J. Allen Hynek, a once UFO skeptic, began classifying the most compelling and promising scientific cases of UFO sightings and alien encounters. As he studied and categorized the various UFO/Alien cases, Hynek began to become less of a skeptic. It his research and expertise that led to the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is considered to be one of the most accurate portrayals of alien/UFO eyewitness accounts in a fictional movie. Just about any investigator (UFO, Criminal, Paranormal, etc.) will tell you that the eyewitness account of an event is normally the most unreliable piece of evidence gathered during an investigation. Yet, often times, it is the only piece of evidence that investigators have to go on. Moreover, the more complex or traumatic an event is, the more difficult it is to rely on these accounts. Additionally, it is even more difficult to categorize and organize these accounts into a coherent fashion which would allow others to study these accounts. This difficulty in categorization definitely holds true for eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings and alien encounters. The difficulty lies in how different each eyewitness account is from one another. As the UFO Casebook put it: “Witnesses to UFOs report many different shapes and sizes; from discs to cigars to triangles and almost anything you could imagine.” Such varying accounts make it almost impossible to categorize them into any sort of neat classification system. However, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a UFO skeptic, set out to do so. According to Hynek, even though UFO sightings and alien encounters vastly differ from one another, there is usually some common thread that can tie various sightings/encounters together, such as distance, time of day, shape of object, etc. He began looking at eyewitness accounts under a new light. Once he made his break with the Air Force, the former skeptic began to study these various accounts on his own; still categorizing them in his home-grown classification system. To date, the Hynek system is the most widely used UFO/Alien sighting classification system. Also see the UFO Casebook article: The Hynek Classification System.
