Dr. Richard F. Haines — NARCAP-founder interview (2013)
- Speaker: Dr. Richard F. Haines, retired NASA Ames research scientist (perception/human-factors), Chief Scientist of NARCAP. Interviewed by Todd. ~1h01m.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/s9NkwzdMicg (2013)
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio → Whisper.
- Primary for haines-narcap-perception-scientist. His own framing: NARCAP = National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a nonprofit “primarily an aviation safety organization” collecting/analyzing “high-quality scientific data” on UAP for flight-safety purposes; proactive (vs FAA’s ASRS reporting and NTSB after-the-fact); UAP framed as “black swan events.” Sober, safety-framed, non-sensational.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript (“Haynes”=Haines); verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.
Well, welcome to the Conversation at airsafe.com. I’m your host, Dr. Todd Curtis, and we’re pleased today to have Dr. Richard Haynes, who’s the Chief Scientist for NARCAP. Dr. Haynes, a pleasure to have you here today. Well, thank you, Todd. That’s my pleasure, too. I’m looking forward to this. Well, my first question for you is an acronym question. Can you tell us what NARCAP stands for? Yes. NARCAP is an acronym that stands for the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. NARCAP is a nonprofit organization run by Mr. Ted Rowe. And as Chief Scientist, what has been your role primarily through the years with NARCAP? You’ve been with NARCAP for quite some time, I understand. That’s correct. We’ve been working together as a team, aviation specialist team, for over 10 years now. And my role as Chief Scientist is to direct the program of research and then reporting our findings on a rather wide range of atmospheric effects that we feel might threaten flight safety. And that’s basically what I do from day to day. And our website presents these data in a, we hope, a clear way that would encourage the aviation community to take them seriously and to move forward with their own studies. And before I get ahead of myself, NARCAP exists to allow people to report anomalous phenomena. And it’s primarily not just to report them just to have a database, but to report them, to analyze them, to see what impact it may have on aviation safety. Yes, I think that’s a very clear statement of our goals. We are primarily an aviation safety organization. But secondarily, we believe that we are in a position to collect and analyze and then report rather high-quality scientific data that our colleagues in science and academia and the industry can use to better understand the safety impact and also the remedial measures that need to be taken to make flying safer. Now, NARCAP is a private organization not funded by any government entity in the United States or elsewhere. One question that comes to mind is, isn’t there some agency or some reporting entity that one can use in the U.S. government that covers the same information? Well, that’s a great question. You might argue that there are several, one being the FAA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System called ASRS. And that is a confidential, a voluntary program that is administered by NASA, by the way, to anyone inside aviation or outside to report safety-related issues. But I must say that the focus there is more of the reporting and perhaps analyzing of some of the data, but not the research. I don’t see them doing research like we are intending to do. I think another agency, of course, would be the National Transportation Safety Board that goes in after an accident, as you well realize, and does very thorough analyses of what happened after the fact. NARCAP, our objective is proactive. We don’t want to wait after the fact. We want to try to be proactive and look at data and incidents and reports, subtle, very subtle effects, what are sometimes called black swan events, events that have never happened before, and draw conclusions from those that can lead to improved safety. Now, if I remember my definitions correct, in fact, there is a book called Black Swan, which is about economics, which is getting to sort of the same point. That is, a black swan is a very rare event, which is so rare that the average person would think, well, gee, I’ve heard of white swans. Black swans, they can’t possibly exist. So rare is this event that if one were to actually see it in real life, that person would try to convince themselves it looks like a swan, but it’s black, but it can’t be a swan because there, quote, are no black swans, unquote. That’s sort of a roundabout definition, but am I kind of getting close to what we’re talking about here with respect to the phenomena that NARCAP would like to collect in its database? Well, yes. If you look carefully at the definition of a black swan event, UAP, as we call them, unidentified aerial phenomena, do fall into some of the definition, but they certainly don’t fall into other parts of the definition. Let me give you an example. A black swan event, by definition, is an event which has never happened before or with such low frequency that it’s impossible to do valid statistics on them. In other words, inferential statistics allows us to draw conclusions and inferences, if you will, about events because there’s a background or a universe or population of data already existing against which you can compare the low probability event. That cannot be done with a true black swan event. However, what we’re dealing with is something a little different. UAPs have been reported for hundreds of years, both from the ground and from the air, and do have a rather impressive statistic already built up, a baseline, let’s call it. Does that make sense? That makes sense. A baseline, a sense of rare events where you think, well, geez, these events can’t happen, but in fact you have through NARCAP and other places actually a fairly complete record, not a complete, a fairly extensive record of things that were rare, even considered impossible before they actually were observed. Now, one example I like to give to people when I talk about this subject is the fact of