Night of July 19
At 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, July 19, 1952, Edward Nugent, an
air traffic controller at
Washington National Airport spotted seven objects on his
radar.
[14] The objects were located 15 miles (24 km) south-southwest of the city; no known aircraft were in the area, and the objects were not following any established flight paths. Nugent's superior, Harry Barnes, a senior air-traffic controller at the airport, watched the objects on Nugent's radarscope. He later wrote:
We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed . . . their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.
[15]
Barnes had two controllers check Nugent's radar; they found that it was working normally. Barnes then called National Airport's radar-equipped control tower; the controllers there, Howard Cocklin and Joe Zacko, said that they also had unidentified blips on their radar screen, and saw a hovering "bright light" in the sky, which departed with incredible speed.
[14] Cocklin asked Zacko, "Did you see that? What the hell was that?"
[14]
At this point, other objects appeared in all sectors of the radarscope; when they moved over the
White House and the
United States Capitol, Barnes called
Andrews Air Force Base, located 10 miles from National Airport. Although Andrews reported that they had no unusual objects on their radar, an airman soon called the base's control tower to report the sighting of a strange object. Airman William Brady, who was in the tower, then saw an "object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail . . . [it was] unlike anything I had ever seen before."
[14][16] As Brady tried to alert the other personnel in the tower, the strange object "took off at an unbelievable speed.
[16]
On one of National Airport's
runways, S.C. Pierman, a
Capital Airlines pilot, was waiting in the
cockpit of his
DC-4 for permission to take off. After spotting what he believed to be a
meteor, he was told that the control tower's radar had detected unknown objects closing in on his position. Pierman observed six objects — "white, tailless, fast-moving lights" — over a 14-minute period.
[17][14] Pierman was in radio contact with Barnes during his sighting, and Barnes later related that "each sighting coincided with a pip we could see near his plane. When he reported that the light streaked off at a high speed, it disappeared on our scope."
[18]
Meanwhile, at Andrews Air Force Base, the control tower personnel were tracking on radar what some thought to be unknown objects, but others suspected, and in one instance were able to prove, were simply
stars and meteors.
[19] However, Staff Sgt. Charles Davenport observed an orange-red light to the south; the light "would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude . . . this happened several times."
[18] At one point both radar centers at National Airport and the radar at Andrews Air Force Base were tracking an object hovering over a radio beacon. The object vanished in all three radar centers at the same time.
[20]
At 3 a.m., shortly before two
United States Air Force F-94 Starfire jet fighters from
New Castle Air Force Base in
Delaware arrived over Washington, all of the objects vanished from the radar at National Airport. However, when the jets ran low on fuel and left, the objects returned, which convinced Barnes that "the UFOs were monitoring radio traffic and behaving accordingly."
[18] The objects were last detected by radar at 5:30 a.m.
