UFO Sightings in 1969: Public Reports and Scientific Skepticism

In late 1969, Illinois used a University of Waterloo podium to argue that the United States government had shut the door on the unidentified flying object question prematurely. The professor, J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University, had studied the phenomenon for twenty-one years, and his complaint was not that every sighting defied explanation but that the official accounting did not add up.

According to the source document, Hynek said the government had closed the subject even though a substantial share of cases remained unexplained. The numbers he cited gave the dispute its shape. Hynek reported that roughly 30 per cent of the reports examined in the Condon book could be blamed on natural heavenly bodies, another 30 per cent on birds, balloons, or other misinterpreted natural phenomena, and that the rest were not explained.

That residual category — the cases left over after the ordinary explanations were subtracted — is…