The 1952 Washington D.C. UFO Incident

[A51Watcher]

Quite a few more visual sighting report details here, bout 1/2 way down the page -

1952 - YEAR OF THE UFO

by Bruce Maccabee


http://brumac.8k.com/1952YEAROFUFO/1952YEAROFUFO.html

[A51Watcher]

http://rense.com/general78/shoot.htm

[A51Watcher]

Newspaper articles from the incidents with further details -


http://www.worldgathering.net/world/1952-1953.html

[A51Watcher]

This one has hot links directly to actual news articles -

http://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/wash195201b.htm

[Sinny]

Thanks...

I'll take the time to read through.

[A51Watcher]

-continued-


(from the book - Flying Saucers From Outer Space by Major Donald Keyhoe)

The 2nd Visit

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July 26 1952 ... at 9:08 p.m. a formation of saucers descended on Washington for the second time.


Luckily, they were too high to be seen by most people in the city.

But as before, jittery controllers at the Center tracked the strange machines. Again, Andrews Field and Washington Airport tower men confirmed the saucers' maneuvers, pinpointing them simultaneously at spots where lights were seen by airline pilots.

Oddly enough, the Air Force jets were again delayed in getting to the scene. But this time, when the first fighters arrived, some saucers were still in sight.

Flying at top speed, over 600 m.p.h., Lieutenant William L. Patterson tried to chase the nearest machine. But it quickly left him behind.

Meantime, Air Force Intelligence had gone into action.

Major Dewey Fournet, Jr., the Pentagon's top investigator, had been rushed to the Center. With him were Albert M. Chop and an officer specialist on radar. For two hours they watched the saucer blips, Fournet and Chop quizzing Barnes and his men while the radar specialist checked the set.

Several newsmen, tipped off to the sightings, were waiting when Fournet and the others came out. The three men refused even to speculate on what the saucers might be, but they confirmed Patterson's report on the unsuccessful chase.

The new Washington story broke with a bang in papers all over the country. Within 48 hours newspaper editors from coast to coast were hammering at the Air Force.

Even under the furious barrage from within and outside the Pentagon, General Samford still battled against any public discussion. But in the end he had no choice.

From somewhere higher up, General Samford was given an order. I have reliable evidence that it came from Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, now the Air Force chief of staff.

What could he say? There was only one safe step, in the nation's present mood.

The saucers would have to be debunked.

Up to the very last, the Intelligence officers hoped that the conference would be canceled. But the sightings, instead of letting up, were still increasing.


The Press Conference

July 29 - That very morning Army officers and Indiana state police had watched a weird "dogfight" between several discs over Indianapolis. Three hours later a saucer had scouted the atomic energy plant at Los Alamos, racing off at high speed when Air Force jets went after it.

By noon the Air Force had still another headache. The night before a story by INS had reported a new Air Force order—if saucers ignored orders to land, pilots were to open fire.





At Washington, Frank Edwards had picked up the flash and repeated it on the Mutual network.

Telegrams protesting the order were now coming in from all over the country. One, typical of the rest, came from Robert L. Farnsworth, president of the U. S. Rocket Society.

Also wiring the White House, Farnsworth gave United Press a copy of his message to help arouse the nation.

It read:





Under this new barrage General Samford gave up his last-ditch attempt to postpone the conference. By this time no one could have stopped it without a disastrous flare-back.

Many people would have suspected some frightening answer too terrible to make public.

By 4 o'clock the room was packed with top correspondents, wire-service men, and commentators. I hadn't seen a bigger turnout since the A-bomb story broke.

Promptly on the minute, General Samford came in, a stockily built man with whimsical blue eyes. His shrewd, pleasant face showed no hint of concern—it was not for nothing that he was Director of Air Force Intelligence.



___________________________________________________


(ed note: The video clip above is commonly known as 'The Press Conference' but actually it is not.)

It is a newsreel clip General Samford posed for in a different room AFTER the actual news conference had ended, where he repeated a few selected statements for the movie cameras.

___________________________________________________


Here now is the real press conference reported by Major Keyhoe:


Behind Samford came Major General Ramey, a florid-faced, serious-looking officer. Their advisers spread out around the platform—an impressive group of colonels, majors, captains, and civilian specialists.

