Interview with Richard Haines, retired NASA research scientist and former Chief of the Space Human Factors Office at Ames Research Center

RH: I have a lot of ideas on a lot of subjects in this field, ranging from photic bacteria as basic explanatory hypothesis to fractal dynamics that would explain a lot of the characteristics that are seen and described by people. I have written papers on the fractal part.

I have been involved with the phenomenon for a little over thirty years and as a professional research scientist my interest is the core phenomenon as opposed to history or sociology. I’m an experimental psychologist by training and experience at NASA. I want to push this field along in the methodology area. That was what my first book was about – observing UFOs. To help people become better investigators, to raise the standards. Over the year I have specialized in two main areas – pilot sightings and photographic analysis. They each represent a different aspect of the evidence with fairly high credibility. I am as aware as anybody of deliberate hoaxes but nonetheless, if you do have a good pedigree on the photographs, you can obtain a great deal of stable information, the same kind of information the weather bureau uses to predict hurricanes etc. Photographs – if done right, and with the full pedigree – camera, film, lens, photographer, the time etc. – you can draw some conclusions about the phenomenon, more than just the conclusion that it is there.

The pilot sightings are really what have turned out to be the gold mine because of the credibility of the pilots. I have a computer database called AirCat (Air Catalogue) with over 3400 cases from around the world going back to the beginning of aviation – foreign, commercial – that are very interesting, most of them are just fascinating. Some you’ll read about in the open press, some accounts are historical, but many are from pilots who came to be and I did interview quite a few.

Joe Firmage and his International Space Science Organization (ISOO) funded a proposal I submitted and as a result I went through those 3400 cases. Just in terms of American aviation safety, I found over 100 cases that qualified (see his article at the NIDS web site) – that paper resulted in the formation of a new national organization called the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (Narcap). We do not say UFO, we say UAP – unidentified aerial phenomenon. We take no public position on what we think this phenomenon is, and as a group of professionals, we are ready willing and able to study any luminous or electronic phenomenon in the atmosphere that might impact aviation safety. We have an executive board, technical advisors (meteorology, physics etc). We’ve developed a data reporting form patterned after NASA’s aviation safety reporting system (ASRS). That guarantees the pilot or air traffic controller or radar operator absolute anonymity and confidentiality so his boss can not find out who he was. We are aggressively going to friends at the NAFTA (Natl. Air Traffic Control Assn.), the tower guys, and the National Tower Supervisors Union (SoupCom), and ADVA, and the Allied Pilots Assn. at Delta, to all the airline pilots union, to AOPA .. it’s a bottoms up approach because we won’t get very far top down, because of politics denial etc.

Our toll free number for NARCAP is 1-800-732-3666- or go to www.narcap.org. We also have a group of professionals, research associates, some of who want to remain anonymous while others are retired and don’t care, who do independent research and write technical reports on topics related to NARCAPs’ mission. Those are published on the web site. We also have a foreign advisory board representing 11 nations – while we’re focusing on US aviation only, often an American aircraft will be over a foreign state when this happens so we need representatives there to get out aviation maps, weather, radar tapes, etc.

Let me use the initiation model, because it does have predictive power. The sense of an initiation in historic times has been to enter into an experience that the general public does not have so you become part of an elite or a club or a men’s group or whatever. Often it’s a rite of passage for the young person into adulthood. I think UFOs – whatever they are, and I am not saying that they’re extraterrestrial either – I never have said that in public, whatever they are or represent, they are acting like an initiation mechanism. One my stock questions is, how did you get interested in the subject in the first place? Well over half have seen lights in the sky or had an encounter and are motivated to get to the bottom of it. Others I ask, can you think of any ways your life has changed as a result of this experience? A Bible Church pastor called a month ago who had a close encounter with his wife and daughter in the car. I’ve started preaching more cosmically, he said, widening my expanse. It opened my eyes.

