Washington, D.C. UFO incident

1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident

Type	Case (radar-visual sightings)
Also known as	Washington flap; Washington National Airport Sightings; Invasion of Washington
Dates	12–29 July 1952; main nights 19–20 and 26–27 July
Radars	Washington National Airport (ARTC long-range and tower); Andrews AFB
Key witnesses	Harry Barnes, Edward Nugent, Howard Cocklin, Joe Zacko (CAA); Capt. S. C. Pierman (Capital Airlines); Lt. William Patterson (F-94 pilot)
Interceptors	F-94 Starfires from New Castle AFB, Delaware
Official explanation	Temperature inversions; stars, meteors and city lights (press conference, 29 July 1952)
Blue Book	Carried as "unknown" according to Ruppelt
Consequences	CIA study group; Robertson Panel (January 1953)

The 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident, also called the "Washington flap", the Washington National Airport Sightings or the "Invasion of Washington", was a series of radar and visual sightings of unidentified objects over the U.S. capital between 12 and 29 July 1952. It came at the peak of the largest UFO wave of the 1950s. The most publicised sightings came on the consecutive weekends of 19–20 and 26–27 July. Radars at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked unknown targets, including over the prohibited airspace above the White House and Capitol, and jet fighters were sent to intercept. The sightings pushed the Democratic National Convention off the front pages. The Air Force blamed temperature inversions. Project Blue Book's chief, Edward Ruppelt, wrote that the cases remained unknowns, and the episode alarmed the CIA, leading to the Robertson Panel. The historian Curtis Peebles called it "the climax of the 1952 flap".^[1][2]

The 1952 flap

The summer of 1952 saw an unprecedented wave of UFO reports and press attention. In the previous four years the Air Force had logged 615 reports, and during the 1952 flap it received more than 717. Ruppelt later recalled that in six months of 1952, 148 of the nation's leading newspapers carried more than 16,000 items about flying saucers. On 3 April the Associated Press reported that Life magazine would reveal the Air Force's serious interest. Life's article "Have We Visitors From Space?", in its 7 April issue with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, seriously considered extraterrestrial spaceships and is believed to have fed the summer's reports. In June Look carried the astrophysicist Donald Menzel's theory that saucers were mirages caused by temperature inversions.^[1]

Reports had been building around Washington. On 10 July a National Airlines crew near Quantico, Virginia, saw a light "too bright to be a lighted balloon and too slow to be a big meteor". On 13 July another airliner crew 60 miles southwest of Washington saw a light rise to their level, hover, and climb steeply away when the pilot turned on his landing lights. On 14 July a Pan American crew reported eight UFOs near Newport News. Two nights later a prominent aerodynamicist from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics laboratory at Langley watched amber lights manoeuvre over Hampton Roads. A few days before the first big sighting, a scientist told Ruppelt that from the trend of reports, Blue Book was "sitting right on top of a big keg full of loaded flying saucers". He predicted that within days there would be "the granddaddy of all UFO sightings... probably Washington."^[2]

19–20 July

At 11:40 p.m. on Saturday 19 July, Edward Nugent, an air traffic controller at Washington National Airport, saw seven objects on his radarscope. They were about 15 miles south-southwest of the city, where no known aircraft were flying, and followed no established flight paths. The long-range Air Route Traffic Control (ARTC) radar, with a 100-mile range, controlled all traffic approaching Washington. The airport tower had a shorter-range set, as did Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles east, and all were linked by intercom. The senior controller, Harry Barnes, watched the targets. "We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed... their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft," he wrote. The targets loafed along at 100 to 130 mph, then two streaked out of range in sudden bursts of speed. A technician found the radar in perfect working order.^[1][2]

Barnes called the tower, where controllers Howard Cocklin and Joe Zacko also had unidentified blips. They saw a hovering "bright light" that left at incredible speed. "Did you see that? What the hell was that?" Cocklin asked. Soon targets appeared in every sector of the scope, including over the White House and the Capitol, and one was clocked at 7,000 mph. Barnes called Andrews, which at first had nothing on its radar. Then an airman called the Andrews tower to report a strange object, and Airman William Brady saw "an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail... unlike anything I had ever seen before" that "took off at an unbelievable speed". Staff Sergeant Charles Davenport saw an orange-red light to the south that "would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude". Some Andrews tower personnel suspected stars and meteors, and in one case proved it. Once, all three radars tracked a target hovering about three miles north of the Riverdale radio beacon. After thirty seconds it vanished from all three scopes at the same moment. In the early hours, the Andrews tower saw a "huge fiery-orange sphere" hovering over its radio range station, where ARTC said it had a target.^[1][2]

Shortly after midnight, Captain S. C. Pierman of Capital Airlines, taking off in a DC-4, was asked to watch for unusual lights. "There's one – off to the right – and there it goes," he called, as a target beside him vanished from the scope. Over the next 14 minutes he saw six more "white, tailless, fast-moving lights". Barnes said "each sighting coincided with a pip we could see near his plane". About two hours later a pilot approaching from the south reported a light following him at "eight o'clock level". Both radars showed a target behind him until it pulled away four miles from touchdown. ARTC repeatedly called for Air Force interceptors. At about 3 a.m., as two F-94 Starfire jets from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware arrived, all the targets vanished from the National Airport radar. When the jets ran low on fuel and left, the objects returned, convincing Barnes that "the UFOs were monitoring radio traffic and behaving accordingly". The last radar contact was at 5:30 a.m.^[1][2]

