UFOs over Washington prompted policy of denial and ridicule

7/13/2000
The View from Marrs by Jim Marrs challenges bureaucratic secrecy and the status quo. Big Media watch out!

Beginning on the night of July 19, 1952, both the American public and government officials were jolted by events in the sky over Washington, D.C. This incident, largely forgotten today, resulted in the government's policy of denying the existence of UFOs and ridiculing anyone that questioned their position.

That night about 11:40 p.m., more than eight UFOs were tracked on radar at both Andrews Air Force Base and Washington National Airport streaking over Washington at "fantastic high speeds."

Experienced pilots and air traffic controllers observed the objects along with countless citizens, in addition to the radar contacts, which lasted until nearly daylight. Ominously, these objects were well within Washington's most restricted airspace - passing over both the Capitol and the White House.

These sightings continued later in July. Each time jet interceptors were vectored to the area of the UFOs, they would disappear until the jets returned to base when they would reappear and continue their aerobatics demonstration.

When the aerial show began, news reporters jammed into the radar room at National Airport, but were quickly ordered out with the excuse that classified radio frequencies would be used to communicate with the interceptors. "I knew this was absurd because any ham radio operator worth his salt could build equipment and listen in on any intercept," noted Air Force Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, who later headed Project Blue Book. He said he later learned the real reason for dismissing the newsmen was to prevent them from learning the reality of the UFOs, should one be brought down.

With little chance that the extraordinary aerial display could be denied, the Air Force called a news conference on July 29. It was largest and longest Air Force briefing since World War II. Maj. Gen. John Samford hedged on many questions asked by the reporters largely because, according to Ruppelt, he simply didn't have an answer.

Samford finally passed the buck to an intelligence officer who speculated that the display over Washington might have been caused by temperature inversion, a phenomenon creating pockets of warm air, which could both reflect light and be picked up on radar. This explanation, while reported skeptically by the media, was embraced by UFO debunkers. However, Blue Book investigators determined that each night of the sightings, temperature inversions were never strong enough to affect radar. "So the Washington National Airport sightings are still unknowns," Ruppelt concluded.

The Washington incidents were enough to cause Blue Book staffers to decide it was time to end the official secrecy regarding UFOs. This decision was supported by then Navy Secretary Dan Kimbell, who ordered a Navy investigator after experiencing his own UFO sighting while flying to Hawaii.

Both the Air Force and the Navy spent months studying some of the best sightings of the period, including a film of fast-moving, bright, flying objects taken on July 2, 1952, by Navy Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse. Neither Air Force nor Navy photo analysts could offer a conclusive explanation for the objects in the film.

With both the Air Force and the Navy now in the UFO investigation business and with Blue Book members calling for an end to the secrecy, it was obvious to anyone wishing to control and contain the issue that something had to be done.

This was accomplished by calling upon the CIA, then one of the most secretive government agencies, and one that had been surreptitiously keeping tabs on UFOs since its inception in 1947. Retired Marine Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe, who in 1956 helped form a private UFO group called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), claimed fellow NICAP member and former CIA Director Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter confirmed to him this early CIA interest. (This is the same Adm. Hillenkoetter named as an MJ-12 member in the controversial .MJ-12 documents).

Keyhoe, a man with impressive credentials and highly placed Washington contacts, said a decision was made to "seize control of the AF investigation and insist on a hard-boiled, ruthless censorship, to kill off public belief in UFOs."

To this end, CIA officials quietly convened a panel of distinguished scientists to make a secret study of the UFO evidence up to that time. The panel was selected by then CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith - another name on the MJ-12 list - and included yet another MJ-12 listee, Dr. Lloyd Berkner. Dr. H. P. Robertson, a California Institute of Technology physicist with close connections to U.S. intelligence, especially through his study of the German V-2 rocket program during World War II, chaired the panel.

One panel member, Dr. Thornton L. Page of Johns Hopkins University, reflected the viewpoint of most of his peers when he later recalled, "At the start I thought it was a lot of nonsense and said so."

The Robertson Panel, as it came to be known, was hampered by men of Page's mindset and thrown off by the highly selective presentation of UFO cases by the CIA, charged one of the attending Air Force officers. "We were double-crossed," commented a Blue Book member. "The CIA (didn't) want to prepare the public - they're trying to bury the subject. Those agents ran the whole show and the scientists followed their lead. They threw out the Utah [Newhouse] film - said the Navy analysts were incompetent. We had over a hundred of the strongest verified reports. The agents bypassed the best ones. The scientists saw just 15 cases and the CIA men tried to pick holes in them."

This assertion was supported by Blue Book astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who by that time was too convinced of the spaceship theory to be allowed anywhere near the Robertson panel. "The panel was not given access to many of the truly puzzling cases," he confirmed, adding, "The Robertson panel did get someplace: they made the subject of UFOs scientifically unrespectable, and for . . . years not enough attention was paid to the subject to acquire the kind of data needed to even decide the nature of the UFO phenomenon."

After just five days of study, the Robertson Panel concluded there was no indication that the UFO phenomenon constituted a direct threat to national security. No one knowledgeable with the panel's operation was surprised.

Intriguingly however, the panel saw fit to delve into the psychological aspect of UFOs while denying any physical reality. Panelists concluded that "the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these perilous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic," such as clogging defense communications with "irrelevant reports" and causing false alarms which might diminish a rapid response to a Soviet attack.

To remedy this perceived weakness in the defense system, the panel recommended that "national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired."

With the CIA-dominated Robertson Panel, the U.S. Government thus began a conscious program of dismissal and ridicule regarding UFOs, which has continued - with only minor interruptions - to this day.

If you would like to learn more about the Government's UFO cover up, be sure a get a copy of the most comprehensive book ever on UFOs, Alien Agenda, by Jim Marrs. And don't miss his new e-book on the U. S. Army's top-secret remote viewing program titled Psi Spies. Both are available right here at AlienZoo.