Somewhere in the Skies - Hynek, Spielberg & Close Encounters with Mark O'Connell (SITS CLASSIC)

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In this SITS classic from 2017, we speak with Mark O'Connell. With UFOs once again dominating headlines through government hearings, whistleblower claims, and renewed public interest, we’re revisiting this conversation with O'Connell about his book,The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs, chronicling the life of legendary astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Originally hired by the Air Force to debunk UFO sightings, Hynek’s years investigating unexplained cases led him to a startling conclusion: UFOs deserved serious scientific attention. Through unprecedented access to Hynek’s personal and professional files, including his time working with Steven Spielberg, O’Connell paints a compelling portrait of the man who transformed from skeptic to pioneer in UFO research. At a time when many of the same questions Hynek raised decades ago are resurfacing today, this episode remains more relevant than ever. Buy the book: https://amzn.eu/d/05vp8xtW Use promo code: SOMEWHERE15 for 15% OFF Anomalous Cards: https://www.letsgetanomalous.com/ Send us a voicemail with questions, comments, or topic suggestions: https://www.speakpipe.com/SomewhereSkiesPod Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All socials and books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Follow Suzanne on X: https://x.com/csuzannelanders Email: [e-mail] Opening theme song by Septembryo Closing song by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #DisclosureDay #UFO #UAP #SomewhereInTheSkies #JAllenHynek #UFOPodcast #AlienLife #Disclosure #ParanormalPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've got a story to tell you. It might sound unbelievable, but the person who experienced it once fought the same, until they saw something that changed them forever. Here we dive into the paranormal, the strange and the unexplained, from personal supernatural encounters to some of the most infamous unsolved mysteries and history, all told in an immersive, atmospheric narrative-levels,

style. Let's hear these stories and try to figure out together what really happened. The world is a very strange place. Someone has to record it. Because after all, everywhere has a ghost story. Archived in collaboration with Spectre Vision Radio, welcome to the tape library. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac.

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Old Navy's Drapey denim Wide Legg. Division Radio. While our government's official position is not to speculate on this subject, We can choose to let our minds explore other possibilities to use our imaginations. For if we consider the astro-scientists agree on one point that the possibility of life elsewhere is not only quite probable, some field is there without a doubt. Let us suppose them that these objects are real space vehicles, extraterrestrial origin, and not an illusion of the mind. This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan Sprague. Hey guys, Ryan here. So back in the 1950s and 60s, the UFO mystery was largely shaped by one man,

standing at the uneasy crossroads between science, government, secrecy, and public curiosity, Dr. J. Allen Heineck. At first, he was brought in by the United States Air Force to explain away sightings, and reassured the public that there was nothing extraordinary happening in our skies. But over time, Heinex position began to change. The more cases he investigated, the more he realized that not every encounter could be dismissed so easily. Today, decades later, we find ourselves in a strangely familiar moment. Governments around the world are openly discussing UFOs. Military footage is being released.

Congressional hearings continue. Scientists are cautiously entering the conversation. and yet many of the same questions Heinek wrestled with still remain unanswered. That's exactly why I wanted to revisit this conversation you're going to hear today. In this episode, I'm joined by author Mark O'Connell to discuss his incredible book, The Close Encounters Man, how one man made the world believe in UFOs. With unprecedented access to Heinex's personal and professional files, O'Connell paints a deeply human portrait of the astronomer who evolved from a skeptic

to one of the most important voices ever in UFO history. As debates rage on today over disclosure, transparency, and the legitimacy of the phenomenon itself, Heineck's story feels more prescient than ever. His journey reminds us that the UFO topic has never simply been about lights in the sky. It's about how institutions shape narratives. how science confronts the unknown, and how curiosity can sometimes lead us to the truths we never expected to find. So we're going to dive deep into that conversation,

but first, please be sure to rate and review somewhere in the skies on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps us gain visibility and find more curious minds. Links to all our socials are in the show notes. Along with several ways you can help support us through Apple Premium, YouTube channel membership, Patreon, and Buy Me a Coffee. All your support truly means the world to us, and we greatly appreciate it. Thanks again for listening, and for those hopping in, this might be a brand new conversation you're about to hear, and for those veteran sitsters out there, I hope you enjoy this

somewhere in the sky's classic. Let's get to our conversation with Mark O'Connell. He's welcome from the Center of UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois, Dr. J. Allen Heinek. Dr. Heinek. When you first get a report of a sighting, is your job to assemble evidence that will prove it to be so or to assemble evidence to prove that it did not happen? You know, there are two ways to go on any investigation. The first thing we do is to try to disprove it.

Because what is the point of perpetuating a myth or that isn't so? And it turns out that some 90% of the raw reports, see, we have a nationwide police network, an 800 number that the police use. And we get reports every night from police departments or different parts of the country. Most of them are planets, twinkling stars. Explainable or identifiable thing. The IFOs, we call them, identifiable flying objects. But that remaining 10%, those are the ones we go after.

Now, a UFO, the U.N. UFO, of course, simply means unidentified. It does not necessarily mean visitors from outer space. But it must be unidentified, not just to the person who is puzzled by it, but it must remain unidentified after considerable study. Then and only then, is it a UFO? In June of 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold looked out his cockpit window and saw a group of nine silverly crescents weaving between the peaks of the Cascade Mountains at an estimated speed of 1,200 miles an hour.

