The 1952 Washington D.C. UFO Incident

[A51Watcher]

Major Donald Keyhoe (ret.)  had friends in the military still on active duty who gave him unprecedented inside access to information.







The following excerpt is from his report on the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO Incident.

From his book - FLYING SAUCERS FROM OUTER SPACE


... July 20 1952 - Washington itself took the spotlight. The action covered a wide area, in and around the capital.

But the most dramatic scenes took place in a strange, windowless room—the Air Traffic Control Center at Washington National Airport.

Although its operations dovetail with those of the tower, the Center is located in a separate building, a fourth of a mile away. In the tower, operators control only the final approaches, landings, and take-offs. But the men at the Center reach out by long-range surveillance radar to track planes 100 miles away.

Heavy traffic, even in clear weather, must be carefully funneled in to the airport approach lanes. After take-offs, airliners must be dispatched from congested areas to their assigned levels. In fog, storms, and when cloud ceilings are low, planes must be guided in by two-way radio, kept separated while pilots are flying blind, and "stacked up" when necessary, to wait their turn for landing.

It is a precision job. The Center controllers never see the planes they guide in, as they track them on the main scope. But thousands of lives depend on their quick, accurate tracking and split- second recognition of the various aircraft blips.

The radar room at the Center, where this night's action started, is a long dim-lit chamber, darkened so that scopes can be easily read.

At midnight, as the 20th of July began, eight traffic experts, headed by Senior Controller Harry G. Barnes, entered this room and took over the watch.

The night was clear, traffic was light, and the men settled down for a routine eight-hour duty.

For a few minutes Barnes bent over the main scope, a phosphor-coated glass 24 inches in diameter, with a pale lavender glow. Traveling around the glass, like a clock hand, was a purplish streak called the "sweep."





At the time the Center was tracking a single airliner, several miles from the airport...

...When traffic was heavier, he and the other controllers could pencil in the tracks, marking each plane's position with a numbered plastic chip.

But there was no need tonight; the sky was practically empty.

At about 12:30, Bames went out to the supervisor's desk, leaving Controller Ed Nugent at the main scope. Two other controllers, Jim Ritchey and James Copeland, were standing a few feet away.

At exactly 12:40, seven sharp blips suddenly appeared on the scope. Nugent stared at the glass. The strange planes, or whatever they were, seemed to have dropped out of nowhere.

There was only one possible answer. The unknown machines had raced into the area at terrific speed, between sweeps, then had abruptly slowed, there in the southwest quadrant.

"Get Barnes in here—quick!" Nugent told Copeland.

The senior controller came on the run. Both console scopes showed the strange blips. Bames hastily buzzed the tower, got Operator Howard Cocklin.

"Our scope shows the same blips!" Cocklin said swiftly. "I can see one of the things. It's got a bright orange light— I can't tell what's behind it."

Now really alarmed, Bames flashed word to the Air Defense Command. Then he turned back to the main scope. The unknown machines had separated. Two were over the White House, a third near the Capitol—both prohibited areas.

Keeping his eyes on the glass, Bames called Andrews Field, across the Potomac in Maryland.

"We're tracking them, too," a worried radar man told him. "We've got them the same place you have."

"Are you sending up interceptors?" Bames asked quickly.

"No, the field's being repaired. Our jets are up at Newcastle."

Bames hung up, looked at the other controllers. "The interceptors will have to come from Delaware. It may be another half-hour."

For several minutes they silently tracked the saucers.

Then Controller Jim Ritchey saw that one was pacing a Capital airliner which had just taken off. He cut in his mike and called the captain, a veteran named "Casey" Pierman. Giving Pierman the saucer's position, Ritchey vectored him toward it.

Until then, the saucer's tracked speed had been about 130 miles an hour. Suddenly, to all the controllers' amazement, its track came to an abrupt end. Where the next blip should have been was only a blank space.

A moment later Pierman called back. "I saw the thing, but it streaked off before I could get close. It climbed out of sight in three to five seconds."

The controllers stared at each other. Here was the answer to the blip's disappearance.

Incredible as it seemed, the saucer had zoomed completely out of their radar beam between sweeps. That meant it had accelerated from 130 miles an hour to almost 500 in about four seconds.

A few minutes after this, Barnes and the others got a new jolt. One blip track showed an abrupt 90-degree turn —something no plane could do.

Then as the sweep came around, another saucer suddenly reversed—its new blip "blossoming" on top of the one it had just made.

From over 100 miles an hour, the mystery machine had stopped dead and completely reversed its direction—
all in about five seconds.

