'Project Sphere Recommended Pilot-Awareness Training'

An ounce of prevention?

Huzzahs to New York magazine for this week’s attempt to play the UFO thing straight, plus Eric Benson’s followup interview with retired Sen. Harry Reid. Reid raised a number of familiar but worth-repeating issues, including the social stigma that keeps pilots from filing reports. And he added this well-deserved smackdown of the mainstream media: “Let me give you something that the press has totally failed and conjured. We have hundreds and hundreds of papers, pages of paper, that have been available since this was completed,” Reid said, ostensibly referring to the work produced by the Pentagon’s once-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. “Most all of it, 80 percent at least, is public. You know something? The press has never even looked at it. Not once. That’s where we are. I wanted it public, it was made public, and you guys have not even looked at it.”

By Billy Cox De Void 3-22-18

De Void has yet to see that documentation posted anywhere, but never mind. Reid’s larger points are spot on, and the AATIP data is hardly the only material the MSM has ignored over the years. What comes first and foremost to De Void’s mind is a report titled Spherical UAP and Aviation Safety: A Critical Review. It has languished online since 2010, perhaps because its language is forbiddingly technical. Project Sphere, as it’s known, is the work of a now-dormant nonprofit called the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. Among other things, NARCAP was able to bring good science to bear on strong cases because it promised anonymity to pilots fearing professional blowback. Its work is especially relevant now, given the jet fighter video released by erstwhile Defense Department official Chris Mellon via The Washington Post on 3/9/2018.

The whateveritwas that went zipping across the video viewfinder of the Navy F-18 looks like it could qualify, at least superficially, for inclusion into NARCAP’s Project Sphere. Relatively small, white or luminous, oval or ball-shaped unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) often displaying what looks like impossible aerodynamic characteristics, these elusive and transient spheres have been raising flight-safety concerns for decades.

As NARCAP executive director Ted Roe reported eight years ago, “The majority of spherical UAP reports involve initial detection by aircrews. It is uncommon for ATC (air traffic control) to detect spherical UAP and vector aircraft around them though, in some instances, spherical UAP are detected on radar after aircraft request confirmation.”

Among other things, Project Sphere recommended pilot-awareness training, as in-flight over-corrections when confronted with the abrupt and unexpected appearance of these UAP could end with catastrophic results. “If a jumbo jet should crash because of impact (or other negative interaction) with a UAP, the total financial burden will be enormous (along with the negative publicity and political fallout that will occur) and our present warnings (then as hindsight) suddenly will come clearly into focus,” the NARCAP summary stated. “The total financial burden of such a disaster is likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the cost of doing the research now.”

We got a glimpse of that potentiality two weeks ago. Tyler Rogoway, the War Zone reporter who, using recorded ATC chatter, reconstructed a November UFO/UAP event over California-Oregon that resulted in a jet-fighter scramble, came up with another gem that sounded like a case study ripped from Roe’s script.

Last month, a Learjet pilot flying over Arizona asked Albuquerque ATC if it was tracking a mystery without a transponder that had just flown overhead. ATC said there was nothing on the screen, but it alerted a nearby American Airlines Airbus to keep an eye open. Moments later, the Airbus pilot responded: “Yeah, something just passed over us, like a – I don’t know what it was, but it was at least two-three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over top of us.” Rogoway has posted the conversation online and it’s definitely worth a read.

Bottom line, Mellon’s cautionary remarks in his WaPo op-ed need serious scrutiny. By citing potential technological gaps between the U.S. and its adversaries, including a nod to Vladimir Putin’s “recent chest-thumping claims about propulsion breakthroughs,” Mellon makes his best and perhaps only realistic play for getting congressional attention. No doubt his proposal to apply focused analysis on “infrared satellite data, NORAD radar databases, and signals and human intelligence reporting” will make a lot of federal acronyms nervous. But what happens if and when a plane goes down in an accident that might’ve been prevented with a little pilot training? Especially given how well-reasoned advocacy for such situational awareness has been sitting in the public arena for years. Who wants to go for a swim in that hell-broth of litigation?

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See Also:

Two Pilots Report UFO in Arizona Skies | FAA Recording

OREGON UFO EVENT: Air Traffic Control Audio Tapes Released via FOIA Request

Secret Pentagon UFO Study – Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon | VIDEO

The Military Keeps Encountering UFOs – Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care? | VIDEO

What the Government Knows About UFOs | Interview with Harry Reid

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