Aerospace psychologist Dr. Richard F. Haines joined investigator Ted Roe in 1999 to launch the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), a volunteer nonprofit that archives and analyzes reports of unidentified aerial phenomena affecting flight safety. Its operating model copies NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System while focusing exclusively on UAP encounters.12
Key Personnel
Richard F. Haines served as Chief Scientist, bringing three decades of NASA cockpit human-factors expertise.
Ted Roe remains Executive Director and primary field investigator.3
French aviation historian Dominique Weinstein curates the pilot-sighting catalogue and co-authors technical studies.4
Long-time advisers include systems theorist Jacques Vallée, radar analyst Martin Shough, and astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani, each contributing specialised peer review.5
Research and Technical Publications
NARCAP has released twenty-one Technical Reports. The inaugural "Aviation Safety in America: A Previously Neglected Factor" (2000) assembled one hundred historic near-misses; the latest, "Recommendations to Improve Acquisition and Management of Aviation-Related UAP Data" (2023), proposes standardised digital reporting protocols for airlines and regulators.6
Project Sphere (2010) investigates luminous spherical UAP across six countries, comparing trajectories and electromagnetic interference signatures.7
The case library now exceeds 3,400 pilot and air-traffic records, many supported by radar replays and cockpit imagery. All validated files are published without redacted safety data in an open-access archive.4
International Work
A 2010 cooperation agreement with Chilean government agency CEFAA enabled joint study of the El Bosque Airport incident and subsequent radar–video correlations.8 NARCAP personnel have since briefed the FAA, the AIAA UAP IOC, and France's CNES-GEIPAN on the need for harmonised UAP data standards.9
Continuing Advocacy
Run entirely by volunteers and funded through donations, NARCAP campaigns for mandatory UAP awareness training in pilot recurrent curricula and promotes confidential incident reporting via its portal within ten days of occurrence to protect FOIA radar access windows.10