The media, the military, and the scientific community led by J. Allen Heineck, an astronomer hired by the Air Force, debunked this and many other UFOs. But after years of denial, Heinek made a shocking pronouncement. UFOs are real. Today, I talk to author Mark O'Connell about his new book, The Close Encounters Man, how one man made the world believe in UFOs. Mark O'Connell broke into the television business writing several episodes of Star Trek, The Next Generation, and Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

Mark has had feature film projects optioned and or developed with Disney, Dreamworks Animation, Barcelona Films, Endless Entertainment Group, and Al Ruddy production. He was also a former Mufon field investigator. With unprecedented access to J. Allen Hinex's personal and professional files, Mark smashes conventional wisdom to reveal the intriguing man and scientist beneath the legend. Tracing Hinex career, Mark examines Hynix often ignored work as a professional astronomer to create a complete portrait of a groundbreaking enthusiast who became an American cult icon and transformed the way we see our world

and our universe. So, without further ado, here's our conversation with Mark O'Connell. Mark, thank you so much for joining me. Today is book release day, so I'm so honored and excited to have you on the show. Thanks, Ryan. I'm thrilled to be here. I really appreciate the invitation to come in and talk to your listeners. Of course. Well, I guess let's start at the beginning. We don't often see biographies written within the UFO subject, if ever. So what made you, want to write a book about Jay Allen Heineck? Well, I didn't set out wanting to write a book about Jay Allen Heineck. The genesis of this was kind of weird and improbable.

About six years ago, 2011, I had the idea to start writing a UFO blog, but not just about UFOs. It was going to be specifically about my experiences becoming a certified UFO field investigator for Mufon, the mutual UFO network. And then blogging about my adventures in the field as I investigated UFO reports. So that's how it all started out. About a year into that, and I was really loving writing this blog, having a lot of fun. You know, I would only get maybe 12 or 15 page views a day, but, you know, that was enough to keep me going.

And then about a year into it, I, you know, I was constantly scoured in the internet for interesting UFO stories I could mention. the blog. And I came across a website for the J. Allen Heineck Center for UFO studies and discovered that it still was in existence, which shocked me because their website looked like it had been put together in, you know, in 1987, literally. And, but they were still going concern and there was somebody in charge, a gentleman named Mark Rodger. And I thought, wow, this, I, I knew a little bit about Dr. Heineck. I knew about his involvement in the movie Close Encounters of the third kind. I knew a little bit about the swamp gas story from the 1960s, but I didn't know a whole lot about it.

I just knew he was an important guy in the study of UFOs. So I contacted Mark Rodiger, who's now the scientific director of the Heinex Center for UFO Studies, and said, hey, I'm writing this little blog. I was living in Chicago, a ton. I'd love to stop by and just see what you're doing and look through your archives. So he invited me to stop by for a visit. and I discovered that what was left of Dr. Heineck's work was one half of Mark Rodger's basement in his home in Chicago. Wow.

A bunch of broken down old file cabinets, ancient, ancient manila folders just stuffed with documents, letters, and all sorts of things. And shelf after shelf after shelf of U.F. Vobbooks that the center had collected over the years. And I was kind of shocked at the condition of the archives, but I was also just amazed at the material that was hidden away inside all of those file drawers. So I just, I just was eating it up. And one visit turned into two visits and then three visits.

And then at some point or another, Mark said, hey, we here at Ku Klux have, we've always wanted to recruit a writer to write the definitive account of Dr. Heinz's career. And I wonder if you'd be interested. And I said, heck yeah, I would love that. That's like a dream, a dream job for me. So that's how it all started. So first off, I had access to Dr. Heinick's archives and professional files in Mark's basement, quickly found out that there was another Kufos person, Mary Kastner, who lived about 10 miles away.

in Skokie, Mary had the other half of the files in her basement. She had all the case files, then found out that because Dr. Heineck had spent so much of his professional career as an astronomer teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, just a few miles from Skokie, I started going to their library and discovered that they had just immense, an immense collection of Dr. Heineck's professional papers from his time at Northwestern. So those things all just sort of fell together, came together at the same time. And that's how the biography was born. And it wasn't, it was never intended to be a full biography because they don't spend a whole lot of time on his home life and his family life. That would be a whole other book. So the focus of the

book is on his, his dual careers. And I think that's, to me, that's what made the story so interesting. The fact that he was not just this world-renowned UFO researcher, but he was also a pretty accomplished astronomer with a whole lot of really amazing, really amazing scientific breakthroughs to his name that very few people seem to know about. So, you know, when I learned that I was going to be writing about these two different stories, these two different careers that kind of gave me the shape of the biography or the book and, and off I went. Right. Yeah. And like you mentioned, not many people know about his accomplishments and success within the, you know, the astronomy field. So I think that's what you did best.

That and bringing forth kind of the UFO history into this, you interweave all of these famous UFO cases into Heinex life and essentially career. And you bring up a case that really sort of kicked off the Air Force's involvement in UFO investigation. And that was the Mantell case. Could you, for our listeners who may not be familiar with this case, Mark, could you tell us a little bit about this case and how the Air Force got involved? Sure. This happened very, very early in the stages of the modern UFOs Day, which, of course, celebrates its 70th anniversary this month, the 70th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold sighting in the Pacific Northwest.