lightning that behaves in a way unusual compared to lightning that we’re familiar with, your standard white bolts of lightning going from the cloud to the ground or going between clouds. We’re talking about upper atmospheric lightning that goes from the tops of thunderstorms into the lower reaches of space. And these events had been observed even back in the 50s and 60s, especially by military pilots and flying high altitude test and research and surveillance aircraft. But it was something that was so unusual that they were fearful of reporting it out of fear that if they reported something that was seemingly impossible, that is strangely colored lightning going into the lower reaches of space, they’d be grounded. But it turns out later on that scientists did verify that these things exist. And since then, they’ve been studied extensively. Is that a fair example of a black swan event? Turns out to have a scientific basis where it can be studied once you know what to look for. Yes, I think so. I think that there are a number of UAP like sprites and jets, blue jets, that are very infrequent and science is not quite caught up with them yet. And it takes a credible witness or a body of reports coming in. In your example, it took an astronaut sighting from space to see it from above, actually, to give it legitimacy. Well, we in NARCAP are still fighting an uphill battle, if you will, against a bias, a negative attitude towards UAP by various people who are simply maintaining that UAP don’t exist because flight crews don’t see them anymore or don’t see them at all or are making them up or they’re illusions or whatever. When in fact, these events are happening quite often and we are receiving some of these very interesting cases. It’s just that the flight crews aren’t reporting them. Now, we’re not talking just about unusual events that are observed. That is, I saw something out in the distance. It was a bright light, etc. But we’re also talking about things where the pilots did some action, performed some action because of the perceived danger they felt to be in because of the presence of this UAP. And by doing that, they might have done something like make an abrupt maneuver at cruise or violate an altitude restriction, etc. Am I correct in characterizing some of these UAP events? Yes, you are, Todd. There are documented events of that kind where passengers have been injured. This is not clear air turbulence that we’re talking about. This is a deliberate control input. Flight crew, cabin attendants, for instance, have been severely injured, taken to hospital after this has happened. This is a serious situation, of course, and it lends some credibility to the reality of the phenomenon outside the airplane. Well, let’s back up for a second. As many people who listen to this podcast know, I’m very big on publicly available safety databases, especially the FAA and NTSB databases. And when you get to a point where there are passengers and flight crew injured or severely injured, that becomes an incident or even an accident that is a reportable event. In some cases, the flight crews and airlines be legally required to report these. Now, when this happens, how do they describe the precipitating event? Or do they tend to talk around it or tend to give it another name or say it’s clear turbulence even when it’s not? I mean, what has been your experience with what people actually do when they report these? That’s a great question, and I can’t answer it directly because I don’t have access to the inside information. What we have access to are from the pilot’s point of view, usually well after the fact, for instance, after they’ve retired. And then we hear about it. And we have to draw the best conclusions we can from that very much later date. So I really can’t answer that. I’m sorry. Here’s a naive question. Why would a pilot want to wait until after he or she retires before talking openly about this sort of thing? Well, NARCAP has prepared an interesting historical review on that very subject, the basis of denial. And our executive director, Ted Rowe, has authored that very interesting paper on our website, which, by the way, is www.narcap.org. And I invite your listeners to look at our website and to come to your own conclusions on what’s there. But Ted has documented quite a number of these cases where pilots have to wait until after they’re retired because they are afraid of ridicule. They’re afraid of job security, losing job security. They’re afraid of the social consequences within the company. I’m speaking now of commercial pilots, of what happens when you start describing something that the society around you doesn’t accept as real. And so that puts a damper on the reporting. And so it’s kind of a negative spiral, a principle of declining feedback, let’s call it. Are you saying that in some cases that pilots might be afraid of reporting it because someone will use the F word in their presence? That is, someone will say, hey, it sounds like you saw a flying saucer or something along those lines. Yes. That’s one of the ways it happens. There are many others, of course. And so we, NARCAP, did a survey among pilots in a major airline of this country quite some years ago now. We got permission from management to give the survey, and we had a very good response rate. That survey report is on our website. And what we discovered, among other things, is that pilots can be very ingenious on giving excuses why something didn’t happen. In other words, to explain why they did not report to the authorities. And this was quite, from a psychological point of view, this is fascinating, the basis of denial, let’s call it. And I won’t go into the details since they’re all already published. We urge people to become more knowledgeable about our work and hopefully to give us some support. By the way, for the audience out there, you can go to their website at NARCAP.org, N-A-R-C-A-P dot O-R-G. And we’ll also have links to important parts of the site at our own site, UAP.airsafe.com. That is, if you go to the URL UAP.airsafe.com, we’ll have a synopsis of this interview, and we’ll also have links to NARCAP. Now, some time ago, a couple of