by Dr. Jacques Vallée

“You’ve betrayed your responsibility to science, Allen,” said the tall, intense man with black hair, pounding the astronomer’s desk. “You should have spoken out years ago!”

The contrast between the two adversaries was striking. Seated behind the desk was an older man with a goatee speckled with silver hair. His eyes narrowed as he registered the insult.

“You just don’t understand the situation, do you, Jim?” He replied, managing to hide his emotions by drawing several puffs of blue smoke from his pipe. “Where were you when I tried to get support from the academic community?”

The conflict between these two men, J. Allen Hynek and James McDonald, illustrates a great lesson about the potential of science to explore the unknown and its relevance to the modern world. The book you are about to read tells their story and draws that lesson. Time and again in scientific history, new phenomena come to the attention of researchers or old phenomena suddenly appear in a new light. The resulting increase in knowledge gives us new hope, because it brings a realization that intellectual progress continues to be made, and that greater understanding of nature is always possible. At times, however, all that new knowledge also brings new concerns: If the phenomena do not fit well within the accepted framework, people raise strong doubts about the nature of the discoveries and their relevance. Society has a great deal of resistance to change; it may even reject the reported new facts on philosophical, religious or political grounds.

Over the last fifty years we have witnessed the emergence of such a new phenomenon &emdash; or was it an old phenomenon seen in a new light? It aroused public passion and created an immediate controversy within the technical community. That controversy centered on unusual flying objects. It continues to this day. And Dr. James McDonald, who was the most vocal champion for their physical reality, embodied every facet of the challenge they posed to the scientific establishment.

Pilots and military personnel began reporting UFOs during World War Two. The sightings reached such peaks between 1947 and 1952 that official commissions were hurriedly put into place and forceful attempts were made to explain the observations in terms of natural effects or manufactured objects. By the early ‘60s a few scientists had become involved in analyzing the cases, but the descriptions were so strange, the objects so elusive, and the political implications so troubling that academics rejected the notion that science would ever be advanced by a full-scale effort to research UFOs. A few hardened skeptics, led by Donald Menzel and later Carl Sagan, militantly fought any attempt to place the best cases under the scrutiny of analysis. Without embracing such an extreme position, most researchers rested comfortably in the knowledge that the U.S. Air Force had an ongoing study group, known as Project Blue Book, which kept watch over the reports. They went on with their own business.

The heated exchange I described above took place at Dearborn Observatory on the Northwestern University campus, just North of Chicago. I was a witness to that explosive argument. I had met Dr. J. Allen Hynek in 1963, at a time when he had already served for many years as the top scientific consultant to Blue Book. He was a patient and contemplative astronomer who did not want to rock the boat. When UFO sightings became so numerous and so well documented that classical explanations failed regularly, he could have blown the whistle, as I often urged him to do, on the complacency of the military establishment, but he feared isolation and believed that he would have been ostracized and ridiculed by more senior voices in science if he did so. Better to stay quiet and at least preserve the data, he argued, until people were ready to hear what he had to say.

Dr. James E. McDonald is the subject of this book. He was the man who burst on the scene at that point, demanding action, digging into the cases with great energy, exposing the false explanations. He was an atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona with a formidable reputation as an independent thinker, an expert on weather modification who had successfully fought the military on the implementation of missile bases, a first-class researcher and teacher. His stormy, passionate life and his fight with the more conservative segments of the scientific community have never been described in full detail and an account of his involvement with the UFO problem is long overdue. It illuminates some of the unsavory aspects of scientific life, at a time when the American public is beginning to question the ethics of many academic pursuits and their relevance to their own life.

As a young computer scientist at Northwestern University with a long-term interest in the UFO problem who was privileged to know both of these men, I tried to moderate their debate. Unfortunately their conflict ran far deeper than my ability to bring about a lasting reconciliation. It left me with a feeling that an opportunity had been missed, and with a painful lack of closure. Therefore I am grateful to Ann Druffel, a careful and knowledgeable researcher, for her marvellous reconstruction of the world of Jim McDonald, his epic fights with the skeptics, his repeated efforts to bring his data before the Air Force, NASA and his complacent colleagues, and his occasional brushes with the more fanatical, irrational believers. She describes his private anguish and his public energy, his heroic attempts to shake his peers into action. She deals poignantly with his eventual failure.

