Washington D.C. UFO Sightings, 1952
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The summer of 1952 had the greatest wave of UFO sightings since the first flying saucers of the late 1940s, and the Air Force was under mounting pressure to produce an explanation. Then, for two nights in July, a group of UFOs entered restricted airspace over Washington D.C. and triggered a media frenzy. The public reaction to the Washington sightings proved that the global fascination with UFOs would not go away, and prompted the Air Force to retreat from its responsibility to answer to the public on this enduring mystery.
The First Sighting
Project Blue Book, the UFO investigation group of the US Air Force, received reports in record numbers in the summer of 1952. Ominously, an unnamed scientist told Blue Book Director, Edward Ruppelt, that he would see “the granddaddy of all UFO sightings” in a few days, and that it would “probably” occur in Washington.
A few days later, it happened. Around 11:40 on the night of July 19, 1952, a radar operator at Washington National Airport began tracking eight uncorrelated targets southeast of Andrews Air Force Base, moving 160 to 210 kph. Suddenly, two of them darted off at tremendous speed, with one being clocked at over 11,000 kph. Another operator corroborated the reading from a second radar at the airport. The operators contacted Andrews Air Force base in Maryland where it was found that flight controllers there were tracking the same targets on their radar scope. They also saw three tailed, orange lights from their tower, moving erratically. Later in the morning, the tower operators at Andrews saw a “huge fiery-orange sphere” hanging over their radio range station that controllers at national were tracking on radar.
The three radar stations continued to track 8 to 10 targets over the next 6 hours, though they didn’t always track the same objects simultaneously. At one point, however, all three radar stations tracked a target north of Washington, discussed it over the intercom, then watched it disappear from all their screens at the exact same time. The objects entered prohibited air space over the White House and the Capitol building, though they exhibited no hostile intentions, and moved with no apparent purpose. They seemed to move more frequently when there were aircraft around, however.
Airline pilots also saw strange lights that night. At one point, both radar controllers at National Airport tracked a target that an incoming pilot had seen from his cockpit at precisely the location indicated on radar. The operators watched the target move on radar at exactly the same time that the pilot saw it speed away. The same pilot saw six more identical lights in the next 14 minutes. Two hours later, another pilot reported a light trailing his plane. The object was also seen on radar at National airport, and when it left the plane’s side, it moved on radar as well.
Jet fighters were requested several times for an intercept. Unfortunately, by the time that one arrived, after the third request, the objects had already disappeared, and the pilot was never able to see the objects from his cockpit.
The Second Sighting
The sightings made front page headlines, and quickly became the biggest news story in the U.S. They caused a stir at the Pentagon as well. Even President Truman had requested an explanation. Eventually, intelligence decided that Ruppelt perform an investigation. However, he was denied a car and any travel reimbursements from the Air Force, and was required to report back to Wright Patterson Base before he could interview all the witnesses around Washington.
For a week, new reports were pouring in to Blue Book at a rate of 30 or 40 a day. Then, the targets returned on radar. Around 10:30 p.m. on July 26, the same radar controllers at both National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked the targets as they were spread out in a semi-circle around Washington. All reporters and photographers were cleared out of the radar room as controllers requested an intercept around 11:30 p.m..
But once again, the jets arrived too late, and the targets disappeared. At this point, people around Newport News, Virginia called in to report strange, spinning lights of alternating colours. Tower operators at Langley Air Force base then saw a similar light, and called for an interceptor, which also saw the light before it suddenly disappeared, “like somebody turning off a light bulb,” in the pilot’s words. Several times after this the pilot was able to lock-on to the target on radar, but the object consistently darted away before he ever got a close inspection.
Before sunrise, the objects reappeared on the radar scopes at Washington National, and the F-94s returned. Though the targets remained on radar this time, they repeatedly disappeared from view around 3 km away, before the pilots could see anything more than a point of light. The jets’ radar operators were not able to track the targets on their radar screens. They gave up the chase just before dawn, and the objects never reappeared.
Aftermath
The second night of sightings made front-page headlines once again, and the media demanded an explanation. Ruppelt claimed that he nearly incited a riot amongst members of the press when he refused to comment on the sightings at a hotel lobby in Washington. New UFO reports came in by the hour, and Ruppelt even received a call from the President’s aide wondering what was going on.