Only Ruppelt came near to matching Samford's unconcerned look. Most of the others were sober-faced, and with good reason:

For the next hour or so they would be sitting on a powder keg. Two simple questions would light the fuse. All they could do was pray that nobody thought to ask them.

In his opening remarks, General Samford set a pattern which he used later in answering difficult questions.

Normally, Samford is not a verbose man: on occasion he can be as terse as a drill sergeant. But clipped words, short sentences, often give a dramatic effect, and the Director wanted no drama here.

A dry, academic approach was the best answer, and Samford did his utmost to set the pattern.

"I think the plan is to have very brief opening remarks," he said in a slow, unruffled voice, "and then ask for such questions as you may want to put to us for discussion and answer.

Insofar as opening remarks are concerned, I just want to state our reason for concern about this.

"The Air Force feels a very definite obligation to identify and analyze things that happen in the air that may have in them menace to the United States and, because of that feeling of obligation and our pursuit of that interest, since 1947, we have an activity that was known one time as Project Saucer (press name for Project Sign) and now, as part of another more stable and integrated organization, have undertaken to analyze between a thousand and two thousand reports dealing with this area.

And out of that mass of reports that we've received we've been able to take things which were originally unidentified and dispose of them to our satisfaction in terms of bulk where we came to the conclusion that these things were either friendly aircraft erroneously recognized or reported, hoaxes—quite a few of those—electronic and meteorological phenomena of one sort or another, light aberrations, and many other things."

The general's involved sentences could not have been better calculated to ease the tension.

Already the saucers seemed a little less real.

He went on in the same detached, academic manner. "However, there have remained a percentage of the total, in the order of 20 per cent of the reports that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things.

And because of those things not being possible for us to move along and associate with the kind of things that we've found can be associated with the bulk of these reports; we keep on being concerned about them.

"However, I'd like to say that the difficulty of disposing of these reports is largely based upon the lack of any standard measurement or any ability to measure these things which have been reported briefly by some, more elaborately by others, but with no measuring devices that can convert the thing or idea or the phenomenon into something that becomes manageable as material for the kind of analysis that we know."

Several reporters looked at each other blankly. The man on my right leaned over to me.

"If he's trying to befuddle us, he's already got me," he whispered.

The general went on for two or three minutes; "Our real interest in this project is not one of intellectual curiosity, but is in trying to establish and appraise the possibility of a menace to the United States. And we can say, as of now, that there has been no pattern that reveals anything remotely like purpose or remotely like consistency that we can in any way associate with any menace to the United States."

Here, I knew, Samford was skating on thin ice. Even before I saw all the ATIC evidence, I had enough reports that did show a definite pattern. But it was the general's job to dispel public fear, and admitting a pattern would only have increased it.

After mentioning reports of strange aerial objects back in biblical times, Samford threw the conference open for questions.

In giving the questions and answers here, I have taken them verbatim from the official transcript. It is not a complete account—the conference lasted 80 minutes, and many questions were unimportant. But all the main points are included.

Since reporters did not identify themselves, the transcript shows queries as merely from "the press." In one or two cases I have identified men whom I recognized.

General Samford's preliminary remarks had, somehow, lifted the saucers into a distant, shadowy realm. But the first question briskly brought them back to earth.

It came from Doug Larsen of NEA.

"Have there been more than one radar sighting simultaneously?" he asked. "That is, blips from several stations all concentrating on the same area?"

"You mean in the past?" said Samford.

"Yes, sir."

"Yes. That is not an unusual thing to happen to this sequence at all. Phenomenon has passed from one radar to another and with a fair degree of certainty that it was the same phenomenon.. . Now, when we talk about down to the split second, I don't know . . ."

"Enough to give you a fix so that you can be sure it is right in a certain place?"

"That is most rare," said the general.

"Has there been any?" persisted Larsen.

"Most rare. I don't recall that we have had one that gives us that kind of an effect."

Larsen and many of the others looked baffled, for this very point had been emphasized by the Control Center men. But before Larsen could go on, another man cut in with a safer question on ionized clouds.

A minute later a redheaded correspondent down in front tried to pick up where Larsen was stopped.

"General, have you talked to your Air Intelligence officer who was over at National Airport when they were sighting all these 'bandits' on the CAA screen?"

