No flying saucer report in the history of the UFO ever won more
world acclaim than the Washington National Sightings.
When radars at the Washington National Airport and at Andrews AFB,
both close to the nation's capital, picked up UFO's, the sightings
beat the Democratic National Convention out of headline space. They
created such a furor that I had inquiries from the office of the
President of the United States and from the press in London, Ottawa,
and Mexico City. A junior-sized riot was only narrowly averted in the
lobby of the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington when I refused to tell
U.S. newspaper reporters what I knew about the sightings.
Besides being the most highly publicized UFO sightings in the Air
Force annals, they were also the most monumentally fouled-up messes
that repose in the files. Although the Air Force said that the
incident had been fully investigated, the Civil Aeronautics Authority
wrote a formal report on the sightings, and numerous magazine writers
studied them, the complete story has never fully been told. The pros
have been left out of the con accounts, and the cons were neatly
overlooked by the pro writers.
For a year after the twin sightings we were still putting little
pieces in the puzzle.
In some aspects the Washington National Sightings could be classed
as a surprise--we used this as an excuse when things got fouled up--
but in other ways they weren't. A few days prior to the incident a
scientist, from an agency that I can't name, and I were talking about
the build-up of reports along the east coast of the United States. We
talked for about two hours, and I was ready to leave when he said
that he had one last comment to make--a prediction. From his study of
the UFO reports that he was getting from Air Force Headquarters, and
from discussions with his colleagues, he said that he thought that we
were sitting right on top of a big keg full of loaded flying saucers.
"Within the next few days," he told me, and I remember that he
punctuated his slow, deliberate remarks by hitting the desk with his
fist, "they're going to blow up and you're going to have the
granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in
Washington or New York," he predicted, "probably Washington."
The trend in the UFO reports that this scientist based his
prediction on hadn't gone unnoticed. We on Project Blue Book had seen
it, and so had the people in the Pentagon; we all had talked about it.
On July 10 the crew of a National Airlines plane reported a light
"too bright to be a lighted balloon and too slow to be a big meteor"
while they were flying south at 2,000 feet near Quantico, Virginia,
just south of Washington.
On July 13 another airliner crew reported that when they were 60
miles southwest of Washington, at 11,000 feet, they saw a light below
them. It came up to their level, hovered off to the left for several
minutes, and then it took off in a fast, steep climb when the pilot
turned on his landing lights.
On July 14 the crew of a Pan American airliner en route from New
York to Miami reported eight UFO's near Newport News, Virginia, about
130 miles south of Washington.
Two nights later there was another sighting in exactly the same area
but from the ground. At 9:00P.M. a high-ranking civilian scientist
from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Laboratory at
Langley AFB and another man were standing near the ocean looking
south over Hampton Roads when they saw two amber-colored lights,
"much too large to be aircraft lights," off to their right, silently
traveling north. Just before the two lights got abreast of the two
men they made a 180-degree turn and started back toward the spot
where they had first been seen. As they turned, the two lights seemed
to "jockey for position in the formation." About this time a third
light came out of the west and joined the first two; then as the
three UFO's climbed out of the area toward the south, several more
lights joined the formation. The entire episode had lasted only three
minutes.
The only possible solution to the sighting was that the two men had
seen airplanes. We investigated this report and found that there were
several B-26's from Langley AFB in the area at the time of the
sighting, but none of the B-26 pilots remembered being over Hampton
Roads. In fact, all of them had generally stayed well south of
Norfolk until about 10:30P.M. because of thunderstorm activity
northwest of Langley. Then there were other factors--the observers
heard no sound and they were away from all city noises, aircraft
don't carry just one or two amber lights, and the distance between
the two lights was such that had they been on an airplane the
airplane would have been huge or very close to the observers. And
last, but not least, the man from the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics was a very famous aerodynamicist and of such professional
stature that if he said the lights weren't airplanes they weren't.
This then was the big build-up to the first Washington national
sighting and the reason why my friend predicted that the Air Force
was sitting on a big powder keg of loaded flying saucers.
When the keg blew the best laid schemes of the mice and men at ATIC,
they went the way best laid schemes are supposed to. The first one of
the highly publicized Washington national sightings started,
according to the CAA's logbook at the airport, at 11:40P.M. on the
night of July 19 when two radars at National Airport picked up eight
unidentified targets east and south of Andrews AFB. The targets
weren't airplanes because they would loaf along at 100 to 130 miles
an hour then suddenly accelerate to "fantastically high speeds" and
leave the area. During the night the crews of several airliners saw
mysterious lights in the same locations that the radars showed the
targets; tower operators also saw lights, and jet fighters were
brought in.
