What happened
Just before midnight on Saturday 19 July 1952, controller Edward Nugent at Washington National Airport picked up seven unknown blips south-southwest of the city, moving in ways no airliner did. Senior controller Harry Barnes had the equipment checked; it was working. The tower's radar showed targets too, a controller saw a bright light streak away, and an airman at Andrews AFB saw an orange ball of fire. Capital Airlines pilot S. C. Pierman watched six fast white lights that, Barnes said, matched blips near his plane. Targets drifted over the White House and the Capitol. Jets arrived around 3 am and the blips vanished, returning when the jets left. A week later, on 26–27 July, it happened again, this time with Blue Book's press officer and a Pentagon liaison in the radar room. An F-94 pilot chased white glows he could not catch. Headlines such as 'Saucers Swarm Over Capital' forced the largest Pentagon press conference since World War II.
The official explanation
At the 29 July press conference Maj. Gen. John Samford said the radar targets were not solid objects and attributed them to temperature inversions, which were present on both nights, with visual reports explained as stars and meteors. A Civil Aeronautics Administration study found an inversion in almost every instance of unidentified targets. The crew of a B-25 vectored onto targets saw nothing, and in one case the radar was tracking a Potomac steamboat. Donald Menzel and Philip Klass supported the inversion explanation.
The anomalous case
Several separate radars, operated by experienced air traffic controllers responsible for thousands of passengers a day, tracked targets that moved, hovered and sometimes matched lights seen by pilots and tower staff. Barnes said the targets' movements were completely radical compared with aircraft, and that each light Pierman reported coincided with a blip near his plane. Navy radar specialist Lt. John Holcomb, present on 26–27 July, judged the inversion too weak to explain the solid returns, and Maj. Fournet said everyone in the radar room believed the targets were probably solid objects. Ruppelt wrote that inversions occurred on almost every summer night in 1952 Washington, yet the targets appeared on only a few, and that the inversions were never strong enough to affect radar in the usual way. His conclusion: still unknowns. CIA historian Gerald Haines records that the episode alarmed the Truman administration and led directly to the Robertson Panel.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Maj. Gen. John A. Samford's statement on flying saucers, 1952 (newsreel, NARA via Wikimedia Commons) video, commons.wikimedia.org
- Project BLUE BOOK records (National Archives, microfilm T-1206) official, archives.gov
Sources
- 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident Wikipedia
- The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956) Project Gutenberg
- CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 (Gerald K. Haines, Studies in Intelligence, 1997) Federation of American Scientists (reprint of CIA article)
Witness reports elsewhere
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