UFO Encounters, Sightings, Visitations, and Investigations: THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY TAKES CONTROL
A few minutes before midnight on Saturday, July 19, 1952, an air traffic controller at National Airport in Washington, D.C., noticed some odd blips on his radar screen. Knowing that no aircraft were flying in that area—15 miles to the southwest of the capital—he rushed to inform his boss, Harry G. Barnes. Barnes recalled a few days later, “We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed. . . . [TJheir movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.” They moved with such sudden bursts of intense speed that radar could not track them continuously.
Soon, National Airport’s other radar, Tower Central (set on short-range detection, unlike Barnes’ Airway Traffic Control Central [ARTC]), was tracking unknowns. At Andrews AFB, ten miles to the east, Air Force personnel gaped incredulously as bright orange objects in the southern sky circled, stopped abruptly, and then streaked off at blinding speeds. Radar at Andrews AFB also picked up the strange phenomena.
The sightings and radar trackings continued until 3 A.M. By then witnesses on the ground and in the air had observed the UFOs, and at times all three radar sets had tracked them
simultaneously.
Exciting and scary as all this had been, it was just the beginning of an incredible episode. The next evening radar tracked UFOs as they performed extraordinary “gyrations and reversals,” in the words of one Air Force weather observer. Moving at more than 900 miles per hour, the objects gave off radar echoes exactly like those of aircraft or other solid targets. Sightings and trackings occurred intermittently during the week and then erupted into a frenzy over the following weekend. At one point, as an F-94 moved on targets ten miles away, the UFOs turned the tables and darted en masse toward the interceptor, surrounding it in seconds. The badly shaken pilot, Lt. William Patterson, radioed Andrews AFB to ask if he should open fire. The answer, according to Albert M. Chop, a civilian working as a press spokesperson for the Air Force who was present, was “stunned silence. . . . After a tense moment, the UFOs pulled away and left the scene.”
As papers, politicians, and public clamored for answers, the Air Force hosted the biggest press conference in history. A transcript shows that the spokesperson engaged in what amounted to double-talk, but the reporters, desperate for something to show their editors, picked up on Capt. Roy James’ off-the-cuff suggestion that temperature inversions had caused the radar blips. James, a UFO skeptic, had arrived in Washington only that morning and had not participated in the ongoing investigation.
Nonetheless, headlines across the country echoed the sentiments expressed in the Washington Daily News: “SAUCER” ALARM DISCOUNTED BY PENTAGON; RADAR OBJECTS LAID TO COLD AIR FORMATIONS. This “explanation” got absolutely no support from those who had seen the objects either in the air or on the radar screens, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, in a little-noted statement, rejected the theory. In fact, the official Air Force position, which it had success¬ fully obscured, was that the objects were
“unknowns.”
But while the nation’s opinion makers, satisfied that all was well, went on to other stories, the aftershocks of the Washington UFO invasion reverberated throughout the defense establishment. H. Marshall Chadwell, assistant director of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, warned CIA director Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, “At any moment of attack [from the Soviet Union], we are now in a position where we can-not, on an instant basis, distinguish hardware from phantom, and as tension mounts we will run the increasing risk of false alerts and the even greater danger of falsely identifying the real as phantom.” Chad well feared that the Soviets could plant UFO stories as a psychological war¬ fare exercise to sow “mass hysteria and panic.” In fact, as The New York Times noted in an August 1, 1952, analysis, the Washington sightings and others across the country in July were so numerous that “regular intelligence work had been affected.”
In fact, during the Washington events traffic related to the UFO sightings had clogged all intelligence channels. If the Soviets had chosen to take advantage of the resulting paralysis to launch an air or ground invasion of the United States, there would have been no way for the appropriate warnings to get through.
Determined that this would never happen again, the CIA approached Project Blue Book and said it wanted to review the UFO data accumulated since 1947. In mid-January a scientific panel headed by CIA physicist H. P. Robertson briefly reviewed the Air Force material, dismissed it quickly, and went on to its real business: recommending ways American citizens could be discouraged from seeing, reporting, or believing in flying saucers. The Air Force should initiate a “debunking” campaign and enlist the services of celebrities on the unreality of UFOs. Beyond that official police agencies should monitor civilian UFO research groups “because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking. . . . The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.”
The panel’s existence and its conclusions remained secret for years, but the impact on official UFO policy was enormous. In short order Project Blue Book was downgraded, becoming little more than a public-relations exercise. In 1966 the Air Force sponsored a project, directed by University of Colorado physicist Edward U. Condon, to conduct what was billed as an “independent” study. In fact it was part of an elaborate scheme to allow the Air Force, publicly anyway, to get out of the UFO business.
The Condon committee was to review or reinvestigate Project Blue Book data and decide if further investigation was warranted. As an internal memorandum leaked to Look magazine in 1968 showed, Condon and his chief assistant knew before they started that they were to reach negative conclusions. Condon sparked a Fire storm of controversy when he summarily dis¬ missed two investigators who, not having gotten the message, returned from the field with positive findings. In January 1969, when the committee’s final report was released in book form, readers who did not get past Condon’s introduction were led to believe that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified on the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.” Those who bothered to read the book found that fully one-third of the cases examined remained unexplained, and scientist-critics would later note that even some of the “explained” reports were unconvincingly accounted for.
But that did not matter; Condon and his committee had done their job, and the Air Force closed down Project Blue Book at the end of the year.
Some years later a revealing memo came to light through the Freedom of Information Act. It amounted to confirmation of a long-standing suspicion: Project Blue Book served as a front for a classified project that handled the truly sensitive reports. The memo, prepared on October 20, 1969, by Brig. Gen. C. H. Bolender, the Air Force’s Deputy Director of Development, noted that “reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose.” He did not explain what this “standard Air Force procedure” was, and the 16 pages attached to his memo—which presumably would have shed some light on this curious assertion—are missing from the Air Force files.
The Bolender memo was the first whiff from the cover-up’s smoking gun. There would be more—a lot more—in the years to come.