But nobody bothered to tell Air Force Intelligence about the
sighting. When reporters began to call intelligence and ask about the
big sighting behind the headlines, INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS
OVER WASHINGTON, D.C., they were told that no one had ever heard of
such a sighting. In the next edition the headlines were supplemented
by, AIR FORCE WONT TALK.
Thus intelligence was notified about the first Washington national
sighting.
I heard about the sighting about ten o'clock Monday morning when
Colonel Donald Bower and I got off an airliner from Dayton and I
bought a newspaper in the lobby of the Washington National Airport
Terminal Building. I called the Pentagon from the airport and talked
to Major Dewey Fournet, but all he knew was what he'd read in the
papers. He told me that he had called the intelligence officer at
Bolling AFB and that he was making an investigation. We would get a
preliminary official report by noon.
It was about 1:00P.M. when Major Fournet called me and said that the
intelligence officer from Bolling was in his office with the
preliminary report on the sightings. I found Colonel Bower, we went
up to Major Fournet's office and listened to the intelligence
officer's briefing.
The officer started by telling us about the location of the radars
involved in the incident. Washington National Airport, which is
located about three miles south of the heart of the city, had two
radars. One was a long-range radar in the Air Route Traffic Control
section. This radar had 100-mile range and was used to control all
air traffic approaching Washington. It was known as the ARTC radar.
The control tower at National Airport had a shorter-range radar that
it used to control aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the airport.
Bolling AFB, he said, was located just east of National Airport,
across the Potomac River. Ten miles farther east, in almost a direct
line with National and Bolling, was Andrews AFB. It also had a short-
range radar. All of these airfields were linked together by an
intercom system.
Then the intelligence officer went on to tell about the sighting.
When a new shift took over at the ARTC radar room at National
Airport, the air traffic was light so only one man was watching the
radarscope. The senior traffic controller and the six other traffic
controllers on the shift were out of the room at eleven-forty, when
the man watching the radarscope noticed a group of seven targets
appear. From their position on the scope he knew that they were just
east and a little south of Andrews AFB. In a way the targets looked
like a formation of slow airplanes, but no formations were due in the
area. As he watched, the targets loafed along at 100 to 130 miles an
hour; then in an apparent sudden burst of speed two of them streaked
out of radar range. These were no airplanes, the man thought, so he
let out a yell for the senior controller. The senior controller took
one look at the scope and called in two more of the men. They all
agreed that these were no airplanes. The targets could be caused by a
malfunction in the radar, they thought, so a technician was called in
--the set was in perfect working order.
The senior controller then called the control tower at National
Airport; they reported that they also had unidentified targets on
their scopes, so did Andrews. And both of the other radars reported
the same slow speeds followed by a sudden burst of speed. One target
was clocked at 7,000 miles an hour. By now the targets had moved into
every sector of the scope and had flown through the prohibited flying
areas over the White House and the Capitol.
Several times during the night the targets passed close to
commercial airliners in the area and on two occasions the pilots of
the airliners saw lights that they couldn't identify, and the lights
were in the same spots where the radar showed UFO's to be. Other
pilots to whom the ARTC radar men talked on the radio didn't see
anything odd, at least that's what they said, but the senior
controller knew airline pilots and knew that they were very reluctant
to report UFO's.
The first sighting of a light by an airline pilot took place shortly
after midnight, when an ARTC controller called the pilot of a Capital
Airlines flight just taking off from National. The controller asked
the pilot to keep watch for unusual lights--or anything. Soon after
the pilot cleared the traffic pattern, and while ARTC was still in
contact with him, he suddenly yelled, "There's one--off to the right--
and there it goes." The controller had been watching the scope, and a
target that had been off to the right of the Capitaliner was gone.
During the next fourteen minutes this pilot reported six more
identical lights.
About two hours later another pilot, approaching National Airport
from the south, excitedly called the control tower to report that a
light was following him at "eight o'clock level." The tower checked
their radar-scope and there was a target behind and to the left of
the airliner. The ARTC radar also had the airliner and the UFO
target. The UFO tagged along behind and to the left of the airliner
until it was within four miles of touchdown on the runway. When the
pilot reported the light was leaving, the two radarscopes showed that
the target was pulling away from the airliner.
