At 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, July 19, 1952, an air traffic controller named Edward Nugent saw seven pale violet blips on his radar screen at Washington National Airport. They sat about 15 miles southeast of the city, and nothing on the schedule explained them.
For the next two weekends, the night sky over Washington would not behave. Radar at National and at Andrews Air Force Base tracked targets nobody could identify. Pilots and airmen saw lights. Jets were scrambled from Delaware. And on July 29, the Air Force held its biggest press conference since World War II to tell the country it was probably the weather.
Here’s what the people who were there saw, and what the Washington papers said at the time.
Saturday, July 19: seven blips
National Airport had two radars that night: the long-range set in the Air Route Traffic Control Center, run by senior controller Harry Barnes, and a shorter-range set in the control tower. Barnes had the equipment checked. According to Edward Ruppelt, who ran the Air Force’s UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, “the set was in perfect working order.”
The center itself had no windows, so the men watching the targets couldn’t look outside. The tower could. Controllers Joe Zacko and Howard Cocklin had the same blips on their scope, and then something out the window. Zacko said, “Look at that bright light.” Cocklin remembers answering, “What the hell was that?”
Across the river at Andrews, an airman in the tower named William Brady reported “an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail.” Ruppelt later noted that the Andrews tower men decided it had been a star.
The radar was harder to wave away. Ruppelt wrote that the targets would “loaf along at 100 to 130 miles an hour” and then suddenly speed off, and one was clocked at 7,000 miles an hour. Some had “flown through the prohibited flying areas over the White House and the Capitol.”
At one point all three radars, the two at National and the one at Andrews, had the same target three miles north of the Riverdale radio beacon. About 30 seconds later it “left all three radarscopes simultaneously.”
Flight 807
Around 2 a.m., the controllers asked a pilot for help. Capital Airlines Flight 807 had left National at 1:45 a.m., westbound for Pittsburgh and Detroit, with Capt. S. C. “Casey” Pierman at the controls. He was a 17-year veteran of the airline.
The Evening Star reported on July 22 that Pierman, cruising at 6,000 feet between Washington and Martinsburg, West Virginia, saw at least seven objects that looked “like ‘falling shooting stars without tails.'” He watched for about 12 minutes. Ruppelt’s version has six more lights over 14 minutes. Each time Pierman reported a light streaking off, Barnes later said, it disappeared from the scope.
Then the story gets fuzzy. The Air Force told the Star that no planes were sent to intercept anything. Ruppelt wrote that “just about daylight, an F-94 arrived, but by that time the targets were gone.” Even the Star admitted the official picture was a mess:
It was all very confused.
By the way, the Star’s Sunday paper that same weekend carried a story about a new book by Harvard astrophysicist Donald Menzel, “The Truth About Flying Saucers.” Its explanation for saucers? A “temperature inversion.” Hold that thought.
The Air Force’s UFO man needs a ride
Ruppelt flew in from Dayton on other business Monday morning and learned about the sightings from a newspaper he bought in National’s terminal. He wanted to drive around and interview the controllers and pilots while it was fresh. The Pentagon told him the regulations said “no staff cars except for senior colonels or generals.”
His other option, he wrote, was a cab: “You can take a cab if you want to pay for it out of your per diem.” He gave up and headed back to Ohio, later writing that “if saucers were buzzing Pennsylvania Avenue in formation I couldn’t care less.”
Saturday, July 26: they come back
A week later it happened again. According to the Evening Star, about a dozen objects showed up on the control center’s radar at 9:08 p.m., and the scope at Andrews picked up similar specks about 15 minutes later. This time the Air Force sent jets.
There were no interceptors at Andrews, because its runways were being rebuilt. So F-94 night fighters of the 142nd Fighter-Interceptor Squadron came down from New Castle, Delaware, about 90 miles away. Ruppelt wrote that just as the jets arrived, the targets disappeared from the radarscopes, and a few minutes after the jets left, the targets were back.