Under pressure, the Air Force held a press conference at the Pentagon on July 29, just three days after the second incident. It was one of the largest and longest lasting press conferences in American history, and the largest since World War II. Here, Major General John Samford discussed the lingering unknowns in the Blue Book files, and suggested the visual sightings were misidentified stars or meteors. He then introduced technical intelligence Captain Roy James to suggest the possibility that the radar returns were generated by a temperature inversion, a common meteorological phenomenon that caused radar waves to bend downwards and pick up objects on the ground. Strangely the General then gives airtime to Donald Keyhoe, fiction writer, ufologist, and intense critic of the Air Force, to explain that UFOs were really alien spaceships.
The conference succeeded in satisfying media curiosity, but to the Air Force, the lead-up was a demonstration in the dangers of public hysteria. The volume of UFO reports at the time of the Washington sightings was so great that some intelligent officials feared that the UFO phenomenon could be exploited to overwhelm military channels of communication during an enemy invasion. As a precaution, the Air Force introduced some new policies aimed at diminishing the public's fascination with unidentified flying objects. Air Force Regulation 200-2, for example, stripped Blue Book of its investigative function, and classified all radar scope photographs of UFOs. It also prevented officers from discussing any cases for which they could not already provide an explanation.
The CIA also did their part to delegitimize the UFO phenomenon by assembling the Robertson Panel, a team of scientists who watched three days of presentations and ruled that UFO research was scientifically without merit. The panel delivered a secret report that almost perfectly mirrored the CIA’s own objectives on the UFO issue, including the desire to debunk more sightings and reduce public interest through education and entertainment media.
Explanation
None of the radar operators agreed with the temperature inversion explanation. Temperature inversions occurred almost every day that summer, but never before or after had they caused these sightings. Weather-related targets are often amorphous and inconsistent, but on the second night, sharp and distinct targets had been tracked continuously for almost two hours. Technicians confirmed during the sightings that the radar units were not malfunctioning.
The radar operators at both airports all insisted that the targets were caused by the radar waves bouncing off of solid, probably metallic, objects. But none of them were willing to speak out against the official explanation. Ruppelt also had good reason to believe that the tower operators at Andrews had been “convinced” to drop their story of a fiery, orange sphere over the radio range station. One of the F-94 pilots also changed his story after talking to Ruppelt, and wrote in an official report that he’d only seen lights reflected off a layer of haze.
Even the Air Force did not seem to believe its own explanation, as the official Blue Book files list the two Washington sightings as unknown. At least one pilot was convinced that the radars had been tracking a steamboat on the Potomac river. It’s also suspicious that although many of the objects appeared in the areas where the Washington National and Andrews’ radar scopes overlap, rarely did all three stations pick up the same target.
Still, many of the other reports that poured in that summer were even more compelling than those from Washington. The night of the second sighting, a similar incident occurred in California: another F-94 there got within visual range of a large, yellowish-orange light that darted away at tremendous speed every time the F-94 got near weapons’ range. The night of the conference, a target appeared on a radar screen in Michigan, and an F-94 went out to intercept. The pilot and his radar operator chased a large ball of light that changed colours, shrank in size, and made rapid changes of speed. Both the jet and ground radar tracked its movements.
Summary
The sightings over Washington D.C. in 1952 were one of the best early examples of multiple witness sightings that were also correlated with targets on multiple, independent radar units. It was one of many radar cases in the Blue Book archives that the Air Force explicitly denied having.
Whatever the U.S. Air Force really knew about UFOs, their public stance on the issue changed dramatically after the Washington sightings. Project Blue Book was slowly turned into a public relations front, and the Air Force became more active in their effort to debunk UFOs and downplay the importance of investigating sighting reports. The Washington sightings were among the last great cases before UFOs stopped making national news, and before the Air Force stopped treating them as matters of public concern.
Sources:
Edward Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Doubleday, 1956.
Richard Dolan. UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up, 1941-1973. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2002. 1938): 247-260.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
UFO Case Review contains sound design with elements downloaded from Freesound.org. Typewriter_2rows.wav, Uploaded by Fatson under the Attribution License.
