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NASA worker tracks UFO reports by pilots < By HAL BERNTON Daily News business reporter The mysterious flashing lights sighted by the crew of a Japan Air Lines cargo jet last November aren’t the only strange things pilots have seen through their cockpit windows. In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 sightings of UFOs have been reported by pilots, according to Richard Haines, a NASA scientist who tracks UFO sightings by pilots in his spare time. “Some of them are vefy spectacular and very signiti- cant from the standpoint of getting a better idea on how to characterize the phenome- na,’ said Haines. He said the sightings are reported by military, civilian and commercial pilots who fly both national and interna- tional routes. UFO reports from Alaska pilots are rela- tively rare. . The sightings tend to occur in cycles that peak about ev- ery five years, Haines said. For the past two years, sight- ings have been in a trough. Haines said many of the reports fall into two -main See Back Page, SIGHTINGS Dr. Richard Haines, 415-941-0958, Ames Research Center, NA§A, Moffett Field, CA 94305 { /~G + = =o weno ANCE. MEWS SIGHTINGS: UFO reports i Continued from Page A-1 | categories. One category involves UFOs that suddenly appear within view of the cockpit and then disappear very rap- idly. “The airplane is flying along essentially minding its own business. Then some- thing comes up and does bar- rel rolls around the airplane.” Many other reports, includ- ing the Nov. 17 sighting by the JAL crew, involve UFOs that tail aircraft for periods ranging from a minute to more than two hours. Haines’ interest in UFOs results from his more than two decades spent working in NASA’s man-in-space pro- gram. In the early 1960s, as he began studying visual optics im space, he encountered many reports from pilots who claimed to have seen UFOs. “I thought I could explain all these strange phenomena as nothing more than strange lighting,’’ said Haines, who now studies “‘human factors in space” at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. ome ee 4.9°ene"-_—- > “But I had to look at the data as an open-minded scien- tist and pretty soon realized that we are facing something totally different.” NASA currently doesn’t in- vestigate any UFO sightings. But Haines, working out of his Los Altos, Calif., home on his own time, has clipped newspapers, interviewed pi- lots and talked with control- lers to amass reports of more than 3,000 sightings. _ Haines said he hopes to fly to Anchorage to investigate the Nov. 17 sighting by Capt. ‘Kenju Terauchi, pilot of a JAL cargo plane en route from Iceland to an Anchorage refueling stop. The report was made public in late Decem- ber. | | Terauchi, a 47-year-old pi- lot with 20 years: of experi- ence, told United Press Inter- ‘national that two small brightly lit objects and one enormous object — the size of two aircraft carriers — fol- lowed his jumbo jet for 400 miles. 7 Terauchi first sighted the * lights shortly after the plane entered Alaska airspace. At first, the lights were directly in front of the plane, and Terauchi feared a midair col- lision, said Paul Steucke, Alaska spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administra- tion. Terauchi then obtained permission from an air traffic controller to try and evade the UFOs with several turns © and drops in altitude. He fi- nally lost the UFOs about 80 miles northwest of Anchor- age, according to Steucke. The FAA controller who monitored the JAL plane, Flight 1628, reported tracking the UFOs several times on radar, as near as five miles from the aircraft. ‘‘The traffic (UFO) stayed with JL1628 through turns and descents,”’ said the controller in a state- ment released by the FAA. The identity of the controller, however, has not been re- leased. The Military Regional Operations Control Center re- ported picking up the UFO on radar about eight miles from the plane. The military center then lost track of the UFO for 11 minutes, then picked up ‘“‘a flight of two,’ according to a flight chronology released by the FAA. It picked up the UFOs as they dropped back rand to the right of the plane, then lost radar contact. More recently, Steucke has said that neither the military nor the FAA puts any faith in the early radar sightings. Steucke said that the FAA controller mistakenly inter- preted a split-image of the cargo plane as a UFO and that the the military now reports its radar images were simply ‘‘clutter.”’