UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (35 page)

The U.S. Air Force, which had publicly declared UFOs not worthy of investigation, seemed to have deeply rooted hesitations about the Carter administration’s request that NASA initiate a new inquiry. Colonel Charles E. Senn, chief of the Community Relations Division at the Air Force, stated in a letter addressed to NASA’s Lieutenant General Duward L. Crow, “I sincerely hope that you are successful in preventing a reopening of UFO investigations.”
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There is no record to indicate to what extent this or any other pressure from the Air Force influenced developments within NASA in response to Frank Press’s request on behalf of Carter. Some NASA employees had reservations as well.

After a fairly lengthy series of letters, memos, and inquiries made through various levels of the hierarchical NASA bureaucracy, the agency turned down the president of the United States in December 1977—without giving a project officer a chance to review the accumulated data. Frosch said that NASA needed “bona fide physical evidence from credible sources … tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis” in order to do so. Due to the absence of such evidence, he said, “we have not been able to devise a sound scientific procedure for investigating these phenomena.” Therefore, he proposed that no steps be taken to “establish a research activity in this area or to convene a symposium on this subject.”
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Dr. Richard C. Henry, a prominent professor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University, was then deputy director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division and involved in the decision-making process. In a 1988 published essay, Henry takes issue with Frosch’s claim of “an absence of tangible or physical evidence.” He says there was an abundance of relevant evidence at the time, a situation that he, as head of the Astrophysics Division, was certainly aware of.

Henry says Frosch’s statement denying the existence of a sound scientific protocol was simply false. “The National Academy of Sciences endorsed the Condon study of UFOs, and specifically endorsed their procedures (protocol). It hardly does for us to say no sound protocol is possible!” he wrote in a memo to NASA space science administrator Noel Hinners. “The point is that
to be meaningful
the protocol must cover the possibility that the UFO phenomenon is due in part to intelligences far beyond our own.”
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Ironically, it was this very Condon report which set the negative tone within mainstream science and no doubt influenced NASA’s flimsy rejection of Carter’s scientifically based presidential request.

Clearly, NASA appears to be an unlikely home for an American UFO agency. But what about the FAA? This agency seems to play a very different role in relationship to UFOs than the civil aviation departments of western European and South American countries, despite its mandate to protect our skies. We must remember that in 2006, the FAA informed the pilots and other aviation witnesses to the disc hovering over O’Hare Airport that it was actually weather, even though the weather was quite normal, it was daylight, and all weather data was recorded through standard procedures. When pressed, the FAA went a step further and attributed the sighting to a hole-punch cloud—a specific and quite rare weather phenomenon that requires freezing temperatures to occur—despite the fact that the temperatures at O’Hare that afternoon were well above freezing. Such irresponsible statements serve to discourage witnesses from filing reports, which would normally be the first step in conducting any sort of investigation.
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Unfortunately, the FAA seems like an even less likely candidate than NASA to take on UFOs at this point.

A comparison with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of our closest ally, the United Kingdom, is in order. There, it is
mandatory
to report any incident where pilots or aircrews believe there has been any danger to their aircraft—whatever the source. Then the CAA and other authorities have the basis upon which to decide if an investigation is warranted.

After Captain Ray Bowyer and his passengers observed a pair of brilliant objects over the English Channel in 2007, the first thing Bowyer did upon landing was fax a report to the CAA, following standard required procedure. There was no attempt by his airline or anyone else to hush up the story, which was reported by the BBC.
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In fact, many CAA files on unsolved cases involving pilots, air traffic controllers, and ground crews have been released. For example, in 1999, a BBC news item reported that “a UFO that narrowly avoided colliding with a passenger jet flying from London’s Heathrow Airport has baffled aviation experts.” A metallic object passed within twenty feet of the aircraft, but for some reason was not picked up on radar. The BBC reports that the pilot filed a near-miss report (an “airprox”) and that “a report by the Civil Aviation Authority found no explanation for the incident which has also confounded local military experts and local police.”
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Imagine if the FAA had made such a statement about the equally radarless O’Hare incident. Being used to a saner approach, Captain Bowyer found the U.S. “non-reporting system” hard to imagine, because the CAA makes no distinction among the possible causes of distress on aircraft. How odd, upon reflection, that America’s FAA seems to discount one rare hazard—unidentified flying objects—and recognizes all others, even if the potential impact could be the same. The FAA provides no reporting forms for these kinds of sightings—although it does offer report forms for volcanic activity and bird strikes, and a detailed “laser beam exposure questionnaire.”

The FAA does not try to hide its discrimination. As a matter of policy, the agency has informed its employees that it wants nothing to do with reports of UFOs or anything anomalous, no matter how severe the danger to the aircraft or the lives within it. The 2010 FAA Aeronautical Information Manual,
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in Section 6 on “Safety, Accident, and Hazard Reports,” states that “persons wanting to report UFO/unexplained phenomena activity” should contact a collection center such as Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a new research organization focusing on novel and emerging spacecraft technologies, or the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), a civilian group with a UFO hotline and reporting forms that keeps careful records of UFO sightings.

With unintentional humor the manual goes on to say that “if concern is expressed that life or property might be endangered” by the UFO, “report the activity
¹⁸
to the local law enforcement department.” Does this mean the local police department over whose jurisdiction the jet is flying at the time it is endangered at, say, 35,000 feet above the ground? Or the nearest police force to an airport that might have a UFO hovering over it? Assumedly, such illogical directives would be changed if our country ever set up a UFO agency.