I like Leo Sprinkle’s idea of initiation as cosmic consciousness conditioning. It’s a one-way change that seems to be going on. I have interviewed a lot of people who claim to be abducted and in those cases, the rubric of recruitment is much more valid. There’s something else going on that these people did not ask for, mostly. In CE5, it’s people who voluntarily go out and try to establish communication themselves and bring the phenomenon under their control. In those 200 cases, they claim a reply or closing of the loop which I interpret as a sign of intelligence. The case is quite strong for an intelligence of some form – a programmed robot or actual localized intelligence. The evidence speaks for itself.

RT: Where does all of this begin for you?

RH: In the most general sense, my interest began as a skeptic. I had a vision laboratory at NASA, Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, CA, where I was doing navigation and guidance, space simulation; it was a surgical clean room with a solar simulator, and I had the ability to mock up or set up a rendezvous and docking set-up like the astronauts would experience – this was for the Gemini Program around 1966 – and I found during that research that I could totally fool a person looking into this dark environment with very bright targets so you could not tell me accurately what you were looking at. I could change perceptually the shape, size, color, position, practically all the characteristics I could control, so as a skeptic I said, I can explain UFOs, they’re just misidentified natural phenomena, which is probably true part of the time. But – this is the important turning point – over the succeeding years I met pilots, usually here at NASA, where I would ask this rather naive question – have you ever seen anything you could not identify? and some of them said, yes, and they described their experiences and they were nothing that I could produce. I had to admit I was wrong. I couldn’t explain all of them. I could explain a small percentage of them, perhaps ten per cent, but that left a large balance that I had to cope with somehow. As a scientist, the only way I could cope with it was to look at the evidence, try to be logical and use the scientific method, and so I did.

RT: Are there successive stages to entertaining possibilities? what we think is outlandish, and then over time, the more we hear of it, we no longer find them outlandish – which makes the subject matter more complex, because it is not just one thing.

RH: That’s my experience. In general, you are exactly right. I share your view that it is extremely multidimensional, so much so that traditional science is really not up to the task. Now, that‘s an insight that has come slowly over the years, because I clung to science as a method, a technique to tease out these fine points and eventually get to the bottom of it, but the longer I am looking at the evidence, the less I am convinced that that’s the way to go. There certainly is part of the phenomenon that will yield to science – but there is a whole other psychic or psychological dimension that not even psychology is going to come close to. I can see why a lot of my colleagues are in denial about this.

RT: It’s simply too much to get your mind around.

RH: It’s too much. That’s right.

RT: In your book, CE5, many cases are nuts and bolts because they involve things scientists could get hold of. Peter Sturrock, describing what he wanted to do with the Pocantico panel, talked about it as if a single datum could be the subject matter. But any one datum – is it a hoax? the moon? – can be disposed of but not the aggregation of data over the years that is itself the compelling case. To approach it one datum at a time will never yield the whole story.

RH: I agree. I met that very attitude very often. No fact of science ever derived from one case, yet they’re applying that standard here.

RT: Scientists do not usually proceed in tiny bits, they think big first, even philosophize, then test the data.

RH: That’s right.

RT: There are lots of people who have done work now. Any thoughts of a seminar or a course, gathering people together?

RH: Who would you audience be?

RT: I think of New Paradigms for Computer Security as a model. A two-week program where people are chosen on the basis of insight, willingness to discourse and push each other to the edges. They present papers and then tear into one another.

RH: Would that be like preaching to the choir?

RT: Perhaps, but singing what song? It would have to be people willing to look at anomalous phenomena. Is there a formal way to enable the domain to become more than individuals working in isolation?

RH: I like the idea of a course. That’s a good idea.

RT: At this point, what do you think?