But the Mantell crash took place in early 1948. Mantell was an Air National Guard pilot, and he and three other pilots were ferrying four P-51 Mustangs from a base down south, back up to their home base in Kentucky. It was meant to be a low-level flight, so only one of the four planes was equipped with oxygen. That's an important point. The day that these planes were all flying north to Kentucky, all sorts of people in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio started seeing this strange thing in the sky. And people were calling their local police departments. The local police departments were in turn calling the local Air Force,

and and everyone was seeing this strange object floating through the sky that looked like, it looked to some people like a gigantic ice cream cone. It looked other people like a gigantic umbrella. And it was just sort of hanging out there in the sky for everyone to see. And the control tower operators at Standaford, which is the air base at Fort Knox in Kentucky, they were tracking this object visually. They learned that Mantell and his crew were flying through the area, and they radioed Captain Mantel and said,

hey, we've got this strange thing in the sky. You're going to be flying pretty close to it. Would you and your guys mind just taking a little detour to try to get a closer look at this? Well, they did, and one of the planes were short on fuel, so it just continued on to its home base. The other three turned and started chasing this, object. Two of the planes just sort of gave up and dropped out, but Mantel kept going. He made

visual contact with this thing. His last radio contacts were just to tell the control tower operators that it appeared to be metallic and it was immense in size. And then they lost contact with Mantel. Well, three minutes later, Mantel's plane comes screaming out of the sky over a farm in northern Kentucky and just crashes into the ground and is disintegrated. The investigators find that Mantell's cockpit had never been opened. So the theory is that he either passed out or was asphyxiated because he flew too high. He flew higher than he should have without oxygen. So the upshot of all of this is that UFOs were still a fairly new phenomenon at this point.

But all of a sudden they were a deadly phenomenon. This was the first time that a military pilot, a highly trained, fearless military pilot, had actually chased a UFO and died because of it. So it put a real chill into the air. And it made it immensely important that Project Signed, the Air Force's newly minted UFO investigation project. They needed answers fast because people were very, very nervous about the fact that a military pilot had just died pursuing what seemed to be

and possibly some sort of alien craft in the sky. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in terms of that, we also have another case that involved pilots, and that was the Clarence Chilis and John Witted case. And this really seemed to be an important moment in terms of the Air Force's attempts to debunk these ZFOs before they really got out of hand. Would you mind touching on this case briefly for us before we get into Hynix's involvement? Yeah, and of course, I'd never do it briefly. Yeah, no, please, elaborate. And this is one of my favorite cases, so I'm really glad you're asking about it. Cool. It followed hot on the heels of the Kenneth Arnold sighting and then the Thomas Mantel crash. An eastern airline flight traveling across the southern United States heading east towards Atlanta,

flying over, I think they were around Jackson, Mississippi or so. And the two pilots notice a glowing red light that seems to be heading towards them. At first, they think it's an experimental aircraft jet. Because remember, jet point, this is 1949, jet aircraft were not very common at this point. Right. So they assumed it was an experimental jet aircraft from the military. Well, then it gets closer,

and it's actually a tubular object, a rocket with no wings, no apparent wings, two rows of glowing lights along the fuselage, a blue glow along its lower head, and a giant 50-foot red and orange, plane shooting out of its tail. And as it approaches the aircraft, it seems to make a conscious maneuver to its left to avoid a collision with the airliner.

And it zooms past the plane and then veers up into the clouds and just, now for years and years, that was all I ever knew about the case. But when I started researching it for my book, I came across this very interesting story that also fits into this, and that is that a ground crew guy from an Air Force base in Macon, Georgia, saw the exact same thing from the ground and exactly an hour before the pilots of that Eastern Airlines flight saw this thing. So all of a sudden, you've got this incredibly complicated situation because the guy on the ground in Georgia sees this wingless rocket with a giant flame shooting out of its end, flying away, to the northwest. An hour later, it's seen by these airline pilots over Mississippi, but that means

that the flying object, if it was only one object, crossed from the eastern time zone into the central time zone. And so all of a sudden, the timing of these events becomes very hard to trace, because the Heineck and the Air Force investigators weren't really, we're never really sure if everyone was recording the time in their own time zone, or if they were all reporting it in central time zone and if they were figuring in daylight savings time, which was still a fairly new thing at the time. So all of a sudden, you've got this situation where you have not just the witnesses on the airplane, but a witness on the ground who saw this apparently the same thing. And depending on how you look at the timing, the sightings either took place an hour apart or two hours apart

or instantaneously. And I think it could never really figure out which of those it was. It completely vexed him throughout this research. Another monkey ranch was that there was one passenger in the airliner who, he may not have been the only one to see it, but he was the only one who spoke up about it, who saw this thing, zoom past the plane in the middle of the night and then fly up into the clouds. He turned out to be a personal friend of Dr. Heinex. So Heinek had some very, very reliable witnesses in this case. He had the two Eastern airline pilots who were decorated military pilots, very high credibility. He had his friend who was writing him. And then he had another very credible Air Force professional in the end of the sighting from the ground. So put it all together. You've

got, you've got, you know, concurrent sightings of the same object, apparently. You've got several witnesses that are very, very qualified observers and very credible. And you've got a real mystery on your hands. This was a really, really tough case for a project signing to take on. And like we mentioned earlier, you know, the whole idea of Project Sign essentially was to debunk these cases to give a conventional reasoning for them. And this is why they brought in Heinek. When he left Project Sign Mark and he went back to teaching, it was clear that he wasn't quite done with the Air Force. And he was brought back again to do a discrete study. I had no idea about this.

