Sunday 8 April 2012

What has happened to NARCAP?

Hello and a Happy Easter to you all.

In drafting my cluster of initial posts, I wanted to review the content of the NARCAP web site. NARCAP stands (or at least stood) for the National Aviation Reporting Center [sic] on Anomalous Phenomena.

Set up by Dr. Richard Haines, a retired NASA research scientist, its aim was to allow 'pilots, air traffic controllers, radar operators and other aviation professionals to report, in confidence, an observation or incident involving unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP'.  Each report would be rigorously investigated and recorded adding to the body of data about phenomena in the sky that could subsequently be explained and prepared for by aviation professionals. NARCAP's key concern was with finding ways to improve aviation safety, especially in the context of a number of alleged hair-raising 'near-misses' between unidentified aerial phenomena and civilian or military aircraft.

Dr. Haines' background and credentials gave him unprecedented access to and cooperation with official and commercial stakeholders in the aviation community. This access allowed for a large body of solid, reliable data to gathered on UAP incidents. As an intriguing by-product, data was gathered on thousands of cases (over 3000 I read somewhere recently) for which there is - as yet - no conventional explanation, the most famous of which remains the O' Hare International Airport incident

Rather oddly,  the NARCAP site currently appears to be off-line with no apparent explanation. After having carried out an internet trawl, I've yet to see information about the apparent closure of this site.  The cached snapshot is supposedly as it appeared on 3 April 2012. I hope this is just down to a technical issue and not anything more ominous or final.

In the meantime, here is a clip of one of Dr. Haines' video interviews about a specific case.

7 comments:

  1. Like you, I noticed that narcap.org seems to have disappeared literally overnight. I've attempted to contact Ted Roe, but as of yet, I've not succeeded.

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    1. Thank you for your comment Roger - and congratulations! You are the first person to post a comment to my humble Blog.

      I'd be interested to hear if your enquiry with Ted bears any fruit.

      I still see nothing public about the apparent website closure. If anyone out there knows something, please clue me in so that I can spread the word.

      Thanks

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    2. I assume you know by now, Jonathan, but just in case, the site, narcap.org, is back up. Ted never returned my calls, so the mystery of what occurred to the site, remains a unknown.

      First person? Wow!

      Honestly, a Google search revealed your blog as the only site to mention the odd disappearance of NARCAP (other than my own). I'm somewhat surprised that the search results didn't include inquiries on other sites. One would expect more than two people to notice the missing narcap.org site.

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  2. I hadn't picked this up so thank you Roger - have just flagged this in a brief new post. I agree it seems a bit odd that an internet trawl didn't reveal anyone else noticing the site was down.

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  3. Anytime, Jonathan. Thanks for the mention in your other other post. I've placed a link to this specific blog post in my website's forum. Thus, I can find your blog anytime. Once the website team has more time, we'll add some sort of page for links to other websites, and we'll be adding your blog to that page.

    I'll be dropping in from time to time, so see you then. By the way, I enjoyed the well written content in your blog.

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  4. Hi Roger. Thanks for popping the link into your website. You'll have seen my latest post where NARCAP suggests the closure was supposedly to do with "...changes in the hosting". By way of return, I'll add your site to those on the right hand index list of my Blog.

    Many thanks again for your kind comments.

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  5. is the site down again?

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