6.6 The Summer of 1952: UFOs Over Many Areas Including Washington, D.C

For additional details, please see the official government documents regarding this incident, which the Disclosure Project obtained through a FOIA request. These are found in Appendix I (Document A1.4).

6.6 The Summer of 1952: UFOs Over Many Areas Including Washington, D.C.

One of the most frequent rhetorical questions posed about UFOs is: if they are real, why don’t they just land on the White House lawn? Actually, they came pretty close to doing just that on two consecutive weekends in July of 1952.

The summer of 1952 was one of the most prolific for reported sightings of UFOs. There had been a significant number of reports flowing in all along the Eastern seaboard and from the Midwestern states for weeks. Intelligence officers grew increasingly more uneasy over the sharp rise in sightings. Of special concern was that many of these statements were coming from civilians. Prior to that fateful summer, most sightings had come from military personnel and had been kept from the public. But now the citizens themselves, including commercial airline pilots had become sources of information:

July 10, 1962: A National Airlines plane over Quantico, Virginia observed a light at 2,000 feet which the crew stated was too slow to be a big meteor and too fast to be a lighted balloon.

July 12, 1952: Former Air Force jet pilot Jack Green in Delphi, Indiana was one of many who witnessed a blue-white saucer-shaped object high in the sky.

July 13, 1952: Thousands of people in Indianapolis witness a huge oval speed over the city at 5,000 feet, frightening many. An Eastern Air Lines captain, an Air Force pilot, and a private pilot all saw a controlled craft initially flying much higher which descended to about 5,000 feet and flew over the city of Indianapolis. This was the first low-range sighting witnessed by thousands of people, at least in the era of UFO sightings that began in the 40s. Just prior to its appearance over Indiana, possibly the same object - certainly one bearing the same description - was seen on Air Force radar at Kirksville, Missouri. It was estimated to be flying at 1,700 mph and to be the size of a B-36 bomber.

July 13, 1962: A commercial pilot and crew, flying at 11,000 feet sixty miles southwest of Washington, spotted a light below them. The light rose to the same altitude as the plane, hovered to the left of the plane for several minutes, then rose rapidly when the pilot turned on the plane’s landing lights.

July 14, 1952: A PanAm flight headed south to Miami from New York reported observing glowing orange UFOs near Newport News, Virginia. (Note: The first formation consisted of six discs were seen; two more were seen soon after the first formation flew off.) As the formation approached the plane, the lead disc turned on its edge. The others instantly did the same. All the discs flipped to horizontal, changed direction and sped off.

July 17, 1952: An American Airlines flight near Denver received a radio transmission warning of a craft ahead. Captain Paul Carpenter and crew observed four saucers in formation flying at an estimated 3,000 mph.

From the ground:

July 16, 1952: Langley Air Force Base was the scene for a sighting of two large amber lights. One of the two observers was a well-respected civilian scientist from Langley. The lights

made a 180Ν degree turn, returned to where they were first spotted, jockeyed with each other, were joined by a third light, started climbing and when doing so, were joined by several other lights - all flying in formation. It is estimated that the entire event lasted three minutes.

UFOs Buzz the White House: At 11:40 pm on July 19, 1952, dual radar stations at Washington National Airport picked up seven objects east and south of Andrews Air Force Base. Andrews also picked up the targets on their radar. Conventional aircraft were quickly ruled out as the cause; these targets would fly at 100-130 mph, suddenly accelerate to extremely high speeds and leave the area. One object was clocked at 7,200 miles per hour. Reportedly, the objects appeared in every sector of the radarscopes, including flying through restricted air space over the White House and Capitol building. The objects returned several times throughout the night and were also seen by airline pilots (at midnight and 2:00 a.m.), air traffic control tower operators, and jet fighter pilots who were dispatched from Andrews.

Edward Ruppelt wrote:

But the clincher came in the wee hours of the morning, when an ARTC traffic controller called the control tower at Andrews AFB and told the tower operators that ARTC had a target just south of their tower, directly over the Andrews Radio range station. The tower operators looked and there was a ‘huge fiery-orange sphere’ hovering in the sky directly over their range station.62

Apparently, Air Force Intelligence was not informed about the events until they, along with everyone else in the area, read the newspaper headlines the next morning: INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS OVER WASHINGTON, D.C. Even a major at the Pentagon stated to Project Blue Book investigator Edward Ruppelt that all he knew about the events was what he’d read in the newspaper. A full investigation ensued immediately under the supervision of said major — Dewey Fournet. The air traffic controllers at Washington National told intelligence officers that the targets they observed were caused by radar waves bouncing off a hard, solid object — these were not temperature inversions. The radar operator Air Forceman at Andrews and the two veteran airline pilots concurred.

