UFOs

written reports on their sightings. Ironically, both told me they had never read the FAA manual and were unaware that the official tome dictated that this is what they should do! Both had heard of NUFORC independently and didn’t know where else to go with their information, which they felt, as a matter of duty, needed to be on the record. It was these reports that were eventually provided to the Chicago Tribune, prompting transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch to investigate further and eventually to break the O’Hare story on the front page.

It is my understanding that most FAA employees probably do not read the manual—certainly not cover-to- cover—but when sightings occur they seem aware of their employers’ attitudes regardless. The message is conveyed to them, often subtly and indirectly as a kind of veiled professional threat, that they are not to talk to the press about these incidents. The FAA’s negligence may border on the dangerous, or the problem may be that other government agencies need to take more responsibility for UFO incidents that the FAA claims are outside its jurisdiction. No matter which branch of government does so, the threat, if there is one, posed by unidentifiable objects in proximity to commercial aircraft needs to be properly assessed by a new unit established to investigate UFOs.

Nick Pope, former MoD official and UFO expert in the UK, says that governments define “threat” in a very specific way, especially within military intelligence circles. The formula goes like this: Threat = capability + intent. For example: the United States is aware that the UK has nuclear weapons (threat) and therefore could launch a nuclear attack on America (capability), but since the UK has no intent to launch such an attack, the United States faces no threat in this regard. Pope points out that we certainly know that UFOs have the capability of being a threat, given their fantastic speed and maneuverability, far superior to our own technology. But, in this case, the intent of UFOs is completely unknown, and therefore immeasurable. Because of that fact, UFOs must be taken seriously as possible threats, and the UK’s Ministry of Defence monitors them for that reason.[158]

Pope suspects that United States military intelligence circles also define “threat” in this way. The fact that the FAA instructs its employees not to report this particular potential threat lies in contradiction to this basic formula. Maybe it’s time to change the FAA manual and provide employees with the proper reporting forms.

U.S. government reticence about addressing the problem of UFOs seems to have infected all departments that could potentially house a new agency for investigations. Yet we can overcome these obstacles through a rational, commonsense approach. Some authorities have suggested specific ways forward, based on their direct experience.

In the late 1980s, John J. Callahan was head of the FAA’s Accidents, Evaluations, and Investigations Division, an extremely high-level position just one rank below federal positions appointed by Congress. When working with military agencies, Callahan’s rank (GM15) was equal to that of general.

One day in early 1987, he was unexpectedly faced with the problem of managing a UFO case—a dramatic, thirty-minute sighting by three Japan Air Lines pilots of a giant UFO over Alaska. Previously, Callahan had never given the slightest thought to the subject of UFOs. When he first heard about the JAL case, he requested the extensive data be sent to him immediately and he brought it to the attention of FAA administrator Admiral Donald D. Engen. Admiral Engen set up a briefing, which, according to Callahan, included members of President Reagan’s scientific staff, as they were described to him at the time. It also included three CIA agents.

Callahan did not say anything publicly about his role in the incident until 2001, thirteen years after his retirement. While talking to some close associates in his community who had probed him for information, he decided that it was time to speak out. The data from this case had been shipped to his home office when he retired, and had languished in his barn for all those years. A few charts were even nibbled on by mice, he discovered later. Fiery and blunt with a somewhat folksy style and a biting sense of humor, John Callahan makes no bones about the fact that he is not happy with the way the FAA conducts itself regarding UFOs. Nor is he in favor of withholding information about the subject from the public, and he’s armed with the evidence, the experience, and the authority to make a very strong case.

So far, no one else has come forward who attended the debriefing at the FAA’s Washington headquarters described by Callahan. I made a FOIA request to the FAA for Admiral Engen’s log of appointments and schedule during this time, but was told no such records exist (Engen has since died). I called Callahan’s boss at the time, Harvey Safeer, now retired in Florida. Safeer remembered the Alaska incident, but had no recollection of any such meeting taking place.

John Callahan’s wife, J. Dori Callahan, was a major player at the FAA in her own right at the time of the incident. Initially an air traffic controller, Ms. Callahan was branch manager for Flight Service Data Systems (FSDS) of the Airways Facilities organization, the part of the FAA which provides the hardware support for all its air traffic control systems. She later became division manager for the Automated Radar Terminal Systems (ARTS) software programs, and retired from the FAA in 1995, after twenty-eight years there.

Dori Callahan remembers well that this high-level debriefing was called a short time after her husband presented his data to the admiral, and also that he told her what happened there immediately afterward. In addition, as an FAA expert, she later analyzed the radar printouts on the Alaska case, which Callahan had provided for the CIA at the meeting, along with the explanatory drawings prepared by the engineering and software staffs from the Tech Center. “And since I had worked in both hardware and software organizations at one time, I understood all of it,” she explained in a 2009 e-mail.

John Callahan points out that, when looking at the unusual radar data during the briefing, the hardware department said it was obviously a software problem, and the software department said it was clearly a hardware problem. “Both teams were fully experienced and knew the air traffic software system, and both were fully capable of knowing when the system was not working correctly,” Ms. Callahan stated in her e-mail. “In other words, there was nothing wrong with the hardware at the time of the JAL 1628 sighting, and the software was working as well. Looking at the radar display of the object darting in and around JAL 1628, it was obvious that there was an object changing positions around the jet. If it had been ghosting [a false target] as suggested by the FAA, all traffic in that control area would have had ghosting, and it would not have moved in front of and behind the aircraft.”

In contrast to the O’Hare incident, the FAA did conduct an official investigation two months after the Alaska event—mainly because there was radar evidence, and because “public interest” forced the issue. The FAA wanted “to ensure that somebody didn’t violate airspace we control,” a spokesman explained at the time.[159]

But maybe there were other reasons the agency looked into this. Despite the FAA’s proclaimed disinterest in UFOs, Richard O. Gordon, an official from the FAA’s Flight Standards Office, informed the JAL captain of a surprising scenario during a lengthy 1987 interview. He said that the captain’s detailed account was “very, very interesting and we need to see if we can figure out what is there.” As revealed in a verbatim transcript,[160] Gordon then described plans to take the information provided by the captain and send it to Washington so authorities there could find out if it matched any previous reports. “We have a lot of stuff where pilots have had other sightings,” he declared. He told the captain that maybe his description and drawings will be the same as what happened “in Arizona and New York or wherever,” and that “we got a place in Washington, D.C., we’ll put them all together” to find out if any two cases are alike. This is a very interesting admission: the FAA keeps records of UFO sightings by pilots; they’re stored in a specific location in Washington, D.C.; FAA officials make case comparisons when new incidents occur. If it’s true, it certainly flies in the face of the agency’s public stance on UFOs.

Despite the reaction of individual FAA officials directly involved with the Alaska case, the stated FAA conclusion was that the radar readings were false targets, malfunctions in the system. Even though it had radar to support the witness accounts, the FAA dismissed this data as erroneous, and declared that it “was unable to confirm the event.”[161] It praised the three “normal, rational, professional pilots,” yet the final report completely ignored the visual sightings reported in detail during the FAA’s interviews with these witnesses.[162]

John Callahan vigorously disputes these claims about the radar. He makes the important point that radar is not configured to detect objects that behave the way UFOs do, and that we need to revamp and upgrade its technology. This former head of the Accidents and Investigations Division was not at all surprised by the FAA’s response to the O’Hare incident a few years ago. “It was predictable,” he told me. “When pilots report seeing such an object, the FAA will offer a host of other explanations. It’s like wearing a blindfold. It’s always something else so it can’t be what it is.”