Did you know that the White House once had a close encounter with UFOs?
It was July 1952, and UFO obsession was at a fever pitch, thanks in part to an article
that had appeared in an April 1952 issue of LIFE magazine called “Have We Visitors From
Space?”
The article featured 10 UFO cases that, in the opinion of one scientist quoted in the
article, “have an out-of-world basis.”
As evidence of their extraterrestrial origins, he cited things like the acceleration ability
of the aircrafts and the fact that no human pilot could survive the maneuvers they pulled
off.
So it’s easy to see why, when seven weird blips appeared on the radar of Washington
National Airport not long before midnight on July 19, 1952, the man in the air traffic
control tower would crack a joke about “a fleet of flying saucers.”
Soon, air traffic controllers at Andrews Air Force base were also seeing strange blips
moving at incredibly high speeds on their screens.
But no one was laughing when those crafts, whatever they were, flew by the Capitol Building
and the White House.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, and this is The List Show.
Mysterious craft buzzing the White House is just the first of many facts about UFOs that
I’m going to share today.
Let’s get started.
By the time interceptor jets were mobilized back on that day in July 1952, whatever craft
had paid a visit to a snoozing Harry S. Truman had disappeared.
But, according to most versions of the story, when the planes left, the blips came back!
When night ended, they left—and then came back again the following Saturday.
Jets were called up again—but just when they would get to an area where the blips
had been seen on radar, the blips would vanish from radar.
The incident was officially blamed on temperature inversion, an event in which—simplistically
speaking—a layer of warm air traps cooler air underneath; radar signals bounce off the
layer and appear to show objects that are actually near the ground in the sky.
But the radar operators who saw the phenomenon, as well as the people behind Project Blue
Book, didn’t accept that explanation, and what really happened remains unsolved to this
day.
Before we dive into any more facts about UFOs, we should discuss terminology.
UFO, of course, stands for Unidentified Flying Object, a term that the Oxford English Dictionary
says was coined in 1953 by writer Donald Keyhoe in an issue of Air Line Pilot.
In the article, though, Keyhoe mostly uses the term in quotes from Air Technical Intelligence
Center reports, which is part of the U.S. Air Force.
In a document from the ‘50s, they defined a UFOB as “any airborne object which by
performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any
presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as
a familiar object.”
Things that fall into the category of familiar objects include balloons, birds, and planets.
UFO isn’t the only acronym used to refer to these crafts.
A recently released government report that we’ll talk about later uses UAP, or Unidentified
Aerial Phenomenon, amongst other creative abbreviations.
And just because we call something a UFO doesn’t necessarily mean there are aliens involved,
although of course the two terms are associated in the public consciousness.
But if you do want to talk about little green men and sound super official about it, you
can call them ETBs, or extraterrestrial beings.
There are also ETCs, or Extraterrestrial Crafts.
These terms, by the way, come from an NSA list of terms included in unsuccessful Freedom
of Information Act requests.
If you were curious, yes, people did want government documents containing the word ALF.
And Big Bird.
For some reason.
You know Foo Fighters as a totally badass rock band headed up by Dave Grohl, but the
term dates back to World War II.
The word foo seemingly originated from Smokey Stover, a popular comic at the time; members
of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron paired it with the word fighters to describe the
weird, annoying balls of light they spotted in the air over Germany.
Grohl was apparently reading a lot of books about UFOs at the time, and—take note, wannabe
rock stars—he has said that “there's a treasure trove of band names in those UFO
books!"
The phrase flying saucer has a pretty fascinating history.
It seems to have gotten its big break after an incident that occurred on June 24, 1947.
Pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier looking for plane wreckage when he
spotted nine metallic objects in the sky.
They were huge—Arnold estimated they were each about the size of a DC-4 plane—and
moving around 1200 mph.
He thought they were military planes and reported them, at which point the press misquoted him
as saying the objects were “flying saucers.”
As Arnold recalled in an interview with legendary journalist Edward Murrow:
The misquote took flight, you might say—in the weeks afterward, flying saucers were spotted
in 40 other states.
