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The truth may be out there but just where is there?
"The comedy, indeed, should be finished, and serious work should begin. The problem of UFOs can be attacked productively." - Dr. J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience
Dr. J. Allen Hynek was "visually shaking" and "white as a ghost!' when he deplaned in Phoenix, Sherry Hansen Steiger says.
Hynek was returning from a Los Angeles TV appearance, and when Hansen Steiger watched the broadcast she thought he "seemed just a little bit preoccupied." At the airport, she learned why.
"He was told that he would be given a walk-through in the large facility in Edwards Air Force Base ... a top secret walk-through from someone really high up," Hansen Steiger says. "He was shown all these things that were supposed to be top secret; but he said the puzzling thing was that nothing was shown him that he didn't already know about."
At least, at first. Walking down a corridor, his guide dropped a file and never missed a step.
"Allen said he started to say you dropped something," she says, "but the guy kept going, and he (Hynek) realized this is how information is passed."
Hynek did not miss his own beat. With a quick scoop the file disappeared into his briefcase.
For whatever reason, according to Hansen Steiger, Hynek had not yet looked at the file when he returned to Phoenix, but he had a myriad of questions from somethIng he had learned.
"'Why are they turning to me?'" she says he audibly pondered. "Presidents have been turned down. Why are they setting me up?"
A STAR VIA THE STARS
I have a feeling that UFOs are ushering us into the science of the 21st Century. " - Dr. J. Allen Hynek, to Sherry Hansen Steiger
Millions know Hynek from a seconds-long cameo in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Toward the film's climax, as the alien ship disgorges decades of UFO abductees, the bearded Hynek, his scientific ambience unmistakable, glides through the crowd. Once director of Ohio State University's McMillan observatory, chairman of Northwestern University's Department of Astronomy, consultant to the U.S. Air Force's UFO study "Project Blue Book," and author of 1972's The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, Hynek developed the criteria Spielberg's film title denoted. Close encounters of the first kind are a visual sighting; the second kind, "interaction between the UFO and the environment"; the third kind, "interaction" with aliens. That Hynek was an important source for Spielberg, there is no doubt.
"He and Spielberg had been corresponding," Hansen Steiger says, and Hynek served as technical adviser to the film.
- Whether true or not, some conspiracy theorists believe the was based on an incident at White-Sands Missile Range.
Like many, Hynek's foray into the UFO phenomenon began 56 years ago this weekend, in 1947 Roswell.
Initially, Hynek, along with his peers, Iaughed at the idea of otherworldly aliens, but the Roswell tale would not die. (Today the legend has benefited the community with millions of tourist dollars.) On or about July 4, 1947, a UFO reportedl crashed on Mac Brazel's ranch near Corona, outside Roswell, home to a U.S. Army Air base that readied for nuclear engagements. Suddenly, Brazel was telling tales of alien bodies, some dead, others alive.
The Chaves County sheriff called the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), Intelligence Officer Maj. Jesse Marcel investigated; and, on July 8, the RAAF announced that, yes, a flying disk did crash.
The RAAF recanted the next day, insisting instead that the found object was acommon weather balloon. Rumors swirled that the aliens were transported to Wright- Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, not far from Ohio State University, Columbus. Two months later, in September 1947, the military initiated Project Sign; which, in February 1949 became Project Grudge; and, from 1951-69, Project Blue Book,
The skeptical Hynek either had the fortune or misfortune to be the closest astronomer, at Ohio State. Project Sign, he wrote in The UFO Experience, "needed an astronomer to weed out obvious cases of astronomical phenomena." He likened himself to the "proverbial innocent bystander who got shot."
Now his peers were guffawing at him. But Hynek's clinical approach in interviewing hundreds of credible witnesses changed his own mind, and his groundwork set scientific parameters.
HAPPENSTANCE OR SYNCHRONICITY "The Galileo of UFO research. . Probably the world's ranking expert on the science or art of UFOlogy." - Newsweek on Dr. J. Allen Hynek
"Divine intervention" led Hansen Steiger to Hynek. With a nursing, theology and media background, Hansen Steiger, an ordained minister, has authored or co-authored 29 books on miracles, healing, angels, and the unknown. She also spent a decade in advertising, and worked with Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King to bridge and eradicate race discrimination. In the 1970s, she created a non-profit holistic center focused on non-denominational physical, spiritual and emotional healing. She had 40 teachers and "powerful people on board," she says, including Elisabeth KiiblerRoss who wrote the 1969 book On Death and Dying."
"I was closed down by city officials who said the school was growing too fast, and it was in the wrong area, and neighbors were complaining," she says. "In the interim, I felt everything was goingso fast, so successful, but I truly felt that I was getting an answer to prayer."
Her troubles climaxed with the Iran crisis. Three million dollars in "anonymous" funds bequeathed to the school were frozen, which she learned "turned out to be Iranian money." Her dream, along with her staff, was suddenly on hold. To this day, she says, those assets are frozen.
