by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In the late 1960s, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a key figure in getting members of the scientific community to take flying saucers/UFOs seriously. He was a prominent astronomer who was involved in the mystery at the very beginning as a consultant for the Air Force’s investigation, which operated for most of its existence as Project Blue Book until its termination in 1969. He was born in Chicago in 1910 and worked and lived in Ohio from 1935 until he became chair of the astronomy department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1960. In 1973, he founded the Center for UFO Studies, which was based in Chicago. Then, in 1984, after spending his entire life in the Midwest, he rather suddenly moved with his family from Chicago to Scottsdale, Arizona. In this blog, we’ll explore what was going on behind the scenes.

In 1972, Hynek’s first book, The UFO Experience, was published. In it, he presents his vision of a UFO research center:

If funds were no object (!) and I were directing a UFO institute, I would personally train an adequate number of full-time investigators and then, when a particularly interesting UFO report came along, assign two investigators to bird-dog the case until every bit of potentially available data was obtained.

In his 2017 biography of Hynek, The Close Encounters Man, Mark O’Connell quotes Hynek telling a Chicago Tribune reporter that the reason he and his wife, Mimi, had moved to Arizona was because “Chicago… is a hotbed of inertia.” While this may have been part of the reason, it seems his main motivation was the opportunity to realize his dream of a well-funded UFO research center. O’Connell goes into this, but Jacques Vallée, a longtime friend and associate of Hynek’s, describes the circumstances in much more detail.

Vallée wrote about Hynek’s move in a journal kept during the period that was published in 2016 as Forbidden Science: Volume Three. The first entry addressing this is headed, “Spring Hill. 10 November 1984.” There he wrote, “Allen told us his new center was now duly established in Scottsdale with the backing of wealthy Englishman Jeffery Kaye, a pro-Israeli businessman who maintains homes in three countries…” He explains that Kaye had only provided startup funds and intended to fund the center through publishing and film projects starting with a biopic on Hynek written by John Fuller. According to him, Hynek talked about spending two million dollars a year, “but Mr. Kaye will not provide that kind of cash.”

How Hynek came to meet Kaye comes out in entries up to December 15, 1986. It seems the driving forces for the center were a pair of gold-mining entrepreneurs Vallée identifies as Tina and Brian. O’ Connell gives their last names as Choate and Myers respectively. They had known Kaye for several years as a potential investor.

Tina Choate, a former Chicago deputy sheriff who had been interested in psychic research, became interested in UFOs after meeting Ed Slade in Las Vegas, who told her he was a “former agent.”  According to Vallée, Slade told her that the U.S. had captured flying saucers, one of which was being held at Nellis AFB, and their occupants. He would later tell her he was a contactee and show her a scar as proof.

Slade and Jules Glazer, Kaye’s financial adviser, shared an interest in collecting old share certificates, and it was arranged that Kaye and Slade would meet. Vallée notes that “Kaye long refused to meet with Slade.” Once they did meet, Kaye was “fascinated by the man’s brilliant conversation.” After this, Kaye, Choate, and Glazer started making plans to establish a UFO research center.

Choate suggested inviting Hynek to join their effort, which would be based in Scottsdale. Kaye agreed, and she then went to Hynek with the proposal that he move there saying, presumably these are Vallée’s words, “A multimillionaire from Monaco begs you to join him in solving the UFO problem: he pledges his support…” Hynek jumped at the chance and bought a house from Glazer who was taking care of the business aspects of getting the center started. Kaye offered the use of a duplex he owned in Phoenix for the base of operations.

It seems Hynek was a bit hasty, and Vallée wrote in his journal, “Allen himself now feels he may have rushed a bit too fast to set up his new Center in Arizona under pressure from the fair Tina.” Besides the iffyness of the finances, the people involved were far from being the scientific-minded researcher/investigators Hynek had surrounded himself with throughout his time with CUFOS, which was now attached to the center in Scottsdale.

Vallée provides some insight into Glazer, whom he met at a meeting after being invited to Scottsdale to discuss lending his name to the project. He describes wincing, and Hynek saying nothing, as Choate said, “Glazer jumped on the idea of ufology as a money-making operation when he saw the Meier photographs from Switzerland.”

As for insight into Choate and Myers, they show up in The Zanfretta Case, the 2014 book we just looked at by Rino Di Stefano. The book was about an Italian security guard, Piero Fortunato Zanfretta, who reported, with corroborating evidence, multiple abductions and contact with creatures “about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead.” Under hypnosis he said they gave him a glass sphere with a gold pyramid inside and told him to give it to Hynek. It was described variously as a communication device, homing beacon, and doomsday machine.

According to Di Stefano, he and Zanfretta were invited by Wendell Stevens to the first World Congress of UFOlogy in Tucson, Arizona, in 1991, which was after Hynek’s death. There, they met Choate and Myers who said they were CEO and president respectively of the International Center for UFO Research and were the spiritual heirs of Hynek. They made a point of wanting to speak Di Stefano and Zanfretta in private.

When they got together, Choate and Myers told them that there were other cases where people were abducted and given spheres. They said they were able to obtain two of them and needed a third, in Di Stefano’s words, “to carry out a project on a global scale.” After Zanfretta told them he needed to think about it and went back to his home in Genoa, Italy, Choate and Myers went so far as to fly to Genoa to press the matter. They made a formal proposal that involved Zanfretta being flown to Arizona in a private plane. He was to stay there while the three spheres were united. They said that this would reveal a hidden alien message. Di Stefano says that Zanfretta replied, once again, that he’d have to think about it but seemed to really mean, “I’d like to, but I can’t.”

It seems that Hynek lost patience with his new partners and their approach to the UFO subject, and Vallée wrote this: “Allen told me that CUFOS, from Chicago, had sent a sternly worded letter to Tina and Brian, forbidding them from using Hynek’s name in connection with their work. This saddened Allen, who gave Tina credit for bringing him to the freedom of Arizona, although he no longer wants to be associated with Jeffery Kaye.”

Unfortunately, in the midst of all this, Hynek was diagnosed with prostate cancer and a brain tumor was discovered as well. He died on April 27, 1986.

Excerpts from Forbidden Science were sourced from the blog by Keith Basterfield titled “Why did J Allen Hynek move to Scottsdale?” posted October 8, 2017, on the blogspot.com site, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – scientific research.