"Yes, sir, I have."

"Have you talked with the Andrews Field people who apparently saw the same thing?"

"I haven't talked to them myself, but others have."

"Well, could you give us an account of what they did see and what explanation you might attach to it?"

This was getting closer, but Samford showed only a good-natured patience.

"Well, I could discuss possibilities. The radar screen has been picking up things for many years that—well, birds, a flock of ducks. I know there's been one instance in which a flock of ducks was picked up and was intercepted and flown through as being an unidentified phenomenon."

"Where was that, General?" asked the redheaded man.

"I don't recall where it was. I think it might have been in Japan."

In the next five minutes the reporter's question somehow was lost in the shuffle. Then Gunnar Back brought it to light again.

"General Samford, I understand there were radar experts who saw these sightings Saturday night or early Sunday morning. What was their interpretation of what they saw on the scope?"

"They said they saw good returns."

"Which would indicate that these were solid objects similar to aircraft?"

"No, not necessarily. We get good returns from birds."

"Well, you wouldn't get as large a blip from a bird as—"

"No, unless it was close."

"Did they report that these could have been birds?"

"No," said Samford.

(In fact they had flatly denied it, as I learned later.)

At this point an Associated Press man broke in with a question on temperature inversions.

Samford passed it on to Captain James.

"What sort of ground targets give these reflections?" the AP man asked.

"It depends on the amount of the temperature inversion and the size and shape of the ground objects," Captain James told him.

I could see he was uneasy; this was getting close to one of the key questions.

"Would this reflection account for the simultaneous radar sightings and visual sightings which appear to coincide on the basis of conversations between the radar operator and the observer outside?"

"There is some possibility of that," James said cautiously.

"Why would these temperature inversions change location so rapidly or travel?"

"Well, actually," said James, "it can be the appearance or disappearance of different ground targets, giving the appearance of something moving when, actually, the different objects are standing still."

"Would these pseudo-blips cause any difficulties in combat?"

"Not to people that understand what's going on." James hesitated. "They do cause difficulty."

Shortly after this, another newsman came even closer to the danger point.

"Captain, was there a temperature inversion in this area last Saturday night?"

It jarred James; I could see that.

"There was," he said briefly.

"And the Saturday night proceeding?"

"I'm not sure—"

"Did any two sets in this area get a fix on these so-called saucers around here?"

"The information we have isn't good enough to determine that," evaded James.

The reporter looked incredulous. "You don't know whether Andrews Field and Washington National Airport actually got a triangulation on anything?"

"You see," said James, "the records made and kept aren't accurate enough to tie that in that close."

"What is the possibility of these being other than phenomena?"

This was too hot a potato for Captain James. General Samford quickly caught it.

"I'd like to relieve Captain James for just a minute," he said.
Confirming the query to guided missiles, Samford ruled them out in a long discussion that reduced the saucers to "something" with unlimited power and no mass.

"You know what no mass means," he added. "There's nothing there."

For the next ten minutes the questions led into safer fields. By this time I had changed my mind about questioning General Samford. It was obvious this was a deliberate debunking, a carefully worked-out plan to combat hysteria. There might be more reason for hiding the facts than I knew.

I decided to wait until after the conference and ask my questions privately.

After several vain attempts the red-headed man down front finally got back to his original question.

"You had two experts over there last Saturday night. . . What was their opinion?"

He had put the query to Captain James, but again General Samford interrupted.

"May I try to make another answer and ask for support or negation on the quality of the radar operator? I personally don't feel that is necessarily associated with quality of radar operators, because radar operators of great quality are going to be confused by the
things which now appear and may appear in a radar ... I think that a description of a GCA landing has some bearing on that in which to get associated with the GCA you have to make a certain number of queries and do a certain number of things and then you become identified through the fact that you obey..."

This went on for a minute or so, during which the redheaded man began to look a trifle groggy. Then Samford finished.

"Would you address yourself to what I've just said?" he inquired.

"Yes," said the redhead. "What do the experts think? That was the question."

"The experts?" said General Samford.

"The ones that saw it last Saturday night. What did they report to you?"

"They said they made good returns."