What the pilots saw depends on who’s telling it. Here’s the Star on Monday, July 28: Lt. William L. Patterson spotted two or three lights about 10 miles away at 11:25 p.m., “but he could not rule out the possibility that they were reflections of ground lights, or even stars.” His flight leader, Capt. John W. McHugo, saw nothing.
Decades later, Albert Chop, the Air Force’s press spokesman for the saucer project, who was in the radar room that night, remembered it very differently:
“I see them now and they’re all around me. What should I do?” And nobody answered, because we didn’t know what to tell him.
After midnight, Maj. Dewey Fournet of Air Force intelligence and a Navy radar specialist, Lt. John Holcomb, reached the radar room. Holcomb counted seven “good, solid targets.” He checked with the weather station, which reported a slight temperature inversion. He didn’t think it was nearly strong enough to explain what he was seeing.
Meanwhile, two Washington-area pilots from the 121st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron flew the dawn patrol over Mount Vernon. One of them, Capt. John C. Lang of District Heights, told the Star he saw “two little patches of clouds. And also a lot of shooting stars.” He joked to National’s control center about “Stars Over Alabama.”
Mount Vernon turns up in Ruppelt’s book, too. A pilot told him about a night when radar kept tracking a target over the Potomac that turned out to be the Wilson Lines moonlight steamboat trip to Mount Vernon.
By Monday morning, the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa had “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL” across its front page.
Room 3E-869, the Pentagon, 4 p.m.
The White House wanted answers. Ruppelt wrote that President Truman’s air aide, Brig. Gen. Robert Landry, called at the President’s request. Ruppelt told him the radar targets “could have been caused by weather but that we had no proof.”
On Tuesday, July 29, the Air Force called reporters to Room 3E-869 at the Pentagon for what Ruppelt called “the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II.” Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, the Director of Intelligence, did the talking, alongside Maj. Gen. Roger Ramey, the Director of Operations, and Ruppelt’s team from Dayton.
Fournet and Holcomb, the two men who had been in the radar room, were, as Ruppelt put it, “extremely conspicuous by their absence.”
Samford said his analysts had worked through “between a thousand and two thousand reports.” Most were explained. About 20 percent were not. According to the official transcript, those had come from:
credible observers of relatively incredible things.
For Washington, he leaned on the inversion theory, the same one in Menzel’s book. Hot, humid air stacked over cooler air can bend radar beams and light. But he wouldn’t promise it:
So the gamble as to whether that is the cause or not is about a fifty-fifty proposition.
Asked how radar could steer an airline pilot to lights he then saw, Samford said, “I can’t explain that.” On whether any of the reports looked like a missile, he got a laugh from the room:
We have nothing that has no mass and unlimited power!
The Air Force, he said, would give the reports “adequate attention but not frantic attention.” The next day the Star’s front page had the takeaway.
The same story reported one more blip, at 1 a.m., south of National. A passing plane checked it out and found “No lights, no saucers, no space ships. Nothing but space.”
Weather, or something else?
In May 1953, the Civil Aeronautics Administration’s technical center studied the radar plots and reported that an inversion “had been indicated in almost every instance” of the unidentified targets. Project Blue Book closed the Washington case as weather.
Ruppelt never fully bought it. In his 1956 book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” he pointed out that “hardly a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn’t an inversion in Washington,” yet the scopes didn’t fill with targets every night.
The skeptics had their own blunt version. Aviation writer Philip Klass put it this way: “we had two dumb controllers at National Airport on those nights.”
Inside the government, the bigger worry was the flood of reports itself. That September, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence sent Director Walter Bedell Smith memos about flying saucers. In January 1953, a CIA-sponsored panel of scientists led by physicist H. P. Robertson met for four days and recommended a policy of debunking UFO reports and educating the public. The Air Force announced the end of Project Blue Book on December 17, 1969.
Howard Cocklin, the tower controller, never changed his mind. Fifty years later he told a reporter:
I saw it on the screen and out the window.
He told the reporter he never saw anything like it again, “not before, not since.”
For more Cold War Washington, see why the Pentagon has five sides, and Hoover Field, the airport that sat where the Pentagon stands now.
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