months ago, I believe, I interviewed Leslie Kane, who wrote an excellent book a few years ago. And I’m going to misquote the title, UFOs, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, where she was addressing the UAP issue from a different perspective. That is, rather than going on secondhand information or unofficial information, she went to actual documented cases where people saw what you would call a UAP, other people would call a UFO. But people saw, some of them very highly ranking folks, high-ranking military officers, et cetera, who witnessed things that simply didn’t make sense from their aviation experience. That is, a phenomenon that was performing in ways that was just completely unknown to them before that time. And in spite of being ridiculed in some cases, these folks stuck to their guns and said, look, this is what I saw, this is what I experienced, these are the effects it had on my aircraft. So NARCAP is not the only entity that’s documented this or even written books about it. The plenty of information is out there. Very little of it, in my opinion, is the kind of objective, scientifically oriented, evidence based, documented case sort of evidence that you would see at NARCAP. One can do an easy search on the Internet and find literally millions of pages talking about related issues. But very few of them would do so in a way that would stand up to scientific scrutiny. And NARCAP is clearly one of those. So that’s my commercial for NARCAP right now. But as far as Leslie Kane and her book and other resources like that, other than NARCAP, what are some places, what are some websites that you can recommend where people have an interest in pursuing this further? They can get some relatively decent information. Well, I’m caught a little bit off guard there. I guess I’d need some time to look some up because there are very few. NARCAP is not a UFO organization. I think that’s really important to emphasize. We are maintaining distance from that particular interest group in this country because of its loss of credibility and for other reasons as well. We can’t afford to be lumped together with the UFO group, let’s say, because we are aviation professionals. Almost everybody in our organization has at one time been a pilot or an air traffic controller or a meteorologist, physicist, chemist, or they still are. And so I think that’s an important point to make that our heart and soul is aviation safety oriented. We are not looking after extraterrestrials. We want to leave that door open as a possibility, but we also want to let the data speak for itself. But let me go back to your comment about Leslie Kane’s book for a minute. Leslie is an investigative journalist, and she does some excellent work. She took the initiative here to contact people from around the world and talked a number of us into contributing to that book. I think that book is going to have a long history in terms of a longevity, I should say. I think it’s going to stand the test of time as a classic in what you should write about when you’re talking about UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. And we like that initial UAP because the phenomena is plural. It’s unidentified, of course. It’s aerial, of course. But it can be more than one thing. And as I read the UFO literature these days, I’m more and more seeing a concentration into the ET explanation without very much open-mindedness in terms of what else it might be, the phenomena. NARCAP is trying to explore a much wider range of phenomena, electrostatics for instance, and contain plasma, atmospheric weather effects, electrical effects, not just psychosocial hallucinations within the mind of the pilot or the flight crew, which of course is still a possibility. It’s just a very low probability that that’s the explanation. So I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that we want to keep the door open to all possibilities until we know for sure what the right answer is. And let me add that from my experience in aviation safety and working with industry and looking at rare events, there are rare events that happen all the time that have an impact on safety. Some of them have an explanation that’s fairly simple to get to. Let’s say a component breaks down. Others are due to circumstances, phenomena or physical attributes of the atmosphere that were simply unknown before they happened. And one of the ones I like to point to is Flight 800, which was back in 1996, a TWA 747 that exploded near Long Island. It was thought that the fuel vapor at that temperature and pressure and density wasn’t an explosive combination. That was not true. Upon further review, it turns out that there were conditions that were previously unknown to be explosive that were indeed explosive. And that was one of those things. Here’s something where the industry has decades of experience investigating the very thing. Millions of hours, millions of flights of experience flying airliners. And it wasn’t until this very dramatic event happened that resources were put to bear on the problem. And there was an understanding of it that simply wasn’t there before. And I look at these sorts of phenomena, for example, unusual weather phenomena, which covers a whole range of things, which once looked at might shed some light on what has happened in the past. And we just give you a scenario. We all know about meteors. Meteors happen. Well, what if you were flying an aircraft over the ocean late at night? You’re a pilot looking out the windscreen and suddenly you see a very bright ball of light coming right at you. And maybe if you think about it for five or six seconds, you think, oh, that’s a very bright meteor. I’ve never seen one of those before in my life. But in the first one or two seconds, that pilot might react as though it were an oncoming aircraft. Now, point of fact, it’s not an oncoming aircraft. But in the first moments, seeing something that is unusual, perhaps never in their lifetime seen before phenomena, they may react in ways that are perfectly acceptable had it been an oncoming aircraft, but not acceptable if it were a meteor that was actually dozens of miles away. Now, is that