And for a time, the phrase was basically shorthand for a UFO.
Long before Kenneth Arnold saw flying saucers, people were spotting UFOs in the skies—and
either drawing them or writing about them.
As Richard Stothers put it in a 2007 piece for The Classical Journal,
In that Classical Journal paper, Stothers focused on the Ancient Romans, who wrote about
strange things in the sky all the time.
Some of them can definitely be explained by natural phenomena, like eclipses or meteor
showers.
Others, not so much.
In 74 BCE, thousands of people witnessed a strange event in which, as Plutarch wrote
around 150 years later, “a huge, flame-like body,” silver in color and shaped like a
wine jar, interrupted two warring armies.
Pliny the Elder wrote that
It eventually became as large as the Moon before going back into the sky.
And in the 200s BCE, there were reports of things like “a spectacle of ships” and
“round shields” seen in the sky.
Things don’t get any less weird when you fast forward to the 1560s, when people living
in Germany and Switzerland reported seeing strangely shaped objects doing aerial battle
and flying around.
The first written record of UFOs in what eventually became the United States comes from the 1630s,
when some men who were out on Boston’s Muddy River at night reported seeing a light in
the sky.
In the words of Governor John Winthrop, who recorded the incident
Even stranger, by the time the incident was over, the boat the men were in had somehow
moved a mile upstream—and then men weren’t sure how that had happened.
Let’s jump forward in time to post-World War II, when modern UFO research really ramped
up.
Sightings of weird things in the sky spiked, and the government responded by having the
U.S. Air Force investigate the incidents.
The Air Force formed the first of several task forces, Project Sign, in 1948.
It was quickly succeeded by Project Grudge, which itself was superseded by the most famous
UFO inquiry, Project Blue Book, in the early 1950s.
We’ll get back to Project Blue Book in a minute, but first, we have to talk about what
is probably the most famous UFO incident of all time—the one that occurred near Roswell,
New Mexico.
Here’s what happened: At some point in the summer of 1947, something crashed on a ranch
outside of Roswell.
The rancher who discovered the debris said it was “bright wreckage made up of rubber
strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.”
In early July, he delivered some of the debris to the sheriff, who called in the big guns:
the military.
Men based at the Roswell Army Air Field went out to collect the rest of the debris, and
soon, their press representative released a statement, which said:
The statement made news around the country, even as the Army was backpedaling.
As Dick Pearce at the San Francisco Examiner reported on July 9, 1947, he called General
George Ramey at a base in Fort Worth, Texas, who described the disc and noted his belief
that it was a piece of a weather balloon, saying,
Pearce described the initial statement as “the boner of” the Army’s public relations
official and no, you’re 12 years old.
Anyway, Pearce wrote that the debris was actually “the box kite radar reflector of a weather
balloon” and that “while the mistake lasted, it was a honey.”
And for a while, that was that—until the 1970s, when people who believed the government
was covering something up started casting doubt on the official story.
And in a way, they weren’t wrong.
What crashed outside Roswell may not have been extraterrestrial in origin, but it also
wasn’t a weather balloon—most likely, it was part of Project Mogul, which was an
experimental project to acoustically spy on the Soviets.
OK, back to Project Blue Book—which was named after those little blue books you take
college exams in, by the way.
To handle UFO sightings, Project Blue Book asked people to fill out standardized questions,
including “when did you see the object?”
“where were you when you saw the object?”
“what was the condition of the sky?” and “if there was more than one object, then
how many were there?”
UFO spotters were also asked to draw what they had seen, describe what sound it made,
and note if its edges were fuzzy, bright, or sharply outlined.
Project Blue Book was active until 1969 and in that time, according to Britannica, recorded
12,000 incidents which were either identified—as things like atmospheric phenomena or man-made
objects like weather balloons—or “unidentified.”
The unidentified incidents accounted for 6 percent of the cases recorded by Project Blue
Book.
