1952 Washington D.C. UFO Incident - Criticisms of The Air Force Explanation

Criticisms of The Air Force Explanation

Almost from the moment of General Samford's press conference, eyewitnesses, UFO researchers, and Air Force personnel came forward to criticize the temperature inversion/mirage explanation. Captain Ruppelt noted that Major Fournet and Lt. Holcomb, who disagreed with the Air Force's explanation, were not in attendance at Samford's press conference. Ruppelt himself discovered that "hardly a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn't a inversion in Washington, yet the slow-moving, solid radar targets appeared on only a few nights."

According to a story printed by INS, the United States Weather Bureau also disagreed with the temperature inversion hypothesis, one official stating that "such an inversion ordinarily would appear on a radar screen as a steady line, rather than as single objects as were sighted on the airport radarscope."

Also, according to Ruppelt, when he was able to interview the radar and control tower personnel at Washington National Airport, not a single person agreed with the Air Force explanation. Michael Wertheimer, a researcher for the government-funded Condon Report, investigated the case in 1966. He found that the radar witnesses still disputed the Air Force explanation, but that did not stop the report from agreeing with the temperature inversion/mirage explanation. Ruppelt related that on July 27 the control tower at Washington National had called the control tower at Andrews AFB and notified them that their radar had an unknown object just south of the Andrews control tower, directly over the Andrews AFB radio range station. According to Ruppelt, when the Andrews control tower personnel looked they all saw "a huge fiery-orange sphere" hovering over the range station. When Ruppelt interviewed the tower personnel several days later, they insisted that they had been mistaken and had merely seen a bright star. However, when Ruppelt checked an astronomical chart he found that there were no bright stars over the station that night, and that he had "heard from a good source that the tower men had been 'persuaded' a bit" by superior officers to claim that their sighting was merely a star.

There were also witnesses who claimed to see structured craft and not merely "glows" or bright lights. On July 19 an Army artillery officer, Joseph Gigandet, was sitting on the front porch of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. At 9:30 p.m. he claimed to see "a red cigar-shaped object" which sailed slowly over his house. Gigandet estimated the object's size as comparable to a DC-7 airplane at about 10,000 feet altitude; he also claimed that the object had a "series of lights very closely set together" on its sides. The object eventually flew back over his house a second time, which led Gigandet to assume that it was circling the area. When the object flew away a second time, it turned a deeper red color and moved over the city of Washington itself; this occurred less than two hours before Edward Nugent first spotted the unknown objects on his radar at Washington National. Gigandet claimed that his neighbor, an FBI agent, also saw the object. Dr. James E. McDonald, a physicist at the University of Arizona and a prominent ufologist in the 1960s, did his own analysis of the Washington sightings. After interviewing four pilot eyewitnesses and five radar personnel, McDonald argued that the Air Force explanation was "physically impossible." Harry Barnes told McDonald that the radar targets "were not shapeless blobs such as one gets from ground returns under anomalous propagation", and that he was certain the unknown radar blips were solid targets; Howard Cocklin agreed with Barnes.