Sixty-six years ago, in July of 1952, the greatest government documented cluster of UFO sightings in our history took place in and around our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. and the country was in a near panic.
This was just five years after the infamous Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash, also officially reported by the government, only to have a cover up begin within twenty-four hours. These two are among very few documented UFO cases by the government before the veil of secrecy dropped down on the events.
To put things in even sharper perspective, the world was on edge since two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945 ending World War II. Former allies the US and Soviet Union turned their threats and guns on each other and these two superpowers were intent on nuclear dominance.
The nation of Israel was formed in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated the same year. A year later NATO was formed to protect the west from the growing might of the Soviet Union. By 1950 the Korean War started, a proxy war for the two superpowers that lasted three years.
Before the end of 1952 the world would witness the first thermonuclear bomb, the USA hydrogen bomb, moving us one step closer to a doomsday weapon.
As for aliens, our attention first turned to the possibility of alien beings, not with the shocking crash of the UFO in Roswell, but a decade earlier when a young actor named Orson Welles gave a live radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds involving a Martian landing in New Jersey. Millions of Americans panicked.
PBS Overview
Orson Welles radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” 1938
War of the Worlds Movie clips 1953
Why the sudden interest in major UFO activity over the years? Stay tuned, the Truth is Out There and it is about to Come Here!
THE 1952 WASHINGTON, D.C., UFO INCIDENT, EXPLAINED
Gaia staff
THE GREAT 1952 WASHINGTON, D.C., UFO INCIDENT
It was around 11:40 p.m. on Saturday night, July 19, 1952. Air traffic controller Edward Nugent was at his radar screen at Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., when he saw seven unusual blips on the screen. No known aircraft were in the area and there was no explanation for the presence of the objects. Nugent called his superior, Harry Barnes, to come and look. Together, they watched the mysterious objects dart across the sky. They even checked to make sure the radar was working properly.
Nugent and his boss checked with the control tower and learned that both controllers in the tower had also seen the blips. They called nearby Andrews Air Force Base, where controllers also saw strange objects on their radar screens.
Two of the objects clearly hovered over the White House, with another one over the Capitol. Controllers at both airports began tracking the objects, which they estimated to be traveling at about 130 mph when they suddenly disappeared from the radar screen. Then appeared again, zipping all around the sky. One made a 90-degree turn and another one suddenly went in reverse, both maneuvers that American airplanes could not make at the time.
An airline captain, S.C. Pierman, was waiting on the tarmac in the cockpit of his DC-4 at National Airport for authorization to take off. While waiting, he saw six objects moving about the sky. Over a 14-minute time period, Pierman would see the objects and then they would disappear, reappearing moments later. He was talking to controller Barnes this entire time. Every time Pierman reported a sighting, a blip appeared on Barnes’s radar screen. At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 20, the objects disappeared entirely.
Were these really unidentified flying objects (UFOs)? Did they come back again on another day for a second look? What was the significance of the 1952 UFO sightings and how did the sightings become known as the Great UFO Flap of 1952?
THE OBJECTS RETURN ON JULY 26, 1952
At around 8:15 p.m. one week later, a stewardess and a captain were on an inbound flight into Washington National Airport. They observed strange lights above their plane. At the same time, an officer at Andrews Air Force Base also observed the objects. Other pilots in the air at the time saw them, too. Similar to the occurrence from the week before, the “encore performance” of the UFOs ended around dawn on Sunday morning. The objects disappeared from sight and off of the airport radar.
NEWS HEADLINES AND UFO PUBLICITY
After the UFO Washington, D.C. incident of July 19, 1952, the headlines from The Washington Post's Monday edition declared, “'Saucer Outruns Jet, Pilot Reveals.” The article stated that the Air Defense Command sent a jet pilot up “to investigate the objects,” but was unable to overtake the moving glowing lights.
According to The Washington Post, the UFOs hovered only 1,700 feet above the White House lawn. An Air Force spokesperson said that their organization took steps to properly investigate the event, but the newspaper found the investigation veiled in secrecy. An unidentified traffic controller said the radar signals ruled out the possibility that the objects were due to weather conditions. He noted that they looked like an "aircraft in flight" on the radar screen.
The government created Project Blue Book to scientifically investigate all reported UFO sightings and relevant data to determine if they posed a threat to national security, which they terminated in January 1970. During its time in existence, from 1952 to 1970, it investigated 12,618 UFO reports. It found most of the occurrences coincided with natural phenomena. Only a handful remained unexplained.
As luck would have it, Air Force Captain, Edward J. Ruppelt, supervisor of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, was in Washington, D.C. He learned of the UFO incident from reading the newspaper and discussed the situation with Captain Roy James, a radar specialist. James thought unusual weather conditions could have been responsible for objects appearing to show on radar.
