Every area of science, technology, or indeed every field worth pursuing has its so-called "rock stars." These are the people who have proven to be so prominent in their respective areas that they have almost transcended normal reality to become larger than life gods of their respective fields, going down to imprint upon history an indelible legacy that will never fade. Within the realm of UFOs and supposed alien encounters, there have been a few such people who have carved out a place here for all time and even shaped the direction of the field, and one of these must certainly be a legendary man who managed to change the face of UFO studies, put it on the map, and clear a path for ufology that goes well into the future.
The man who would become one of the most legendary figures the UFO field has ever seen and who would change the entire way we classify such encounters started out having nothing to do with alien or ships from outer space. Before World War II, Dr. Josef Allen Hynek had completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Yerkes Observatory, in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, after which he had joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio State University, specializing in stellar evolution and in the identification of spectroscopic binary stars. During the war, he worked as a civilian scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory developing new defense technologies, and it was in the years just after the war when his life would go from a mainstream scientist with no connection or even interest in UFOs whatsoever to diverge onto a path that would take him into a whole new realm of the weird.
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