Alright, so this happened back in July of 1952, and I've told this story a hundred times, but it still gives me chills. And I'm telling you, I know what I saw. I saw it on the radar screen and out the window. Both. And I'm not the only one. I was working as an air traffic controller at Washington National Airport, in the radar-equipped control tower. Me and my colleague Jim worked the night shift together. It was late Saturday night, July 19th, around eleven forty at night. Hot and muggy, the kind of night where the heat just sits on you. We were monitoring the scopes, pretty routine evening, when one of the controllers down in the main radar center called up to us. His name was Ed, and he sounded rattled. He said his supervisor Henry had spotted seven objects on radar, about 15 miles south-southwest of the city. No known aircraft were in the area. These things weren't following any established flight paths. Henry told us later that they knew immediately something very strange was going on. He said their movements were completely radical compared to ordinary aircraft. Not just unusual, radical. So we checked our own scopes in the tower. And there they were. Unidentified blips, right there on our screen too. I looked at Jim and he looked at me. Then I saw it. Through the window, there was a bright light hovering in the sky. Just sitting there. And then it departed. I mean, it shot away at incredible speed. I turned to Jim and said, 'Did you see that? What the hell was that?' He saw it too.
By this point, objects were appearing in all sectors of the radarscope. We're talking multiple targets now, not just one or two. When they moved over the White House and the Capitol building, Henry called Andrews Air Force Base. That's only about 10 miles from National Airport. At first, Andrews said they didn't have anything unusual on their radar. But then an airman at Andrews called their control tower to report seeing a strange object himself. The guy in the tower at Andrews, his name was William, he looked out and saw what he described as an orange ball of fire with a tail. He said it was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. And then, just as he tried to alert the other personnel in the tower, the thing took off at an unbelievable speed. Just gone. heard there were multiple witnesses - Victor' Meanwhile, down on one of our runways, there was a Capital Airlines pilot sitting in his DC-4, waiting for permission to take off. His name was Casey, nice guy, very experienced pilot. He spotted what he thought might be a meteor. So we told him, hey, our radar's got unknown objects closing in on your position. And he starts seeing them. Six objects, he said. White, tailless, fast-moving lights. He watched them for 14 minutes straight. And I'm telling you, here's the thing that convinced me these were real, solid objects. Casey was in radio contact with Henry down in the radar center the whole time. Every time Casey reported that he saw a light streak off at high speed, it disappeared on our scope at the exact same moment. The timing was perfect. Whatever he was seeing, we were tracking it. It wasn't in his head, and it wasn't a malfunction.
Over at Andrews, one of their staff sergeants was watching too. His name was Charles, and he saw an orange-red light to the south. He said it would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude. This happened several times. Not drifting like a balloon, not following any normal flight pattern. Abrupt changes. At one point, and this is something I'll never forget, all three radar centers were tracking the same object. National Airport had it on two different scopes, and Andrews had it too. It was hovering over a radio beacon. We're all watching this thing, and then it vanished. Not like it flew away. It just vanished from all three radar centers at the exact same time. Simultaneously. How do you explain that? Around 3 AM, two Air Force F-94 jets finally showed up from New Castle Air Force Base up in Delaware. The moment those jets got close to Washington, every single object disappeared from our radar. Just gone. But here's the kicker. When the jets ran low on fuel and had to head back, the objects came back. Every single one of them. Henry was convinced at that point that these things were monitoring our radio traffic and behaving accordingly. They knew the jets were coming, and they knew when they left. We tracked objects until about five thirty in the morning, right around sunrise. And then they were gone. The whole thing made front-page headlines everywhere. I mean everywhere. The Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa had it in huge black letters, 'SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL.' That was the kind of coverage this got.
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