Once during the night all three radars, the two at Washington and
the one at Andrews AFB, picked up a target three miles north of the
Riverdale Radio beacon, north of Washington. For thirty seconds the
three radar operators compared notes about the target over the
intercom, then suddenly the target was gone--and it left all three
radarscopes simultaneously.
But the clincher came in the wee hours of the morning, when an ARTC
traffic controller called the control tower at Andrews AFB and told
the tower operators that ARTC had a target just south of their tower,
directly over the Andrews Radio range station. The tower operators
looked and there was a "huge fiery-orange sphere" hovering in the sky
directly over their range station.
Not too long after this excitement had started, in fact just after
the technician had checked the radar and found that the targets
weren't caused by a radar malfunction, ARTC had called for Air Force
interceptors to come in and look around. But they didn't show, and
finally ARTC called again--then again. Finally, just about daylight,
an F-94 arrived, but by that time the targets were gone. The F-94
crew searched the area for a few minutes but they couldn't find
anything unusual so they returned to their base.
So ended phase one of the Washington National Sightings.
The Bolling AFB intelligence officer said he would write up the
complete report and forward it to ATIC.
That afternoon things bustled in the Pentagon. Down on the first
floor Al Chop was doing his best to stave off the press while up on
the fourth floor intelligence officers were holding some serious
conferences. There was talk of temperature inversions and the false
targets they could cause; but the consensus was that a good radar
operator could spot inversion-caused targets, and the traffic
controllers who operated the radar at Washington National Airport
weren't just out of radar school. Every day the lives of thousands of
people depended upon their interpretation of the radar targets they
saw on their scopes. And you don't get a job like this unless you've
spent a good many years watching a luminous line paint targets on a
good many radarscopes. Targets caused by inversions aren't rare--in
the years that these men had been working with radar they had
undoubtedly seen every kind of target, real or false, that radar can
detect. They had told the Bolling AFB intelligence officer that the
targets they saw were caused by the radar waves' bouncing off a hard,
solid object. The Air Force radar operator at Andrews backed them up;
so did two veteran airline pilots who saw lights right where the
radar showed a UFO to be.
Then on top of all this there were the reports from the Washington
area during the previous two weeks--all good--all from airline pilots
or equally reliable people.
To say the least, the sighting at Washington National was a jolt.
Besides trying to figure out what the Washington National UFO's
were, we had the problem of what to tell the press. They were now
beginning to put on a squeeze by threatening to call a congressman--
and nothing chills blood faster in the military. They wanted some
kind of an official statement and they wanted it soon. Some people in
intelligence wanted to say just, "We don't know," but others held out
for a more thorough investigation. I happened to be in this latter
category. Many times in the past I had seen what first seemed to be a
good UFO report completely fall apart under a thorough investigation.
I was for stalling the press and working all night if necessary to go
into every aspect of the sighting. But to go along with the theme of
the Washington National Sightings--confusion--there was a lot of talk
but no action and the afternoon passed with no further investigation.
Finally about 4:00P.M. it was decided that the press, who still
wanted an official comment, would get an official "No comment" and
that I would stay in Washington and make a more detailed investigation.
I called Lieutenant Andy Flues, who was in charge of Project Blue
Book while I was gone, to tell him that I was staying over and I
found out that they were in a de luxe flap back in Dayton. Reports
were pouring out of the teletype machines at the rate of thirty a day
and many were as good, if not better, than the Washington incident. I
talked this over with Colonel Bower and we decided that even though
things were popping back at ATIC the Washington sighting, from the
standpoint of national interest, was more important.
Feeling like a national martyr because I planned to work all night
if necessary, I laid the course of my investigation. I would go to
Washington National Airport, Andrews AFB, airlines offices, the
weather bureau, and a half dozen other places scattered all over the
capital city. I called the transportation section at the Pentagon to
get a staff car but it took me only seconds to find out that the
regulations said no staff cars except for senior colonels or
generals. Colonel Bower tried--same thing. General Samford and
General Garland were gone, so I couldn't get them to try to pressure
a staff car out of the hillbilly who was dispatching vehicles. I went
down to the finance office--could I rent a car and charge it as
travel expense? No--city buses are available. But I didn't know the
bus system and it would take me hours to get to all the places I had
to visit, I pleaded. You can take a cab if you want to pay for it out
of your per diem was the answer. Nine dollars a day per diem and I
should pay for a hotel room, meals, and taxi fares all over the
District of Columbia. Besides, the lady in finance told me, my travel
orders to Washington covered only a visit to the Pentagon. In
addition, she said, I was supposed to be on my way back to Dayton
right now, and if I didn't go through all the red tape of getting the
orders amended I couldn't collect any per diem and technically I'd be
AWOL. I couldn't talk to the finance officer, the lady informed me,
because he always left at 4:30 to avoid the traffic and it was now
exactly five o'clock and she was quitting.
