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The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) is a privately-funded unidentified flying object UFO research group. It was founded in 1973 by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois.
Dr. Hynek was also a top scientific consultant for Project Blue Book, the US Air Force’s official study of the UFO mystery from 1948 to 1969. Although Dr. Hynek started out as a skeptic and helped the Air Force to debunk most UFO reports, he gradually became convinced that a small number of UFO cases were not hoaxes or explainable as misidentifications of natural phenomena, and that these cases might represent something extraordinary - even alien visitation from other planets. When the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book in 1969, Dr. Hynek decided to establish his own organization to continue to study UFO reports in a scientific and unbiased manner.
Started in Evanston, Illinois, but now based in Chicago, CUFOS continues to be a small research organization stressing scientific analysis of UFO cases. Its extensive archives include historically valuable files from defunct civilian research groups such as NICAP, one of the most popular and credible UFO research groups of the 1950s and 1960s. Following Dr. Hynek’s death in 1986, CUFOS was renamed the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in his honor. The current Scientific Director of CUFOS is Dr. Mark Rodeghier, who holds a masters in Astrophysics from University of Sussex, and a Doctorate in Sociology from the University of Illinois.
Prominent ufologists who have served on the CUFOS Board of Directors are Jerome Clark, an award-winning UFO historian and author of the “UFO Encyclopedia”; Dr. Michael Swords, a retired history professor from Western Michigan University; Dr. Thomas E. Bullard, a folklorist at Indiana University; and John Timmerman.
Local branches of CUFOS were known as LAURAs.
Dr. Irena Scott claims to have been an investigator for CUFOS.²
References
- The Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, IL (at the time) was mentioned in The X-Files Season One Episode “Conduit” (1993) .
- “Update: Crop Circles”, Sightings (Sci-Fi 1996)
- “Contact at Socorro”, Sightings (Sci-Fi 1996)
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