[116] Government apathy, he realized, is what had kept the story from exploding into the national media.

Despite the fact that he had been at the forefront of many UFO investigations for more than three decades, the unrelenting Hudson Valley wave seemed to both awe and baffle Hynek beyond anything else. Nothing quite like this had happened before in America. In a 1985 essay,[117] he described “hundreds of largely professional, affluent people in suburban areas,” whose statements he and others recorded on cassette tapes, as “astonished, awestruck and often frightened” by the bizarre sightings. When flying over the Taconic Parkway, or cruising low over streets and houses, an “utterly strange and possibly menacing object” constituted a serious hazard that should have concerned the FAA, he wrote. For scientists, these events should have been of breathtaking scientific concern, and the police and the media were completely derelict in their apathy and indifference, keeping the whole thing out of public awareness.

To understand how such things could occur without our knowing about them, we need to examine the total inaction by those in positions of responsibility. “It was as if a malady plunged all who encountered it, except the witnesses, into a deadly stupor,” Hynek mused. “In the story of the Boomerang sightings, the FAA, the media, the scientists, the politicians and the military all may momentarily have touched the mystery, but it appears that then apathy intervened, sapping all incentive, and left in its place a powerful desire to do nothing.”

Like so many today, Hynek wanted to know how and why this shocking inaction occurred. He had been a committed skeptic about UFOs when hired by the Air Force, and with his colleagues in the scientific world had often made fun of people who reported seeing them. Although he initially set out to show there was nothing to any of this “nonsense,” he underwent a gradual transformation during his long tenure working for the government. While investigating hundreds of UFO cases and interviewing countless credible witnesses, he came to recognize that there was a real, physical phenomenon involved, and a very mysterious one. He described it this way in 1977:

I had started out as an outright “debunker,” taking great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling cases. I was the arch enemy of those “flying saucer groups and enthusiasts” who very dearly wanted UFOs to be interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book personnel: they were all “crackpots and visionaries.”

My transformation was gradual but by the late sixties it was complete. Today I would not spend one further moment on the subject of UFOs if I didn’t seriously feel that the UFO phenomenon is real and that efforts to investigate and understand it, and eventually to solve it, could have a profound effect—perhaps even be the springboard to mankind’s outlook on the universe.[118]

In 1985, the dedicated investigator was confronting an extreme manifestation of a peculiarly American phenomenon known as the UFO taboo—the automatic, deeply ingrained refusal to acknowledge that something so contradictory to what we consider “normal,” and therefore unacceptable to our worldview, could possibly exist no matter what the evidence shows. In this case, Hynek observed that the taboo is so powerful that it can thwart the duties of groups of otherwise highly responsible people in positions of authority. He struggled to find some kind of core answer to this dilemma.

Hynek noted that seeing the otherworldly Westchester County boomerangs caused stress, trauma, and fear among the witnesses. They were given no answers and felt unprotected by their government, and many did not want to “go public” about these events for fear of being ridiculed. Rooted in the minds of most people, such as the policemen who received reports from witnesses and had not seen anything themselves, was the collective belief that this type of event cannot possibly happen. The only way out was to label the witnesses “crackpots.” And yet thousands of people actually saw the objects. They were faced with the conundrum that they knew that these events did happen, as did others from the area personally acquainted with witnesses or informed about sightings from trusted sources, such as local newspapers. Could all of these people be lying or confused? Or could it be that there was something larger, more deeply rooted, that kept government officials from truly listening to these accounts, accepting them as true, and investigating accordingly?

Hynek postulated that, in its inability to accept something as revolutionary as the existence of these inconceivable crafts, our psyche simply shuts the whole thing out. The impossible reality “overheats the human mental circuits and blows the fuses in a protective mechanism for the mind…. When a collective breaking point is reached, the mind must openly disregard the patent evidence of the senses. It can no longer encompass such evidence within its normal borders.” He concluded that, due to the totally bizarre, shocking, and even traumatic nature of such an event, there is no energy for action, as if everyone was operating on a dead battery. This dynamic can affect groups of people as a whole, and those in charge were not exempt from its numbing effects. “With apathy goes the ability to accept even the most inane explanations—anything whatever—to stave off the necessity to think about the unthinkable,” Hynek wrote.

This may not provide a complete answer, but it touches on the profound nature of the UFO taboo, which manages to keep us in the dark even about events in our own backyard. This primarily psychological phenomenon, set in motion by the Robertson Panel in the 1950s, operates here with much greater strength and tenacity than it does in other countries. It infused the improper management of our Air Force agency, Project Blue Book, until its eventual demise. Then the taboo became integrated and accepted, affecting all levels of government. It’s still hard to believe that the Hudson Valley events slipped by, unnoticed by most of us—but in fact, that’s what happened. Of course, if our government had responded the same way the Belgian government did when that country was hit by a similar wave, everything would be different. And even more important, if we had set up an agency similar to the one in France, devoted to research for its own sake, even greater knowledge could have been acquired. The UK, our closest ally, had an office in place to receive UFO reports during the time of the Hudson Valley wave, and would have investigated. The U.S. government, albeit responsible for an enormous territory of land and sky in comparison to France, Belgium, or the UK, appears to be operating at one extreme in its ability to turn a blind eye to UFOs.