The summer of 1952 had the greatest wave of UFO sightings since the first flying saucers of the late 1940s, and the Air Force was under mounting pressure to produce an explanation. Then, for two nights in July, a group of UFOs entered restricted airspace over Washington D.C. and triggered a media frenzy. The public reaction to the Washington sightings proved that the global fascination with UFOs would not go away, and prompted the Air Force to retreat from its responsibility to answer to the public on this enduring mystery.
The First Sighting
Project Blue Book, the UFO investigation group of the US Air Force, received reports in record numbers in the summer of 1952. Ominously, an unnamed scientist told Blue Book Director, Edward Ruppelt, that he would see “the granddaddy of all UFO sightings” in a few days, and that it would “probably” occur in Washington.
A few days later, it happened. Around 11:40 on the night of July 19, 1952, a radar operator at Washington National Airport began tracking eight uncorrelated targets southeast of Andrews Air Force Base, moving 160 to 210 kph. Suddenly, two of them darted off at tremendous speed, with one being clocked at over 11,000 kph. Another operator corroborated the reading from a second radar at the airport. The operators contacted Andrews Air Force base in Maryland where it was found that flight controllers there were tracking the same targets on their radar scope. They also saw three tailed, orange lights from their tower, moving erratically. Later in the morning, the tower operators at Andrews saw a “huge fiery-orange sphere” hanging over their radio range station that controllers at national were tracking on radar.
The three radar stations continued to track 8 to 10 targets over the next 6 hours, though they didn’t always track the same objects simultaneously. At one point, however, all three radar stations tracked a target north of Washington, discussed it over the intercom, then watched it disappear from all their screens at the exact same time. The objects entered prohibited air space over the White House and the Capitol building, though they exhibited no hostile intentions, and moved with no apparent purpose. They seemed to move more frequently when there were aircraft around, however.
Airline pilots also saw strange lights that night. At one point, both radar controllers at National Airport tracked a target that an incoming pilot had seen from his cockpit at precisely the location indicated on radar. The operators watched the target move on radar at exactly the same time that the pilot saw it speed away. The same pilot saw six more identical lights in the next 14 minutes. Two hours later, another pilot reported a light trailing his plane. The object was also seen on radar at National airport, and when it left the plane’s side, it moved on radar as well.
Jet fighters were requested several times for an intercept. Unfortunately, by the time that one arrived, after the third request, the objects had already disappeared, and the pilot was never able to see the objects from his cockpit.
The Second Sighting
The sightings made front page headlines, and quickly became the biggest news story in the U.S. They caused a stir at the Pentagon as well. Even President Truman had requested an explanation. Eventually, intelligence decided that Ruppelt perform an investigation. However, he was denied a car and any travel reimbursements from the Air Force, and was required to report back to Wright Patterson Base before he could interview all the witnesses around Washington.
For a week, new reports were pouring in to Blue Book at a rate of 30 or 40 a day. Then, the targets returned on radar. Around 10:30 p.m. on July 26, the same radar controllers at both National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked the targets as they were spread out in a semi-circle around Washington. All reporters and photographers were cleared out of the radar room as controllers requested an intercept around 11:30 p.m..
But once again, the jets arrived too late, and the targets disappeared. At this point, people around Newport News, Virginia called in to report strange, spinning lights of alternating colours. Tower operators at Langley Air Force base then saw a similar light, and called for an interceptor, which also saw the light before it suddenly disappeared, “like somebody turning off a light bulb,” in the pilot’s words. Several times after this the pilot was able to lock-on to the target on radar, but the object consistently darted away before he ever got a close inspection.
Before sunrise, the objects reappeared on the radar scopes at Washington National, and the F-94s returned. Though the targets remained on radar this time, they repeatedly disappeared from view around 3 km away, before the pilots could see anything more than a point of light. The jets’ radar operators were not able to track the targets on their radar screens. They gave up the chase just before dawn, and the objects never reappeared.
Aftermath
The second night of sightings made front-page headlines once again, and the media demanded an explanation. Ruppelt claimed that he nearly incited a riot amongst members of the press when he refused to comment on the sightings at a hotel lobby in Washington. New UFO reports came in by the hour, and Ruppelt even received a call from the President’s aide wondering what was going on.
