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least some pilots would see dazzling light displays while flying at night, or maybe giant triangles in the daytime, or metallic discs speeding by the cockpit window. In fact, wouldn't they be more likely to see them than anyone else? Perhaps passengers might even be at risk if they found themselves too close to an unpredictable unidentified flying object. One could easily imagine that witnessing such a thing at 35,000 feet— something with no wings but much faster and more agile than the lumbering jet aircraft holding one prisoner—must be considerably more unnerving than viewing the same object with one's feet safely planted on the ground. But beyond simply seeing one, could they be dangerous? Much to my amazement, I quickly discovered that a ninety-page report dealing with this very question had just been released by the world's most qualified researcher of pilot encounters with UFOs. Even better, I recognized that this well-documented scientific study could serve as the "news hook" for another story, in the same way that the COMETA Report had done before. "Aviation Safety in America—A Previously Neglected Factor" by Dr. Richard Haines, a retired senior research scientist from NASA Ames Research Center and former chief of NASA's Space Human Factors Branch, was a mind-boggling study, with more than fifty pages of case summaries involving pilots and their crews, [1] That "neglected factor," of course, referred to unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. [2] The report featured over one hundred cases of pilot encounters with a variety of these UAP, including fifty-six near misses, all affecting the safety of aircraft. Most cases involved multiple witnesses, and many were backed by ground radio communications and radar corroboration. Experienced pilots presented accounts of objects, ranging from silver discs to green fireballs, flying loops around passenger aircraft, pacing alongside despite pilots' evasive attempts, or flooding cockpits with blinding light. Dr. Haines documented cases of electromagnetic effects on aircraft navigation and operating systems linked to nearby UFOs, or a pilot's sudden dive to avoid a collision. He wrote that a crew's ability to perform its duties safely is disrupted when crew members are faced with "extremely bizarre, unexpected and prolonged luminous and/or solid phenomena cavorting near their aircraft." The danger posed by the phenomenon in flight lies more with the human response to it than from the actions of the UAP itself, 1 a 1 a4 1 because the objects do not appear to be aggressive or hostile, and seem to be able to avoid collisions by executing last-minute high-speed turns in a oao4 flash. Dr. Haines, who has authored more than seventy papers in leading scientific journals and published over twenty-five U.S. government reports for NASA, specialized in human performance, technology design, and human-computer interaction while at NASA. Having contributed to the U.S. Gemini and Apollo projects, as well as Skylab and Space Station, in 1988 he retired from his twenty-one years as a senior aerospace scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. Subsequently he worked as a senior