This was really interesting when I read this in your book. And this involved interviewing fellow astronomers. Could you tell us a bit about this project? Well, by this time, Project Sign had evolved into Project Grudge, which in turn evolved into Project Blue Book, which is probably the one most people are familiar with. And so Project Blue Book contracted with the Tull Memorial Institute at the technology consulting firm in Ohio

to help continue with their study of UFO sightings. Butel ended up hiring Heineck to go out and do a sort of a sleuthing, do some sleuthing among his fellow professional astronomers. They just sent him out to do sort of a informal anonymous poll of his colleagues and try to find out how many of them, A, had ever seen a UFO and B were willing to talk about it. So there's two levels here. It's not just who has seen one. It's who has seen one and is willing to go out on a limb and speak about it publicly. And what he found out after interviewing about 45 or 50 astronomers over the course of the few months, what he found was that about 11% of the astronomers had seen something that they would classify as a UFO,

something that was very real to them, but they could not explain in any sort of normal, physical or astronomical terms. So that's about 11 percent is a pretty high percentage. Heinek was very surprised to find that that many scientists had seen something and were willing to admit it to him. And, you know, it's in a way it makes sense because, of course, astronomers are always looking up at the sky. And when they are looking over the sky, they know instantly when something does not belong in the sky. So, you know, that sort of makes them the world's most perfect UFO witnesses. So it was kind of a big deal for Heineck to discover that so many of them has seen UFOs. Another element of that, though, was that he also found that, I think that

Percinium was around a third, around a third of these chromonomercyphold, even if they wouldn't admit to having seen UFOs or never had seen UFOs, were willing to say that they would be willing to study the problem if the right opportunity presented itself. So that was another big thing, too. Just the fact that there were other scientists who's curiously curiosity had been had been peaked just enough that they would say, sure, I would take a look at this. You mentioned Project Grudge, Mark, and this eventually began to dwindle into sort of a one-man show when Edward Rupel picked up the pieces. And again, Grudge seemed to be, you know, the real stampdown of we are going to find conventional reason for every single one of these cases that are being

reported. But Rupelt really caught my attention in terms of your book. He seemed to sort of rise from the ashes to revive this entire government-funded project on studying UFOs involving Heinex. So could you give us a little background on who Repel was and how he ultimately began what we all know, the most famous government-funded project, and that was Project Blubon? Yeah, he's kind of a hero to me, actually, after writing this book. And it was so many moments in the story of UFOs sort of rely on this sort of weird, mystical, chance. that sort of brings different people or different elements together at just the right time to create some sort of new understanding. And I think that's what happened with Rupelt and Heinek. Heinek had already been involved with the Air Force with Project Sign, which towards the end was leaning very heavily heavily

hypothesis before it was quickly disbanded before they went too far down that road. It was placed with Project Grudge, and Grudge's mandate was basically to make the UFOs go away for good. So Ruppelt comes in at the tail end of Project Grudge and takes a new approach. He says, you know what, we're not going to lean in any direction. We are going to be as unbiased as we possibly can. We're going to be as scientific as we possibly can. And if anybody on my staff starts talking about how they believe in aliens, they're going to get transferred. And if anybody on my staff alternately starts saying that they think UFOs are mass hallucinations, they are also going to get transferred.

He did not want any of that sort of thinking on his team, which, you know, of course, time was kind of revolutionary. So, and it was about that time that he started working with Heineck, because Heinek had been brought back in in the early days of Blue Book, By Rubell, by the way, who was very impressed with Heinek. So the two of them developed, they worked closely for several years and they developed a sort of, I would say, a grudging mutual respect. They never completely trusted each other because there was always a recognition that they were serving different masters. Rupelt was serving the Air Force and the Pentagon.

Heinek was serving science and public opinion. So, you know, they never quite completely bonded. but there was enough mutual respect there that they actually were able to do quite a bit of good work and do some really, really interesting investigations. And it was repelled in the end who, this is a major point I want to bring up. In the early days, all Heinek ever did was he would sit at a desk

and he would look at these printout of UFO reports and he would read the narratives and he would say, oh, well, that was obviously Venus. that was obviously a comet, that was obviously a meteor. And that was all he did. Under Rupelt's leadership, Heinek was actually sent out in the field to do his own first field investigation. This was a mass siting in South Dakota and North Dakota.

And Heinek did a really good job investigating a very pleasant case. And it only happened because Rupelt said, Rupelt was actually on his way out at that time. was retiring from the military, and this was the last case that he investigated, but in the conclusion of his investigation, he said, I think Dr. Heinex should be sent out to South Dakota and North Dakota. I think he should look into this as well. So that moment started this whole new chapter in Heinzik's career where he was not just sitting behind a desk, but going out in the field, investigating these UFO incidents on the scene, meeting face to face with the witnesses, which is a huge, huge deal.

And it was a gigantic step in his transformation as a UFO research. Absolutely. And then we see Heinex sort of feelings on the entire topic start to sway, start to ebb and flow when speaking face-to-face with these people. I mean, it's one thing to see it on paper, but then to go and actually boots on the ground, do it, Mark. I'm sure you know as a Mufon investigator, like that's when you really start to think there's something to all this.