RH: There has to be a nuts and bolts component that radiates energy that is sensed by many human terrestrial sensors. At the same time there is a component which is extremely intuitive or paranormal that is sensed not by sensors but by the brain, by the emotions, by the intuition of the human being as if there is communication going on. And there well could be. Our science is not well qualified to get at that yet. Look at what they did to J. B. Rhine. We’re a long way from that. So it may take a whole new discipline, a new science if you will, to even come close to this, and even then we might not come to it. This is all by way of saying that the nuts and bolts component very well could be ET, I don’t discount that possibility – the universe is far too vast for us to be the only sentient beings in it – but let me return to the notion of photic bacteria, which I mentioned last time.

I like that idea. Using an epidemiological model from our own domain of medicine, germs are spread through physical contact. There has to be contact from the source to the host, the host being the lungs for example and down the passageway until they find tissue that will host them and protect them long enough to embed and have their effect. What if what we’re talking about is a photic bacteria that originates somewhere else, that travels vast interstellar distances at the speed of light, but when it arrives – the host is the human eyeball, the aperture of the iris, the pupil of the eye, so that its entry into the nervous system is immediate – in fact, that’s one of the prominent characteristics, how fast the phenomenon affects a person, it’s almost instantaneous, so that in a viral sense, it has a cognitive impact that is almost immediate. So if you don’t shut your eyes almost immediately and deny it, close it out and turn your head, you will be affected. Then, how does it encode itself in the nervous system? How does it gain further meaning if you will within the nervous system, to gain the great complexity that we know it has? I’m still working on that part, that’s the challenge. I know a lot about video compression and the techniques used there, the codec that we have developed, if you have the right algorithm at the sending end, you can match the decoding algorithm at the receiving end, so the implication is, if this is at all correct, whoever is sending this photic stream out in all directions from where they are, from a sphere, their knowledge of the decoding at our end on planet earth must be pretty smart. Otherwise we wouldn’t decode it the way it was meant to be decoded. We would come up with randomness.

RT: What do others at NASA observe? Schuessler’s statement about NORAD and somebody knows, which shifts us to, who knows and why is it being managed the way it is?

RH: I’m not with NASA any more, I retired in 1988 and have been working for support contractors since then. I couldn’t and wouldn’t speak for NASA, no single voice speaks for NASA. But in general I will say that when I discuss this with my colleagues here, I find a great amount of open-mindedness, a great amount of support, very little ridicule, regardless of what you might read, and they’ll often say, let’s have lunch, I have a lot of questions, and some of them get involved in field investigations with me because of personal interest, special skills, education and training, and they want to make a difference. That’s one of the things I like about NASA people.

Now, from the nuts and bolts point of view that we discussed, I would have to agree that NORAD would have everything under surveillance, from my knowledge of radar and so forth. But from the second point of view, I don’t have to agree with it. There might be a component slipping in wavelengths that NORAD has not even thought of yet. Standing ground waves, long wave lengths, etc – they don’t measure those. NORAD really has a very narrow spectrum that they monitor – it has to do with infrared because of ballistic missiles, metal-reflecting surfaces which is how we make missiles, awfully anthropomorphic – I hope NORAD is monitoring all those things in space but there could be all kinds of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum that are completely ignored, overlooked, forgotten.

RT: Any firsthand knowledge of what somebody might know and when they knew it?

RH: No. I don’t have time to investigate in the intelligence direction. That’s valuable from the POV of the intelligence community but I’m a research scientist.

RT: What has kept you going through the years? Why not take up golf?

RH: That’s part of the mystery. We talked about the initiation model. If the initiation is powerful enough, you will remain a member for life. Some organizations will not permit you to leave.

RT: Like the Scientologists?

RH: And the CIA. Because of what you carry with you. I don’t have a good answer for that. But there is an invisible college and camaraderie and a sense of pioneering and adventure. It is a frontier area that remains unexplained and deserves serious study. There are lessons to be learned and scientific principles that could revolutionize the way we live.

RT: In CE5 and your Aircat data base and in car interference cases from Mark Rodigher, there is data. We could use computer programs to help us see patterns. We have the data. Is anyone developing the algorithms that would enable us to see patterns? Your data in CE5 leads to a conclusion I am inclined to believe unless all these people are hallucinating, crazy, or hoaxers.