an unidentified aerial phenomena? For the first two critical seconds, perhaps. Upon further review, perhaps not. And I use that as an example because, again, this is a what if sort of scenario. What if meteors do cause pilots in general to make these abrupt maneuvers? How would you mathematically or scientifically or in an engineering sense investigate this? One scenario is, well, gee, you have a body of evidence that shows this event has happened so many times in various parts of the world. And you say to yourself, well, gee, one hypothesis is it was a meteor entering the atmosphere. Are there other resources out there outside of the aviation community that tracks very bright meteors and tracks them on a regular basis? If it turns out there is, they have a very good database. You take one database, which has the events, the times, the places, directions. The other database that shows a meteor is entering the atmosphere. And you might very easily say, hey, there’s a correlation. Nine out of 10 of these had a meteor entering the atmosphere in a way that would have been perfectly visible for this windscreen, for that pilot looking through that windscreen. That’s a scenario, but this is where I’m coming from with respect to why pilots should contribute to something like NARCAT. You see an unusual event. You may not be able to make any sense of it at the time, but putting this information in the hands of an organization is dedicated to trying to get to the bottom of these things. Might, in fact, allow the community as a whole to get to the bottom of something like that. And perhaps eliminate one risk that could potentially cause an aviation accident. Now, speaking about aviation accidents in general, as anyone in the business knows, the rate of accidents has been dropping steadily over the last few decades. But there’s still the occasional rare, unusual event that causes an accident. And each one of these rare and unusual events have to be addressed in its own way. Unusual aerial events, unusual aerial phenomena, that either cause an effect on an aircraft or cause a crew to take actions that are unusual, potentially dangerous, et cetera, is one of those rare events. I don’t think anyone can argue that these things don’t happen, nor can anyone argue that pilots don’t respond when these things happen. Therefore, it’s only logical that the community, whether it’s government, whether it’s private industry, whether it’s private organizations, should get together and figure this out. Again, sorry, Dr. Haynes, that was a bit more long-winded than I wanted it to be, but I was trying to get a general point across. And I’d like you to comment or critique what I just said about the need for getting this information in a place where it can be analyzed. Well, I find myself in full agreement. I think you’ve done an excellent job of outlining some of the issues that we face and the approach that should be taken, which is an honest and open disclosure right away before time goes by by aircrew. Let me just comment on a couple points you made. It raises the issue of data that we have been collecting for a long time, and I’ve been in this business for about 40 years now, speaking with pilots from around the world. I have over 3,000 reports from pretty far back. Now, I haven’t interviewed all of them. Some of those are historic and written down in history books and so forth. But I’ve done quite a bit of statistics on this large database, and I can tell you a couple interesting things. First of all, these are not single-witness events. The average number of pilots in the cockpit crew is over two and a half witnesses per event. The next thing I can point out is that how long does a typical event last? In other words, a phenomenon beside the airplane or approaching and staying with the airplane and then departing? It’s well over two minutes, which to me, at least, would eliminate meteorites and a rather wide range of prosaic explanations. A third point I’d like to make is that, by definition, an unidentified aerial phenomenon is only that after it has been studied critically by trained and educated people who are qualified to study the evidence of all available evidence and using common sense as the final criteria, if you will. It is not simply the application of slapping on a name for something, like a UFO, just because you think it is. It’s a very deliberate, long process of looking at an awful lot of evidence, and if you had time, I could tell you some stories that will illustrate that whole approach. Fortunately, at airsafe.com, since we have total control over how much time we can take, we’d like to give you the opportunity to give us one story, one scenario, one situation that illustrates what you just talked about. Okay. I would be delighted. We received fairly recently a report from a newly retired commercial pilot who took off from LAX, Los Angeles International, on September 27, 1996, on a cargo flight. There were only two guys on board this DC-10. As far as I know, there were only two. They were bound for a destination on the East Coast. The reporting witness wants to remain anonymous, so I cannot tell you the airline or any other flight details, but I will tell you what happened to him and his captain sitting in the left seat. He was first officer at the time. He told me that they had taken off after midnight and had climbed to about 1,500 feet per minute climb rate, about 250 knots airspeed. Flaps were zero, gear was up and stowed, and everything was normal. It was a cavu night with the full moon off to the right-hand side over the ocean. There was a noise abatement in place there, and so they had to take off to the west out over the ocean. They were on VFR night flight rules. They could see the ocean’s horizon. I’m sorry, they couldn’t see it clearly because it was just such a dark background sky. It was so clear, but visibility was excellent otherwise. He said they were in a left-hand turn. The captain was still flying manually. They were still in contact with SoCal, ATC, and the reporting witness told me that he was head down doing something with the inertial navigation system. He didn’t elaborate on that, but the captain