Publicity and the Air Force reaction

The sightings made front-page news across the country. The Cedar Rapids Gazette's headline read "SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL", and another paper ran "INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS OVER WASHINGTON, D.C." Nobody had told Air Force intelligence. When reporters called, they were told no one had heard of the sighting, so the next edition added "AIR FORCE WON'T TALK". Ruppelt, who happened to be in Washington, first learned of it on the morning of Monday 21 July from a newspaper in the airport lobby. That afternoon an intelligence officer from Bolling Air Force Base briefed him and Major Dewey Fournet, Blue Book's Pentagon liaison. Ruppelt said the consensus in the Pentagon was that experienced controllers could recognise inversion targets. The controllers had told the Bolling officer the targets were caused by radar waves bouncing off hard, solid objects.^[1][2][3]

Ruppelt was asked to stay and investigate. But he was refused a staff car, since only senior colonels and generals could use them, and told he could take buses or pay for taxis from his $9 per diem. He then learned his travel orders did not cover the work. Frustrated, he flew back to Blue Book's headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. There an Air Force radar specialist, Captain Roy James, told him the targets sounded as if they had been caused by weather. Meanwhile the reports reaching Blue Book had risen to forty a day, about a third of them unknowns. On 24 July two Air Force colonels flying from Hamilton Air Force Base to Colorado Springs reported unidentified triangular objects.^[1][2]

26–27 July

At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday 26 July, a pilot and stewardess on a National Airlines flight into Washington saw lights above their plane. At about 10:30 p.m. the same radar operators picked up similar slow-moving targets spread in an arc from Herndon, Virginia, to Andrews, and marked each with a plastic marker. The tower and Andrews had them too. At Andrews, Master Sergeant Charles E. Cummings said the lights "did not have the characteristics of shooting stars... they traveled faster than any shooting star I have ever seen." Life's UFO expert, Bob Ginna, telephoned Ruppelt in Dayton. Ruppelt had the Pentagon duty officer send Fournet to the airport, and Fournet brought Lieutenant John Holcomb, a Navy electronics specialist. They found Albert M. Chop, Blue Book's press spokesman, already there. Chop refused reporters' requests to photograph the radar screens. By 9:30 p.m., according to one account, targets were appearing in every sector, sometimes moving slowly and sometimes reversing at speeds calculated at up to 7,000 mph.^[1][2][3]

Two F-94s from New Castle were airborne by about midnight. Reporters and photographers were asked to leave the radar room on the grounds that classified frequencies and procedures were being used. Ruppelt said the real reason was that many present thought this would be the night a pilot finally got a good look at a UFO. As the jets arrived, the targets vanished, and the jets searched and returned to base. Ruppelt wrote that at that point people near Langley Air Force Base began reporting bright, colour-changing lights. A Langley F-94 saw one go out "like somebody turning off a light bulb" and got brief radar lock-ons that broke within seconds. Then the targets returned to the Washington scopes.^[2]

When two more F-94s arrived, the flight leader, Captain John McHugo, was vectored to the blips but saw nothing. His wingman, Lieutenant William Patterson, a Korean War veteran, saw four white "glows" and chased them. "I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet... I was at my maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them," he said. According to Chop, when ground control asked Patterson what he saw, he replied, "I see them now and they're all around me. What should I do?" Chop added: "And nobody answered, because we didn't know what to tell him." Holcomb received a call from the Washington National Weather Station reporting a slight temperature inversion, but felt it was not "nearly strong enough to explain the 'good and solid' returns". Fournet said everyone in the radar room was convinced the targets were most likely solid metallic objects. Weather targets were on the scope too, he said, but the controllers "were paying no attention to them". Civilian aircraft also reported glowing objects that matched Andrews radar returns. As on the previous weekend, the sightings ended at sunrise.^[1][2]

The White House and the press

The second weekend's sightings also made front-page headlines, such as "FIERY OBJECTS OUTRUN JETS OVER CAPITAL" and "EXPERT HERE TO PUSH STUDY". When Ruppelt arrived at the Roger Smith Hotel, reporters rose "like a covey of quail", and a "junior-sized riot" was only narrowly averted when he refused to tell them anything. On the morning of Tuesday 29 July President Harry Truman's air aide, Brigadier General Landry, called Air Force intelligence at the President's request, and the call came to Ruppelt. Truman listened on another line. Remembering Captain James's view, Ruppelt said the targets might have been caused by a temperature inversion, in which a layer of warm, moist air over cool, dry air bends radar beams and gives false returns. He added that there was no proof. He had not yet interviewed any witnesses. Ruppelt said he also received inquiries from the press in London, Ottawa and Mexico City.^[1][2][3]

