Think about this era for a moment. Men and women dressed like the cast in Grease, Afro-Americans still couldn’t vote, and in most states, the only way you could divorce your spouse was to prove he or she was guilty of a crime. The Cold War was in full swing, and Harry S Truman, the unpopular incumbent president, had decided not to run in the November election. Eisenhower won that election and ended twenty years of Democratic rule.
But in July 1952, Truman was still president and, according to CIA historian Gerald Haines, his administration was alarmed about a “massive buildup of (UFO) sightings over the United States.”
The sightings in Washington, D.C. began on July 19, at 11:40 p.m., when seven to ten UFOs were tracked on radar at Andrews Air Force Base and Washington National Airport. They were about fifteen miles south-southwest of the city, no known aircraft were in the area, and they didn’t follow any established flight path. The UFOs reportedly moved along at normal speeds of 100-130 mph, then accelerated to speeds estimated to be over 7,000 mph. They were observed for more than six hours.
The objects were seen by pilots, air-traffic controllers, civil engineers, and ordinary citizens. Around three that morning, shortly before jet fighters arrived from Newcastle Air Force Base in Delaware, the UFOs vanished simultaneously from all radar screens. But when the jets ran low on fuel and had to return to base, the objects reappeared, which convinced a senior air traffic controller, Harry Barnes, that the UFOs were monitoring radio frequencies.
Over the next ten days, the UFOs reappeared and F-94 military jets were dispatched to intercept them. But the jets were never able to get close enough to shoot. According to Lt. Colonel Moncel Monte, an Air Force public information officer, they sometimes outflew the pilots by “as much as a thousand miles an hour.”
The media, of course, had a field day, with headlines screaming about flying saucers in restricted airspace over the White House and the Capital. The headlines of the Washington Post on July 28 read: ‘Saucer’ Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals. From The New Yorker: ‘Saucers’ Spotted on Capital Radar. The Washington Daily News headline for July 29: Jets Ordered to Hunt Down Flying Saucers.
On July 29, Major General John Samford apparently realized the Air Force had to make some sort of official response, so he held a press conference. It was the largest and longest pres conference the Air Force had held since the second world war. The following day, July 30, the Washington Times Herald ran a cartoon featuring flying saucers, with a caption that read: Are these what you saucer? Beneath it was: Mirage, Says AF Officer of ‘Saucers.’ The officer, of course, was James Samford, who told the press corps that he was satisfied in his own mind that the appearances of the objects were the result of atmospheric conditions.
The article went on to explain that radar experts from the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson AF Base said that false radar images often are created “by a type of air layer that ‘bends’ the electrical beams.” Temperature inversions as an explanation was readily accepted by debunkers, but Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt wasn’t convinced. Even though temperature inversions occurred nearly every night in June, July, and August, none were strong enough to effect radar.
So, way back in 1952, sightings by dozens of ordinary citizens and technical experts were relegated to the land of “weather.” And anyone who thought otherwise instantly became an outlier, to be shunned and ridiculed. It’s an effective weapon. And it has worked for decades.
Whoot, I was raised in Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1950s Martin Luther King days. Black people still had to ride in the back of the bus. They were not allowed to use white folks’ restrooms or eat in white folks’ restaurants. Crosses were still being burned in the their yards and in the yards of the white people who supported integration. Black folks were still being taken into the woods and hung by their necks in trees, by the KKK. Governor Jim Folsom, “Big Jim , was governor of AL during a portion of that time, in the late 1940s-early 1950s.
We lived directly across the street from the governor’s mansion and I played with his children. Folsom was a HUGE force in the KKK. And lest we forget, George Wallace came along with his evil ways.
I don’t know if you’ve lived in California all your life, but as a Southerner born and bred, I can tell you that TODAY there are still white racists gatherings, still active KKK clans, still the white supremacy groups. It hasn’t gone away in the Southern U.S. It’s alive and well. Progress for the African Americans here has been won slowly and, unfortunately, with much death and degradation, and continues to have far to go.
you guys telling me that in 1952 african americans did not have the rigth to vote in the US,, you sure about that,,, CAN’T B Correct!!
The 15th amendment gave them that right, but the south fought it all the way. It wasn’t until the voting rights act of 1965, which aid voting is a CIVIL right, that Afro-Americans had the guarantee to a vote. https://www.kqed.org/assets/pdf/education/digitalmedia/us-voting-rights-timeline.pdf
unfortunately, some things never change…
ain’t that the truth!
Speaking of aliens,this new film looks good from the preview –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x1TZLcMjgA
It’s based on a Stephenie Meyers novel,and while I’m not into her Twilight series this story looks promising…from the trailer,anyway.
Thanks for the link! I read the novel. It’ll be interesting to see how they do the movie.
Want to add that cancer at age 45 created the necessity of radical surgery to remove all my internal female parts. So if this needle pain below my navel is coming from ‘them’, they can’t be harvesting any more eggs from me. There aren’t any. More disturbing for me is the presence in my “energy field of dreams” of that individual who invaded my life for several years. He’s extremely powerful, and extremely creepy.
To my awareness, I’ve had no contact from or with him in a couple of years, so his appearance in my lucid dream with the two UFOs is stressful, to say the least.
The above video is compelling. The explanation of weather anomalies is very common and absurd. Sooner or later the gov’t will be forced to stop using such an innane and utterly ridiculous response to these sightings.
Nothing is really new, and it’s always easier to mock than to believe or explain.
Good footage on the video and also found maths’ comment interesting.
It’s why being a skeptic is so easy!
It still works. I just emailed T and R that last night, (Saturday night/Sunday morning) I dreamed about a man whom I knew to be, well, very likely a hybrid human-alien, and he was scary as the devil. i knew him up close and personal for several years. Yeah, I know that sounds insane. But the MacGregors know the entire story and it’s not as insane as it sounds.
Anyway, in my dream, which was lucid, I was standing on the ground beside this guy and was looking over my head at two hovering UFOs. They were strange-looking. One was small, the other was quite large. I didn’t feel threatened, yet I was unable to move away. Was being held by some kind of invisible force or something. This morning my stomach feels as if a needle is being stuck into it, just beneath my navel. It’s a very quick, sharp pain that is coming and going. This has nothing to do with the above post about the Washington UFOs. I wanted to share it, though. Thanks, macgregors, for giving me the space to do so.