On top of this uncanny discovery, a startling report came in from the tower. Operator Joe Zacko had been watching his ASR scope, which was built to track high speeds, when a saucer abruptly appeared on the glass. One look and he knew it was moving at fantastic rate.

Fascinated, he watched its blips streak across the screen as the saucer raced over Andrews Field toward Riverdale.

When the trail suddenly ended, Zacko hastily called Cocklin. Together, they figured the saucer's speed.

It had been making two miles per second—7,200 miles an hour.

From the trail it was plain that the saucer had descended vertically into the ASR beam. It had leveled off for a few seconds. Then, climbing at tremendous speed, it had zoomed out of the beam again.

For some unknown reason, the jets had not arrived.

(There were rumors later that another saucer alarm, near New York, had taken all available fighters. Though the Air Force denied this, the delay was not explained.)

The saucers now had been circling Washington for almost two hours, and controllers' nerves were getting taut. Until tonight, some had laughed off the idea of visitors from other planets. But now they were badly shaken.

For the simultaneous radar tracks and visual sightings added up to only one answer. Up there in the night some kind of super-machines were reconnoitering the capital.

From their controlled maneuvers, it was plain they were guided—if not manned—by highly intelligent beings.

They might be about to land— the capital would be a logical point for contact. Or they might be about to attack.

Being cooped up in this windowless room didn't help. The tower men and the airline pilots at least could see the strange machines' lights. Whatever happened, they'd have a few moments' warning.

All Barnes and his men could do was track the machines and pray they were not hostile.

By now Barnes had an eerie feeling that the mysterious visitors were listening to his radio calls. Two or three times saucers darted away the instant he gave pilots directions for interception.

Not once did a pilot get close enough to see behind the lights.

It was almost 3 o'clock when the Air Force jets reached Washington. Just before this, the saucers vanished. Apparently they had sighted the distant fighters or heard them call the Center.

Five minutes after the jets left, the queer machines reappeared, swarming all over Washington. One of them, its shape hidden by a large white light, followed a Capital airliner close to the airport, then raced away.

As the sky began to lighten, the saucers ended their five-hour survey of Washington.

But before they left, at least one witness distinctly saw the shape of the elusive machines.

At about 5:30 a radio engineer named E. W. Chambers was leaving the WRC transmitter station when he saw five huge discs circling in a loose formation. As he watched, dumbfounded, the discs tilted upward and climbed steeply into the sky.

Fortunately the saucers were gone before most people awoke. As it was, hysteria grew rapidly after the story broke.

At first the Air Force tried hard to play down the Washington sightings. For several days officers denied that Andrews Field radar men had tracked the machines. One spokesman insisted the Control Center scope had been defective.

Another officer, to prove the incident was unimportant, said that no fighters had been sent to the area. But their attempts to reduce public fear were in vain.

Telegrams, long-distance calls, letters by the thousands poured into the Pentagon.

Congressmen, under pressure from voters, demanded action. Newspapers, syndicates, and radio commentators began to insist on a press conference.


____________________________________________________


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




...available online for free from NICAP:

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

[A51Watcher]

-continued-


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

The 2nd Visit

____________________________________________________


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".)

[A51Watcher]

-continued-


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

The Radar Control Center Men

_____________________________________________________


For the next two weeks I talked with Barnes, Ritchey, Copeland, and most of the other Control Center men. Though they had cooled off, some were still bitter about the Air Force inversion answer.

For years they had been guiding airliners through fog, snow, and rain without an accident.

When the weather turned sour, thousands of lives were in their hands. As expert radar men, they were proud of their record—a record that depended on their ability to analyze and track blips in a split second.

Then, overnight, they had been, in effect, called fools-deceived by a simple atmospheric condition they'd known for years.

"Every man in here knows temperature-inversion effects," Barnes told me. "When an inversion's big enough, it picks up all sorts of 'ground clutter'—water tanks, buildings, shore lines, and so on.

"But anybody here can recognize it. You'll see huge purplish blobs, but nothing like those things we tracked.

In the six years I've watched the scopes, absolutely nothing—high-speed jets, storms, inversions, or anything else —has ever caused blips that maneuvered like that.

And we've had identical weather many times."

We were watching the main scope as Barnes talked, with Copeland and two or three others standing nearby.

"The only other time," interrupted Copeland, "was that night we saw the 'saucer' on Red Airway."

"That's right," said Barnes. "I'd forgotten that—but it wasn't any inversion. That was something like these saucers we saw in July, except that it didn't maneuver."

"What happened?" I asked him.

"Jim and I were on duty together," replied Barnes. 'That was before the Control Center was built; we had our M.E.W. set operating for tests, over in the terminal.

