"Crackpots" is what astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a consultant on the Air Force's Project Blue Book for over twenty years, used to call flying saucer enthusiasts.  That was back in the days when he adhered to the provisional conclusions of die-hard Project Blue Book personnel.  What was it, in the late 1960's, that caused this famed professor and staunch enemy of the UFO cult to significantly alter his opinion - to make the radical turnabout that rocked the scientific world, exposed high-level cover-ups, de-authorized the authorities, and advanced the march of science?
It's all in The Hynek UFO Reports, which distills over 12,000 sightings and 140,000 pages of Blue Book "evidence." From this mountain of once-classified data, Dr. Hynek reveals:
-The lowdown on Project Blue Book -what its mission was, and why
-The government's official "debunking policy"
-Sightings the Air Force claimed to have identified but actually did not
-Eye-witness reports that are far from mad ravings
-Close encounters of the First, Second, and Third Kind
This astonishing-but-true account took many years to compile.  Sifting through masses of material, conducting surveys, and holding interviews, Dr. Hynek takes the reader on an incredible whirlwind adventure as he, almost step-by-step, relives those harrowing, spine-tingling moments that led him to go where few had dared to go, unraveling the mystery behind baffling UFO phenomena.  From UFO-basher to the world's foremost authority on UFOs, Hynek indeed made a quantum leap.
To put Dr. Hynek's remarkable career in proper perspective, world-renowned UFO expert Jacques Valle has contributed an illuminating foreword, written expressly for this reissue of the book.