'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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The Attack on Ufology's Isaac Koi

Isaac Koi is a well-known researcher from the UK working to preserve and share UFO literature and documents, with the stated purpose of making them freely available to all. Isaac is known personally by a few trusted colleagues, but uses a pseudonym while

By Curt Collins Blue Blurry Lines 12-4-16

working in the UFO community in order to protect his career. Recently, exposure of his identity has been threatened, causing him to announce that he was leaving UFO research.

Here's how it came to be.

[...]

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'...NARCAP From Its Inception Ditched The UFO Acronym...'

Broccoli or smores? Hmm ...

By Billy Cox De Void 5-15-15

      OK, let’s face it, nothing competes with dead space aliens when it comes to creating orgasmic worldwide hype. And when the pyrite that tried to pass for bullion dissolved into snake oil during last week’s “Roswell Slides” calamity in Mexico City, there were plenty of critics quick to point to the hogslop as the industry standard for evidence attending The Great Taboo. So now might be a good time to step back and revisit the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena website, which would probably do somersaults if it could get even a fraction of the attention provoked by the clumsy mummy farce.

On April 10, without any fanfare (no dead aliens/visuals = no buzz), NARCAP executive director Ted Roe issued a status report on the non-profit’s ongoing research, at home and abroad, since 1999. And just for reference, stunts like the "Roswell Slides" have so poisoned the well for inquisitive fence-sitters, NARCAP from its inception ditched the UFO acronym altogether for the more neutral unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. Either way, institutional American attitudes continue to stagnate despite NARCAP's attempt to frame the mystery as a potential flight safety issue.

“Data regarding aviation related UAP observations and incidents flows away from the aviation system and is not examined for safety factors by US aviation authorities, the NTSB, etc.,” writes Roe. “In fact, the FAA refers pilots and air traffic controllers that want to make a UAP or ‘UFO’ report to contact civilian UFO research groups and private businesses. These organizations have not published a single study nor demonstrated the slightest concern for the matter of UAP and aviation safety.”

Led by retired NASA scientist Richard Haines, NARCAP’s multi-disciplinary, multi-national contributors labor thanklessly to educate (mostly) pilots on the potential hazards of close encounters, which have never gone away despite nearly a half century of wishful thinking from the University of Colorado and the U.S. Air Force. As technical work, this is forbidding stuff, dense with physics and geometry, largely inaccessible to general audiences and most assuredly not for the sound bites that pass for journalism these days.

Take a single report from 2010, Project Sphere, which attempted to get a better grip on those elusive white blips and metallic-looking orbs that have, for decades, been photographed and detected on radar. Fifteen contributors weighed in -- from Spain, Canada, France, the U.K., Brazil and Japan, joining American scientists like NASA engineer Lawrence Lemke (his chapter: “Aerodynamics of Spheres”) and Richard Spalding from Sandia National Laboratories (“An Atmospheric Electrical Hypothesis for Spherical Luminosities Occurring at Aircraft Altitudes”).

Properly circumspect, NARCAP declined to hang a label on this puzzle, but felt secure enough in its data to make seven recommendations, including the integration of UAP characteristics into flight-simulator training, alongside more conventional variables like wind shear and bird collisions. If knowledge alone wasn’t a sufficient motivator, perhaps the threat of liability could make the case.

“If UAP are judged to be naturally occurring so-called acts of God ...” wrote Haines in the report’s conclusion, “then airlines have less to fear in terms of litigation. If, on the other hand, UAP are discovered to be intelligently controlled or otherwise artificial, then a quite different legal judgement could be made, one whose outcome could only be guessed at. It makes good sense, then, that we should try to discover the core nature of UAP sooner than later if, for no other reason, (than) to obviate some of these problems that are associated with aviation accident litigation.”

Not even a shrug, of course, from U.S. authorities. But in his blogpost, Roe reminds us of how the rest of the world has made adjustments to The Great Taboo since Uncle Sam bailed in 1969, e.g., the rise of government studies sweeping South America, the expansion of NARCAP’s links into Chile, Germany and Mexico, even a concession from the British Ministry of Defence — which proclaims itself officially disinterested in these matters — “that UAP exist is indisputable… and they (UAP) are probably a threat to safe aviation.”

NARCAP’s work should be news. If only it could find some dead alien mummy pix. . . .

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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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"... NARCAP, Which Refers to UFOs as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Does Real Science Without Resorting to Hype or Speculation ..."

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A good move for NARCAP

By Billy Cox De Void 2-7-13

     One web site the “skeptics” have avoided like fire ants over the last decade is the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. That’s because NARCAP, which refers to UFOs as unidentified aerial phenomena, does real science without resorting to hype or speculation, perhaps to its own detriment. But last month, this most cautious affiliation of researchers announced its intentions to apply for nonprofit 501(c)3 status and take its mission to a broader audience.

“While this was the general plan since we began our effort 12 years ago,” writes NARCAP executive director Ted Roe, “it seemed to better serve our interests as an organization to manage our expenses out-of-pocket.” Working without donations since its inception in 1999, Roe adds, “we have completed a great deal of research, investigations and analysis (with) very limited resources.”

That’s an understatement. Guided by former NASA scientist Dr. Richard Haines, NARCAP has posted more than two dozen technical reports on its site, with frequent international contributions. After all, states Roe, “These reports arise from every region on the planet and are global in nature. As such, they are a concern for all aviation jurisdictions and they deserve a much closer examination.”

In Y2K, Haines produced a landmark paper, “Aviation Safety in America: A Previously Neglected Factor,” that should’ve given mainstream science a reason for concern. Drawing upon cases languishing in, among other places, FAA, NTSB and NASA files, Haines examined near-miss incidents, some of which exerted disruptive magnetic effects on navigation and communications systems, with the potential for forcing startled pilots into catastrophic overcorrections. Today, NARCAP augments that sort of data by promising confidentiality to pilots, air controllers and other industry insiders who fear professional blowback by going public.

Using only personal expenses, NARCAP has been referenced by the U.S. Department of Transportation, worked with the Government Accountability Office, huddled with Congressional contacts, networked with foreign countries and signed a data-sharing agreement with the Chilean government’s UFO research unit, CEFAA. Roe offers a quick reminder that just 30 years ago, pilots who reported perplexing light shows in the sky were roundly dismissed; today, thanks to due diligence, science has catalogued those upper-atmosphere lightning discharges into groupings like sprites, blue jets and ELVES.

Now, in an effort to dig deeper into another transient phenomenon that presents “a clear hazard to aviation,” Roe, for the first time, is appealing for outside volunteer and financial support. NARCAP, he says, is working on an ambitious budget “that involves international travel and accommodations as well as funding for research, office space, equipment and the rest of the things that make an aviation research organization function.”

Pulling it off won’t be cheap. But with its track record for drilling into actual data and dispensing with the dreck (in 2009, for instance, it published a paper about exposing digital forgeries via “JPEG ghosts”), NARCAP’s bid for additional resources is good news. It cleared its highest hurdle — credibility — years ago.

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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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