Dr.
Richard Haines - November 2000
Dr. Haines has
been a NASA research scientist since the mid 1960's. He has worked
on the Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs as well as several others.
Over the past 30 years, Dr. Haines has compiled over 3,000 cases of
unusual visual and radar sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena.
He notes that numerous foreign cases also appear in the literature
and are very similar in nature to the American reports. In one case
here in America, a B-52 captain told him that he and his crew had
five round spheres appear just off of each wingtip, behind their aircraft,
above the aircraft, and below and they kept up with the plane at cruise
altitude and speed. The captain tried to shake the spheres with evasive
maneuvers but each sphere kept exact position. There are other cases
where pilots look into the transparent cupola of some of the UFOs
and detail can be seen inside.
… In many
cases, Air Force interceptors have been sent up to identify or investigate
the phenomenon. And the pilot might ask for radar coverage. Did
you see anything on radar? I have many, many cases in my AIRCAT
files where there is good, positive, visual radar correspondence.
AIRCAT stands
for Air Catalogue. This is a rather extensive library I've been
collecting for almost 30 years now from commercial, military, private
and test pilots.
I have over
3,000 cases. I have tape recordings or video recordings of the interviews
with some of the pilots. I have FAA tapes that you can obtain as
a citizen through Freedom of Information Act requests. And so this
database is very large. Those cases that are not complete are usually
the result of a hesitancy on the part of the pilot to disclose everything.
If they are a commercial pilot, for instance, there may be concerns
about job security or ridicule…
We have an interesting
case involving several aircraft, compasses deviating, radio frequency
interference, and radar. There is a wealth of data there. And it
just amazes me that my colleagues in the physical sciences, for
some reason aren't interested in this subject…
Is there some
intelligent guidance behind the phenomenon? Well that's a scientific
question. That is a valuable scientific question. And to me, where
I am right now in the data analysis, I think there is. I'm gaining
more and more data to make this case that there is a high degree
of intelligence and control behind this phenomenon…
I had a B-52
captain tell me once that he was flying in the front left seat of
a brand new B-52 from Wichita, Kansas, where it was made by the
Boeing Corporation. His job was to ferry that aircraft with a light
crew to an Air Force base in the southwestern part of America. It
was a clear, sunny day, beautiful bright sky, and an object, a round
sphere, probably four or five feet in diameter with no markings,
no rivets, no seams, no insignias, no USAF on the side- showed up
right off his left wing tip. Well, his co-pilot said, Captain, we
have an object off our right wing tip and he described it and it
was the same shape, size, everything, identical to this one on the
left wing. So there are two objects now keeping up with the aircraft
at cruise altitude and cruise speed.
Well, to make
a long story short, he told me that an object showed up behind the
aircraft, above the aircraft, below the aircraft and off each wing
tip, five total. And, I said, well, what did you do. He said, well,
I hit the autopilot button on the control column and went into evasive
maneuvers, which is kind of standard operating procedure, to try
to shake these things. He said if they were balloons, they weren't
going to keep up with us very long. If they were birds, why were
they at that altitude and flying at 300 or 400 miles an hour, so
forth and so on. Good, typical piloting behavior, checking off what
they weren't, you see. Well, he said, no matter what he did with
that aircraft, they stayed with the aircraft, perfectly aligned.
It is called station keeping. So he said, after a while of this,
we are running out of fuel and I have a job to do. So he added power,
got back up to cruise altitude, and put her back on autopilot. After
15 or so minutes more the objects departed from the aircraft in
the exact opposite order they arrived. Intelligence. To me that's
not random. That is intelligence. That is deliberate…
Now the skeptics
will say that these are all visual illusions. And I can't buy that.
Not all these cases, not with three sets of eyeballs in that cockpit,
not with radar confirmation, not with ground confirmation by radar
and even additional aircraft nearby…
Pilots, being professionals, have careers at stake. And so it is
easier not to report them and usually they don't report them. My
estimate is that for every one pilot who does come forward and makes
a confidential or a public report, there are 20, 30 other pilots
who don't.
As a result of this review of my AIRCAT files, I found a number
of cases back in the '60's for instance when the Air Force was still
heavily involved in this subject, where they stepped in and interrogated
commercial pilots. Not just their own military pilots, but also
commercial pilots. The Air Force ended the interview by saying you
are not to tell anybody about what you saw…
Quite often
there is a little protrusion either on the top or the bottom, or
both, that some people describe as a cupola or a cockpit of some
sort. And very often, they are transparent. And detail can be seen
inside the windows. It is very interesting for a pilot to look you
in the eye and tell you that he saw this at 100 yards distance,
at altitude. That has a great emotional impact on me, I must say…