Richard Haines

Richard F. Haines is a psychologist, retired from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, who has served on the Safety and the Human Factors Committees of the Aerospace Medical Association and is a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators. His current interests involve unidentified flying objects, especially pilot reports of them.

Between 1967 and 1986, he was a research scientist in human factors at NASA Ames Research Center. After retirement, he joined the faculty of San Jose State University as an Associate Professor of Psychology, while working part time as a scientist in the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science and continuing to consult to NASA regarding laboratory automation.

"His interest in UFO phenomena spans over 20 years with special interests in sightings by pilots, analysis of photographic evidence, and data on Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind. He claims that, "these three areas contain the type of data that will bring us to a successful discovery of the core nature of the phenomena. He recently founded (and co directs) the "Joint American - Soviet Aerial Anomaly Federation" (JASASF)"

He participated in the 1997 symposium on Physical Evidence from UFO Reports, supported by the LSE Fund and conducted by the Society for Scientific Exploration.

One of his papers discusses the analysis of UFO photography, and observations on best photographic and interpretive practice. "...one must be careful to fully document seemingly unimportant details concerning the person taking the photograph, the social situation which surrounded the photograph(s), the camera-lens-film data, the developing-printing- enlarging activities and the manner in which the photograph came to the attention of the investigator. Since such a photograph image is only as credible as the photographer who took it, one must exercise "due diligence" in each of the above areas. Many older UFO photographs remain useless artifacts of the UFO enigma because the investigator did not or could not obtain all of the relevant background information. "