1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident
[6] Project Blue Book director Edward J. Ruppelt later recalled: "During a six-month period in 1952... 148 of the nation's leading newspapers carried a total of over 16,000 items about flying saucers.
[8] On April 3, the Associated Press reported on an upcoming story in Life magazine that would reveal the Air Force was taking a serious interest in flying saucers.
[9] The June edition of Look magazine featured a story where astrophysicist Donald Howard Menzel proposed flying saucers were optical mirages created by temperature inversions.
[12] On April 7, Life magazine, featuring Marilyn Monroe on its cover,[13] published the Flying Saucer article under the title "Have We Visitors From Space?
At 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, July 19, 1952, Edward Nugent, an air traffic controller at Washington National Airport, spotted seven objects on his radar.
"[19] At this point, other objects appeared in all sectors of the radarscope; when they moved over the White House and the United States Capitol, Barnes called Andrews Air Force Base, located 10 miles from National Airport.
"[23] Meanwhile, at Andrews Air Force Base, the control tower personnel were tracking on radar what some thought to be unknown objects, but others suspected, and in one instance were able to prove, were simply stars and meteors.
However, when the jets ran low on fuel and left, the objects returned, which convinced Barnes that "the UFOs were monitoring radio traffic and behaving accordingly".
[26] By coincidence, USAF Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the supervisor of the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigation into UFO sightings, was in Washington at the time.
He was told that he could rent a taxicab with his own money; by this point Ruppelt was so frustrated that he left Washington and flew back to Blue Book's headquarters at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio.
[31] USAF master sergeant Charles E. Cummings visually observed the objects at Andrews, he later said that "these lights did not have the characteristics of shooting stars.
"[23] Meanwhile, Albert M. Chop, the press spokesman for Project Blue Book, arrived at National Airport and, due to security concerns, denied several reporters' requests to photograph the radar screens.
[35][19] He told investigators that "I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet," and that "I was at my maximum speed but...I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.
In addition, Samford stated that the unknown radar contacts were not caused by solid material objects, and therefore posed no threat to national security.
"[46] Project Blue Book would eventually label the unknown Washington radar blips as false images caused by temperature inversion, and the visual sightings as misidentified meteors, stars, and city lights.
[47] In later years two prominent UFO skeptics, Donald Menzel, an astronomer at Harvard University, and Philip Klass, a senior editor for Aviation Week magazine, would also argue in favor of the temperature inversion/mirage hypothesis.
[48] In 2002 Klass told a reporter that "radar technology in 1952 wasn't sophisticated enough to filter out many ordinary objects, such as flocks of birds, weather balloons, or temperature inversions.
"[23] The reporter added that "UFO proponents argue that even then seasoned controllers could differentiate between spurious targets and solid, metallic objects.
It may be that 'we had two dumb controllers at National Airport on those nights'...[Klass] added that the introduction of digital filters in the 1970s led to a steep decline in UFO sightings on radar.
[44] Michael Wertheimer, a researcher for the government-funded Condon Report, investigated the case in 1966, and stated that radar witnesses still disputed the Air Force explanation.
On 19 and 20 July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked mysterious blips.
Both groups felt that an enemy nation could deliberately flood the U.S. with false UFO reports, causing mass panic and allowing them to launch a sneak attack.
The memo stated that "the flying saucer situation ... [has] national security implications ... [in] the public concern with the phenomena ... lies the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic.
Howard P. Robertson, a physicist, chaired the panel, which consisted of prominent scientists and which spent four days examining the "best" UFO cases collected by Project Blue Book.
The panel recommended that the Air Force and Project Blue Book should take steps to "strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.