The same could be said for Heinek. And, I mean, one of those cases where he was out there in the field actually investigating was the Socorro New Mexico case. Now, this is a pivotal case for UFO buffs out there. But for those who may not know about it, could you tell us a little about this case and how Heinek considered it the Rosetta Stone, as it were? Sure. Another one of my favorite cases, it involves a traffic cop named Lonnie Zamora in, um, the town of Sikora, New Mexico, which just happens to be pretty much a stones throw away from Holiman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Grounds, okay, to places, places where a lot of

experimental military hardware is developed and tested. So with that as a background, Lani Zamora was just finishing up his shift when he spotted the speeder going through town. So he takes off after the speeder, just about to catch up with the car, and he hears him. hears a loud boom coming off from the side of the highway, and he sees a cloud of smoke coming from where the boom is, and he knows that there is a dynamite shack over in these hills on this part of town. He's afraid that the dynamite check has just blown itself up. So he veers off the highway, drives off on a gravel road into this rocky, rocky hilly area,

and he spots what he first thinks is an overturned car. He thinks some people drove their car off the ridge of this hill and rolled it down into this Arroyo down beneath. And he sees two people outside this vehicle, and they're both kind of short because he can compare them to the nearby shrubbery. They appear to be either large children or small adult men, and they're wearing white coveralls. Well, he loses sight of them for a minute while he drives his car closer, and then he sees him again. and at this point the two people in the white coveralls, one of them turns and notices Zamora's approaching the coal car and sort of jumps as it's startled.

And then Zamora parks and he gets out of his car and you can't see these guys anymore, the men in the white coveralls. He scrambles down the hill towards this object and he realizes that it is not an overturned car. It's actually a gigantic egg-shaped thing. It appears to be made of metal, white aluminum possibly, and it's standing on landing struts, and it has a strange symbol painted on the side.

Well, as he's approaching this thing, it starts to roar and flameshoot out of the bottom. Well, Zamora goes running back up to his squad car to hide as this thing takes off and zooms across the sky and disappears against the horizon. And Zamora gets on the radio and calls in for help. And when the next, when a state policeman, Sam Chavez shows up,

He says Zamora is just white as a sheet. Looks like he's just seen the devil. He seems to be in shock. He's just been seen something that has absolutely unnerved him. And it also turns out that a family of tourists driving through town had seen the same thing. They pulled into a gas station in Socorro and they said, hey, what if you got flying around here?

And the gas station guy says, well, what do you mean? You know, we're close to a military basis. So there are always a lot of helicopters around. And the guy says, no, this wasn't a helicopter. This was some weird thing that buzzed our station wagon just a minute ago as we were driving into town. And he says, and just after we saw it, we saw one of your local police cars go driving off the highway onto this gravel road.

So they saw Zamora actually responding to the blast that he had heard. So you've got this really interesting case where you've got this no-nonsense policeman, who, according to Heinek, was a very solid citizen, not a really imaginative person, not the kind of person you would expect to fabricate a crazy story about a UFO. And there are these independent witnesses. There are these tourists who told the gas station attendant

that they had seen the very same thing. At the very same time in the very same place, unfortunately, they paid cash for their gas when they filled up their car. So, I mean, there have been searches for these people, and I stayed away from that part of the story. it because it wasn't really relevant to my narrative. But what you've got is a really puzzling account, and it attracted a lot of attention.

And Project Blue Book sent Heinek to Sicoro very quickly. He said he needed to sort of squash it down before it became a legend. And he met with Zamora and was very impressed with, again, how very matter-of-fact Zamora was. He did not embellish his story. His story remained exactly the same with every telling. he was he was clearly confused and disturbed by what he had seen but he was also really upset because he wasn't going to hand out his quota of speeding tickets because that was more you know

which he took us an interesting clue to this guy's personality it's like why would he be making this thing up if he really just wants to be out there handing out speeding tickets it's got when it's close to that i thought was kind of funny so this case has been studied and analyzed a lot of people suggested that this object that Zamora saw was maybe a prototype of NASA's lunar excursion module, which was being tested for the Moonflux, the Apollo Moonflex later on in the 1960s. So that was a possibility that a lot of people pointed out to. It's never been proven. The Air Force has always denied that that was the case.

But nobody's ever come up with an explanation for the case. It remains a really intriguing unknown. And like Heinek said, it's kind of the Rosetta Stone because it had all the perfect elements, all the elements of a perfect UFO, the situation. Right. And I mean, you know, human occupants or non-human, it also sort of ushered in this whole new classification system that Heineck himself created. And this bleeds sort of into the title of your book and his involvement with another big project. But could you tell us a little, Mark, about this classification system that Heinek ultimately came up with while working on Blue Book? Sure. His classification system actually went through several different permutations over time because he was constantly trying to think through the UFO problem and think of the best approach.

And of course, he's a scientist. Scientists like to categorize things. So it made sense to him that he should try to categorize UFO sightings. And the first system he came up with, and he actually described it first in an article that appeared in Playboy magazine of all. all thing. The Reader's of Playboy loved reading about flying saucers. I don't know why. So Heinek does this story for Playboy magazine in the late 60s, and he starts talking about how he sees that you could categorize UFO sightings according to the strangeness of the situation. In other words, is it an event that can be explained by physical laws? And the number two factor is the credibility of the witness.

Is the witness someone who is a, you know, solid citizen, good observer, someone who can be counted on to give an honest telling of their experience? And he thought that, he thought that if you could group together, if you could, if you could group together, sightings that had a high strangeness factor and a high credibility factor for the witness, that those were the cases that you should focus on. So that became his first approach. Over time, he sort of developed that.

He expanded that into three very simple categories of UFOs, and those were, number one, the daylight disks, which I think the term is fairly obvious, self-explanatory. The second category was meandering nocturnal lights. And if you've been studying UFOs for a while, you know that the vast majority of sightings are meandering nocturnal lights. His third category was visual and radar sightings, and those were sightings where, you know, obviously a visual sighting of the OFA was backed up and confirmed by a radar reading,

confirming the presence of a solid object and its movement. And those were very, very intriguing cases to Enoch. So that was his first group of three categories. Later on, he expanded that and he added the close encounter categories. That's what people are most familiar. familiar with, obviously, from the movie and from that terms use in common parlance in our language today, a close encounter of the first kind involved visual contact with an unusual object in the sky that was within 500 yards. He figured that was a close enough measure that you could make out a visual detail on the UFO.

