by Mack Maloney
Many of those same experts considered Captain Ruppelt to be the most open-minded military officer ever connected with investigating the UFO phenomena — though, on the other hand, that wasn’t saying much. Interestingly enough, it was Ruppelt who in 1952 coined the term “UFO,” feeling it took into account all strange things spotted in the sky, not just ones that were saucer shaped.
Having Ruppelt in town after the events of the weekend would have seemed the perfect situation for the air force then. A massive UFO sighting, one that had lasted for hours and had plenty of credible witnesses, had just taken place — and just by luck, the air force’s number one UFO expert was close by. Common sense says a thorough, extensive investigation would have started immediately.
But that didn’t happen.
Ruppelt didn’t even know about the Saturday night sightings until two days after they happened — and even then he only found out by reading about them in the newspaper.
Immediately contacting his Pentagon superiors, Ruppelt was understandably anxious to begin investigating the sightings. Yet for reasons never fully determined, Ruppelt’s own superiors refused to cooperate with him. They chose not to provide him with the barest essentials to start an inquiry, going so far as to deny him transportation, telling him if he wanted to visit Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base, he’d have to take a taxi and pay for it himself.
Ruppelt was furious. He flew out of Washington and went back to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where Project Blue Book was headquartered. What awaited him there was an avalanche of UFO sighting reports, from all across the country, spurred by the incident over DC.
* * *
One week later, another Saturday night, July 26, around 8 P.M., crewmembers of a National Airlines plane heading toward Washington DC suddenly spotted a group of unidentified objects flying above them.
The objects soon showed up on radar screens at National Airport and then Andrews Air Force Base. One of the Andrews’s personnel once again got a visual on the objects.
The UFOs were back.
The press jumped on the story this time, but the Pentagon pushed back. A lower-tiered spokesman for Project Blue Book was at National Airport when reporters arrived. The first thing he did was to deny their request to take pictures of the objects on National’s radar screens.
Within an hour, though, those same radar screens were detecting unidentified flying objects in all sectors around the airport. The ATC personnel watched dumbfounded as these UFOs performed seemingly impossible aerodynamic maneuvers, starting and stopping on a dime, reversing direction, sometimes moving at 100 miles per hour and the next moment, roaring off at 7,000 miles per hour.
By 11:30 P.M., two jet fighters had arrived, once again flying in from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware. The fighters were directed toward the unknown objects. One fighter pilot saw nothing. But the second fighter spotted four white objects and took up the chase.
As the personnel in the National tower watched, this fighter pursued the four objects — until suddenly, the objects reversed direction. In an instant they’d surrounded the fighter.
Either nervous, perplexed or a little of both, the pilot asked the National tower what he should do. According to people who were there, his request was answered with stunned silence.
Seconds later, the four objects sped away.
* * *
By this time, the Blue Book liaison officer had arrived at the National tower. He had a phone conversation with the Washington office of the Weather Bureau and was told that there were some temperature inversion elements present above Washington DC. (Basically, different temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere can play tricks on radar screens.) But the Weather Bureau added that these effects were slight and not enough to cause the pickup of multiple blips on the National radar screen.
In other words, what the people in the National tower were seeing were solid objects.
Two more fighter jets appeared on the scene. As before, one pilot saw nothing while the other chased a white light before it, too, disappeared.
Then, just like the week before, the UFOs went away as soon as the sun came up.
* * *
No surprise this second round of sightings created a second round of bold-type headlines.
One such dramatic incident — UFOs buzzing the nation’s capital — maybe could be explained away by weather phenomena, faulty equipment or overactive imaginations. But two?
Soon enough, Captain Ruppelt got a call from President Truman. The commander-in-chief wanted to know what was going on. Careful not to misspeak, Ruppelt took the safe route and explained that one reason for the radar sightings might be the temperature inversion theory.
But apparently Truman didn’t buy it. On July 29 he issued his now-legendary “shoot down/talk down” order. Forgotten at the time, though, was that no U.S. jet fighter had ever been in a position yet to shoot down a UFO. And just how the pilots were supposed to “talk” one down was never addressed, either.
When word about the shoot down order got out to the public, the White House was once again inundated with calls from citizens across the country. Many argued that shooting at a UFO, a machine that obviously belonged to some higher technological power, was an insane course of action. They feared if we started shooting at UFOs, the UFOs might fry the earth to a crisp.
Typically, though, at the same time as the shoot down order was being given, the air force was also quoted as saying that UFOs were not a threat to the country’s security nor did they believe they were under control of a higher intelligence, or any intelligence at all.
* * *
While it boggles the mind to think what kind of a reaction all this Pentagon bobbing and weaving would have gotten in a post-9/11 world, in 1952, the mixed messages only served to further confuse the American public on what had really happened.
So the U.S. Air Force decided to call a press conference. Held on July 29, it turned out to be the most crowded media event on a military matter since the end of World War II.
