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except the witnesses, into a deadly stupor," Hynek mused. "In the story of the Boomerang sightings, the FAA, the media, the scientists, the politicians and the military all may momentarily have touched the mystery, but it appears that then apathy intervened, sapping all incentive, and left in its place a powerful desire to do nothing." Like so many today, Hynek wanted to know how and why this shocking inaction occurred. He had been a committed skeptic about UFOs when hired by the Air Force, and with his colleagues in the scientific world had often made fun of people who reported seeing them. Although he initially set out to show there was nothing to any of this "nonsense," he underwent a gradual transformation during his long tenure working for the government. While investigating hundreds of UFO cases and interviewing countless credible witnesses, he came to recognize that there was a real, physical phenomenon involved, and a very mysterious one. He described it this way in 1977: I had started out as an outright "debunker," taking great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling cases. I was the arch enemy of those "flying saucer groups and enthusiasts" who very dearly wanted UFOs to be interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book personnel: they were all "crackpots and visionaries." My transformation was gradual but by the late sixties it was complete. Today I would not spend one further moment on the subject of UFOs if I didn't seriously feel that the UFO phenomenon is real and that efforts to investigate and understand it, and eventually to solve it, could have a profound effect—perhaps even be the springboard to mankind's outlook on the universe. [8] In 1985, the dedicated investigator was confronting an extreme manifestation of a peculiarly American phenomenon known as the UFO taboo—the automatic, deeply ingrained refusal to acknowledge that something so contradictory to what we consider "normal," and therefore unacceptable to our worldview, could possibly exist no matter what the evidence shows. In this case, Hynek observed that the taboo is so powerful that it can thwart the duties of groups of otherwise highly responsible people in positions of authority. He struggled to find some kind of core answer to this dilemma. boomerangs caused stress, trauma, and fear among the witnesses. They were given no answers and felt unprotected by their government, and many did not want to "go public" about these events for fear of being ridiculed. Rooted in the minds of most people, such as the policemen who received reports from witnesses and had not seen anything themselves, was the collective belief that this type of event cannot possibly happen. The only way out was to label the witnesses "crackpots." And yet thousands of people actually saw the objects. They were faced with the conundrum that they knew that these events did happen, as did others from the area personally acquainted with witnesses or informed about sightings from Hynek noted that seeing the otherworldly Westchester County