At a time when a few gutsy sociologists are becoming interested in documenting the human aspects of science, its controversies and its conflicts, and the personal motivations that shape it, the tragic life of Jim McDonald is a precious source of data. It is highly relevant to our time in other ways as well.

Some 30 years after the events recounted so well and so vividly in this book, the scientific community is once again challenged by the continuing presence of unidentified phenomena in a sky newly crowded with the devices of modern technology. The issues are as vexing as ever, but the attitudes of the scientific world have not changed very much from the shameful denial and the closed-mindedness of an earlier period. The skeptics are not the only ones to blame for the lack of good research: Some of the more ardent believers in extraterrestrial visitors are also busy rewriting the history of the field to serve their own biases. Wild rumors about the early, formative years of the phenomenon, the decisions of the government and the reactions of science are being manufactured and circulated every day. In all this confusion, Ann Druffel’s work rises above the noise to remind the reader of the stark reality of the scientific and political context. It forces us to reassess much of what we have learned over the last two decades. It reminds us of the opportunities that have been lost.

Did James McDonald underestimate the subtlety and the complexity of the UFO phenomenon? Was Allen Hynek right to warn him that his blunt, forceful approach would lead nowhere? Would an alliance between these two men have produced, as I once hoped, the germ of a unique scientific breakthrough? We may never know the full answers to these questions, but Ann Druffel, who patiently tracked down and interviewed many of those who witnessed this drama, pushes us closer to the answer by bringing the protagonists back to life for us in these pages. As I read her book I felt I was sitting with them again, listening to their heated arguments.

The lesson Jim McDonald taught us is an important one, and it should not be forgotten: Science is made up of mysteries and of challenges that require more than good work. They demand energy, integrity, focus. They are to be tackled tirelessly. Some of these challenges touch on the extreme borders of our comprehension. They mock our efforts to force them into the rational framework of today.

From the moment when their confrontation began at Dearborn Observatory, Hynek and McDonald certainly had diverging views about the appropriate policies to deal with UFOs, but they did agree on one thing at least: They shared in the certainty that one day science would take notice, and that its very fabric would be altered irreversibly when it began to understand the UFO phenomenon with all its implications.

Another one of Ann Druffel’s discoveries came as a special source of fascination to me: She found out that Jim McDonald had kept a diary or, more precisely, a series of four journals.

Over months that stretched into two years, she carefully transcribed this text, edited it, and selected the salient parts for us. As a source of information about one of the major mysteries of our time it is remarkable. It also shows how a great scientist tackles a new problem. I had kept a journal myself during that period, and it is with special trepidation that I compared Jim’s entries with those I had made. Ann was kind enough to allow me access to the transcribed text, which I perused in her study in Los Angeles, sitting at the keyboard of her Macintosh computer. Jim’s descriptions of shared events often dovetailed with mine, and our impressions of other people correlated well, even when our opinions differed about what should be done. I found it a sobering experience to read his reactions to these moments, revealed at last through his own words.

James McDonald’s diary makes it clear that he ran into precisely the kind of doctrinaire skepticism about which Allen Hynek had warned him many years before. Perhaps it is to his credit that he still went ahead with his crusade. But his tragic end contains a warning: The notion of academic purity is nothing but a charming myth. We must deal with a scientific establishment that is extremely reluctant to take stock of new, disturbing phenomena, just as the Church of the Middle Ages refused to consider that the Earth might be revolving around the sun. The learned clerics would not even look through the telescope. Contemporary academics do not behave much better: They refused to study the UFO cases selected by McDonald, just as they rejected Hynek’s pleas to let him publish his best data in their official journals. A world where people like Allen Hynek are ignored, a world where someone of the caliber of James McDonald is left to die alone and misunderstood, is a world crying out for drastic reform of its intellectual institutions. The issue goes far beyond the question of knowing whether or not there are unidentified flying objects, and where they may originate. What is at stake here is our own spirit, and the uncertain future of human intelligence.