Aviation Safety and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

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By www.avweb.com
7-2-14

     The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena or NARCAP.org was founded in 2000 to address a perceived need to document and analyze incidents involving unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and aviation safety. The literature addressing pilot reports of observations and incidents involving UAP contains many examples of aviation safety factors like loss of separation, near mid-air collisions, crew factors, equipment failures and other problems. NARCAP case files contain over 3400 examples of aviation related observations and incidents involving UAP.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP are not simply something that a pilot could not identify. It means that AFTER examination by those qualified to make a determination and in the presence of enough data to make a determination, it remains unidentified.

The definition of UAP:

"An unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) is the visual stimulus that provokes a sighting report of an object or light seen in the sky, the appearance and/or flight dynamics of which do not suggest a logical, conventional flying object and which remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making both a full technical identification as well as a common-sense identification, if one is possible. " (Haines, Pp. 13-22, 1980)

The term "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" or UAP is an attempt to address the fact that not all UAP are described as unidentified flying objects or UFO. Many are simply described as unusual lights. NARCAP feels the term "UAP" more accurately reflects the broad scope of descriptions in aviation reports as well as the possibility that these phenomena may arise from several different sources.

The answers to the questions regarding the existence, source and nature of the subcategory of UAP referred to as UFO will be found in the data. Given that pilots do report aerial phenomena that they describe as structured objects, NARCAP feels it is appropriate to give attention to the witness' description of what was seen or detected and engage it objectively.

NARCAP.org was founded specifically to collect and document these incidents and offer its findings in a public and transparent manner. NARCAP.org is staffed by current and former aviation professionals, pilots, aviation and aeronautical experts, aviation human factors experts, perceptual psychologists and others who bring a wide variety of skills and abilities to our investigative programs.

NARCAP.org invites any pilot or aviation professional that has experienced an incident or observations involving an unidentified aerial phenomena, unidentified traffic, etc., to contact NARCAP investigators and share their experiences.

Confidentiality: Unless directly instructed otherwise, all cases and investigations are de-identified prior to the final report and no witness will be publicly associated with any case or report by NARCAP.org.

Please contact NARCAP.org via its website or contact Ted Roe admin@narcap.org

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A Milestone for National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP)

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By Billy Cox
De Void
2-22-11

     Considering how American schoolkids trail 16 nations in science scores and rank 24th in math, lamentations from the executive director of a team of scientists shouldn’t take anybody by surprise. Ted Roe, a co-founder of the 11-year-old National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, reports that its Web site draws a modest 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a month, and that maybe 50 percent of those peeks last less than 30 seconds. “Most don’t get past our home page,” Roe says.

Never mind that NARCAP’s roughly 50 members — research associates, mostly, with disciplines as disparate as aviation engineering and perceptual psychology — are studying UFOs, one of the most heavily trafficked subjects in cyberspace. (They refer to the mystery by another acronym, UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, in an effort to avoid the UFO baggage.) Never mind that their perhaps forbiddingly technical analyses — such as last year’s sobering Project Sphere — are routinely ignored by the mainstream media and never referenced by so-called skeptics alleging a lack of data to review.

Without the sort of public squabbles that have lately characterized the much larger, anyone-can-join MUFON, NARCAP labors largely in obscurity as members, which include pilots and radar techs, tend to focus on aviation-safety issues raised by near collisions and electronics malfunctions. But maybe the low profile is about to change.

Unlike the U.S., the Chilean government has a formal and transparent UAP reporting system called the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), which was established in 1997 following a major sighting wave too widespread to ignore. Last December, NARCAP scored a huge and possibly unprecedented coup when it signed onto a partnership with CEFAA under the auspices of Chile’s General Direction of Civil Aviation and National Aviation.

Signatories included the somewhat fearless CEFAA director Gen. Ricardo Bermudez Sanhueza. In 2000, Bermudez dispatched a memo to the Pentagon via the American embassy asking if U.S. anti-missile exercises might account for yet another rash of sightings along Chile’s central coast in 1999. He also expressed an interest in working with an American counterpart to investigate the unremitting weirdness in the skies.

“Both requests went unanswered,” Bermudez wrote last year in Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. “To be frank, we’ve had no response from the United States any time we’ve tried to enlist its cooperation.”

“Actually,” says Roe, “Bermudez approached us about a year and a half ago; they’ve had ongoing UAP issues with their military for a number of years. So we’re looking forward to working with them. We’ve had a cordial relationship with Chile since we started NARCAP.”

Roe’s hope, obviously, is that a NARCAP/CEFAA alliance can create momentum for expanding formal international cooperation and data-sharing. Any bets on what the U.S. response will be?

“I guess science just isn’t sexy,” says Roe. “People don’t want to look at the data because it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so tedious.’ We can’t control that; a lot of people have their minds made up. We’re just going to keep doing the work for peer review and keep looking for outside publications.”

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