Her mind was "flooded," she says, "by personal experiences," as well as with discussions, on man's origins, that she'd had since childhood with friends, colleagues and in seminary. Biblical supernatural events uncannily similar to those in other world religions, when set side by side with modem historical UFO accounts, "suddenly jelled" in her "a new perspective."
Seeking God's direction, Hansen Steiger "went into seclusion," praying, fasting, and rereading the Bible. Understanding came swiftly.
"It was as though a lightning bolt went through me and illuminated things, in a whole new way, I'd read many times," she says: "Long troubled by the bloody Biblical history of the Old Testament, I'd dismissed most of it, but was now being drawn back to it."
Even though, she said, "I'd never read a UFO book."
Then, a self-described "vivid ... daylight sighting" further propelled her in a new direction; and when an inner voice one day urged her to turn on the television, Hynek being interviewed flickered onto the screen.
"I did not know about Dr. Hynek," she says. "I heard him express some of his viewpoints."
His credentials were impressive, and two days later the same inner I voice that prompted her to switch on the TV encouraged Hansen Steiger to pick up the telephone. Hynek himself answered.
"He said somehow it was like divine intervention," she says, recalling his response to her call: "'Young lady, I want to tell you I never answer the phone.''"
He was headed out the door to Phoenix. An anonymous donor there had promised millions of dollars to underwrite his dream of a UFO research center, replete with high technology equipment and even helicopters to quickly deploy to close encounters.
Ironically, Hansen Steiger says, Phoenix "was exactly where I was I at the moment." After several meetings and discussions, Hynek asked her to work with him.
A month later, Hynek, in his early 80s, made the move to Phoenix and the money as instantaneously as it was mysterious dried up.
"I felt terrible for him," she says. "Nothing seemed more important now than to learn from, and promote, Dr. Hynek; and, at his urging, a contract was signed with me to be in charge of his publicity.
"Suddenly, we had alot happening."
A SEEKER, AND SPEAKER, OF TRUTH "The scientific community's most outspoken investigator of UFOs. " - Time on Dr. J. Allen Hynek
The offers were unbelievable and gratifying. Among them, NBC wanted "to do a huge series on Hynek... and were prepared to lay down millions of dollars," Hansen Steiger says. But like the research center money, the TV funds suddenly disappeared.
"Although there were many other television and film projects coming in by the droves," she says, "nothing seemed to come to closure. It was almost like there was interference."
Amid the roller coaster ups and downs, she says; "came some very powerful phone calls from about as high as you can go with the Department of Defense ...literally telling Allen that the governments of Canada and the U.S. had a working relationship with (UFOs)." One caller promised "a walk-through" at Wright-Patterson to see the Roswell bodies, she says. Follow-through, though, never came.
Hansen Steiger was at first skeptical, much like Hynek had originally felt in the late 1940s. However, his patient dedication to those who came from around the world to tell him their stories, convinced her. Other meetings only steeled her newfound resolve.
"I sat in on so many meetings where people accused him of being CIA. He literally broke down in tears," Hansen Steiger says. "He literally, with tears in his eyes, said, 'I don't know how anyone could suspect me of being CIA. I never have been.'" .
As Hynek became more of a public figure, according to Hansen Steiger, the more credible cases were handed to other researchers, as if to ravage his own credibility. He was, she says, "livid" when the Air Force-sponsored Condon Report terminated Project Blue Book in 1969, calling it "a whitewash, totally the exact opposite of the truth."
Hynek formed his own non-profit organization, CUFOS - The Center for UFO Studies (in Evanston, Illinois). It was about then that Hansen Steiger arranged his Los Angeles TV appearance. Whatever he experienced at Edwards Air Force Base severely disturbed the man who had more than 80,000 worldwide cases in his files - 10,000 alone he deemed legitimate and which "couldn't be ignored," she says.
He died not long after, in 1986, within a year of his enigmatic Edwards tour. Ironically, he passed on around the anniversary of Socorro Police Officer Lonnie Zamora's April 24, 1964 close encounter with a landed UFO, a case Hynek believed had great credibility.
During Hynek's final months on Earth, a close associate was transferring his life's work to computer. Although Hansen Steiger says Hynek made "many phone calls to her" asking her to meet the associate and "be present during the entire process in order to be filled in on important information," she chose not to get involved. "Guidance," she says, "seemed to say it would be best not to know."
A good decision? "I don't know if it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life or a wise decision that might have saved it," she says.
Two decades later, she still chokes up at her memories of what seemed to be an unfair treatment and possible misdirection of the man who dedicated most of his life to the UFO field and its mysteries.
"I really believed in him and what he was doing," Hansen Steigersays. "He was such a good man, with such a good heart."
Story by Michael Shinabery