was head up and looking forward, and suddenly the captain called out to him, Who is that? The reporting witness in the right seat looked up, and ahead of his aircraft and slightly off to the right but at their altitude were two very bright white round lights, which at first he interpreted to be the landing lights of an approaching airplane. They both were very concerned because at the closure rate, as you might imagine, you’ve got seconds at the most. So he was bracing himself for a possible impact. He looked at these lights for three to four to five seconds, I believe it was, and they didn’t come any closer. They didn’t get bigger. They didn’t separate apart from each other. They didn’t do anything that would indicate they were approaching them. He then begins to mull over in his mind, what in the world could that be? go through a logical explanation in his own mind what these lights might be related to. And he says, well, perhaps we’re seeing lights at the rear of an airplane that’s going in our same direction at our speed, since the two lights were not separating left and right from each other. They weren’t getting closer or farther apart. He told me that after another short period of time, whatever the object was or the phenomenon was, it started to move to his left, horizontally, and started to accelerate. And then it banked up into the sky and disappeared into the night star background in a matter of seconds, like five seconds, and it was a star, which both men could still see. Well, one of the flight crew called SoCal and said, do you have any traffic up here? And the answer was, no, you’re the only aircraft, why? And he didn’t answer. So that’s where it ended. The two men didn’t talk about it. It was just a non-event, if you will. It was so unreal that nothing matched their prior experience. And they’re left with this dilemma, what do you do in a case like that? Well, I’m glad that he had heard about NARCAP, and so he wrote to us and he told us the details. That’s kind of a typical case. I had this reporting witness work with an artist, a professional artist, near where he lives, to recreate the appearance, as if he’d had a camera there and taken a picture, which he didn’t. But the artist came up with some very excellent recreations of what was seen, which not only the report in time so that memory doesn’t distort it anymore, but also provide us some potential information for further scientific analysis. One of the details that came out in the artist’s drawing was that these two lights seemed to be connected by a structure of some kind that was kind of metallic, almost like a barbell. I have a lot of stories like that. In some cases, we have radar-related evidence. In some cases, we have infrared FLIR recordings. We have verbal transcripts from ATC, ground to air. So the evidence is rather far-ranging. Of course, we have backup meteorological data on some cases, in most cases, actually. We are hoping that we, NARCAP, can be accepted by the aviation community, particularly the FAA, so that we would be the logical reporting center for the country, for air traffic controllers and pilots to use when they want to report confidentially. Now, let me back up a little bit to the story you told about the jet coming out of LAX. Some people in the audience might think, well, hey, Southern California has lots of flight tests going on coming out of Edwards and even further afield out of Nellis Air Force Base. What if it were some sort of military test aircraft? My response to that is about, well, several levels of response. I was a flight test engineer in the Air Force back in the 80s at Edwards, and I had some experience with working around these kinds of tests, and you would not see any flight test person, any flight test commander authorizing anything that would put a civilian aircraft at risk like that, deliberately flying in front of a civilian aircraft, trying to surprise them, that sort of thing. That’s just completely off the wall. And second, air traffic controllers who would have been at the SoCal facility are typically made aware of flight tests that are going on so they could, well, one, you keep a civilian traffic away, and two, if they see something on their radar scopes, and they won’t think it’s something unusual, they’ll have a heads up ahead of time. And third, this was so late at night, typically, flight test activity doesn’t take place that late at night except, of course, for specialized aircraft like the stealth bomber and stealth fighter. But even if it did, it wouldn’t be happening in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. So I just wanted to put that in there to, not to explain what it wasn’t, but just to say that there’s a context under which unusual flight activity happens with flight tests in the Southern California area, and it’s well-established procedures that are in place to keep things like this from happening. So the likelihood that this unusual set of lights was from a test aircraft, in my personal opinion, I’d say is extremely low. Yeah, well, we tend to agree. That case illustrates another statistic that I can share from a whole lot of pilot reports from around the world, and that is the direction that the phenomenon tends to use when it departs. And that direction is either vertical or at a very high angle, not horizontal. Sometimes they go away horizontally. In a few cases, they will descend, but the great, great majority is up, if you will. You might argue that that is a fairly effective escape maneuver for whatever reason, perhaps anticipating pursuit by a scrambled military plane, but it’s just a statistic that falls out, if you will, hardly when you’re even looking for it, when you look carefully at these pilot reports from around the world. This is not an American phenomenon by any means, and almost every, I should say, country in the world has reported, reliably reported, these kinds of events. Let me back up a little bit again and ask another question. I mentioned earlier how one database might have the events that happened, yet somewhere else, someone else may have a database that may have information on a phenomenon that may partially explain what was