UFO encounters from the CUFOS portfolio

Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, and later, chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University.

Wallpaper Cave

Between 1948 and 1969, he served as an astronomical consultant to the US Air Force, especially on the Blue Book project. Essentially, his responsibility was to determine if there was any astronomical explanation for a UFO report. At first, Dr. Hynek was skeptical of the UFO phenomenon, but after examining thousands of reports from credible witnesses, he gradually became convinced that UFOs deserved serious study. After the closure of the Blue Book project, in 1969, he considered establishing a private organization, made up of scientists and other well-trained technical experts, to work together trying to solve the UFO enigma.

In 1973, he founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), where he was scientific director until he died in 1986. John Timmerman was for a long time treasurer and member of the CUFOS board. He spent years, especially in the 1980s, traveling with the CUFOS photo exhibit throughout North America (and occasionally beyond), raising money for the Center. During this time, he recorded hundreds of new UFO case reports. Some were published in the quarterly magazine International UFO Reporter (IUR), of CUFOS, one of the best UFO magazines in the world, published until 2010, in printed format, then only electronically.

John Timmerman died in 2015, leaving behind countless audio tapes and transcripts of his interviews. He did not redact these cases, which thus risked being lost. Michael D. Swords, professor emeritus of the Environmental Institute, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, and former editor of the Journal of UFO Studies, announces in an article the publication of a monograph with about 1200 cases from this fund. In the same article, Swords extracted some of the cases from the Timmerman collection, cases that we present, in summary, below.

Collection cases

A first case. In Benton, Louisiana, on January 19, 1988, around 5:00 p.m., a father, along with his daughter, was driving the car to pick up her mother from work. They entered a parking lot and stopped. The area, the streets, and the nearby I-20 freeway all showed their normal congestion at that time. The daughter drew her father’s attention to an unusual streak of light in the sky. Almost as soon as he concentrated to see it better, the light appeared in front of them, at a distance of about 50 meters and 15 meters above the ground.