Center for UFO Studies
The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) is a privately funded UFO research group. It was founded in 1973 by J. Allen Hynek, the Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois.
Hynek was also a scientific consultant for Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force official study of the UFO phenomenon from 1948 to 1969. Although 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, Hynek decided to establish his own organization to continue to study UFO reports in a scientific and unbiased manner.