observed. The military and the civilian world have different ways of tracking aircraft. In the civilian world, the FAA uses radar, but they’re using it primarily not as a primary signal, that is, radar energy bouncing off the aircraft surface, but actually, they’re relying on transponders to ping out a signal to locate aircraft. Military, on the other hand, has far different capabilities. They can actually spot the aircraft itself, even if it has no transponder, and there are even parts of the military and the government that have the ability to spot, let’s say, a heat signature like a rocket plume going up into the atmosphere or coming down. Has NARCAP ever been able to use, in any way, radar data or other data from the military and the government that could add and supplement what you’ve seen from civilian sources when it comes to analyzing events? Uh-huh. Okay. I think I understand your question. The answer is yes and no. It depends on the nature of the event and the location and when and so forth, whether or not there might be classified aspects to the event. NARCAP is not timid about requesting Freedom of Information Act information using that legal means. I must say that since 9-11, that supply pipe had begun to close down. Not significantly, but we’re getting delays. We’re getting less than acceptable responses, unfortunately, and I don’t know why, but yes, we do try to track down all available radar data through FOIA, and the FAA, in many cases, has been very forthcoming. We’re very pleased about that. An event happened at O’Hare Airport years ago now where we had to do that, and they sent me and some others, of course, radar data, primary and secondary radar, from a number of sites surrounding O’Hare, and this happened on November 7, 2006. NARCAP prepared a technical report number 10 on that event in 2007, not quite a year later, which is, I think, the most comprehensive review of everything that’s known about that event. This is controlled airspace, Class C airspace, I think it was at the time, and an unknown object was seen by multiple witnesses on the ground, some of whom were airline employees and others were citizens in the parking lot and so forth. I guess my point is, I don’t want to go into the details, but for quite a significant period of time, a metallic object, what appeared to be metallic, let’s say, hovered over the United Airlines concourse, and it was not seen from the tower, by the way, and that’s what they told us, that they couldn’t see anything. Well, I did some measurements and determined that they couldn’t have seen it because of its location. Its height was such that it was above the roof cut-off line, let’s say. But nonetheless, when it did leave, it left vertically, and it punched a hole, a round circular funnel hole, right up through that cloud above it, which maintained its open hole shape for quite some minutes. Well, physicists in our group did some energy calculations and found some interesting events there, or effects. The bottom line in that case was that after the FAA and the TSA looked at the reports of the air traffic controllers, they came to the summary conclusion that nothing had happened, and in fact, it must have been something like a reflection of ramp lights up onto the bottom of the clouds. Well, you can look at the records and you find that the ramp lights hadn’t been turned on at that point. This was a convenient excuse given by the FAA to the media. Anyway, it’s an interesting case. It involved radar. We did not find any radar returns, and that is also very typical, that whatever the phenomenon is, it either has deliberate stealth characteristics, or it simply doesn’t reflect microwave, the frequencies that are used in radar. Okay? Now, let me switch gears slightly for a minute, because that event you talked about, the O’Hare event, fairly well known, and one can look up more than enough information on the Internet to satisfy your curiosity, but what do you do when you have some organization totally unconnected to NARCAT, totally unconnected to objective scientific rational thought, pulls out your data and says, well, gee, NARCAT says this, and that proves that, you know, fill in the blank. Well, from the First Amendment standpoint, you really can’t stop people from making wild and unsupported claims based on NARCAT information, but frankly, you have extensive, very well thought out, very well analyzed reports freely available to the public, and how often do people do what you think are unreasonable and unconscionable things with it? Well, Todd, I’m a firm believer and supporter of the right of free speech, and so these folks who do things like that, for whatever reason, have a legal right to do it. I’m not sure they have a moral right to do it, but having said that, I also believe that truth will win out, that if we stay the course, as a previous president used to like to say, and we keep our nose clean, and we do good quality work, that ultimately our work will stand and be recognized with some integrity and usefulness that others will respect us and we’ll be able to gain valuable insights about the phenomenon. So I guess I don’t get very upset over those kind of responses by people. Well, let me ask you something else in regard to the information that comes into NARCAT. If you visit the website, you can see that there is a downloadable form that one can fill out and send confidential information to NARCAT, and of course, there are other places like the ASRS database where anyone, especially crew members, can confidentially input information. But as you stated before, sometimes folks just don’t want to run the risk of being exposed, and they wouldn’t necessarily send in a formal written form, but they might call you up and tell you stories. I’m not saying that to tell stories that reveals anyone’s private, reveals anything that will expose someone’s privacy, but how often do you get stuff where people come to you, people who are looking you in the eye because you’re sitting across the table from them, totally believable, totally credentialed individuals, and they just tell you things that are just so bizarre that it just makes you, it takes your breath