Walter N. Webb

 

Webb has been involved with Ufology since his own UFO sighting in 1951 and is best known as the original investigator of the Betty and Barney Hill case.  A fact often forgotten.

Walter N. Web, born in 1934, graduated in Biology from Mount Union College, Ohio in 1954, and started a career in Astronomy under the teachings of Dr. J. Allen Hynek at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Optical Satellite Tracking Program from 1957 to 1958, and now retired from Charles Hayden Planetarium, Boston, where he spent 32 years as senior lecturer, assistant director, and operations manager. He was the Astronomy consultant of four UFO investigation associations, a member of MUFON and CUFOS. 

He was the first investigator of the Betty and Barney Hill incident and he believed that  among  the "noise" of UFO sighting reports that were caused by common-place phenomena, there existed a core of incidents that are totally unique and that very strong (circumstantial) evidence pointed at extraterrestrial visits as their cause.

Webb was a consultant in Astronomy to MUFON for 15 years and a columnist of "The Night Sky" for the MUFON UFO Journal. He was a member of the program committee for the 1981 MUFON UFO Symposium at M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass.; a speaker at the 1988 symposium in Lincoln, Nebraska and a member of the former MUFON Public information and Public Education Committee.

In 1992, he was a member of the Conference Committee for the Abduction Study Conference held at M.I.T., a landmark scientific assembly on UFO abductions (684-page volume of proceedings). In 1994, the Center for UFO Studies appointed him as its first Senior Research Associate based upon his many years of investigative work and service to Ufology. And as of 1995, a coalition of the three major UFO groups in the U.S. hired Walt as its chief consultant.

Although the initial investigator of the Barney and Betty Hill incident in 1961, he researched what he believed was a much better example of a "dual-witness UFO abduction experience" and documented this case in his book Encounter at Bluff Ledge: A UFO Case History (J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 1994).

There is absolutely no doubt that Walter N. Webb deserves far more recognition for his groundbreaking work in the CE3K/AE research field.