Under pressure, the Air Force held a press conference at the Pentagon on July 29, just three days after the second incident. It was one of the largest and longest lasting press conferences in American history, and the largest since World War II. Here, Major General John Samford discussed the lingering unknowns in the Blue Book files, and suggested the visual sightings were misidentified stars or meteors. He then introduced technical intelligence Captain Roy James to suggest the possibility that the radar returns were generated by a temperature inversion, a common meteorological phenomenon that caused radar waves to bend downwards and pick up objects on the ground. Strangely the General then gives airtime to Donald Keyhoe, fiction writer, ufologist, and intense critic of the Air Force, to explain that UFOs were really alien spaceships.
The conference succeeded in satisfying media curiosity, but to the Air Force, the lead-up was a demonstration in the dangers of public hysteria. The volume of UFO reports at the time of the Washington sightings was so great that some intelligent officials feared that the UFO phenomenon could be exploited to overwhelm military channels of communication during an enemy invasion. As a precaution, the Air Force introduced some new policies aimed at diminishing the public's fascination with unidentified flying objects. Air Force Regulation 200-2, for example, stripped Blue Book of its investigative function, and classified all radar scope photographs of UFOs. It also prevented officers from discussing any cases for which they could not already provide an explanation.
The CIA also did their part to delegitimize the UFO phenomenon by assembling the Robertson Panel, a team of scientists who watched three days of presentations and ruled that UFO research was scientifically without merit. The panel delivered a secret report that almost perfectly mirrored the CIA’s own objectives on the UFO issue, including the desire to debunk more sightings and reduce public interest through education and entertainment media.
Explanation
None of the radar operators agreed with the temperature inversion explanation. Temperature inversions occurred almost every day that summer, but never before or after had they caused these sightings. Weather-related targets are often amorphous and inconsistent, but on the second night, sharp and distinct targets had been tracked continuously for almost two hours. Technicians confirmed during the sightings that the radar units were not malfunctioning.
The radar operators at both airports all insisted that the targets were caused by the radar waves bouncing off of solid, probably metallic, objects. But none of them were willing to speak out against the official explanation. Ruppelt also had good reason to believe that the tower operators at Andrews had been “convinced” to drop their story of a fiery, orange sphere over the radio range station. One of the F-94 pilots also changed his story after talking to Ruppelt, and wrote in an official report that he’d only seen lights reflected off a layer of haze.
Even the Air Force did not seem to believe its own explanation, as the official Blue Book files list the two Washington sightings as unknown. At least one pilot was convinced that the radars had been tracking a steamboat on the Potomac river. It’s also suspicious that although many of the objects appeared in the areas where the Washington National and Andrews’ radar scopes overlap, rarely did all three stations pick up the same target.
Still, many of the other reports that poured in that summer were even more compelling than those from Washington. The night of the second sighting, a similar incident occurred in California: another F-94 there got within visual range of a large, yellowish-orange light that darted away at tremendous speed every time the F-94 got near weapons’ range. The night of the conference, a target appeared on a radar screen in Michigan, and an F-94 went out to intercept. The pilot and his radar operator chased a large ball of light that changed colours, shrank in size, and made rapid changes of speed. Both the jet and ground radar tracked its movements.
Summary
The sightings over Washington D.C. in 1952 were one of the best early examples of multiple witness sightings that were also correlated with targets on multiple, independent radar units. It was one of many radar cases in the Blue Book archives that the Air Force explicitly denied having.
Whatever the U.S. Air Force really knew about UFOs, their public stance on the issue changed dramatically after the Washington sightings. Project Blue Book was slowly turned into a public relations front, and the Air Force became more active in their effort to debunk UFOs and downplay the importance of investigating sighting reports. The Washington sightings were among the last great cases before UFOs stopped making national news, and before the Air Force stopped treating them as matters of public concern.
Sources:
Edward Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Doubleday, 1956.
Richard Dolan. UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up, 1941-1973. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2002. 1938): 247-260.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
UFO Case Review contains sound design with elements downloaded from Freesound.org. Typewriter_2rows.wav, Uploaded by Fatson under the Attribution License.