In 1975, J Allen Hynek (click here) and Jacques Vallee (click here) sat down for a series of discussions on UAP. The resultant collection of conversations was published in book form as "The Edge of Reality: A Progress report on Unidentified Flying Objects." (Henry Regnery Co., Chicago. ISBN 0-8092-8150-3.) Dr Arthur C Hastings, (click here) a psychologist and parapsychology researcher chaired the discussion sessions.
In chapter 9, "For their final session, the authors and Dr Hastings decided to discuss what they see as the possibilities in the years ahead, what might be the future behavior of UFOs and the development of UFO problems. Author Vallee began by asking "What if we were writing "The UFO in the Year 2000?"" (p.235.)
I thought it would be of interest to review just what these preeminent researchers thought of their future, albeit they were looking forward 25 years, and it is now 38 years later. They came up with a number of scenarios.
(1) "Things keep happening as they have for twenty-five years, and we keep publishing more books about it. Blum and Blum publish more books, about it. Von Daniken publishes more books, and nothing else happens. Every two or three years there's a flap somewhere. There is no visible effect on society, there is no direct threat, there is no mass landing..." (p.235.)
(2) They land, they take over. Okay. They say, "We're from Zeta Reticuli and this business has been going on too long!" I call this the "Twilight Bar" scenario, after the play by Arthur Koestler." (p.236.)
(3) "They could stop and go away entirely." (p.236.)
(4) "We learn to contact them. We set up a crash program to communicate with them telepathically, using all the characteristics we have learned that somehow seem to be associated with landings..." (pp236-237.)
(5) "The Air Force shoots one down and they attack, they block all electronic communications." (p.238.)
(6) "Let's say you have a billionaire friend who is interested in helping out and you say to him, look, a lot of people are seeing them but they're not reporting them. What I want to do is set up this universal hot line service. Okay, so we now have twice as many or five times as many...and the reports are about the same, again, not much evidence but the same quality." (p.238.)
(7) "Somebody publishes a book that explains what they are - somebody discovers what they are. Now they have to do something about that!...It would be interesting to find that the behavior of UFOs changes after certain books are published..." (p.240.)
Hynek and Vallee's scenarios 2-7 haven't happened. Scenario 1 is the closest to the situation today. No visible effect on society. No direct threat. No mass landing.
There are still plenty of reported observations of lights in the sky, but the reported number of close encounter cases has noticeably decreased.
In 2013, science as a whole is not interested in UAP. Government intelligence agencies (officially at least) have given up studying UAP. Civilian UAP researchers continue their efforts. However, almost all of these have publicly decided their stand - UAP are extraterrestrial visitors.