I hate to admit it, but I have no choice. I've started to look forward to the weekly one-hour shows of the History Channel series, "Project Blue Book." My initial response to the debut episode two weeks ago was that it was trash: awful as history, mediocre as drama. I still think it's trash, … [Read more...]
“Project Blue Book,” “The History Journal,” and the New York Times
For about fifteen seconds, it did look like a real newspaper when my friend Jake Horwitz handed it to me over lunch. HUNDREDS WITNESS MYSTERIOUS UFOS, the headline proclaimed in enormous type, and beneath it a photo of an arc of white lights embedded in a luminous green ring, against the background … [Read more...]
“The Close Encounters Man” – Mark O’Connell on J. Allen Hynek
Mark O'Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs. HarperCollins, 2017. A human life can be read as the totality of its enigmas. The questions to be asked, naturally, will differ from person to person. For J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), the brilliant … [Read more...]
J. Allen Hynek and Halley’s Comet
This is a PS to last week's post on astronomer and UFOlogist J. Allen Hynek, which I was working on when a story about Hynek's last days came to mind. I looked the story up in Keith Thompson's book Angels and Aliens (Fawcett Columbine, 1991), and found it to be fully as powerful and moving as I'd … [Read more...]
Truth with Meaning – The Quest of J. Allen Hynek
Last week's post, on Jeff Kripal's Mutants & Mystics, has called forth thoughtful responses from a long-time reader named Ross, and from Jeff himself. Both took issue with my (very qualified) endorsement of the view expressed by Lester del Rey, that materialist science's transformation of our … [Read more...]