All of a sudden this strange object came racing down Red Airway—it passed to the west of the field. Since we weren't in regular operation, we hadn't been paying close attention to the scope, and we saw it at the last moment.

It was going a lot faster than any jet, but the blips faded out before we could measure the speed. I'd say, to be conservative, it was well over 800 miles an hour—probably a lot higher."

"Over 1,000 would be my guess," said Copeland.

Ritchey, Copeland, Nugent, and all the other controllers were positive the July saucers could not have been inversion effects. The technicians, too, backed up Bames.

"Beside that," Chief Engineer J. L. McGivren told me, "there was no ground clutter either time, except the big blotch we always have at the center of the scope, where the bottom of the beam picks up the airport buildings."

When I checked at the Weather Bureau, I found the same answer.

Vaughn D. Rockne, the senior radar specialist, had never heard of such blips as Bames and his men tracked.

By now the trail was getting hot. To nail down the answer, I checked with Dr. John Hagin, the chief radio astronomer at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Hagin took the inversion theory apart in about 30 seconds.

"Even with a heavy inversion," he said, "conditions would have to be very, very unusual to cause effects like that.

I'd say it was impossible, with blips pinpointed by three radar stations and lights seen simultaneously at the same points."

"How much of an inversion is needed for ordinary effects?" I asked him.

"At the very least, ten degrees Fahrenheit—to get really strong effects it would have to be much larger. Even then, it couldn't explain the simultaneous sightings."


As soon as I could get to a phone, I called Chop.

"I've got a request. It's the one that Intelligence turned down before—I want an interview with an Air Force radar expert."

'Maybe we can work it," said Chop.

"Wait a second," I said. "I want them to select a radar officer who'll give me the official opinion. I want to quote him. And I might as well tell you, I think it'll kill the inversion story."

There was a silence at the other end.

"Go ahead, knock my ears down," I said.

"I was just trying to think who'd be the right man," Chop said calmly. "Give me a couple of hours."

That afternoon he phoned me at my home.

"It's all set. Your man's Major Lewis S. Norman, Jr. He's in the Aircraft Control and Warning Branch, and he's made a special study of temperature inversions. Also, he's an interceptor pilot."

I hung up, puzzled. It was almost as if the Air Force wanted to throw the Menzel theory overboard. But that didn't make sense.

Maybe Major Norman had an ace up his sleeve.

When I went into his office, I was braced for a repetition of the press conference arguments.

I didn't get them. Major Norman, a quiet, friendly, competent man, made no wild claims for the Menzel theory.

"Inversions probably explain some saucer sightings," he said, casually. "How many, I don't know."

"Exactly what conditions would it take to explain the Washington sightings?" I asked him.

"Well, first, you'd have to have turbulence in the inversion layer. That could give an effect of high speed and sharp maneuvers."

"The Weather Bureau men at the airport said there wasn't any turbulence," I told him. "But assuming there had been, how much of a temperature inversion would it take?"

"On the Centigrade scale, between five and ten degrees. If you used the Fahrenheit scale, between nine and eighteen degrees."

"Do you know what the inversions were on those two nights?" I asked him.

"No, I wasn't in on the investigation."

"The first night it was just one degree Fahrenheit. The second time it was barely two degrees."

If Norman was surprised, he didn't give any sign.

"Are those the official Weather Bureau figures?" he said.

"Yes, I double-checked them, and I also saw the inversion graphs. Would you still say inversions could be the answer?"

"No—they couldn't possibly explain the Washington sightings."

This was it. But it still seemed unbelievable that the Air Force would admit it.

"You realize I'm going to quote you as the official Air Force spokesman?" I asked Norman.

"Yes, I know," he said quietly. "They gave me the whole picture."


____________________________________________________


This book available online for free at:

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

[A51Watcher]

(From Kevin Randle's blog ) -


"I talked to both Al Chop and Major Dewey Fournet, both associated with the official UFO investigation in 1952, and who had been in the radar room on that second Saturday.

They told me there had been one intercept that had gotten "hairy," meaning dangerous.

According to them, and they were watching in the radar rooms at Washington National and listening to the interceptor pilots talking to one another,



as they Air Force attempted to catch the UFOs the interceptor pilot found himself surrounded by the lights.

It was all tracked on radar.



What the pilot, William Patterson said over the radio, the men in the radar center could see on the scope.

"Patterson decided to break off the intercept at that point."



link here

[A51Watcher]

We also now have a poll in this thread as well for you to vote on whose technology you think was reported.