At five-one I decided that if saucers were buzzing Pennsylvania
Avenue in formation I couldn't care less. I called Colonel Bower,
explained my troubles, and said that I was through. He concurred, and
I caught the next airliner to Dayton.
When I returned I dropped in to see Captain Roy James in the radar
branch and told him about the sighting. He said that he thought it
sounded as if the radar targets had been caused by weather but since
he didn't have the finer details he naturally couldn't make any
definite evaluation.
The good UFO reports that Lieutenant Flues had told me about when I
called him from Washington had tripled in number before I got around
to looking at them. Our daily take had risen to forty a day, and
about a third of them were classified as unknowns.
More amber-red fights like those seen on July 18 had been observed
over the Guided Missile Long-Range Proving Ground at Patrick AFB,
Florida. In Uvalde, Texas, a UFO described as "a large, round, silver
object that spun on its vertical axis" was seen to cross 100 degrees
of afternoon sky in forty-eight seconds. During part of its flight it
passed between two towering cumulus clouds. At Los Alamos and
Holyoke, Massachusetts, jets had chased UFO's. In both cases the
UFO's had been lost as they turned into the sun.
In two night encounters, one in New Jersey and one in Massachusetts,
F-94's tried unsuccessfully to intercept unidentified lights reported
by the Ground Observer Corps. In both cases the pilots of the radar-
nosed jet interceptors saw a light; they closed in and their radar
operators got a lock-on. But the lock-ons were broken in a few
seconds, in both cases, as the light apparently took violent evasive
maneuvers.
Copies of these and other reports were going to the Pentagon, and I
was constantly on the phone or having teleconferences with Major
Fournet.
When the second Washington National Sighting came along, almost a
week to the hour from the first one, by a stroke of luck things
weren't too fouled up. The method of reporting the sighting didn't
exactly follow the official reporting procedures that are set forth
in Air Force Letter 200-5, dated 5 April 1952, Subject: Reporting of
Unidentified Flying Objects--but it worked.
I first heard about the sighting about ten o'clock in the evening
when I received a telephone call from Bob Ginna, _Life_ magazine's
UFO expert. He had gotten the word from _Life's_ Washington News
Bureau and wanted a statement about what the Air Force planned to do.
I decided that instead of giving a mysterious "no comment" I would
tell the truth: "I have no idea what the Air Force is doing; in all
probability it's doing nothing." When he hung up, I called the
intelligence duty officer in the Pentagon and I was correct,
intelligence hadn't heard about the sighting. I asked the duty
officer to call Major Fournet and ask him if he would go out to the
airport, which was only two or three miles from his home. When he got
the call from the duty officer Major Fournet called Lieutenant
Holcomb; they drove to the ARTC radar room at National Airport and
found Al Chop already there. So at this performance the UFO's had an
official audience; Al Chop, Major Dewey Fournet, and Lieutenant
Holcomb, a Navy electronics specialist assigned to the Air Force
Directorate of Intelligence, all saw the radar targets and heard the
radio conversations as jets tried to intercept the UFO's.
Being in Dayton, 380 miles away, there wasn't much that I could do,
but I did call Captain Roy James thinking possibly he might want to
talk on the phone to the people who were watching the UFO's on the
radarscopes. But Captain James has a powerful dislike for UFO's--
especially on Saturday night.
About five o'clock Sunday morning Major Fournet called and told me
the story of the second sighting at Washington National Airport:
About 10:30P.M. on July 26 the same radar operators who had seen the
UFO's the week before picked up several of the same slow-moving
targets. This time the mysterious craft, if that is what they were,
were spread out in an arc around Washington from Herndon, Virginia,
to Andrews AFB. This time there was no hesitation in following the
targets. The minute they appeared on the big 24-inch radarscope one
of the controllers placed a plastic marker representing an
unidentified target near each blip on the scope. When all the targets
had been carefully marked, one of the controllers called the tower
and the radar station at Andrews AFB--they also had the unknown
targets.
