defense authorities are under pressure to provide an acceptable answer. Unfortunately, during the Belgian UAP wave, no such answer could be found.
There is only one solution and this is to tell the truth. The truth is that the Air Force could not determine the origin of the objects witnessed by thousands of people. It is not easy to admit that authorities in charge of air defense and airspace management are not capable of finding an acceptable explanation, but, in my opinion, this is better than issuing false explanations. The Belgian government was honest and acknowledged publicly that it could not explain the many sightings.
Nevertheless, military authorities should not wait to take action until they are forced to do so by the public and the media. They should be concerned about the possible security implications of unusual air activities. If reliable witnesses report the presence of UAP that have not been picked up or identified by the civil aviation authorities and the air defense systems, it should be admitted that there may be a problem and an effort should be made to conduct more in-depth investigations with qualified experts.
What if these crafts had more aggressive intentions? Who would have been responsible if incidents had occurred? The question remains: Which military authority dares to tackle this problem, or rather, which military authority dares to recognize that there is a problem? Is this “ostrich” policy the right approach?
Formally investigating reliable UFO reports would create an atmosphere of openness and transparency, and motivate other witnesses to come forward with their experiences. Such investigations would provide the scientific basis for relevant authorities to express an official opinion vis-a-vis the UFO problem. However, it seems a wake-up call will be required for us to formally acknowledge that there is a problem. A major accident would serve as such a wake-up call, but this is not what we hope for; on the contrary, this is something that we want to prevent. We must all be prepared for the next UFO wave, wherever it may occur.
CHAPTER 3
Pilots: A Unique Window into the Unknown
The Belgian UFOs did not appear to create any kind of safety hazard for aircraft in flight, as far as we know, and General De Brouwer made it clear that the objects displayed no threatening behavior. Yet, as I stated in the second point to be considered in the Introduction, this is not always the case. Some of our most compelling reports on UFO encounters have been provided by Air Force and commercial pilots, and sometimes aviation safety is compromised.
Shortly after publishing my first story about the COMETA Report in the
Much to my amazement, I quickly discovered that a ninety-page report dealing with this very question had just been released by the world’s most qualified researcher of pilot encounters with UFOs. Even better, I recognized that this well-documented scientific study could serve as the “news hook” for another story, in the same way that the COMETA Report had done before. “Aviation Safety in America—A Previously Neglected Factor” by Dr. Richard Haines, a retired senior research scientist from NASA Ames Research Center and former chief of NASA’s Space Human Factors Branch, was a mind-boggling study, with more than fifty pages of case summaries involving pilots and their crews.[15] That “neglected factor,” of course, referred to unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP.[16]
The report featured over one hundred cases of pilot encounters with a variety of these UAP, including fifty- six near misses, all affecting the safety of aircraft. Most cases involved multiple witnesses, and many were backed by ground radio communications and radar corroboration. Experienced pilots presented accounts of objects, ranging from silver discs to green fireballs, flying loops around passenger aircraft, pacing alongside despite pilots’ evasive attempts, or flooding cockpits with blinding light. Dr. Haines documented cases of electromagnetic effects on aircraft navigation and operating systems linked to nearby UFOs, or a pilot’s sudden dive to avoid a collision. He wrote that a crew’s ability to perform its duties safely is disrupted when crew members are faced with “extremely bizarre, unexpected and prolonged luminous and/or solid phenomena cavorting near their aircraft.” The danger posed by the phenomenon in flight lies more with the human response to it than from the actions of the UAP itself, because the objects do not appear to be aggressive or hostile, and seem to be able to avoid collisions by executing last-minute high-speed turns in a flash.
Dr. Haines, who has authored more than seventy papers in leading scientific journals and published over twenty-five U.S. government reports for NASA, specialized in human performance, technology design, and human- computer interaction while at NASA. Having contributed to the U.S. Gemini and Apollo projects, as well as Skylab and Space Station, in 1988 he retired from his twenty-one years as a senior aerospace scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. Subsequently he worked as a senior research scientist for the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, RECOM Technologies, Inc., and Raytheon Corp. at NASA Ames Research Center until 2001.
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.[17] 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 Phenomena[18] (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
