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AN EXEMPLARY REPORT: NARCAP Case # 18

 

On January 1st. 2007 (a day almost ‘dead” about news, as all journalists know) writer Jon Hilkevitch of the “Chicago Tribune” newspaper, published an article about something anomalous seen at the height of the clouds, over the Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

 

The incident happened on November 7, 2006. The headline of Hilkevitch’s note read: “In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO?

 

After that article, Hilkevitch participated on a series of TV and radio interviews, and the incident was taken by the press and appeared in many publications.

The case got such a notoriety that the Chicago Tribune decided to request a considerable amount of information using the Freedom of Information Act. That material included depositions of witnesses, radio communications between Control Tower and employees of United Airlines, etc.

 

Due to the fact that what happened could had affected the security of operations of one of the most active airports of the United States, NARCAP, the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, decided to investigate and study the incident.

 

Dr. Richard F. Haines, a perceptual psychologist and former Chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA Ames Research Center and a former senior research scientist for both NASA and Raytheon founded NARCAP in 2000.

 

NARCAP “is dedicated to the advancement of aviation safety issues as they apply to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).”

 

We do not endorse, neither deny the conclusions to which NARCAP arrived, but we feel the unavoidable duty to recommend specially and wholeheartedly the reading of the report of 155 pages.

 

We base this recommendation on two fundamental reasons:

 

1)    The report is an example on how a case should be investigated and studied;

 

2)    The report is an example on how the work done should be shared with other investigators and the general public.

 

It is not to give just the conclusions, or some data, keeping other information out of the public knowledge, making it difficult for the people to make their own minds, the proper way to proceed.

 

Long ago, we in CIOVI have sustained the position that an authentic exchange of information among the investigators, working with the concept of “open files”,

should imply the totality of the information about a case.

 

On the other hand, to hide data, to give partial information, to create mystery where it shouldn’t be, is not the appropriate behavior of a scientific work.

 

NARCAP have made its report public, and available not only to the investigators but to everyone interested in the Anomalous Aerial Phenomena.

 

The only thing kept from the public knowledge, are the names of the witnesses, a criteria we totally agree with. The only exception is when the witnesses themselves made public their observations to the press.

 

The NARCAP report could be find at:

 

http://www.narcap.org/reports/TR10_Case_18.pdf