In 1973, J. Allen Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Evanston, Illinois — the first organization explicitly designed to apply scientific rigor to UAP investigation. In 2024, researchers gathered to assess its fifty-year legacy.
Hynek came to CUFOS having spent two decades as the Air Force's scientific consultant to Project Blue Book. During those years, he had watched case after case be dismissed without rigorous analysis. He coined the phrase "swamp gas" to describe the debunking language the Air Force demanded regardless of what the evidence showed.
CUFOS published the International UFO Reporter, maintained a case database exceeding 100,000 reports, and brought academic researchers into structured engagement with witness testimony and physical evidence.
Hynek's classification system — nocturnal lights, daylight discs, radar cases, and the three categories of close encounter — remains the lingua franca of UAP research, adopted implicitly even by AARO's own case taxonomy.