Washington, D.C. UFO Incident, 1952
The Washington UFO incident（1952 Washington D.C. UFO incident） was an incident, on the nights of July 12 to July 19, 1952, over Washington, of unidentified flying objects appearing in the sky. That night many unidentified flying objects appeared overhead, and Washington National Airport‘s radar picked up 7 unidentified flying objects. They flew past the White House and the United States Capitol and other buildings, while U.S. military fighters tried to intercept them, but the unidentified flying objects moved far faster than the fighters and then, as a group, disappeared. Afterward, government reports also acknowledged that the incident was caused by unidentified flying objects.
The Washington UFO incident (1952Washington,D.C.UFOincident), also called the Washington UFO flap (Washingtonflap), the Washington National Airport sightings (WashingtonNationalAirportSightings), or the Invasion of Washington (InvasionofWashington), refers to a series of reports of unidentified flying objects over Washington, D.C., from July 12 to July 29, 1952.
Newspapers in 1952 used cartoons to show how local residents reported the blips found on National Airport radar.
The best-known sightings fell on the weekends of two weeks running, July 19-20 and July 26-27. UFO historian Curtis Peebles (CurtisPeebles) called the episode “the climax of the 1952 UFO flap” (theclimaxofthe1952(UFO)flap)——“Project Blue Book and the Air Force had never before, and would never again, experience such a flood of unidentified-flying-object reports.”
At 9:35 a.m. on July 16, 1952, U.S. Coast Guard photographer Shell R. Alpert took a photograph at the air station in Salem, Massachusetts. The unidentified flying objects were said to have passed in a “V” formation (official U.S. Coast Guard photograph: 5554. Library of Congress control number: 2007680837)
On Saturday, July 19, at 11:40 p.m., an air-traffic controller at Washington National Airport (now Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport) named Edward Nugent (EdwardNugent) noticed seven objects appear on his radar. They were 15 miles (24 kilometers) south-southeast of the city. No known aircraft were in that area, and the objects were not following any established route. Nugent’s supervisor, Harry Barnes (HarryBarnes), a senior air-traffic controller at the airport, watched the objects on Nugent’s radar scope. He later wrote: We knew at once that a very strange situation existed…… Compared with ordinary aircraft, their movements were extremely violent.
Barnes had two controllers check Nugent’s radar; they found it working normally. Barnes then called the radar-equipped control tower. Tower controllers Howard Cocklin (HowardCocklin) and Joe Zacko (JoeZacko) said unidentified flashes had appeared on their radar screens as well. They also saw “a bright light hovering in the sky…… (it) flew off, climbing sharply away at an incredible speed.” Cocklin said to Zacko, “Did you see that? What on earth was it?” At that moment, still more objects appeared in every sector of the radar scope.
As they passed over the White House and the United States Capitol, Barnes called Andrews Air Force Base, 10 miles from Washington National Airport. Although the base reported that it saw nothing unusual on radar, a pilot soon called the base control tower and reported a strange object. William Brady (WilliamBrady), a pilot in the tower, then saw an object that “seemed to be an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail…… (it) was unlike anything I had ever seen.” When Brady tried to put the rest of the staff on alert, the strange object “left at an incredible speed.”
On a runway at Washington National Airport, Capital Airlines pilot S.C. Pierman (S.C.Pierman) sat in the cockpit of a DC-4 waiting for clearance to take off. After he saw an object he took for a meteor, he was told that control-tower radar had already detected many unidentified objects closing on his position. Within 14 minutes Pierman observed six objects—“white, tailless, fast-moving lights.” While he watched, Pierman was in radio contact with Barnes.
Barnes later recounted, “Every sighting coincided with a radar return we could see near Pierman’s aircraft. When Pierman reported that the light had raced away, it vanished from our view as well.” At the same time, at Andrews Air Force Base, tower personnel were tracking on radar things they took to be unidentified objects. Others were doubtful, and were soon able to confirm that those objects were stars and meteors. Staff Sergeant Charles Davenport (CharlesDavenport), however, observed an orange-red light to the south; the light “seemed to hang motionless, then suddenly changed direction and altitude…… This happened several times.”
For a time, two radar centers at Washington National Airport and the radar at Andrews Air Force Base tracked an object hovering above a radio beacon. The object disappeared from the radar at all three centers at the same moment. Shortly before 3:00 a.m., just as two U.S. Air Force F-94 jet fighters from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware were arriving over Washington, every object vanished from the radar at Washington National Airport. When the fighters left for lack of fuel, however, the objects came back. That convinced Barnes that “those unidentified flying objects could monitor radio communications and respond accordingly.” At 5:30 a.m., radar detected the objects for the last time.
The great number of unidentified-flying-object reports in 1952 alarmed the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. Both believed a hostile country could deliberately swamp the United States with false unidentified-flying-object reports, create a mass panic, and then strike by stealth. On September 24, 1952, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence sent a memorandum to CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith (WalterBedellSmith). The memorandum said: “The flying-saucer situation…… bears on national security…… is a phenomenon the public is watching…… and carries the potential to set off mass hysteria and panic.”
The memorandum was the work of the physicist Dr. Howard Robertson, chair of the Robertson Panel. The panel was composed of eminent scientists, who spent four days reviewing the “best” unidentified-flying-object cases collected by Project Blue Book. It rejected nearly every case it examined, because the cases indicated nothing anomalous and nothing that threatened national security.
The panel made one fiercely disputed assessment: the Air Force and Project Blue Book needed to spend less time analyzing and studying unidentified-flying-object reports, and could spend more time making those reports public. It recommended that the Air Force and Project Blue Book act to “strip unidentified flying objects of the special status they have acquired, and of the aura of mystery they have unfortunately gained.” On the panel’s advice, Project Blue Book rarely published any unidentified-flying-object case that had not been classed as “solved”; unsolved cases were seldom mentioned by the Air Force.