There are plenty of things that can be mistaken for UFOs.
Venus, for example, is a prime culprit behind many supposed UFO sightings, probably because
it’s so bright and so close to the horizon.
SpaceX rocket launches have been mistaken for UFOs, and so has an Army parachute team.
Drones and certain cloud formations also make the list.
But hands-down my favorite mistaken UFO story belongs to one UK resident actually called
the police to report a bright object lingering near their home … which they later realized
was the Moon.
What happened to Betty and Barney Hill is less easy to explain.
Betty worked in child welfare, and Barney at the post office, and in September 1961,
they spontaneously decided to take a vacation to give themselves a little R&R.
They took a three-day trip, driving from their home in New Hampshire to Niagara Falls and
Montreal.
On the way back, they were driving on dark, empty roads of New Hampshire’s White Mountains
when they spotted a light in the sky that moved strangely—it moved upward instead
of falling like a shooting star would.
It got bigger and bigger, and eventually seemed to be keeping track of their car as they drove.
When they looked at it through binoculars, they could see that it was a spinning object.
They kept driving, but eventually, Barney had had enough.
He got out to confront the craft and saw grayish aliens inside with huge eyes.
He felt like they were going to be abducted—he ran back to the car and hit the gas.
As they continued to drive, the Hills encountered some kind of roadblock and a fiery orb and
passed out.
When they woke up a couple of hours later, they were 35 miles away from where they’d
been with zero memory of how they’d gotten there.
Their clothes and shoes were mussed, and their watches weren’t working.
There were strange metal marks on the trunk of their car that made compasses go wild.
Understandably disturbed, the Hills filed a report with Project Blue Book and went to
a psychiatrist, who used hypnosis to help them remember what supposedly happened: Gray
beings took them into a huge metallic craft, where they were separated and examined.
The beings took samples of their hair, nails, and skin, and a needle was inserted into Betty’s
abdomen.
Finally, their memories were erased.
The Hills didn’t tell anyone about the incident until 1963.
Ultimately, despite therapy, research, and getting the government involved, the Hills
didn’t find out what had happened to them.
Many have been skeptical of their accounts, of course, including a young Carl Sagan, who,
in 1967, was a Harvard Professor on a panel discussing the possible abduction.
Project Blue Book officially filed their case under “insufficient data.”
Let’s wrap up with a few facts from a report on UFOs that was released in 2021.
The report, released by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or UAPTF, focused on
144 eyewitness reports of UAPs—unidentified aerial phenomena—reported by government
employees, which occurred between 2004 and 2021.
Of those 144 cases, the report identified just one—one!—with confidence: It was
believed to be a very big balloon that was deflating.
The rest remain unidentified.
That said, there were themes that emerged in the eyewitness accounts, including things
like size, shape, and propulsion.
There was also the fact that sightings often occurred around U.S. military testing grounds,
but the report notes that that might be because of large numbers of high-quality sensors in
those locations and because aviators there are both more focused and encouraged to report
anomalies.
In some of the incidents, witnesses reported UAPs that moved in unusual ways.
According to the report,
Does this mean aliens?
Of course not, according to the task force.
In fact, they think many of them will fall into a few explainable categories:
1.
airborne clutter: think things like that aforementioned balloon, for example, birds, or drones.
2.
Natural Atmospheric Phenomena: things like moisture and ice crystals.
3.
USG or Industry Developmental Programs: classified aircraft, baby!!
4.
Foreign Adversary Systems: craft deployed by the likes of Russia or China.
All the rest end up in the “other” category.
Comforting!
And even then, as one official said,
These objects might have appeared to move strangely because of observer misperception
or things like sensor errors.
So we don’t have an explanation for these sightings yet, and unfortunately, it might
stay that way, thanks to things like insufficient data and limited reporting.
That said, because these UAPs could pose a risk to military aircraft and national security,
these reports will continue to be collected and studied.
So the truth ... might still be out there.
If you’ve had an experience with UFOs, let us know about it in the comments.
Thanks for watching!