CUFOS

The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), formally the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, is a research organization founded in 1973 by the former Project Blue Book scientific consultant to pursue serious, methodical study of the phenomenon. It functions today primarily as an archive and publisher.

Hynek, disillusioned by Blue Book's closure and the Condon Report's reception, created CUFOS in Evanston, Illinois as the "invisible college" made visible: a network of scientists willing to examine the data without ridicule.

CUFOS ran a national sighting hotline in the 1970s (with arrangements for police departments to relay reports), conducted field investigations of major cases including the 1975 Travis Walton affair, and built the field's central research library. It publishes the scholarly Journal of UFO Studies and the International UFO Reporter, and produced foundational statistical work, including the UFOCAT database of hundreds of thousands of report records. When NICAP dissolved, its files came to CUFOS, making the center the custodian of the classic era's best documentation. Researchers Allan Hendry (whose 1979 The UFO Handbook remains the model of rigorous case screening) and Mark Rodeghier defined its analytic standard.

Hynek until his death in 1986; scientific director Mark Rodeghier since; Hendry, Jerome Clark, and many serious researchers across its history.

Active at reduced scale, focused on archives, publication, and making its collections available to historians and the AARO-era research revival.

CUFOS has attracted less scandal than any comparable organization; its criticism runs the other way, with skeptics arguing that even its rigor never produced a confirmed anomaly, and Hendry's own book documenting how few reports survive scrutiny. Its answer has always been Hynek's: the residue is the point.