UFOs - Leslie Kean [22]
Haines unexpectedly became interested in the UFO subject back in the 1960s, when he was conducting research involving flight simulators for NASA. As he explains it, commercial pilots would volunteer to come into his facility and fly the simulators for studies on aviation safety, avionics, and many other areas. “From time to time a pilot would offer to tell me about an experience he had that just blew me away,” Haines said in a 2009 interview.3 Although he had heard of UFOs at the time, he had absolutely no interest in them. “I heard more and more stories from these very credible witnesses, so it began to catch my attention. I said to myself, ‘I can explain these things; they’re all natural phenomena or misidentified phenomena within the human eye,’ which I knew a lot about from studying human vision and optics. So I set out as a skeptic to disprove the whole thing. But the more I looked into the subject seriously, the more convinced I became that there was something there. Something that deserved to be looked at. Yet none of my colleagues were doing so.” He then started systematically collecting data and eyewitness reports, and giving a great deal of thought to the analysis, and has been doing so ever since. Today, he has developed an international database of over 3,400 firsthand UFO sightings by commercial, military, and private pilots, with special attention to cases where aviation safety is compromised, as distinct from sightings during which the objects have no effect on an aircraft or its crew.
In fact, for years, he and his associates have been attempting to alert the aviation community to the effects of unknown aerial phenomena on aircraft safety. In 2001, along with executive director Ted Roe, he established the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena4 (NARCAP), a respected international nonprofit research organization serving also as a confidential reporting center for use by pilots, crew, and air traffic controllers who are otherwise afraid to make reports of sightings. NARCAP scientists collect and analyze high-quality data to further understand the fundamental nature of all kinds of unidentified aerial phenomena that may pose a threat to aviation safety. The group’s technical and science advisors with extensive aviation and aeronautic experience from about a dozen countries, along with other specialists ranging from geophysicists and research psychologists to meteorologists and astrophysicists, contribute research and publish “Technical Reports” on the group’s website.
I have been privileged to come to know Dr. Haines, and he invited me to sit in on a number of private NARCAP annual meetings over the years, the last one being in July 2008. I was honored to meet many of these dedicated professionals, who are doing an outstanding job despite the obstacles they face. Papers and ongoing research are presented at these round-table gatherings, and strategies are discussed for acquiring greater accessibility to the aviation community, making sure that NARCAP remains distinct from activist UFO groups where aviation safety is obviously not the focus and where a rigorous scientific approach is less often employed.
Nonetheless, the group’s efforts to bring this issue into the scientific arena and aviation community have fallen on deaf ears. “There is little doubt in my mind that no amount of rational discussion about the substantiated evidence of the presence and behavior of UAP in our skies is going to quickly overcome the impact on two generations of Americans repeatedly told otherwise: that the subject of UAP should, at best, be cast into the category of folklore and, at worst, viewed as somehow harmful propaganda,” Dr. Haines commented recently in an e-mail. “But we must keep working toward the goal of accepting the truth when and where we find it. To do anything less is to set ourselves up for a possibly dangerous future.”
Beyond the legitimate efforts to confront safety issues, I became intrigued