What Hynek Actually Meant by “High Strangeness”

I was halfway through writing the Spottsville Monster episode of 4Ever Paranormal when I caught myself doing something I should have known better than to do. I’d gotten to the part where the neighbor, alone in that abandoned barn, heard something tell him not to be afraid. It won’t hurt him, and the creature never opens its mouth. It was exactly the kind of detail that makes investigators pause and readers lean closer. High strangeness, I thought, the way I always do. Then I stopped, because I already knew exactly where that phrase came from, and I was using it the same loose way everyone else does anyway.

I first read J. Allen Hynek’s The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry when I was twelve or thirteen. At that age I couldn’t have explained why the book stuck with me, but one section never left. Buried among the case studies were two systems Hynek had built to bring order to the unexplained. A Strangeness Rating and the Close Encounter classifications. Neither described a feeling. Both were attempts to measure something.

The Strangeness Rating counted inexplicable elements in a witness report, one by one, and scored the total. A light with a trajectory nobody could explain got a low rating, since there was only one strange thing to account for. A report stacked with several unexplainable details scored higher. The Close Encounter classification measured something else, how near the witness got to the object, ranked from a distant sighting up through direct contact.

Close encounter held onto its meaning better than most fringe terms do. People still generally use it the way Hynek intended, as a rough marker of proximity, not a synonym for anything unusual. Cryptid researchers didn’t even borrow it when they needed their own rating system. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization built one from scratch. Class A covers clear sightings with little chance of misidentification. Class B covers reports from a distance or in poor light. Class C covers secondhand stories nobody can trace back to a witness. When a community needed precision, it made its own scale rather than grabbing Hynek’s.

High strangeness didn’t get that treatment. It got picked up by everyone, stripped of its tally, and handed out to describe anything that felt sufficiently weird.

Knowing all of that didn’t stop me from reaching for it anyway, as a mood instead of a measurement. That’s the part that got under my skin while I was writing this. I wasn’t ignorant of where the term came from. I just hadn’t noticed how far I’d drifted from what it actually meant, even with the answer sitting in my own head since I was a kid.

Somewhere between 1972 and now, Hynek’s tally disappeared and only the phrase survived. A cold spot in a hallway. A shadowy figure at the foot of a bed. A cryptid that vanishes without leaving a single print in the mud that should have held one. All of it gets filed under the same two words now, regardless of how little those things have in common with each other. The words became shorthand for mystery itself, even though that was never the job Hynek gave them.

Spottsville is a good example of how far that drift has traveled. In 1975 the Nunnelly family described livestock found dead without the expected blood loss, a towering creature that appeared and disappeared in impossible ways, and witnesses who struggled to explain what they believed they had seen. Hynek’s original system would have rated the case highly, not because it felt eerie, but because it stacked one unexplained element on top of another until the accumulation itself became significant.

I don’t think this happened because people were careless with Hynek’s work. I think it happened because ambiguity is uncomfortable, and a shared label makes the unexplainable feel more contained. That’s true even when the label was never built to hold everything people wanted to put inside it. Giving something a name creates the comforting illusion that we’ve contained it. The cost is that the container stops meaning anything specific once everything fits inside it, myself included.

I keep coming back to that kid reading Hynek’s tally, taking it seriously enough to remember it decades later. He never once made the connection. The adult writing about telepathic creatures would slide into using his own knowledge the way everyone else does. Hynek built a tool to measure how different one strange report was from another. I had that tool in my head the whole time. I used the flattened version anyway.

Maybe that’s the real lesson in Hynek’s work. The unexplained doesn’t become clearer because we invent broader labels for it. It becomes clearer when we’re disciplined enough to describe exactly what happened before we decide what to call it. Fifty years later, that may be the part of his system we need most.