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
