magine you’re the first officer on a jumbo jet and you witnessed a UFO encounter that could’ve ended catastrophically. You never leaked word one to management and you carried the thing around in your head for 16 years. Finally, upon retirement, you summon the nerve to contact the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena and fill out an incident report. And even then, you insist on complete anonymity, not only for yourself but for your former employer as well.
That’s true fear, man. It’s the American way, like talking publicly about “making whoopee” in the Fifties. Yet, a dozen years into the 21st century, where commercial pilots in France and the UK are free to file UFO reports without worrying about getting canned, it’s still a 1977 “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” opening-dialogue bluesfest here in the States.
In July, NARCAP director Dr. Richard Haines helped relieve the aforementioned pilot’s load by publishing his report, in addition to transcripts of a followup interview. It’s an instructive post because, unlike so many people startled by UFOs, the first officer is a trained observer with a keen eye for detail. And as a former NASA research scientist and aviation safety expert, Haines’ line of inquiry presents a textbook case for eliminating prosaic explanations and wringing whatever data (approximate size, approximate speed) can still be harvested from a such a cold-case anecdote.
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