The reporter, apparently a bit dizzy from the merry-go-round, gave up and sat down. But another correspondent jumped up.

"Did they draw any conclusion as to what they were, whether they were clouds?"

"They made good returns," said General Samford, "and they think they ought to be followed up."

"But now you come to the general belief that it was either heat inversions or some other phenomena without substance."

"The phrase 'without substance' bothers me a little," said Samford.

"Well, could you—"

"Say what we think?"

About 50 of the press, in one voice, shouted: "Yes!"

General Samford smiled.

"I think that the highest probability is that these are phenomena associated with the intellectual and scientific interests that we are on the road to learn more about, but that there is nothing in them that is associated with materials or vehicles or missiles that are
directed against the United States."

"The question whether these are hostile or not makes very little difference," said one reporter. "Are you excluding from consideration a missile, a vehicle, or any other material object that might be flying through the air other than sound or light or some other intangible? Somebody from this planet or some other planet violating our air space?"

This was the first direct mention of the space visitors answer.

Instead of replying directly, the general brought in outside opinions.

"The astronomers are our best advisers, of course, in this business of visitors from elsewhere. The astronomers photograph the sky continuously perhaps with the most adequate photography in existence, and the complete absence of things which would have to be in their appearance for many days and months to come from somewhere else—it doesn't cause them to have any enthusiasm whatsoever in thinking about this other side of it."

But this oblique answer did not tell the full story. Perhaps General Samford did not know it, but several astronomers had reported strange objects moving in outer space. In several other cases astronomers had seen mysterious objects moving across the face of the moon.

One reporter, not satisfied with Samford's answer, tried to pin him down.

"General, let's make it clear now you are excluding—if you'll affirm that—you are excluding vehicles, missiles, and other tangible objects flying through space, including the subhuman bodies from other planets."

"In my mind, yes," said the general.

The man on my right leaned over to me. "Why 'subhuman?' They'd have to be superhuman to be that far ahead of us. And I noticed Samford didn't make that an official answer."

A few moments later one of the press brought Samford back to the subject of simultaneous radar tracking. It was a touchy point. If the general admitted the triangulation, by absolutely simultaneous radar bearings, it would wreck the Menzel answer, as several
scientists had already told ATIC. But this time he had a determined opponent.

"General, you said there'd never been a simultaneous radar fix on one of these things."

"I don't think I wanted to say that," replied Samford.

"You didn't mean to say it?"

"I meant to say that when you talk about simultaneously, somebody will say, 'Was it on 1203 hours 24 ½ seconds?' and I don't know."

"Well," said the reporter, "I'd like to point out this fact. The officer in charge of the radar station at Andrews Field told me that on the morning of July 20, which was a week from last Saturday, he picked up an object three miles north of Riverdale.

He was in intercom communication with CAA and they exchanged information. The CAA also had a blip three miles north of Riverdale and on both radars the same blip remained for 30 seconds and simultaneously disappeared from both sets—"

"Well, their definition of simultaneous, yes," said Samford. "But some people won't be satisfied that that is simultaneously."

"It is pretty damned simultaneous for all purposes," the reporter said firmly.

But the general refused to be trapped. "Well, I'm talking about the split-second people...  they'll say your observations are delayed by half a second, therefore you can't say it was simultaneous."

Outmaneuvered, the reporter turned to Captain James.

"Does your inversion theory explain away that situation?"

"It possibly could, yes," James said warily.

"It possibly could, but could it?"

"We don't have the details."

"Is there any reason why it couldn't?" the reporter demanded.

James squirmed, looked at Samford, apparently in the hope of being taken off the hook.

"General," the reporter said tardy, "can we get this clarified?"

For the first time Samford ducked the issue. "I'm trying to let this gentleman ask a question—" he looked down at the front row. "Excuse me."

For the next 15 minutes Samford and his advisers had an easier time.

One reporter, quizzing Ruppelt, tried unsuccessfully to make him admit a concentration of sightings at atomic energy plants.

Mr. Griffing and Colonel Bower, discussing the refraction-grid cameras, Schmidt telescopes, and plans for more scientific investigations, managed to avoid any pitfalls.

So did General Ramey, when he explained a few of the interception details.

Then one reporter, who'd tried for ten minutes to get the floor, tossed in a hot question.

