When UFOs Buzzed The White House

Above, The Day The Earth Stood Still display at the International UFO
Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Not too many people (outside of UFO enthusiasts) are aware that the White House was buzzed by UFOs back during the Truman Administration in 1952.

In fact, a number of UFO sighting were reported in the Washington, DC area.

History.com has an article on the White House UFO encounter and Washington, DC UFO sightings.

They begin with:

When a slew of saucer-like sightings was reported over Washington, D.C. in 1952, the Air Force blocked its own investigator from checking them out. 

1952 was the year America caught flying-saucer fever. 

So when a rash of strange sightings was reported in the skies over Washington D.C. that summer, the press and the public demanded answers. Were these unexplained radar blips, crafts that in some cases outran jets, part of a nuclear-armed Soviet invasion—a very real threat at the height of the Red Scare? Or were they evidence of something far more mysterious? 

The Washington, D.C. sightings of July 1952, also known as “the Big Flap,” hold a special place in the history of unidentified flying objects. Major American newspapers were reporting multiple credible sightings by civilian and military radar operators and pilots—so many that a special intelligence unit of the U.S. Air Force was sent in to investigate. What they found—or didn’t find—along with the Air Force’s official explanation, fueled some of the earliest conspiracy theories about a government plot to hide evidence of alien life.

The White House and Capitol buzzed:

When radar operators at National watched the objects buzz past the White House and Capitol building, the UFO jokes stopped. Two F-94 interceptor jets were scrambled, but each time they approached the locations appearing on the radar screens, the mysterious blips would disappear. By dawn of July 20, the objects were gone.

It is interesting that UFOs buzzed the capital after The Day The Earth Stood Still was released in September 1951.

To read more, go here.