away? Well, I think it’s a combination of them coming to you and you going to them. Of course, you have to know who they are to go to them, but I will say that when I was still working at Ames Research Center… Let me interrupt you for a moment. I just want to tell the audience, you were a NASA scientist for quite some time. Yes, over 30 years. And your area of expertise within NASA was what exactly? Well, I worked in a number of areas in life sciences at Ames Research Center. I worked in vision and lighting for the space program, Gemini and Apollo, and later on Space Station, but I also worked in the aeronautics area in flight simulation. I was managing the joint FAA NASA Head-Up Display program, which led eventually to the certification of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-80 HUD, Head-Up Display. So I’m familiar with the jargon and got a chance to meet a lot of the pilots who would come to Ames for a period of time, like a couple hours at a time to fly our flight simulators for research purposes. We would do low visibility approaches with and without HUD and so forth and so on, or looking at turbulence or, you know, wind shear coping and so forth, power management. And so to go back to your question, sometimes they come to us because they just feel they’ve got to report something, and fortunately they’ve come across NARCAP. But in other cases, we have to go to them. And so when I was working years and years ago, I would just casually ask some of these pilots that I was working with in a simulator, oh, by the way, have you ever seen anything in your flight career that you’ve never seen before that you couldn’t explain? And every once in a while, the guy would look at me with a funny look on his face and say, well, it’s funny you should ask, and I haven’t told this story very much, but, but, and then he would go into his account. And that very slowly but gradually turned me from a skeptic about this whole subject into at least a curious, I’m not saying a believer, but a curiosity that I’ve had ever since. Because what these pilots were sharing with me, I couldn’t explain. And I had done quite a bit of space vision simulation, the way things look to the astronauts in outer space in a vision lab I had at NASA Ames. And so I thought that I could explain this strange set of phenomenon as as perceptual, as relying within the eye of the observer or the brain of the observer. But as these pilots were telling me these stories, I finally had to realize that I was wrong, that I, I was a skeptic for the wrong reason. And so I was confronted with real hard evidence now. And that was a turning point. And that’s just a bit of fascinating endeavor ever since. So the, the hard evidence that, of the eyewitness testimony, let me throw something out at you. What would you say, there’s been some argument in some circles that the kinds of information that’s currently in the black boxes of commercial airliners, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder could be supplemented with visual data. That is a camera that shows the cockpit, shows the cockpit instrumentation, or even one that’s pointed outside forward of the aircraft to take in whatever happens to be out there. Would you say that any sort of visual evidence being added to the current black box information, would that be helpful, not just from a UAP perspective, but overall for enhancing safety? Oh, absolutely. Yes, we would advocate that. I think that airlines could even advocate it from an insurance point of view. As you said yourself, the accident, the curves, if you will, and you know, millions of miles flown and so forth over the years is continuing to come down on the average with, you know, with a sense of complacency. And I think that you’d have to have some pretty firm justification to pay for the installation of cameras. But nonetheless, I certainly would advocate that at least a camera or two on the exterior surface, perhaps one facing forward and one facing back, and at least a camera in the cockpit. It would contribute, I think, greatly to the understanding of the crew dynamics during a critical event that the black box may or may not disclose. I know the audio channel contains an awful lot of valuable information, but I think the video channel would too. Now, although those installations aren’t there yet, what we do have, which we didn’t have 10 years ago, is a situation where the average airliner may have dozens of people with full motion video cameras at the ready all the time. Have you seen this result in any passenger-reported events backed up by video or audio of unusual events? No. That’s a good question. We keep coming across YouTubes all the time on the internet, taken by passengers looking out the side windows of the cabin. But so far, at least, we have not found any reported pilot events, reported by the pilots, I should say, that would correlate in time and place with those YouTubes. Now, that raises the question, why not? Well, two possible reasons. One is that the passenger may be photographing something that’s so prosaic, so understood by the flight crew, that they didn’t want to report it. But the other possibility is that the passengers were taking a photograph or a video of something very unusual, and it was so unusual that the flight crew didn’t want to report it. So either way, there’s a disconnect there. Now, when it comes to YouTube videos, I disbelieve just about all of them. But in your opinion, have there been any that you’ve come across, not because of the video itself, but because of the circumstances of the video being there? For example, the classic case I’ve seen is an unusual event posted by someone. It’s the only video they’ve ever posted. There’s only a handful of views, and the person wasn’t trying to promote this as, hey, I just got a secret thing here. And the video evidence was compelling. Have you ever seen anything that meets all those kinds of criteria? That’s a good question, too. There are so many thousands of them out there now. They seem to be multiplying. I’m keeping so busy with current cases that I just don’t have time to track that level of evidence down. Our emphasis is with flight crews