A close encounter of the second kind involved the UFO leading behind physical traces. And that could be anything from scorch marks, which the UFO in Lonnie Zamora's case left behind, a scorch burn brush, landing gear imprints in the ground. That could also include ultraviolet burns to the witness's eyes. It could involve the witness's car engine shutting off and its light shutting off in the presence of the UFO. So that was a close encounter of the second kind. Those cases most intrigued Enoch because he thought that they had the most scientific value. And he thought that they had the highest chance of actually proving something about the UFO phenomenon.

And then, of course, the close encounter of the third kind involves citing and possible interaction with a being that emerges from the UFO or is seen in close proximity with the UFO. So those are the three iconic categories that that everyone's, that, that everyone's, knows so well today. Right. And I mean, we couldn't know it any better than when it came to us in the form of Steven Spielberg's film. And obviously, Heinek had to be involved with this somehow. So this is a really interesting part of the book, one of the more pop culture-esque aspects of Heinick's entire career. So could you tell us a little about how Heinek got involved with Spielberg's film, Mark? Sure. This is my discovery of this story, Keeneck. about while I was rooting through those decrepit those decrepit file cabinets in Mark Rodger's

basement at the Center for UFO Studies, I found a manila folder labeled Spielberg. And I'm a screenwriter and a film buff and a huge admirer of Steven Spielberg. So, of course, I grabbed that envelope and flipped it open to see what was in it. It was a fairly thin envelope, as I recall, compared to some of the other envelopes in those files. But there was one letter in particular that really jumped out at me, and it was this painfully awkward letter that J.L. and Heineck had written to Steven Spielberg to very politely point out that his new movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had actually stolen its title, kind of sort of from a book that Heineck had written in 1972, called the UFO experience. So in this letter, Heinek very gently and politely points out to Spielberg that, hey, the term closing cows of the third kind is actually my intellectual property. So, and then he mentions that he's going to be in Los Angeles soon. And he says, you know, maybe the two of us could get together and talk while I'm in town.

So I'm staring at this letter that Heinek has written to Steven Spielberg. And my jaw is on the floor because I feel like this is a, this is a, this is a. such a fascinating little moment in history that I'm holding in my hands. And it's real because I'm holding it in my hands. And those are the kind of amazing discoveries I've made over and over again in researching this book. So I started digging into that story and discovered that when Heineken and Spielberg did actually meet, they were able to sort things out very amicably. As I say in the book, both men got what they wanted. Spielberg was able to use the title plus. encounters of the third kind in his movie.

He hired Heinek to be his technical advisor. A lot of the incidents in the movie were inspired by stories that Heinek had told in that book, UFO experience. So Heinex's fingerprints are actually all over that movie. And in fact, towards the climax of the movie, at the dark side of the moon UFO landing base at the bottom of Devil's Tower, Heinek has a cameo appearance in the movie. the movie. He has a, he's in a shot that lasts about six seconds. The alien mothership has appeared. Everyone is just in awe. They're all bathed in this glowing light coming from the

mothership. And they cut to a quick shot of this scientist. He's like the only person to the scene who isn't wearing a white overall. So he's just, he's this very professorial looking guy with a goatee and glasses and a pipe. And he, while all these scientists are sort of hanging back and staying away from the mothership. Heinek is actually stepping towards it. It's sort of fiddling with his pipe and sticking it in his mouth. And so he, he has this moment in the film where he alone is approaching the mothership, which to me was fairly significant. It was kind of an acknowledgement, I think, on Steven Spielberg's part, that Heineck really was a leader, maybe the leader in this field and that he had really shown the way. So I think it's a pretty neat moment in the movie,

even though it's only six seconds. And in the book, of course, I tell the story of, Heinek tells the story of how they actually filmed a lot of scenes that day where the little humanoid aliens sort of clustered around Heinek and started fiddling with his pipe and tugging on his goate. And it sounds very, he says it was all very corny and he's really glad it didn't get used in the movie. But man, someday I would love. Oh, my God.

God, yeah, give us the deleted scenes. That's incredible. Well, I mean, so Mark, at that point, I mean, Heinek was now, you know, he was mainstream. He was in a Hollywood movie. He was doing interviews all over the place, late-night talk shows. He was everywhere. He was very visible, and he was the UFO guy. You know, and we know Jacques Valet as well had worked with Spielberg in the film, talked with him, consulted with him.

And while these two were sort of visible, there were a lot of scientists working behind the scenes, still studying UFOs. And this was something that has sort of been coined as the Invisible College. Could you describe this a little bit for us and what you make of this entire aspect of scientific research of UFOs? Yeah, it's a fascinating story. And it's kind of an interesting case in a case of beware unintended consequences. because the Invisible College came about at a time when institutional science was essentially killing euthology once and for all. And while they were doing that, the Invisible College sprung up and kept Eupology alive in spite of science's best effort. So it's a very curious story.

