Moon rising in Washington DC (View
larger version)
Steven Heap
By: Patrick J. Kiger
Published June 8, 2012
A video clip of a bright
light seemingly hovering in the night sky over Reagan National Airport in
Virginia on May 16, is creating a stir among UFO researchers, believers and
enthusiasts on the Internet—perhaps because it revisits the scene of one
of the most famous UFO sightings ever, which occurred at the airport
almost exactly 60 years before.
The one-minute, eight second
video, posted on YouTube on May 16 by a user identified only as “wowforreeel,”
shows a large flickering light hovering in the sky to the north of National’s
control tower. The clip subsequently was reposted by
“Greyhunter2012,” a collector of UFO and paranormal videos, and has garnered
roughly 30,000 views. It subsequently was featured on websites such as
the Paranormal Searchers blog, Disclose.tv, The Conspiracy
Index and UFO Casebook, and was the subject of an article on
Gather.com, a site where amateur journalists post their work. “This incident
needs to be thoroughly investigated,” writer Jim Kane urged.
Unfortunately,
“wowforreeel,” provides little information about the video, including such key
details as time of night when it was recorded. “Watched this for several
minutes trying to see if it was a plane or helicopter,” the poster notes,
cryptically. Subsequently, however, “wowforreeel” posted a second, longer clip
that looks at the same video footage in more detail. He notes that the
bright object in the sky appears to remain motionless in relation to the
ground, and that it did not make any sound. He explains that he panned out to
shoot a more expansive view of the object, so that it would be clear that it
was not a streetlight, and then zoomed in to get as good of a close-up as
possible.
Neither the National UFO
Reporting Center’s database nor a similar compendium of sightings
maintained by the Mutual UFO Network show any similar sightings in the
Washington, DC area around May 16.
Unfortunately, digital video
wasn’t yet available back on July 19, 1952, when one of the most famous UFO
sightings in history occurred. On that evening at about 11:40 p.m, an air
traffic controller at Washington National Airport spotted seven unidentified objects
on the radar screen, about 15 miles to the southwest of the nation’s capital
city.
“Here’s a fleet of flying
saucers for you,” he jokingly told his supervisor."
But the mood changed when a
second controller at another facility reported that he not only had the objects
on his screen, but could see “a bright orange light” through the window of his
control tower.
Other strange occurrences
ensued. At 12:30 a.m., one of the objects buzzed a runway at National. A
controller who observed the object described it as an orange disk, and said
that it hovered at 3,000 feet over the airport before disappearing.
Jet fighters from a base in
nearby Delaware were scrambled and sent to confront what appeared to be an
intrusion into the capital’s airspace. But the objects mysteriously
vanished—and then, after the fighters had returned to their base, reappeared.
After a repeat visit by
similar objects on July 26, President Harry Truman asked his Air Force aide,
Brig. Gen. Robert B. Landry, to find what what the UFOs were. He in turn called
Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt the supervisor of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a
secret probe of UFO reports, and asked him to investigate.
Eventually, at a heavily-attended press conference, Air Force
intelligence director John Samford told the press that the sightings may have
been a false radar reading, caused by a temperature inversion in the
atmosphere. Given than eyewitnesses actually had seen the UFOs, that
explanation failed to quiet speculation over the sightings, which has continued
ever since.
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