By 11:30P.M. four or five of the targets were continually being
tracked at all times, so once again a call went out for jet
interceptors. Once again there was some delay, but by midnight two F-
94's from New Castle County AFB were airborne and headed south. The
reporters and photographers were asked to leave the radar room on the
pretext that classified radio frequencies and procedures were being
used in vectoring the interceptors. All civilian air traffic was
cleared out of the area and the jets moved in.
When I later found out that the press had been dismissed on the
grounds that the procedures used in an intercept were classified, I
knew that this was absurd because any ham radio operator worth his
salt could build equipment and listen in on any intercept. The real
reason for the press dismissal, I learned, was that not a few people
in the radar room were positive that this night would be the big
night in UFO history--the night when a pilot would close in on and
get a good look at a UFO--and they didn't want the press to be in on
it.
But just as the two '94's arrived in the area the targets
disappeared from the radarscopes. The two jets were vectored into the
areas where the radar had shown the last target plots, but even
though the visibility was excellent they could see nothing. The two
airplanes stayed around a few minutes more, made a systematic search
of the area, but since they still couldn't see anything or pick up
anything on their radars they returned to their base.
A few minutes after the F-94's left the Washington area, the
unidentified targets were back on the radarscopes in that same area.
What neither Major Fournet nor I knew at this time was that a few
minutes after the targets left the radarscopes in Washington people
in the area around Langley AFB near Newport News, Virginia, began to
call Langley Tower to report that they were looking at weird bright
lights that were "rotating and giving off alternating colors." A few
minutes after the calls began to come in, the tower operators
themselves saw the same or a similar light and they called for an
interceptor.
An F-94 in the area was contacted and visually vectored to the light
by the tower operators. The F-94 saw the light and started toward it,
but suddenly it went out, "like somebody turning off a light bulb."
The F-94 crew continued their run and soon got a radar lock-on, but
it was broken in a few seconds as the target apparently sped away.
The fighter stayed in the area for several more minutes and got two
more lock-ons, only to have them also broken after a few seconds.
A few minutes after the F-94 over Newport News had the last lock-on
broken, the targets came back on the scopes at Washington National.
With the targets back at Washington the traffic controller again
called Air Defense Command, and once again two F-94's roared south
toward Washington. This time the targets stayed on the radarscopes
when the airplanes arrived.
The controllers vectored the jets toward group after group of
targets, but each time, before the jets could get close enough to see
anything more than just a light, the targets had sped away. Then one
stayed put. The pilot saw a light right where the ARTC radar said a
target was located; he cut in the F-94's afterburner and went after
it, but just like the light that the F-94 had chased near Langley
AFB, this one also disappeared. All during the chase the radar
operator in the F-94 was trying to get the target on his set but he
had no luck.
After staying in the area about twenty minutes, the jets began to
run low on fuel and returned to their base. Minutes later it began to
get light, and when the sun came up all the targets were gone.
Early Sunday morning, in an interview with the press, the Korean
veteran who piloted the F-94, Lieutenant William Patterson, said:
I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet, but they
[the radar controllers] vectored us around. I saw several bright
lights. I was at my maximum speed, but even then I had no closing
speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking
them. I was vectored into new objects. Later I chased a single bright
light which I estimated about 10 miles away. I lost visual contact
with it about 2 miles.
When Major Fournet finished telling me about the night's activity,
my first question was, "How about the radar targets--could they have
been caused by weather?"
I knew that Lieutenant Holcomb was a sharp electronics man and that
Major Fournet, although no electronics specialist, was a crackerjack
engineer, so their opinion meant a lot.
Dewey said that everybody in the radar room was convinced that the
targets were very probably caused by solid metallic objects. There
had been weather targets on the scope too, he said, but these were
common to the Washington area and the controllers were paying no
attention to them.
And this something solid could poke along at 100 miles an hour or
outdistance a jet, I thought to myself.
I didn't ask Dewey any more because he'd been up all night and
wanted to get to bed.
Monday morning Major Ed Gregory, another intelligence officer at
ATIC, and I left for Washington, but our flight was delayed in Dayton
so we didn't arrive until late afternoon. On the way through the
terminal building to get a cab downtown, I picked up the evening
papers. Every headline was about the UFO's:
FIERY OBJECTS OUTRUN JETS OVER CAPITAL--INVESTIGATION VEILED IN
SECRECY FOLLOWING VAIN CHASE