"General, suppose some super intelligent creature had come up with a solution to the theoretical problem of levitation. Would that not be mass-less in our observations, either by radar or by sight—no gravity?"

"Well, I don't know whether I can give any answer to that," said General Samford. "We believe most of this can be understood gradually by the human mind."

The reporter, balked, sat down. But later he tried another angle.

"General, did you notice in all of your, say, 20 per cent of the unexplainable reports, a consistency as to color, size, or speed—estimated speed?"

"None whatsoever," said Samford.

Like a chorus in Pinafore, several correspondents exclaimed in unison: "None whatsoever?"

I almost expected Samford to come out with, "Well, hardly ever." Instead, he said very firmly, "No."

It would have been folly to admit that such patterns were known; it would immediately have nullified everything Samford had said. But such groupings did exist; even the Project report in 1949 had listed two distinct types and certain frequency periods. However, General Samford was not Director of Intelligence at that time, and he may not have known of this analysis.

By now the conference had run well over an hour. Some of the reporters were anxious to close it and get their stories filed. But one man made a last stubborn try to crack the simultaneous sighting angle.

"General, how do you explain this case? . . . The Senior Controller said whenever one of the unidentified blips appeared anywhere near Pierman's plane he would call Pierman and say, 'You have traffic at two o'clock about three miles,' and Pierman would look and say, 'I see the light.' This was done not once but three times. And then this past Saturday night Bames vectored at least a half a dozen airline pilots in to these things . . ."

"I can't explain that," said Samford.

The reporter looked amazed; he had obviously been expecting another evasion.

"Well, how do you explain ... is that auto-suggestion or—"

"I can't explain it at all," admitted the general.

But a moment later, after a comment on mesmerism and mind reading, he compared it with spiritualism. "For many years, the field of spiritualism had these same things in which completely competent creditable observers reported incredible things. I don't mean to say this is that sort of thing, but it's an explanation of our inability to explain."

Near the last, a correspondent asked him if the Air Force was withholding facts.

The general replied that only the names of sighting witnesses were withheld.

"How about your interpretation of what they reported?" the newsman said bluntly.

Perhaps Samford's guard was down; it had been a trying 80 minutes, and he looked tired.

"We're trying to say as much as we can on that today and admit the barrier of understanding on all of this is not one that we break."

Knowing the service phrase "break security," I was sure this was what he meant. Later several service friends of mine agreed. But evidently none of the press took it that way, for no one followed it up.

As the conference broke up, I heard some of the newsmen's comments.

"Never heard so much and learned so little," one man said acidly.

His companion shrugged. "What did you expect? Even if they know the answer, they wouldn't give it out now, with all this hysteria."

Pushing through the crowd toward General Samford, I heard a press photographer jeering at a reporter. "OK, wise guy, I told you there wasn't anything to the saucers."

"You're nuts," snapped the reporter. "Didn't you notice the way Samford kept sliding around hot questions—and the way he kept taking Captain James off the spot?"

"I think you're wrong," said another newsman. "I believe it was on the level."

When the group around Samford thinned out, I asked him the two questions I'd had in mind.

"How big an inversion, General—how many degrees is necessary to produce the effects at Washington Airport, assuming they're possible at all?"

He looked at me with no change in expression. I would not want to play poker with the general.

"Why, I don't know exactly," he said. "But there was an inversion."

"Do you know how many degrees, on either night?"

"Excuse me, General," someone broke in sharply. I turned around and saw Dewitt Searles, now a lieutenant colonel, eying me suspiciously.

"You still on this saucer business?" he said.

Without waiting for an answer—I had the feeling he had merely wanted to cut off my questions—he turned back to Samford. "Any time you're ready, sir; the newsreel men are waiting."


___________________________________________________


The above excerpt is from Major Donald Keyhoe's book -




...available online for free from NICAP:

http://www.nicap.org/books/fsos/fsos.htm



____________________________________________________


(ed note: And with that, off went General Samford to the newsreel room and recorded the short film that has erroneously come to be known as "The Press Conference".)

Well well, we finally get to see the rest of the General Samford newsreel clips mentioned above. There is more than just the famous 'nothing to see here move along'. clip, of rehearsed talking points for the newsreel cameras only.