RH: Me too.

Now, if your question has to do with advanced algorithms, I would probably say no, because we’re all self-funded, this is a personal hobby, we don’t have access to a Cray. With $50,000 a year, we could. But there is an ongoing effort by many of us to use desktops and straightforward statistical routines to draw out patterns. Larry Hatch has a PC DOS based program with data on 18,000 cases.

RT: Isn’t that GIGO? He used too wide a net.

RH: Much too wide. It’s user beware. But I like to err on that side than on the other side. We should know how to extract the signal from the noise. There’s a lot of noise – hoaxes, misidentifications, etc. That’s true of all databases.

RT: Do you have an opinion on crash retrievals in general, not particularly the “Roswell incident?”

RH: Well – I don’t know, what I know is not in that particular domain. Off the record – something happened. There’s no doubt about that. The issue is what. I can tell you a short story. I have an acquaintance in Moscow who is a hero of the Soviet Union and a former cosmonaut. His name is Pavel Popovich. I sent him a letter in Russian and asked him if he would write a letter on his own stationery and over his own signature to the KGB or whatever it was called after perestroika to ask them to check their files and see if they had any material there related to Roswell NM from 1946-48. He said he would, and he did, and I got this nice letter back from him with a copy from the KGB on their letterhead in Russian and a second letter form the Ministry of Defense (to whom he sent a parallel letter) and both letters were fundamentally the same: Dear Colonel or General Popovich, we have investigated the subject you raised with us and reviewed our files and can find no evidence of any material of that kind, period. Well, I don’t believe a word of it. That’s a great public statement and I would probably say the same thing. Whenever you have the level of security that surrounded the A bomb and the H bomb in those days and you have the 509 Bomb Group there that was responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know that there were agents from many countries just across the border and coming in every night. The question then is, that “something that happened,” could that have been related to a monitoring by a foreign power? There is a small but finite possibility of that. Of course the government would want to cover it up, they covered everything up around that subject. So to say that it had to be ET is specious, it’s not logical, any more than a child’s balloon or Project Mogul is logical. The Air Force shot themselves on the foot on that one. I’d fire the lieutenant who put that story together. I guess they think we’re so dumbed down that we’ll buy it, or provide any answer, which is the skeptic’s approach.

RT: Philip Klass?

RH: To skeptics in general, I quote Shakespeare: Methinks thou protests too much. I have to ask who is paying their paycheck. It’s like Ed Condon. He was certainly on the inside as a physicist, yet all of his writings were denial, for public consumption – and Phillip Klass is very good at that. All UFOs are unidentified, and its a very scholarly treatment written for the academic environment, at that level – the general public would not understand it, and that was his objective. I think Phil Corso was the same, I can’t prove it, but I think he was ordered by his superiors to write that book, which is not a very good book. I don’t think he wrote it, either. I think they used Phil.

RT: From your knowledge … what action? What paths would you suggest? E.g. SETI-at-Home as an example of distributed computing. If we build the database, we could distribute the work the same way.

RH: That’s democracy. I don’t object to how they’re doing it – their method is great – I object to what they’re doing.

One of the first drawbacks is lack of funding. There has to be a serious effort to raise money for this. Bigalow is it, so funding has to be near the top of the list. And we need a lot of creative ideas. A skunk works is a very good model, an excellent mode, because of the aerodynamics of the skunk works. Read my book, Project Delta, which traces aerodynamics and specifically flight guidance and navigation that has been reported of two or more objects seen at the same time and place. I argue that the phenomena can not be terrestrial technology because it is doing things which, at the time it was reported, we couldn’t do. I document that pretty thoroughly. It’s not a reactive propulsion, I can tell you that right now.

RT: Any critique of Paul Hill?

