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.

How UFOs Exploded Into Public View

Above, yours truly with a couple of other attendees of the 2018 Roswell UFO Festival.

Ever wondered how the flying saucer or U.F.O. phenomenon burst into the public consciousness?

The New York Times, in an article posted on August 3, takes a look back on how flying saucers became serious business.

It starts with:

In the early morning of July 20, 1952, Capt. S.C. “Casey” Pierman was ready for takeoff at Washington National Airport, when a bright light skimmed the horizon and disappeared. He did not think much of it until he was airborne, bound for Detroit, and an air traffic controller told him two or three unidentified flying objects were spotted on radar traveling at high speed. 

The controller told Captain Pierman to follow them, the pilot told government investigators at the time. Captain Pierman agreed, and headed northwest over West Virginia where he saw as many as seven bluish-white lights that looked “like falling stars without tails,” according to a newspaper report. 

The sighting of whatever-they-were garnered headlines around the world. And in the decades since, U.F.O.s have become part of the pop culture zeitgeist, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files.” In September, a star of that long-running series, Gillian Anderson, will appear in “UFO,” a movie about a college student haunted by sightings of flying saucers. A “Men in Black” remake is in the works. And the History Channel plans to air “Project Blue Book,” a scripted series about the government program that studied whether U.F.O.s were a national threat.

On the Roswell incident in 1947, the article states:

The events in Washington were not the first unexplained encounter report. Debris from what observers called a “flying disc” had been spotted in Roswell, N.M., five years earlier, which Army officials said was from a “weather balloon.” By 1952, though, a number of sightings of U.F.O.s were being reported across the country and the nation was on edge.

To read more, go here.