Last Week Tonight the Other Night

If you missed Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Sunday, the Main Story was about UFOs.  Yes, really.  As you might imagine, this lent itself to a great deal of humor.  That said, the focus was serious, dealing with the question of whether investigations into the issue have been substantive enough.  While I agree with that point, I also think there have been some investigations that have more substantive that the show suggests.  Regardless, it's a very entertaining piece.

This is also where I again get to point out that when Oliver mentions (much too off-handedly, I believe, as just a name on a list...) the Army's Project Blue Book, I had an astronomy class at Northwestern taught by J. Allen Hynek -- who had been the civilian head of the project.  The class was not about that, though he did devote two days to the subject.  (Hynek was also the technical adviser on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Spielberg even gives him a cameo close-up on the movie.  It's in the final sequence when all the scientists are gathered in a semi-circle, and previously-abducted humans leave the ship.  One of the scientists -- who looks exactly like an astronomer with with a gray goatee -- weaves his way through the crowd, steps forward, takes out his pipe, and gets a closer look.  That's Dr. Hynek.)

Three things I remember from the two days of UFO classes:  

One is that when he got a sense that the project was going to be closed down, Hynek made copies of material to take home so that he could later continue research on his own.  A second thing is that he said that Project Blue Book was not allowed to be shut down until all cases were classified -- the problem for the government was that there were many still-open cases.  So, what they did was classify those cases as "unidentified" and therefore could close down the project.  And the third thing is that Hynek said he never came across a case that convinced him the UFO sightings were aliens -- but -- he said it is ludicrous to think that we are the only living beings in the universe.  He said a whole lot more on the subject, as well as on astronomy in general, but after all this time, that's all I've got...

And as a bonus -- I actually tracked down Dr. Hynek's scene, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind!!  I'm sure there have been many people who've watched the movie of the years who have wondered, "Gee, that's a weird shot of just one guy pushing his way through, what is the point of that??!"  Well -- now you know the point.
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