[karl 12]

Great thread mate and one of the truly fascinating UFO cases -there's a good vid taken from the UFO exhibit at the National Archives showing info and news about the Washington flyovers (and the huge spike in UFO sightings during 1952) - also found it interesting that the U.S. Government, the CIA, Project Bluebook, the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Washington radar operators all seemingly rejected the 'temperature inversion' theory which in reality was just an off the cuff remark by Captain Roy James who hadn't even participated in the investigation.

A few minutes after this, Barnes and the others got a new jolt. One blip track showed an abrupt 90-degree turn —something no plane could do.

Here's a diagram from the Washington Radarscope (object executing the right angle turn at figure E).

Diagram of July 20, 1952 UFOs Over DC

Diagram of the UFOs tracked by Washington's National Airport radar scope on July 20, 1952. At A, 7 objects approach the Nation's capital from the south. At B, some are seen over the White House and Capitol. At C, they appear over Andrews Air Force Base. At D, one UFO tracks an airliner. At E, one is seen to make a sharp right-angular turn.

Source: UFOs - A Pictorial History From Antiquity to the Present, by David C. Knight. (McGraw Hill Book Co., 1979.)

Link

Other links:

The 1952 UFO Sighting Wave, Part 1 (pdf) / 2 / 3

Chronological civilian reports

Cheers!


(edit by tfw to replace diagram hosted on Tango)

[A51Watcher]

And then we have the famous photo -




Which is however a cropped version of the original.


Here is the uncropped version -



which, has mysterious origins, and for good reasons as it turns out.

If we examine the street lamps in front of the Capitol with a bit of puzzle solving in mind and compare them to the formation in the air, it appears that a very dim version of the street lamps was rotated and overlaid high in the photo.

I have seen a few others on the net make diagrams with criss- crossing red lines that did not get the point across very clearly, so I made my own by rotating just the formation section to compare to the street lamps -




So clearly it's a case of some hoaxer arriving years after the fact trying to get fortune, not fame as he tried to keep his identity hidden.

Now then, in more recent times we have a blue colored video version on youtube with the formation slowly flying east through the sky.

Note that none of the 'objects' change position in the formation at all. Same old street lamp positioning throughout.

[zorgon]

yeah I noticed the lights thing too  and now that 'famous' Belgian Triangle that so many people depend on to push the TR#B has been admitted to be a deliberate fake after the fact

Sucks really  All those years spent trying to correlate it all and finding the best shots are in reality hoaxes after all

[A51Watcher]

We also note that none of the newspaper articles of that time mentions any photos or videos having been taken.

Neither does Maj. Keyhoe's book mention any, which is the most comprehensive account of those events.


 

[zorgon]

That is why I prefer eyewitness statements

[ArMaP]

I have seen a few others on the net make diagrams with criss- crossing red lines that did not get the point across very clearly, so I made my own by rotating just the formation section to compare to the street lamps -

See below.

So clearly it's a case of some hoaxer arriving years after the fact trying to get fortune, not fame as he tried to keep his identity hidden.

Not necessarily.

The criss-crossing red lines that you say you have seen made by others try to replicate what probably happened in the photo, as that looks like "ghosting", a type of lens flare, the result of bright lights being reflected by the surface inside the lens and finally hitting the film or sensor but coming from the opposite position when compared to the original lights.

This image helps explaining what happens in those cases.



So it's possible (and even likely) that someone got a perfectly innocent photo of the Capitol and, without adding a thing to it, presented it as showing an "UFO fleet".

[astr0144]

Has Saunder 67 done an image analysis on the Washington 1952 images to confirm your suggestions A51 ?

Someone has done this video that shows some various images in different color or lighting  forms.

[zorgon]

You don't need to do an analysis of the photo to see that the reflections match the lights.  It kinda jumps out at you  There are several that are in pairs which match the pairs of lights

The video is an obvious fake because no one had hand held color videos in 1950's

I have used that image as illustration for the sightings but as long as real stories have fake images, there will never be any credibility in the field.

And all you do is give guys like ArMap ammo to shoot down your saucers

[easynow]

The blue colored ufo video is supposedly a reconstruction of the events and is from Nick Cooks documentary UFOs The Secret Evidence 2005

Link - http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread648741/pg1#pid10285494


Allegedly there's pictures of the radar screen showing the objects but I've never seen any I thought were the real deal ...





Image source:

"Saucers Over DC" - Col. Ross Dedrickson Testimony
Link - http://youtu.be/ScuhsQD88wk?t=7m24s

[A51Watcher]

Has Saunder 67 done an image analysis on the Washington 1952 images to confirm your suggestions A51 ?

Someone has done this video that shows some various images in different color or lighting  forms.

I don't think Sander has, but Deuem did one day just for a lark -