In attendance was a pair of high-ranking air force officers who argued that the DC sightings were one of either two things: shooting stars or something caused by temperature inversion. Basically the air force spokesmen said, take your pick.
The officers then reiterated that the contacts made by National Airport’s radar weren’t on solid objects and therefore were no threat to national security.
While Captain Ruppelt later wrote that the press conference succeeded in taking the pressure off the air force as far as the media was concerned, an avalanche of criticism from other quarters fell upon the Pentagon for their ineffectual explanations.
First of all, the Weather Bureau disputed what the air force had told the public. They said that the type of temperature inversion the air force had described would show itself as a steady line on a radarscope and not as a bunch of single targets, as were detected in the Washington area. When Captain Ruppelt checked with the Weather Bureau himself, he was told that the type of temperature inversion described by the Pentagon brass happened almost every night over Washington in the summer.
Then civilian eyewitnesses came forward, people who’d seen the objects flying over Washington at the same time the blips were showing up on radarscopes. Further research revealed that no one in the National or Andrews control towers on the nights in question agreed with the Pentagon’s explanation, either. There was even a photo taken of the UFOs flying over the U.S. Capitol building!
Whether the general public realized it or not at the time, it was becoming clear that just as in the case of the Los Angeles UFO raid, the foo fighters, the ghost rockets and everything that had transpired since the Kenneth Arnold sighting, including incidents happening in parallel in the Korean Conflict, the U.S. military, despite all the denials and explanations, probably had no idea what UFOs were.
* * *
But at the same time, the U.S. military realized they had a big problem.
On a
very basic level, the sheer volume of telephone calls that flooded the Pentagon during these kinds of UFO flaps was in itself a danger to national security.
The reasoning went, if an enemy of the United States wanted to sow confusion on the eve of an attack, all they had to do was somehow create a mass UFO sighting and the phone lines in and out of Washington would be horribly jammed. Panic would result, military commanders would be isolated and, in theory, the United States would be easy pickings.
Enter the CIA. Memos had bounced around the intelligence community after the Washington DC sightings, emphasizing this possibility of UFO-induced mass confusion. The result was that at the CIA’s urging, a panel was created under the directorship of Howard Percy Robertson, a noted physicist. Its mission was to study the top cases of Project Blue Book and discern what was going on.
But sadly, it seems likely now that the Robertson panel had an agenda before it even started its work. Its members wound up discounting all of the Blue Book cases it had studied as far as them being threats to national security. The panel’s conclusion was to recommend Project Blue Book stop investigating unexplained sightings and do more to disprove the existence of flying saucers. The air force brass made it so.
After that, Project Blue Book was mainly charged with releasing information to the public about UFO sightings that had “rational” explanations.
And what happened whenever they came up against a case they couldn’t explain?
They just wouldn’t talk about it.
UFO Chased, Shots Fired…
In that same summer of 1952, just about the same time as the flying saucer invasion of Washington DC, an air force jet interceptor, in another part of the country, actually fired on a UFO.
The location of the incident was kept secret by Project Blue Book’s Captain Ruppelt when he wrote about it in his classic book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. But still, he details the opening shots in what could have turned into exactly what all those people were warning the White House about: some kind of cataclysmic, one-sided interplanetary war.
As Ruppelt told the story, he was called to the unnamed U.S. air base and briefed on the sly by its intelligence officer about the UFO shooting incident. But he was also informed the base’s commander had decided that instead of being defined by such a weird event happening on his turf, it was better to smear the pilot involved as a “psycho.” And according to Ruppelt, that’s exactly what happened.
It all started one morning when the base’s radar picked up an unidentified flying object near the northeast part of the anonymous installation. The object was traveling at high speed — about Mach 1—when first detected. But just as suddenly, it reduced its velocity to a mere 100 miles per hour, a maneuver no aircraft in the world could do at the time.
Two of the base’s fighter planes were scrambled with orders to intercept the object. The airplanes were F-86 Sabre jets, the air force’s top fighters at the time. The base tower directed the Sabres toward the UFO, but as this was happening, the UFO began to fade off the base radar.
The control tower personnel were baffled. Had the UFO disappeared? Or was it flying so high — or so low — that it simply slipped off the radar screen?
The controllers decided the UFO was flying too high, so they instructed the F-86s to climb. Reaching 40,000 feet, the fighters found nothing — and by now the UFO had completely vanished from the base radar screens.
Perhaps the UFO had been flying too low then? The base told one of the F-86s to dive seven miles down to a tail-scraping altitude of 5,000 feet, while the other Sabre should take up station at 20,000 feet. The pilots complied.
On arriving at his prescribed altitude, the pilot who was ordered down to the deck saw a weird flash of light in front of him. Steering his F-86 in that direction, he spotted what at first looked like a weather balloon. But he knew this was impossible because the object was able to stay ahead of him — and he was flying at close to 700 miles per hour.
