UFOs Over Washington Were Officially the Weather

In July 1952, radar at National Airport and Andrews tracked unknowns over Washington two Saturdays running. The Air Force blamed the weather.

Show Notes

On two Saturday nights in July 1952, radar at National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked targets nobody could identify, some of them over the White House and the Capitol. Pilots saw lights, jets were scrambled, and the Pentagon called its biggest press conference since World War II to blame the weather.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2018/02/26/flying-saucers-capitol-white-house/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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It's eleven forty on a Saturday night in July of nineteen fifty-two. A controller at Washington National Airport looks down at his radar screen and sees seven blips. Nothing on the schedule explains them. Over the next two weekends, radar at National and at Andrews Air Force Base would track things nobody could identify. Pilots saw lights. The Air Force sent jets. And then the Pentagon held its biggest press conference since World War Two, to tell the country it was probably the weather. Probably. So what was in the sky over Washington that summer? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. Since twenty twelve, I've been reading this city's old newspapers, and in the summer of nineteen fifty-two, they were full of flying saucers. This one rests on twelve sources, from the Evening Star's coverage that July to an interview with one of the controllers fifty years later. They're all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

National Airport had two radars that night. The long-range one sat in the air traffic control center, and that room had no windows. So the men watching the blips couldn't look outside. The control tower could. Two controllers there had the same blips on their scope, and then they saw something out the window. One of them said, look at that bright light. Howard Cocklin remembers his answer. What the hell was that? Over at Andrews, an airman in the tower saw an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail. To be fair, the tower crew later decided it was a star. The radar was harder to wave away. The targets would loaf along at a hundred miles an hour or so, and then suddenly take off. One was clocked at seven thousand miles an hour. And some of them flew right through the off-limits airspace 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 a radio beacon in Riverdale. Then it left all three screens at the same moment.

Around two in the morning, the controllers asked a pilot for help. Capital Airlines Flight eight oh seven had just left National, headed west for Pittsburgh and Detroit. The captain was Casey Pierman, seventeen years with the airline. Then, somewhere between Washington and Martinsburg, West Virginia, he started seeing lights. He told the Evening Star they looked like falling shooting stars without tails. And every time he said one had streaked away, it disappeared from the radar on the ground. So did the Air Force send jets that night? Depends who you ask. The Air Force told the Star no planes went up. The man who ran its UFO project later wrote that one jet showed up around daylight, after the targets were gone. The Star summed it up pretty well. It was all very confused.

That man was Captain Edward Ruppelt, and he ran Project Blue Book, the Air Force's flying saucer investigation, out of Dayton, Ohio. He flew into Washington that Monday on other business, and found out about all of this from a newspaper he bought at the airport. He wanted a car, so he could go interview the controllers and the pilots while it was fresh. The Pentagon said no. The regulations said no staff cars except for senior colonels or generals. He could take a cab, if he wanted to pay for it himself. So he went back to Ohio. And he later wrote, if saucers were buzzing Pennsylvania Avenue in formation, I couldn't care less. Now, one more thing from that same weekend. The Star ran a story about a new book by a Harvard astronomer. He said flying saucers were optical illusions, caused by something called a temperature inversion. Hold onto that one.

The next Saturday, it happened again. A little after nine at night, about a dozen objects showed up on the screen at National. Fifteen minutes later, Andrews had them too. This time the Air Force sent jets. But there were no interceptors at Andrews, because its runways were being rebuilt. So the night fighters came down from Delaware, about ninety miles away. And here's the part people still talk about. Ruppelt wrote that just as the jets arrived, the targets vanished from the radar. A few minutes after the jets left, they were back. One of the pilots, Lieutenant William Patterson, did see lights. On Monday, the Star said he couldn't rule out that they were reflections of ground lights, or even stars. Decades later, the Air Force's press man, who was in the radar room that night, told it very differently. Here's how he remembered the radio call. 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, a Navy radar specialist got there and counted seven good, solid targets. The weather station told him there was a slight temperature inversion. He didn't think it was anywhere near strong enough to explain what he was looking at. And around dawn, two local pilots flew a patrol over Mount Vernon. One of them, from District Heights, told the Star he saw two little patches of clouds, and a lot of shooting stars. He even joked to the control center about Stars Over Alabama.

By now the White House wanted answers. President Truman's air aide called Ruppelt, at the President's request. Ruppelt told him the targets could have been caused by weather, but that they had no proof. On Tuesday, July twenty-ninth, the Air Force called reporters to the Pentagon. Ruppelt called it the largest and longest press conference the Air Force had held since World War Two. The general doing the talking was the Air Force's director of intelligence, John Samford. And the two men who'd actually been in the radar room on the second night? They weren't there. Samford said his people had looked at a thousand to two thousand reports. Most had answers. But about twenty percent had come from, in his words, credible observers of relatively incredible things. For Washington, he went with the temperature inversion. Warm air sitting on top of cooler air can bend a radar beam. Same idea as the Harvard astronomer's book. But he wouldn't promise it. He called it about a fifty-fifty proposition. When a reporter asked how radar could steer a pilot right to lights he then saw, Samford said, I can't explain that. And when the idea came up that the objects might be some kind of missile, he got a laugh from the room. We have nothing that has no mass and unlimited power! The next day, the Star's front page said it plainly. Pentagon says saucers are natural phenomena, caused by inversion.

The next spring, a government study of the radar plots found an inversion in almost every case. Project Blue Book filed Washington under weather. Ruppelt never quite bought it. He pointed out that hardly a night went by in a Washington summer without an inversion. And the radar screens didn't fill up with saucers every night. The skeptics had their own version. One of the best known put it bluntly. We had two dumb controllers at National Airport on those nights. Inside the government, the worry was less about saucers and more about panic. In January of nineteen fifty-three, a panel of scientists brought together by the C I A recommended debunking UFO reports, and educating the public. Project Blue Book itself was shut down at the end of nineteen sixty-nine. Fifty years after that first Saturday night, a reporter tracked down Howard Cocklin, the controller in the tower. He hadn't changed his mind. I saw it on the screen and out the window. He said he never saw anything like it again. Not before. Not since.

So that's the summer the saucers came to Washington. Thanks for keeping an eye on the sky with me. Those old Evening Star headlines are up on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. If you'd like the next story the day it drops, subscribe to Ghosts of DC in whatever app you're listening in. We go back to the old newspapers so you can hear what people said at the time, before the story got bigger. This has been Ghosts of DC.