The Samford press conference

At 4 p.m. on 29 July, Major General John Samford, the Air Force director of intelligence, and Major General Roger M. Ramey, director of operations, held a press conference at the Pentagon. It was the largest and longest the Air Force had held since the Second World War. Samford said that among hundreds of reports there was "a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things", but that none posed a threat to national security. He said the visual sightings over Washington were probably stars, meteors or city lights, and the radar targets were probably caused by temperature inversions present on both nights. The targets were not solid objects. Asked whether there had been earlier radar contacts, he said there had been "hundreds" with fighter interceptions, all "fruitless". The press called Samford and Ramey the Air Force's two top UFO experts.^[1][4]

Ruppelt said Samford made an honest effort but had to hedge because he did not know many answers, which made it look like a cover-up. Captain Roy James, brought in to answer radar questions, had just arrived and knew little more than the papers. Fournet and Holcomb, known to doubt the weather explanation, were "extremely conspicuous by their absence". James's answers were taken as the Air Force's verdict, and the next day's headlines read "AIR FORCE DEBUNKS SAUCERS AS JUST NATURAL PHENOMENA". Ruppelt called the whole affair one of the "most monumentally fouled-up messes" in the files. He said the root problem was that no one had gone out to investigate. Less than six hours after the conference, an F-94 over Michigan chased a radar target that pulled away at about 1,400 mph.^[2]

The case for an ordinary explanation

Several witnesses supported the Air Force. A B-25 bomber crew flying over Washington during the second weekend was repeatedly vectored to targets but saw nothing unusual. A pilot who had flown in and out of Washington since 1936 recalled being sent over a radar "UFO" again and again on the Potomac east of Alexandria. "The only object we could see where the radar had a target turned out to be the Wilson Lines moonlight steamboat trip to Mount Vernon," he said. "The radar was sure as hell picking up the steamboat." He added that Washington was so full of lights that "mysterious lights" could be seen anywhere. Captain Harold May at Andrews saw a light changing from red to orange to green, and concluded it was a star distorted by the atmosphere. At 3 a.m. on 27 July an Eastern Airlines crew was told a target had moved directly behind them, but when they turned sharply to look, radar said it had disappeared.^[1][2]

Ruppelt also learned that the Andrews tower operators later changed their story about the "fiery-orange sphere", saying it was merely a star and they had been "excited". He noted that astronomical charts showed no exceptionally bright star there, and heard that they had been "persuaded" a bit. The F-94 pilot who had told the press of chasing lights also later reported officially that he had seen only a ground light reflecting off haze. Although the Washington and Andrews radars overlapped, only once did all three track a target together. At the Air Force's request, the Civil Aeronautics Administration's Technical Development and Evaluation Center studied the radar sightings. It found "a temperature inversion had been indicated in almost every instance when the unidentified radar targets or visual objects had been reported." Blue Book eventually labelled the radar blips as false images caused by inversions, and the visual sightings as misidentified meteors, stars and city lights. Menzel and the Aviation Week editor Philip Klass later argued for the inversion explanation. In 2002 Klass said 1952 radar could not filter out birds, weather balloons or inversions, and that digital filters introduced in the 1970s sharply reduced radar UFOs. The ufologist Jacques Vallée called the case "rather poor", the kind researchers would consider "second-rate".^[1][2][4]

The dissent

Ruppelt wrote that many radar and tower personnel, and some Air Force officers, rejected the explanation. Unknown targets had been tracked over Washington on other nights too: fifty on 23 May, and again between and after the two famous weekends and eight more times in August. He found an inversion on every sighting night, but never one strong enough to affect radar the way inversions normally do. Inversions occurred nearly every night that summer, yet the slow, "solid" targets appeared on only a few. Above all, he said, the controllers brought thousands of people into the airport every day and should know a real target from a weather target. "So the Washington National Airport Sightings are still unknowns," he concluded. In 1966 the psychologist Michael Wertheimer found, for the Condon study, that radar witnesses still disputed the Air Force explanation. In 2002 Howard Cocklin told The Washington Post he was still convinced he had seen an object: "I saw it on the [radar] screen and out the window."^[1][2][5]

Consequences

The CIA historian Gerald Haines wrote in 1997 that the massive build-up of sightings in July 1952 "alarmed the Truman administration". The CIA formed a special study group within its Office of Scientific Intelligence and Office of Current Intelligence. Edward Tauss reported for the group that most sightings could easily be explained, but recommended continued monitoring. Both the Air Force and the CIA feared an enemy could flood the country with false UFO reports to cause panic before a surprise attack. On 24 September 1952 the Office of Scientific Intelligence sent a memo to CIA Director Walter B. Smith. It warned that "the flying saucer situation... [has] national security implications" and that public concern held "the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic". The result was the Robertson Panel of January 1953, chaired by the physicist Howard P. Robertson. It dismissed nearly all the cases it reviewed and recommended that the Air Force "strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired". Afterwards Blue Book rarely publicised cases it had not labelled "solved".^[1][6]

In popular culture

The final episode of the first season of the History Channel series Project Blue Book (2019), "The Washington Merry-Go-Round", takes its title from Ruppelt's chapter and is based on the incident. The Netflix series Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified (2021) re-enacts it with computer graphics and archival footage of witnesses.^[1][2]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.