What happened was long series of events that started out with the 1966 Michigan Swamp Gas case, Eventually, that case led to the Colorado project, which refers to the U.S. Air Force hired the University of Colorado, gave them a $300,000 grant in 1967 to do the final, ultimate, authoritative analysis of the UFO problem, and decide, number one, do UFOs pose a threat? to our country. And number two, do they represent any sort of, do they actually represent any sort of interesting alien technology that we're not aware of? So those were the kinds of things the Colorado Project was looking at. And what they did basically was after a couple of years of very public infighting and scandal and embarrassing news leaks, the Colorado Project finally came that was final report that said, no, there's nothing to this. We all just need to forget about UFOs and move on.

And by the way, Project Blue Book should be killed as quickly as possible. So that's exactly what happened. Under the cover of the Colorado Project's final report, the Air Force was able to legitimately shut down Project Blue Book because they said, well, now we know that there's no value to this anymore. So we're just going to kill it. So Heineck found himself free of the Air Force as constraints for the first time in many, many, many years. And when the University of Colorado was picked to run this study, what happened was there were a whole lot of other universities that turned down the chance to participate in this study.

But they had faculty. They had professors on their staffs. They had scientists, astronomers, physicists, psychologists, psychologists, psychologists, psychologists, psychologists, psychologists, psychologists. psychiatrists, biologists who were secretly interested in the UFO problem, but when their universities didn't get the grant, they were all looking for a way to sort of pursue these interests in a safe and anonymous manner. While Heinek gave them that opportunity because he said, look, you know what, Project Blue Book may be dead, but I'm still interested in this topic. And me and my buddies here in Chicago are going to keep moving ahead with our own studies, and anybody who wants to join

us is welcome. And so what happened was a whole lot of these scientists from universities and scientific research centers, not just in the U.S., but around the world, started contacting hunting and saying, I want to be part of this. And they didn't have any formal structure. That's why they're the invisible college. They would get together when two or three of them happened to be a attending the same scientific conference somewhere in the world, or if two or three of them

happened to be in Chicago at the same time, they would all meet at Hinex House and talk about their research and put their heads together and try to make some progress in their research. So that's how the Invisible College came about. It was sort of a retreat for all these establishment scientists who were interested in the problem, but weren't being given the opportunity to pursue their interests in the within the confines of, you know, traditional scientific establishment and academia. Right. And then, I mean, eventually Heinek would then form QFOS, which was an organization that he started

and had, you know, some sort of structure to it. So could you tell us where QFOS stands right now, Mark? Where it stands right now. Boy, that's tricky because as I've already described, you've got, you've got Mark Rodger and Mary Kastner and several really dedicated people who are doing whatever they can to keep Heinick's legacy alive and to keep his records and his archives safe and intact and preserve for future researchers. But they don't, it always comes down to money. They don't have money. You know, when Kufos first began, when Heineck first formed this group, which was essentially, he just basically took the Invisible College and said, hey, we're coming out in the open now.

And they hung up a shingle and said, okay, we are your friendly neighborhood UFO research organization. So, but at that time, the plans were, they were budgeted for about $200,000 a year. This is in the early 1970s to run Kukos. And for a couple of years, they were operating very nicely. They were bringing in a lot of money. They had celebrities involved like Jackie Gleason and Stan Freebird. Then they had the movie, Close Encounters, which brought a lot of attention to Kufos and a lot of support. But over time, the financial constraints became very, very difficult to deal with, especially after Hineck passed away in 1986.

six, Kufos just went through a period of constant downsizing to the point where, as I've mentioned, their files are essentially stored in people's basements and addicts throughout Chicago, which to me is kind of a disgrace. I wish there was a way to come up with the money to get all these records in a safe place, in one place where people like me and you can go and study them. Absolutely, yeah. And I mean, I think things like... Like your book, like shining a light on this man's career, it will invigorate some people to be like,

oh my God, we are sitting on a wealth of information from credible astronomers, scientists, philosophers, psychiatrists, everything you mentioned earlier, and know that there is something to this. So let's, it's 2017 people. Let's digitize this stuff. You know, in terms of the legacy of Jay Allen Heineck, you did such a good job, like I said, weaving his story in with UFO history. It was complex. It was controversial. I'm sure it was messy

to sort of create a narrative around this entire thing. But he has found his place in UFO history, Mr. Heinek has. What do you take from the life of Heinek after digging so deep into his life and career? Well, this just came up this morning. Somebody asked me a question on my blog,

high strangeness UFO.com, about the future of euthology. And this person asked me, if you had unlimited money to pursue UFO research and you, because I have mentioned in my blog, and I've mentioned this several times, but I think maybe we need to sort of throw out the way uphology has been pursued so far and come up with a whole new approach. So this person asked me, okay, if you had unlimited money to come up with a whole new approach, what would you do first?

And I thought, wow, that's a really, really fascinating question. And I realized that I would go back, my thoughts immediately go back to something that Dr. Heinex said to his friend and colleague, Jacques, back when they had flown out to Colorado to give testimony to the scientists on the Colorado Project. And they flown into Denver and they were they were driving to their hotel and they started talking about their scientific philosophies and they actually started sharing some of their spiritual and mystical feelings, which scientists don't always do, especially not with fellow scientists. But during this conversation, Jacques Valet said, well, what caused you to get into science, Alan? You know, there's this story around that when you were eight, you were sick in bed and your mom read you an astronomy textbook and that's what that's what did it. And Heinek said, well, the real reason I got it to science is that I wanted to explore the things that science couldn't explain. I wanted to study the fringes, the ragged edges of science and try to figure out the things that we haven't, that have defied explanation up till now. And I think that's a really good starting point.