OFFICIAL AIR FORCE EXPLANATION
On July 29, 1952, Air Force Major Generals John Samford, Director of Intelligence, and Roger Ramsey, Director of Operations held the largest press conference of any since the end of World War II. The official explanation of the July UFO sightings was that:
- The objects were “misidentified aerial phenomena,” which could mean they were stars or meteors
- The blips on the radar were due to temperature inversions Samford also said that the since the radar blips were not caused by any solid material, there was no threat to national security. He explained that when a weather inversion occurs, lights that are really on the ground may look like they are in the air and this caused the radar to misreport ground objects being in the sky.
The explanation was not well-received. Ruppelt, from Project Blue Book, noted that during the months of June, July and August in Washington D.C. “hardly a night passed” where there wasn’t a temperature inversion and there were not routine UFO sightings on the radar. All air traffic controller involved stated that even if the weather could cause a blip on the radar, it would be as a straight line and would not appear as lights.
In 1969, a scientific report released by the Air Force concluded that a temperature inversion strong enough to create the effect attributed to it by General Samford could not possibly occur in the Earth’s atmosphere. Even so, more than 50 years later, most people still accept the temperature inversion explanation.
THE ROBERTSON PANEL
The CIA commissioned the Robertson Panel in January 1953, in response to the number of UFO sightings from the year prior. The CIA encouraged Project Blue Book to be more active in debunking sightings than investigating them. There was also a huge public relations push to decrease the public’s interest in UFOs.
1952: A BUSY YEAR FOR UFOS
1952 is still one of the most active times in modern history for UFOs. Not only were there reports in Washington, D.C. during that time, but all over the world. In the first six months of 1952, there were about 300 unexplained UFO sightings, four times the number during the same time period of 1951. By the end of July, there were about 400 reports — more than there had been in any other year in history.
For UFO enthusiasts, 1952 remains an important year in history. To delve deeper into the mysterious events of 1952, be sure to watch the Dark Alliance episode of Deep Space.
Uploaded by Lied2Bad on Oct 3, 2010
American History not Taught in School....
E.T been around Since Ancient Civilization this
UFO MASS SIGHTING
The 1952 Washington D.C. UFO incident, also known as the Washington flap or the Washington National Airport Sightings, was a series of unidentified flying object reports from July 12 to July 29, 1952, over Washington D.C.
The most publicized sightings took place on consecutive weekends, July 19--20 and July 26--27.
Longtime ufologist Richard H. Hall, who served as the assistant director of NICAP and as the director of the Fund for UFO Research, writes:[1] "The summer 1952 UFO sighting wave was one of the largest of all time, and arguably the most significant of all time in terms of the credible reports and hardcore scientific data obtained."
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. The objects were located 15 miles south-southwest of the city; no known aircraft were in the area and the objects were not following any established flight paths. Nugent's superior, Harry Barnes, a senior air-traffic controller at the airport, watched the objects on Nugent's radarscope. He later wrote: "We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed . . . their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft" (Clark, p. 653).
Barnes had two controllers check Nugent's radar; they found that it was working normally. Barnes then called National Airport's other radar center; the controller there, Howard Cocklin, told Barnes that he also had the objects on his radarscope. Furthermore, Cocklin said that by looking out of the control tower window he could see one of the objects: "a bright orange light. I can't tell what's behind it" (Clark, 653).
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. Although Andrews reported that they had no unusual objects on their radar, an airman soon called the base's control tower to report the sighting of a strange object. Airman William Brady, who was in the tower, then saw an "object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail . . . [it was] unlike anything I had ever seen before." As Brady tried to alert the other personnel in the tower, the strange object "took off at an unbelievable speed" and vanished in "a split second". He then observed a second, similar object, but it also disappeared before anyone else in the tower could see it (Clark, 654). At 12:30 a.m. on July 20, another person in the National Airport control tower reported seeing "an orange disk about 3,000 feet altitude". On one of the airport's runways, S.C. Pierman, a Capital Airlines pilot, was waiting in the cockpit of his DC-4 for permission to take off. After spotting what he believed to be a meteor, he was told that the control tower's radar had picked up unknown objects closing in on his position. Pierman observed six objects — "white, tailless, fast-moving lights" — over a 14-minute period (Clark, 655). Pierman was in radio contact with Barnes during his sighting, and Barnes later related that "each sighting coincided with a pip we could see near his plane. When he reported that the light streaked off at a high speed, it disappeared on our scope."
At Andrews AFB, meanwhile, 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, Staff Sgt. Charles Davenport observed an orange-red light to the south; the light "would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude . . . this happened several times" (Clark, 655). At one point both radar centers at National Airport and the radar at Andrews AFB were tracking an object hovering over a radio beacon. The object vanished in all three radar centers at the same time (Ruppelt, p. 160). At 3 a.m., shortly before two jet fighters from Newcastle AFB in Delaware arrived over Washington, all of the objects vanished from the radar at National Airport. 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" (Clark, 656). The objects were last detected by radar at 5:30 a.m. Around sunrise, E.W. Chambers, a civilian radio engineer in Washington's suburbs, observed "five huge disks circling in a loose formation.
They tilted upward and left on a steep ascent."
Read more: http://theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/1109/washington-ufo-flap-july-1952#ixzz57dEzIQWb
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