In 1999, Dr Richard Haines and Ted Roe founded the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena to address a problem that had persisted for decades: the Federal Aviation Administration did not collect reports of unidentified aerial phenomena from pilots. The FAA instead directed pilots who reported encounters to civilian organisations, and the reports moved away from the aviation safety system entirely. Haines, a retired Senior Research Scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center who had spent 24 years on human factors research for the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Space Station Freedom programmes, designed NARCAP on the model of NASA’s own Aviation Safety Reporting System: confidential, professionally reviewed, and focused on flight safety rather than on the question of what the objects are.
Twenty-five years later, NARCAP has published 21 numbered Technical Reports and over 40 papers in total, documenting encounters reported by commercial and military pilots across five continents. It remains the only organisation in the world dedicated exclusively to the aviation safety dimension of UAP.
The Reporting Gap
NARCAP exists because of a structural absence in the aviation safety system. The FAA does not formally accept UAP reports. Its Aeronautical Information Manual (section 7.7.4) instructs pilots to report to civilian centres. If a pilot or air traffic controller files a report, the information leaves the aviation community and is examined without regard for safety planning. NARCAP’s founding research (TR-5, the first survey of commercial aircrews) documented what this absence produces: pilots and aircrews regularly observe phenomena they do not report.
The confidential reporting process follows the NASA ASRS model. Pilots, air traffic controllers, and radar operators submit accounts online, by email, or by telephone. NARCAP de-identifies all witnesses, flight numbers, carriers, and identifying details. Reports are not shared with the FAA, airlines, or media. Investigations use structured cockpit interviews (conducted in the cockpit or flight simulator whenever possible to aid associative memory), three-dimensional event reconstruction, FOIA requests for radar and audio data from the FAA (which must be filed within two weeks of an event), and analysis by credentialled technical specialists.
The Technical Record
The 21 Technical Reports, published between 2000 and 2023, constitute the most sustained technical documentation of aviation-related UAP encounters in existence.
TR-3 (Haines and Dominique Weinstein, 2001) documented 57 pilot sighting reports involving alleged electromagnetic effects on aircraft systems: temporary or permanent failures of electronic, communications, and navigation equipment during UAP encounters. TR-4 (Weinstein, 2001) catalogued over 1,300 aviation-related UAP reports from 1916 to 2000. TR-6 (Martin Shough, 2002) reviewed 21 ground and airborne radar contacts with unidentified objects between 1948 and 1976.
The most detailed case study is TR-10: the O’Hare International Airport incident of 7 November 2006. Multiple airline employees and others reported a round, grey, metallic object hovering above United Airlines Gate C17 in Concourse C at an altitude below 1,900 feet. The object departed at a steeply inclined angle through the cloud base, leaving a round hole approximately its own size that witnesses reported persisted for up to fourteen minutes. The FAA stated nothing was detected on radar. NARCAP obtained primary radar data and found this was correct. However, an FAA inbound ground controller was recorded on audio remarking about the object. The 150-page report, authored by nine contributors with Haines as senior editor and chief scientist, concluded that “anytime an airborne object can hover for several minutes over a busy airport but not be registered on radar or seen visually from the control tower, constitutes a potential threat to flight safety.”
In 2023, Ted Roe and Ryan Graves co-authored TR-21, published through the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ UAP Integration and Outreach Committee. The paper proposed establishing a single national reporting centre through NASA’s ASRS and was cited in Graves’s congressional testimony on 26 July 2023. The paper bridges NARCAP’s twenty-five-year technical record with the policy momentum that Americans for Safe Aerospace has generated since 2021.
The International Network
NARCAP was, by its own account, the first private UAP research organisation to partner with an official government investigation programme. Its collaboration with Chile’s CEFAA (now SEFAA), the civil aviation authority’s UAP programme, produced multiple joint analyses of pilot encounters, including photographic and video case studies published between 2010 and 2012.
Richard Haines presented at GEIPAN’s CAIPAN workshop at CNES headquarters in Paris in July 2014, the first time the French government space agency brought together the international UAP research community in a formal setting. His paper, “Useful Research Methods for Aircrew and Air Traffic Controller UAP Sightings,” detailed NARCAP’s investigative methodology, including its 52-question reporting form and its cockpit-based cognitive interview technique.
The SIGMA2 commission of France’s Association Aeronautique et Astronautique (3AF) formalised its technical cooperation with NARCAP in 2015, alongside its existing agreements with GEIPAN and Chile. NARCAP’s international technical reports cover cases from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Estonia, and Australia, each authored by named country representatives.
Dominique Weinstein, a French researcher who authored NARCAP’s pilot sighting catalogues (TR-4 and International Report 4, totalling over 1,900 cases), also served as a GEIPAN/CNES expert, making him a direct institutional bridge between the American and French aviation safety research traditions.
From the Archive
NARCAP’s technical record connects directly to the archive’s coverage of both aviation safety advocacy and international government investigation:
- Americans for Safe Aerospace: Graves and Roe co-authored TR-21. ASA addresses in congressional testimony what NARCAP has documented in technical reports for over two decades.
- GEIPAN: Haines presented at GEIPAN’s CAIPAN workshop. Both organisations maintain pilot-reporting pipelines, one within a national space agency and one modelled on NASA’s own confidential system.
- CUFOS: Haines is a CUFOS consultant. NARCAP’s TR-4 aviation catalogue complements CUFOS’s broader archival holdings.
- The Sol Foundation: Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, a Sol advisory board member, advocates for ocean-based UAP research that complements NARCAP’s atmospheric focus.