The pilot dove a little more, giving him additional speed but less altitude. The tactic worked, though, and he was soon just a half mile behind the mystery object. Finally, he got a close look at it and determined this was unquestionably no balloon. The pilot saw a definitive saucer shape; in his words, like a doughnut with no hole in the middle.
The pilot was soon on the UFO’s tail — and the object was obviously doing its best to stay ahead of him. The pilot tried calling his wingman on the radio, but his message wouldn’t go through. He tried calling the base’s tower, but that message didn’t get through, either. Meanwhile, he was only about 1,500 feet behind the object…
Suddenly, the object began to pick up speed. The F-86 pilot was in a quandary. What should he do? Ruppelt doesn’t say whether this happened before or after President Truman’s famous “UFO shoot down” order. But whatever the case, the pilot thought it was his duty to stop the intruder no matter what.
The F-86 was armed with six .50-caliber machine guns, firepower that could tear up another earthly aircraft with a few seconds’ burst.
So, the pilot opened up on the UFO.
But whether he even hit it is impossible to know. Because an instant after he started firing, the UFO tremendously increased its speed, went nose up and quickly disappeared.
* * *
The pilot linked up with his wingman shortly afterward, and together they returned to base. That’s when the smear campaign began.
No sooner had the two F-86s set down than the pilot in question was summoned before his direct superior, the squadron commander, and told to explain why he had fired his guns. After recounting what happened, the pilot was then called before the group commander, his overall superior officer. It was this officer, a colonel, who proceeded to trash the pilot’s story.
First, he accused the F-86 pilot of going crazy. Then he claimed the man had fired his guns only as a lark and made up the UFO chase story to cover up his actions. According to Ruppelt, other pilots came to the man’s defense, as did the base’s flight surgeon. But the group commander was not swayed. He insisted the pilot was a psycho.
Ruppelt says the base intelligence officer wrote up a UFO sighting report but was ordered by the group commander not to send it to Project Blue Book.
Ignoring whatever importance such an incident might have meant to the overall UFO situation, which in 1952 was at a fever pitch, the group commander instead ordered all copies of the report destroyed.
The Haneda Case
One of the countless advantages of aviation technology is the use of aircraft for search and rescue (SAR).
If someone is lost at sea or in a wilderness, aircraft can cover many more miles in shorter amounts of time than people searching on the water’s surface or on the ground. From a military point of view, highly trained search and rescue units are tasked with saving downed pilots or troops cut off from friendly forces.
Depending on the weather or the terrain, or who is controlling the ground below, there are a number of search patterns rescue aircraft can employ. The expanded square search, the sector search pattern, the parallel search pattern and the Williamson turn are all familiar to SAR personnel. These are proven methods of looking for something or someone from the air.
This aspect of search patterns became an interesting sidelight to yet another mysterious UFO sighting of the 1950s.
It happened over Haneda Air Force Base, a former U.S. Air Force installation that is now Tokyo International Airport. On August 5, 1952, just minutes before midnight, two air traffic control operators were walking to the base’s tower to start their shift. Suddenly they spotted an incredibly bright light northeast of Tokyo Bay.
At first the controllers thought it was just an especially luminous star. But in the next moment they knew this was not the case, because by virtue of their jobs, they’d spent many hours looking up at the night sky — they knew a star when they saw one. As if to confirm this, they realized the light was actually moving; in fact it was coming right at them.
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nbsp; The men were soon up in the tower and, along with the personnel already on duty, began examining the mysterious light through powerful binoculars. It seemed to be illuminating the upper portion of a large, round dark shape, something much larger than the light itself.
This object was getting closer to the air base. It was also becoming more distinct, and now the controllers could see a second, but fainter, light on the bottom of the object.
Suddenly the UFO moved east, out of view of the control tower. But just as quickly, it appeared again. It stayed in sight for a few moments and then vanished again. But then it came back again.
What was going on? Why all these strange movements?
A cargo plane was flying over Tokyo Bay nearby. The tower called the pilot and asked if he was seeing anything unusual. He replied no. But then the tower called a nearby radar station and asked if they had anything strange on their scopes. As it turned out, they did. And it was quickly determined that what the tower operators were seeing visually and the radar men were seeing electronically was the same thing.
Meanwhile the UFO continued acting peculiarly. It was moving back and forth above Tokyo Bay, sometimes hovering motionless, sometimes speeding up to more than 350 miles per hour. Throughout it all, while the radar men were watching the blip act this way on their screens, the tower personnel were watching the lighted object through their binoculars.
Shortly after midnight an F-94 interceptor scrambled from a nearby base arrived over Haneda. The tower controllers directed the jet fighter to get behind the UFO. Seconds later the F-94’s backseat radar man got a lock on the object. It was about three miles in front of the jet.
Now the tower personnel watched as both the F-94 and the UFO made a wide turn together. But the UFO got caught in the ground clutter — buildings and other obstructions that block radar beams — and the radar lock was broken.
At that point, the UFO started to accelerate away from the F-94; at the same moment, the tower operators lost sight of the object.
