Page Content (OCR)
How could something as momentous as these Hudson Valley sightings, repeated year after year, be ignored by our government and swept under the rug? This indifference is so stunning that one could justify questioning whether these events actually took place at all. Many would ask, how could this really have happened if I never heard anything about it? And why didn't I hear about the wave in in Belgium for that matter, or other very credible UFO sightings, if, in fact, thousands of witnesses were involved? This puzzling situation, prompting legitimate questions about whether UFOs actually exist, represents one of the primary reasons intelligent, well-informed Americans don't "believe in" UFOs. And for good reason. A rational conclusion would be that if this were really happening, we would all know about it. If the Air Force Project Blue Book were still in effect at the time of these sightings in New York State, they would have been officially investigated, even if not at the level many of us would have liked. It would have been harder for the Air Force to offer quick, dubious explanations for these events, which happened repeatedly and at very close range. Fortunately, the key scientist with Blue Book throughout its twenty years was still actively investigating UFO cases in the mid-1980s, and was paying attention to the sightings in upstate New York. Although no longer formally associated with the U.S. government, Dr. J. Allen Hynek began investigating the Hudson Valley wave in 1984. By that time he was widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on UFOs as well as an eloquent spokesman on the subject to the American public. These sightings were the final focus of Dr. Hynek's life-he died in 1986—and he poured a great deal of energy into confronting the shocking indifference of U.S. government officials in the face of the repeated, well-documented visits by some kind of phenomenon. [6] Government apathy, he realized, is what had kept the story from exploding into the national media. Despite the fact that he had been at the forefront of many UFO investigations for more than three decades, the unrelenting Hudson Valley wave seemed to both awe and baffle Hynek beyond anything else. Nothing quite like this had happened before in America. In a 1985 essay, [7] he described "hundreds of largely professional, affluent people in suburban areas," whose statements he and others recorded on cassette tapes, as "astonished, awestruck and often frightened" by the bizarre sightings. When flying over the Taconic Parkway, or cruising low over streets and houses, an "utterly strange and possibly menacing object" constituted a serious hazard that should have concerned the FAA, he wrote. For scientists, these events should have been of breathtaking scientific concern, and the police and the media were completely derelict in their apathy and indifference, keeping the whole thing out of public awareness. To understand how such things could occur without our knowing about them, we need to examine the total inaction by those in positions of responsibility. "It was as if a malady plunged all who encountered it, these