The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying

J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986; see his other books such as The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry) and Jacques Vallee (b. 1939; see his other books such as CONFRONTATIONS: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact, REVELATIONS: Alien Contact and Human Deception, and DIMENSIONS: A Casebook of Alien Contact) were two of the most prominent UFO researchers in the 1970s and later. This jointly-written 1975 book (much of which are interviews with the two, separately or jointly) is a fascinating summary at that point in time by two sober researchers. They begin by stating, "The UFO represents an unknown but real phenomenon. It implications are far-reaching and take us to the very edge of what we consider the known and real physical environment." However, they also caution that "what is unidentified to one person or persons may certainly be identifiable by persons of greater technical training and experience. It has been demonstrated clearly that the great majority of what at first are reported to be UFOs are, after study by competent personnel, determined to be really IFOs, or Identifiable Flying Objects." Hynek was, of course, a scientific consultant to the Air Force's Project Blue Book. About the "Blue Book" period, Hynek notes, "We had so much crud in the Blue Book! It wasn't until '66 that I decided I had to revise my views and take a new look, literally a new look at the whole thing from a different vantage point. Then, suddenly, things began to make sense to me." Hynek's position is given in an interview: "One could spend all his energy confronting skeptics. That same energy is much better spent investigating the subject. Why waste time on people who have never bothered to learn the basic facts? It's their problem!" But he is skeptical of many famous reports; e.g., "It seems that these creatures, like the Pascagoula ones, certainly don't resemble the products of higher evolution as we conceive it. Who would think of a clawed creature coming down and being a representative of a very advanced technology? It just doesn't fit!" An expert on hypnosis interviewed admits about "regressive hypnosis," "A lot of times people use their imagination. A lot of times people fabricate things, from either wishful thinking, fantasies, dreams, things such as this." Vallee (who has suggested in his books such as Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds, The invisible college: What a group of scientists has discovered about UFO influences on the human race, and Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults that UFOs are not necessarily extraterrestrial) asks, "Could it be a human phenomenon? In other words, do we really need aliens fo explain UFOs if they are real? Or could the human race have been developed in a very remote past out of a contact between an advanced race or primates and extraterrestrial visitors?" (Hynek notes, however, that Erich Von Daniken's books such as Chariots of the Gods are "illogical and unscholarly.")