Two witnesses to the O’Hare incident did just as the manual suggested: They called NUFORC and submitted written reports on their sightings. Ironically, both told me they had never read the FAA manual and were unaware that the official tome dictated that this is what they should do! Both had heard of NUFORC independently and didn’t know where else to go with their information, which they felt, as a matter of duty, needed to be on the record. It was these reports that were eventually provided to the
Chicago Tribune
, prompting transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch to investigate further and eventually to break the O’Hare story on the front page.

It is my understanding that most FAA employees probably do not read the manual—certainly not cover-to-cover—but when sightings occur they seem aware of their employers’ attitudes regardless. The message is conveyed to them, often subtly and indirectly as a kind of veiled professional threat, that they are not to talk to the press about these incidents. The FAA’s negligence may border on the dangerous, or the problem may be that other government agencies need to take more responsibility for UFO incidents that the FAA claims are outside its jurisdiction. No matter which branch of government does so, the threat, if there is one, posed by unidentifiable objects in proximity to commercial aircraft needs to be properly assessed by a new unit established to investigate UFOs.

Nick Pope, former MoD official and UFO expert in the UK, says that governments define “threat” in a very specific way, especially within military intelligence circles. The formula goes like this: Threat = capability + intent. For example: the United States is aware that the UK has nuclear weapons (threat) and therefore could launch a nuclear attack on America (capability), but since the UK has
no intent
to launch such an attack, the United States faces no threat in this regard. Pope points out that we certainly know that UFOs have the capability of being a threat, given their fantastic speed and maneuverability, far superior to our own technology. But, in this case, the intent of UFOs is completely unknown, and therefore immeasurable. Because of that fact, UFOs must be taken seriously as possible threats, and the UK’s Ministry of Defence monitors them for that reason.
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Pope suspects that United States military intelligence circles also define “threat” in this way. The fact that the FAA instructs its employees not to report this particular potential threat lies in contradiction to this basic formula. Maybe it’s time to change the FAA manual and provide employees with the proper reporting forms.

U.S. government reticence about addressing the problem of UFOs seems to have infected all departments that could potentially house a new agency for investigations. Yet we
can
overcome these obstacles through a rational, commonsense approach. Some authorities have suggested specific ways forward, based on their direct experience.

In the late 1980s, John J. Callahan was head of the FAA’s Accidents, Evaluations, and Investigations Division, an extremely high-level position just one rank below federal positions appointed by Congress. When working with military agencies, Callahan’s rank (GM15) was equal to that of general.

One day in early 1987, he was unexpectedly faced with the problem of managing a UFO case—a dramatic, thirty-minute sighting by three Japan Air Lines pilots of a giant UFO over Alaska. Previously, Callahan had never given the slightest thought to the subject of UFOs. When he first heard about the JAL case, he requested the extensive data be sent to him immediately and he brought it to the attention of FAA administrator Admiral Donald D. Engen. Admiral Engen set up a briefing, which, according to Callahan, included members of President Reagan’s scientific staff, as they were described to him at the time. It also included three CIA agents.

Callahan did not say anything publicly about his role in the incident until 2001, thirteen years after his retirement. While talking to some close associates in his community who had probed him for information, he decided that it was time to speak out. The data from this case had been shipped to his home office when he retired, and had languished in his barn for all those years. A few charts were even nibbled on by mice, he discovered later. Fiery and blunt with a somewhat folksy style and a biting sense of humor, John Callahan makes no bones about the fact that he is not happy with the way the FAA conducts itself regarding UFOs. Nor is he in favor of withholding information about the subject from the public, and he’s armed with the evidence, the experience, and the authority to make a very strong case.

So far, no one else has come forward who attended the debriefing at the FAA’s Washington headquarters described by Callahan. I made a FOIA request to the FAA for Admiral Engen’s log of appointments and schedule during this time, but was told no such records exist (Engen has since died). I called Callahan’s boss at the time, Harvey Safeer, now retired in Florida. Safeer remembered the Alaska incident, but had no recollection of any such meeting taking place.

John Callahan’s wife, J. Dori Callahan, was a major player at the FAA in her own right at the time of the incident. Initially an air traffic controller, Ms. Callahan was branch manager for Flight Service Data Systems (FSDS) of the Airways Facilities organization, the part of the FAA which provides the hardware support for all its air traffic control systems. She later became division manager for the Automated Radar Terminal Systems (ARTS) software programs, and retired from the FAA in 1995, after twenty-eight years there.

Dori Callahan remembers well that this high-level debriefing was called a short time after her husband presented his data to the admiral, and also that he told her what happened there immediately afterward. In addition, as an FAA expert, she later analyzed the radar printouts on the Alaska case, which Callahan had provided for the CIA at the meeting, along with the explanatory drawings prepared by the engineering and software staffs from the Tech Center. “And since I had worked in both hardware and software organizations at one time, I understood all of it,” she explained in a 2009 e-mail.

John Callahan points out that, when looking at the unusual radar data during the briefing, the hardware department said it was obviously a software problem, and the software department said it was clearly a hardware problem. “Both teams were fully experienced and knew the air traffic software system, and both were fully capable of knowing when the system was not working correctly,” Ms. Callahan stated in her e-mail. “In other words, there was nothing wrong with the hardware at the time of the JAL 1628 sighting, and the software was working as well. Looking at the radar display of the object darting in and around JAL 1628, it was obvious that there was an object changing positions around the jet. If it had been ghosting [a false target] as suggested by the FAA, all traffic in that control area would have had ghosting, and it would not have moved in front of and behind the aircraft.”