Witness Demographics From Dr. J. Allen Hynek's The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry

Dr. J. Allen Hynek's book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry, is a classic in the field. Along with providing documentation of important and detailed UFO reports and the basics of an important classification system for UFO reports (made famous through its use in the name of Speilberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind), it also provides some rudimentary demographic statistics concerning the witnesses of each category of reports. Those statistics have been summarized in this paper.

Unfortunately, Hynek does not indicate which witnesses are involved in which cases, so some professions, such as the maritime profession, have been skewed by large numbers of observers in a single case or a small number of cases.

Note that:

• Cases in the Hynek sample are multiple witness cases.
• Hynek does not provide demographics for CE-III cases covered in his book.
• The aviation category includes military aviation personnel, and ground crews.
• Security personnel include police.
• The vast majority of young witnesses are teenagers (78%).

In addition to the raw information in the table shown below, we have developed an interpretation of the statistics.