and not with passengers. We really discourage passengers from contacting us for various reasons. We would rather work with professional aircrew. But if the passenger were a professional aircrew member who happened to be a passenger, that would be something you’d be interested in because of their experience with looking at things outside? Absolutely, yes. Every time I fly somewhere commercially over many decades now, I’ve tried to make it a habit to go and talk with the cabin crew and to give them my card and ask them to give the guys up front my card. I ask them the question, well, in your flying career, have you ever heard about or yourself seen anything out the windows that was really unusual or interesting? I can say that after a lot of flying, I’m receiving approximately 20%. Yes. 80% no. Now, the cabin crew in the back are very busy and they don’t have time to look out the window, I understand. The percentage of aircrew up front flying the airplane has been a little higher than that. It’s been maybe 22%, 24% approximately, which I find very interesting. Of course, they’re supposed to be eyes out and watching what’s going on outside. They’re not tending passengers and so forth. Let me see if I have these numbers right. You’re saying that roughly one out of five of both the cabin crew and flight crews you’ve talked to have seen something unusual outside the aircraft. Just in general. Don’t hold me to the exact number. That’s just a ballpark estimate. Yeah, that’s what we would call an informal survey. It’s completely ad lib, it’s uncontrolled, it would not meet any of the requirements of a survey, a formal survey. It’s an ad lib survey. I find it interesting because it raises the question, why not? Why do these 20% of pilots, let’s say, make their report and 80% not? Is the 80% because they didn’t see anything or because they did see something but wouldn’t talk about it? Well, I’m not arguing that 100% of the pilots are seeing something. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that of the pilots that finally did agree to talk with me, usually after the flight was over and we’re in the terminal somewhere, and they found out that I was somewhat credible and not a news reporter, for instance, then they would open up and make this admission to me. And the next question is, well, what are you going to do with the information, you see? I’m glad you mentioned the fact that they open up to you if you’re not a news reporter. Let me ask you a media question. Is there anyone in the media or any media outlet that has treated the subject with anything approaching seriousness and objectivity? Yes, I think there is. I think the Huffington News has been fairly straightforward with the cadre of reporters that they have available. The mainstream media don’t touch this with a 10-foot pole, as you well know. Outside of the U.S., would you say that mainstream media in other countries has a much different attitude toward this? Yes, I would. Particularly in South America, Central America, they are very open-minded about this, and many governments down there have opened up official files, declassified files. Well, I don’t want to say too much that would burn bridges behind me and make some enemies. I don’t need to here. In general, it’s my personal opinion that it is not good for an airline’s reputation to be known as the airline that you fly to see a UFO. It’s much better to downgrade or downplay this subject, ignore it if you can, deny it if you can, just for the bottom line, just for economic reasons. I’m not arguing that airlines are closed-minded or against science. They’re probably as science-oriented as anybody is. They almost have to be. But on the other hand, they also have to make a profit. So it’s easier to deny this phenomenon and to discourage your flight crews from reporting them in various ways, by the way, than it is to openly come forward and admit that we don’t know everything. Now, there are countries around the world that are more and more openly admitting that they don’t know. And France is a beautiful example of that. And I could name some other countries. But France has had a very open-minded policy about this for a long, long time and has put together a government-sponsored investigation committee or commission to actively integrate the information from the gendarmerie, their police system, of course, the air traffic control, the military, meteorologists, the whole segment of aviation world that will contribute the latest high-quality data to get to the bottom of this. And France has established a model that we ought to be looking at very closely. Well, at the risk of upsetting some of the more conservative elements out there, I’d like to end by saying, yes, France is doing a good thing. We should follow their example. And no one should snicker at that because, like I was saying before, the objective here is to enhance safety. These are events that have happened and are happening that could affect safety. And ignoring them may lead to avoidable accidents. So in spite of the airlines’ need to protect their reputation, I understand that, pilots, cabin crews, and others have an out. They have an opportunity. They have an option to get this information out there. Put it in the hands of people like yourself and the other folks in NARCAP who can make sense of this and progress aviation forward. So on that note, I’d like to end our conversation here with Dr. Richard Haynes, a very fascinating one, and I look forward to getting feedback from the audience. And again, if you go to uap.airsafe.com, we’ll have plenty of links to resources, both at NARCAP and elsewhere, that can inform you on the subject and give you ideas of how you can report this. Anything you’d like to add at the end, Dr. Haynes? Well, Dr. Curtis, I want to just thank you for the opportunity to share with your listeners some of our work and to kind of emphasize what you just said, that we stand ready to work a confidential basis with anyone who has a valid concern in the aviation world. And we just look for a long period of cooperation with airsafe.com. And thank you so much. Well, you’re most welcome, and you will have that cooperation.