Second Washington Flap: Serendipitously, the second wave of sightings over Washington occurred seven days later, nearly to the hour. Those seven intervening days had been far from quiet; UFO reports were flowing into Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio at the rate of thirty to forty per day — triple the previous numbers. Edward Ruppelt claims that "many were as good, if not better, than the Washington incident." The most outstandingly unexplained of those reports included amber-red lights observed over the Guided Missile Long-Range Proving Ground at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida; a rapidly moving large, round, silver spinning object in Uvalde, Texas; and military jets unsuccessfully chasing UFOs over Los Alamos, New Mexico; Massachusetts (two events), and New Jersey.

A stunning prelude was the forerunner to the second wave over Washington. In the early evening of July 26, a saucer-shaped vehicle flashing red light winked in over the Naval Air Station in Key West, Florida, reportedly seen by hundreds. The events then speed up the Eastern Seaboard, focusing again on the nation’s capitol. There, beginning around 9:00 p.m., Washington area radar operators were once more picking up ‘bogies’ similar to the previous weekend’s mayhem. Within an hour, four or five UFOs at once were a continuous presence on the radar

62 The Report on Unidentified Flying Saucers, Ruppelt, Edward J., Doubleday & Company, New York, 1956.

screens. Military jets were dispatched and commercial airlines were rerouted. According to Ruppelt, the press who had gathered at the control tower at Washington National were asked to leave. He wrote:

When I later found out that the press had been dismissed on the grounds that the procedures used in an intercept were classified, I knew that this was absurd because any ham radio operator worth his salt could build equipment and listen in on any intercept. The real reason for the press dismissal, I learned, was not that a few people in the radar room were positive that this night would be the big night in UFO history--the night when a pilot would close in on and get a good look at a UFO--and they didn’t want the press to be in on it.63

However, the extraterrestrial UFO pilots had other ideas. As soon as the F-94 jets were airborne, around midnight, the UFOs all vanished from the radar scopes. The pilots could make no visual contact despite good visibility and weather. However, it was later learned that Langley AFB and civilians in the area had visuals on colored, rotating lights in the sky. But — surprise! — as soon as the military jets left the area, the UFOs popped back up on the Washington radar screens once more. One F-94 pilot who did see a light and was vectored to it by air traffic control reported that it went out as soon as he got near, "like somebody turning off a lightbulb." Brief radar lock-ons were obtained by the pilot.64

The UFOs continued to play games with the F-94s, staying put while they approached, then speeding away or vanishing. The UFOs played "catch me if you can" until the jets had nearly depleted their fuel, which coincided with the approaching sunrise. Once it got light, the UFOs had gone for good. Once more, the radar operators confirmed that they believed the targets were caused by solid, metallic, moving objects and were not due to any weather aberrations. And, once more, newspaper headlines were devoted to the UFOs. In the Pentagon, it was mass confusion, bolstered by the fact that new UFO reports were flowing in which verified visual sightings in the same areas where the radar targets had been located. This did little to support the Pentagon’s working hypothesis that freakish weather conditions had caused the radar bogies. And, prior to the Washington flap, very few reports indicated both radar and visual lock-on.

By now, there was tremendous pressure to tell the public something. Rather lame excuses by the military did nothing to stem the tide of outcry flowing into the Pentagon, additionally fueled by more significant sighting reports coming in from coast to coast and by the creeping suspicion that the Russians were perhaps involved. According to researcher Donald Keyhoe, Director of Air Force Intelligence, Major General John A. Samford grappled with several false explanations which the Pentagon hoped would dowse the escalating agitation of John and Jane Q. Public. Calmly and glibly explaining the saucers away as various quirky natural phenomena, while admitting that "twenty percent" of the cases remained unsolved, the General went on to state that no pattern had remotely been revealed that indicated any threat or menace to the United States. The spin to debunk the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft and visitors was printed by newspapers all over the country. According to Donald Keyhoe, just as the presses were rolling out this yarn, the Air Force had jets chasing saucers over the Midwestern states. Keyhoe stated, "[O]ne case, if it had been made public that night, would have ruined the inversion answer and wrecked the debunking plan. But I didn’t learn this until weeks later."65 Yet, the denial --and ridicule--of all UFO cases continues to the present day.

63 Ibid, p. 164. 64 Flying Saucers from Outer Space, Keyhoe, Major Donald E., Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1953. 65 Ibid, p.88