RH: I’m not a physicist. Let me say that the agency he worked for was and still is conservative and politically correct and afraid to cope with this subject on the public level, and that’s what would have been required to give that book a thorough review by his peers. So either by fiat from above or the old boy’s network that says you don’t comment if you want to keep your job, it never had an adequately in depth kind of review, no peer review. That doesn’t make sense. If any agency should look forward and deal with this general subject, it’s this agency.

So … if we had money, or of we had the president’s ear we could gain access to NORAD’s radar tapes that are non-ballistic trajectories. We don’t care about parabolas, we want 90 degree corners. That’s another possibility.

I mentioned NARCAP, and that’s a step in the right direction. It opens up the consciousness of the aviation world to this subject from the point of view of threats to safety. We’re not threatening anybody, it’s just a fact like wind shear is a fact, and letting the aviation react – hopefully with open-mindedness – it’s really an open-minded, broad-seeking skunk works kind of R&D.

[we discussed a number of cases that are confidential which led to a discussion of the impact of exploring UFO phenomena on the explorer]

RH: You know, you’re part way into a Chinese maze, one of these big gardens, you know, with the pathways in it? And you’ve got to – for your own good – have a navigation system that’s going to serve you.

You have a zeal which a lot of people just don’t have. All right, well what I mean by it is … I’m a Christian myself, and I find that being trained and educated in the sciences, where the spirit is lacking, that I can only go so far in my work. I view myself – in fact, I wrote this in one of my early books – I’m like a man in a forest in the fog, and I can lose direction very quickly as I study this phenomenon. So if I don’t have a moral compass as part of my navigation system so I can know what direction north is, to use this metaphor – if I don’t have colleagues and friends that love me and will come alongside me when I get lost, brothers and sisters let’s call them, I can die. That’s what I mean by the maze effect. We’re all in that maze at some point and sometimes we meet at an intersection and there you are, but usually I might just hear your voice across two bushes so to speak, and I will hear the calling of people lost further away – it’s a great short story, I think – but myself, from an ego point of view, I’m lost but I just don’t know it. So Christianity comes along for me with a much larger perspective, teaching the truth that I have found works for me and my family, and they provide a spiritual foundation that I can always come back to so I can take one or two steps off into the fog in this new direction or interest, but I can always come back to where I started. That’s what I mean by the maze.

It’s a very lonely road.

RT: Very lonely.

I have a pact with my colleagues that if they see me going off the deep end they will come alongside me in the best tradition and help guide me back. That goes for them from me likewise.

I am often asked, how can a scientist like you believe in ETR and visitation and all that when there are such vast interstellar distances? I never published anything that says I believe in ET, I’m looking for the evidence so give me some slack. But let’s assume that there is ET and they grow up as we do on other planets and do come here. What makes you think that they live 70 years as we do? What if the live six hundred years? That quiets some of them. And what makes you think their technology is as limited and young as ours? That quiets the next batch. What makes you think they’re conscious and sentient on the whole trip, rather than sleeping or in suspended animation? And what makes you think they want to come back to their home planet after the trip, like we do? Their social structure may be much more space faring in the star trek mode so that don’t come back to tickertape parades as our astronauts do. So there may be a person who goes in one direction and doesn’t cone back, these folks maybe fourth generation seeking a new home. That’s an old SF concept, but it works. After my tirade, people quiet down and slink away.

There are prima donnas all around us who want to be THE person to break the UFO code like cracking the Enigma Code during WW2. That works to our detriment because they’re one man bands. They’re out there on their own trying to solve the problems of the UFO world and they’re not willing to work with anybody else. There are a number of people like that. I have approached them on a number of occasions and asked them to share and we’ll give them authorship credit and everything else and they won’t do it.

Our discussions led to the formation of NARCAP because of this denial mode of our culture. NARCAP was formed for two reasons – to give pilots a place for anonymous reports so we get data of high quality. The second reason is that, with this highly reliable data, we can challenge the science community to get involved. Until now their mantra has been, we’re not interested in UFOs because there is no reliable data to study. You and I may know that that’s a crock but NARCAP will eventually have data that blows the wind out of their sails.

December 21, 2000