But I think that if you're going to start there, if you're going to start looking at the things science can't explain, it seems to me as a non-scientist, it seems to me that if you're going to start there, then you shouldn't lock yourself into the scientific method. Because as we all know, over decades and decades and decades, 70 years now of UFO study and research, the scientific method has not exactly been our friends.

It hasn't really gotten us anywhere, you know. But the general consensus is, well, if you can't prove it using the scientific method, then it's not true. It doesn't exist. Well, I think we need to get beyond that kind of rigid thinking. I think this is where Heinek would have wanted to go. I think he would have, I mentioned at some point in the book, I said, actually, I think this was in my original book proposal. One of my lines was that as more and more Americans start to wonder what's out there, Heinex starts to wonder what out there really means. In life, he was, he is thinking had become

very expansive. He was thinking in terms of alternate dimensions. He was thinking that there was probably a psychic dimension to the UFO phenomenon. And not getting into talks about ESP or telekinesis, but just saying that the, that someone who is under gone, someone who has gone through a UFO event, a close encounter, an abduction, that part of what they have experienced may have been in their minds. That doesn't mean it's not real. It just means that there's no way in hell we can study that, especially if we stick to the scientific method. So I was really glad that this person brought it up on my blog today because it kind of triggered these thoughts in me. As you can tell, they haven't fully gelled. I know I'm kind of

talking in circles here. But again, I just go back to Heinzsche's quote about I wanted to study the things that science couldn't explain. So, okay, we all want to study that. So why do we rely on science to give us the mode of studying that, the scientific method? I think we need to be more, I think we need to be more open to abandoning the traditional scientific method when it doesn't, when it doesn't fit the bill. And as we all know, there are a lot of instances when it just doesn't fit the bill.

This person also asked me, well, again, this isn't an addition. This was the main question. What would you do if you had unlimited funds? And I thought, you know what? I would go back to what to me is, I think, the most intriguing, unsolved UFO case of all time. It's the Tramont in Utah movie film. A Navy photographer, Dilbert Newhouse, was on vacation driving through Utah with his family. Beautiful sunny day, not a cloud of the sky.

and Mrs. Newhouse looks out the car window and says, hey, what's that up in the sky? Well, there are 15 or 20 bright white lights sort of cavorting about in the blue sky. Well, Newhouse pulls the car over, goes to the trunk of the car. He just happens to have a 16 millimeter movie camera with him. And he shoots about 40 seconds of film,

excuse me, he shoots about 40 seconds of film of these bright objects flying about in the sky. and he sends the film to his higher-ups in the military. The film ends up going to two most technically advanced at the time photo research labs run by our government. And the film is subject to frame-by-frame analysis. And after thousands of man hours, our country's best photo analysts, these are people who work for the CIA and the military. they cannot explain what these objects are.

They are absolutely certain that these objects are not birds. They're not balloons. They're not astronomical phenomenon. They are something solid and manufactured that are either emitting light or reflecting light. So to me, that case is kind of a jaw dropper. And it seems to me, this just occurred to me again just this morning, writing this out on my blog, that if I had those unlimited resources, I would find the closest to original copy of that film in existence,

and I would hire the best special effects of people in the movie industry to analyze it, not just analyze it frame by frame, but analyze it pixel by pixel. If you think about how much imaging technology is advanced just over the last 10 or 20 years or so, if we could apply the latest state-of-the-art photo analysis science, to that film, I wonder what we would find out about it. I can only imagine, man. Yeah, a fascinating case. And where do you got my money?

Where do I send it? Because I couldn't agree more. Let's start this now. Yeah. We'll talk after this. We'll start a Kickstarter or something for sure. Well, Mark, what's next for you? I know, you know, the book is just coming out.

This is an exciting time for you as a researcher and an author. Do you have any other upcoming projects coming out soon? Well, I have three or four ideas for book projects that I'm going to be kicking around over the next couple of months. It's too early to go into them publicly, but I have some fun and treating ideas. Some of them are UFO related, but not all of them are UFO related. So it's possible that my next book may go off in a completely different direction. In the meantime, I will continue to blog at high strangen. UFO.com. That will not change. And, you know, continue to, continue to air commentary and opinion

on happenings in UFO world whenever I can on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or my woman. So that's, that's what I'll be up to next. Perfect. Sounds great. And then again, guys, the book is The Close Encounters Man, how one man made the world believe in UFOs. Mark, I can't thank you enough for joining me. And again, congratulations on the book. I think This will be one of the seminal books when it comes to UFO research and who we can truly learn from. And that is Mr. J. Allen Heineck and yourself included. So again, thank you for joining me on Somewhere in the Skies. Well, I really appreciate it. It's been a blast talking with you.

Let's do it again sometime. Sounds great. That is it for this week's episode. For any new listeners out there, thank you for giving the show a chance. Please share the show. And remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching. So we're in disguise. Receiving frequency transmission.

One of the most interesting ideas about ghosts was proposed by Andrew Lang, who was a fascinating polymath and author. He was one of the co-founders of the Society for Psychical Research, who took one of the first sort of forensic and scientific approaches to gathering and cataloging accounts of ghosts. And in 1897, he collected them in an amazing volume called the Book of Dreams and Ghosts. And in the Book of Dreams and Ghosts,

Lange proposed the unique idea that ghosts may be the effect or the emanation caused by a dead person dreaming, and in effect projecting into the mind of those living. And that's a fascinating concept that when you encounter what seems to be a ghost, you may actually be making contact with a dead person dreaming. Stay tuned to Spectovision Radio.

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