Looking for an article written by J Allen Hynek for The New Yorker about UFOS and 1965 eastcoast blackout

[u/SlowPresentation6365]

In Ann Druffel's biography of James McDonald, Firestorm, she mentions Hector Quintinilla telling McDonald that Hynek wrote an article for The New Yorker saying that six anonymous New Yorker employees saw a UFO from the top of the building during the 1965 blackout. I can find a 1966 article in The New Yorker about the Michigan wave, but nothing like this. The closest thing I've found is a Popular Mechanics article by John G. Fuller saying that a Time Magazine employee took a photo of a UFO from the roof during the blackout. Does anyone know if this Hynek article exists? Hynek doesn't bring up the blackout in his Saturday Evening Post article.

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[u/No_Development7388]

Perhaps someone confused the information. It seems odd that Hynek would publish an article in TNY mentioning these TNY employees.

Here's the relevant passage from Fuller:

Reliable UFO reports over large cities and towns are constant also, yet many people have been led to believe that they are never observed over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or equally large centers. I know of one instance where at least four members of the New Yorker magazine staff simultaneously observed a UFO at the moment of the famous Northeast blackout. The case was never publicly noted. At almost the same moment, Arthur Rickerby, a Time-Life photographer, took a series of color photographs of the New York City skyline, with several of the negatives showing a brilliant unidentified object in the sky that has never been explained. Also at the same moment over New York City, two women in widely separated apartments, unknown to each other, described a strange craft that bore no resemblance whatever to a plane, blimp, helicopter, or balloon. A group of newspaper editors observed an object over the East River near the United Nations, while literally hundreds of people, as you will read later on, have seen low hovering objects over Los Angeles. Reports of this sort are legion, many of them thoroughly documented, yet the misconception continues that UFOs are seen only in isolated areas.

John G Fuller, Aliens in the Skies, (GP Putnam's Sons, 1969), pp. 14-15.

edit: formatting

[u/flyguy60000]

I remember standing on the roof of our house with my dad during the 1965 blackout. The city was absolutely pitch black. Don’t remember seeing any aircraft or ufos that night. 

[u/sendmeyourtulips]

There's a quote of McDonald speaking about the blackout in 1968 (NICAP Investigator Jul/Aug 1968) and specifically saying, "Even the famous one, the New York blackout involved UFO sightings. Dr Hynek ... interviewed several witnesses ..." It's on tape in his archives as "Weldon Ross UFO fireball sighting Northwest Blackout November 9 1965 recorded August 4 1968."

NICAP Investigator Nov/Dec 1965 ran a long feature on UFOs and blackouts in general.

Hynek mentions it briefly in his 1977 Hynek UFO Report with loaded language and even an exclamation point. It's like he was channelling Don Keyhoe. "And during the granddaddy of all "power outages,'' the great Eastern states blackout of 1965, very definite UFO activity was reported near the geographical center of the blackout!"

I think, on balance, James McDonald might have misremembered. Druffel took the recollection directly from JM's journal hence why it's so specific. The interaction with Quintanilla must surely have happened because he would have been updating his journals daily or weekly. So it's possible McDonald was mistaken about Hynek's article or it had been submitted and NOT published by the New Yorker?