Allan Hendry

Allan Hendry (born 1950) is an American astronomer and ufologist. UFO historian Jerome Clark calls him "one of the most skilled investigators in the history of UFO research." He was the main investigator for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in the 1970s.

He earned a B.A. in astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1972. His wife Dr. Elaine Hendry is a physicist and was also a UFO researcher.

Hendry was hired for CUFOS by the organization's founder, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was seeking a full-time investigator with scientific expertise and an open-minded attitude, and who was neither a debunker nor a "UFO believer".

As the chief investigator for CUFOS during most of the 1970s, Hendry personally investigated over 1000 UFO reports. He was able to find mundane explanations for the vast majority of UFO cases, but he also judged a small percentage of cases to be unexplained. One of the most famous "unexplained" cases he investigated was the Val Johnson Incident in 1979, in which a deputy sheriff in Minnesota experienced a "collision" with an unknown object which damaged his patrol car and left him temporarily unconscious. Hendry was the primary ufologist to investigate the case; in 1980 he debated the incident with well-known UFO debunker Philip Klass at a symposium held at the Smithsonian Institution.

He was reluctant to speculate as to origins of the unexplained cases, and argued they might be explainable with further data, leading some researchers to label Hendry a "closet skeptic". At the same time, a few noted skeptics and debunkers who had praised Hendry's scientific rigor subjected him to strong criticism for his conclusion that a handful of well-documented UFO reports seemed to defy analysis, and might represent genuine anomalies. Hendry suggested that the criticism from both camps were little more than ad hominem attacks, since they typically paid little or no attention to the substance of his research.

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