It’s been called the “Invasion of Washington.” Back in the summer of 1952, UFOs may have buzzed the nation’s capital.
A comic strip inspired by the 1952 UFO sightings. Photograph by Air Staff/National Archives, Records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force.may have buzzed the nation’s capital.
The first incident occurred before midnight on July 19, when an air-traffic controller at what was then Washington National Airport reported seven unexplained radar blips, including over the White House and Capitol. Other controllers—at National and Andrews Air Force Base—and even a pilot in the air, also reported strange objects.
The next weekend, the odd radar blips were back—this time, air-traffic controllers counted a dozen. An Iowa newspaper would later blare: “Saucers Swarm Over Capital.” This was just five years after strange debris—which some speculated was a flying saucer but others said was a weather balloon—was found on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. America’s interest in flying saucers was likewise stirred up by an April 1952, UFO sightings spiked—from 23 in March, before the article, to 148 in June. In this atmosphere came the DC “invasion.”
Radar experts theorized that the culprit in DC might have been a temperature inversion, in which warm air sits atop cooler air, trapping it. This can invert radar, too, causing it to bounce off that ceiling and make objects on the ground appear to be in the sky. Some feared it was advanced aircraft from Russia. The Air Force first said it had no idea what the blips were; later, it suggested a temperature inversion had produced the phenomenon.
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