In 1952, DC’s skies were littered with US fighter jets chasing UFOs. More than 70 years later, the mystery persists

The night was warm and muggy over New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware, the kind of heat that clung to the metal skins of the alert fighter jets lined along the runway.

Lt. William L. Patterson of the 142nd Fighter Interceptor Squadron did not stray far from the flight line as part of the readiness posture routine for pilots in 1952: Keep the engines warm, be airborne in minutes and stay alert for the remote chance that Soviet bombers close in on the mid-Atlantic.

Then the order came: intercept unknown objects flying around the White House and Pentagon. Radar screens at nearby Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base were lighting up with targets no one could identify, and they taunted restricted airspace.

Across the country, Americans were constantly looking up. The Red Scare churned on, the Korean War dragged into another year and the threat of Soviet bombardment felt imminent. The country was also in the middle of a record-breaking year for UFO sightings – adding to mounting concerns of aerial attacks – including an eerily similar case just a week earlier, when radar operators and commercial pilots reported unfamiliar objects in the skies over the nation’s capital maneuvering in ways no known aircraft could.

For generations, the events of those two weekends were treated as a Cold War ghost story safely relegated to the past. But as 2025 draws to a close, more pilots than ever are reporting unexplained encounters in US airspace, according to Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit offering pilots confidential channels to report their sightings.

The modern surge in reports raises the same unanswered questions that sent Patterson scrambling into the night more than 70 years ago.

The retelling of how that night and the chaotic days that followed unfolded is based on a historical review of unclassified government documents, archived news articles, books, interviews with researchers, and more.

It was late in the night on July 26, 1952, when Patterson and fellow pilot Capt. John McHugo, known by their callsigns Shirley Red 1 and 2, roared their F-94 jets into the humid dark, burners flaring white against the runway as they turned south toward the unknown.

Just like the incident a week prior, DC airport controllers were watching unknown targets dip, stop, vanish and reappear on radar screens for hours across a 100-mile sweep. They called up their counterparts at Andrews who confirmed they were tracking the same objects.

The operators said the blips appeared to be aircraft, but they knew of no friendly flights in the area.

Patterson, flying at 20,000 feet, arrived first near National Airport when controllers steered him toward a cluster of blips registering around Andrews.

The night was dark and thick in front of him, leaving Patterson with little more than the faint glow of his instruments and the silhouette of the horizon.

Then, suddenly, he saw them.

Four bright lights appeared, 10 miles ahead and slightly above him.

But they didn’t blink or drift like normal aircraft lights. They waited.

He told the controllers what he saw and went full throttle ahead. His interceptor accelerated to nearly 600 miles per hour.

Controllers watched the blips on radar respond in real time, maneuvering through the sky in a way no known aircraft could: They rapidly reversed, hovered, made sharp 90 degree turns and sped in and out of sight at incredible speed.

Before Patterson could close the distance, the lights broke formation and began converging on his interceptor. Radar scopes in the tower showed the targets tightening around his position. In the cockpit, Shirley Red 1 was suddenly engulfed in blinding light.

“They’re closing in on me,” he radioed to controllers, voice edged with alarm. “What shall I do?”

Patterson, a Korean War veteran, was asking if he should open fire on whatever was drowning his aircraft in light.

There was no immediate answer. Controllers and military officials who had gathered in the tower, by several accounts, were stunned into silence.

For a breathless moment, Patterson was alone with the lights circling his aircraft. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they shot away into the night, streaking off radar in seconds.

Patterson was sent after new targets which radar showed probing the capital’s airspace, but each one vanished before he could reach it. After nearly an hour of high-power flight, low on fuel, he returned to base. McHugo, directed to a different sector, reported no visual sightings before joining Patterson shortly after back in New Castle.

A week earlier, on July 19, controllers at National Airport had tracked several unidentified blips, corroborated by Andrews, Bolling Air Force Base and a commercial pilot who reported bright lights pacing his airliner. Interceptor jets didn’t see anything, and many senior officials dismissed the incident to the media as weather anomalies.

The radar blips were caused by a temperature inversion, the officials said – a hot, humid layer in the cool atmosphere that can bend radar waves and produce false returns.

But the second weekend of sightings shattered such confidence.

Capt. Edward Ruppelt, director of the government’s UFO investigation team Project Blue Book, first learned flying objects had returned to Washington when a reporter called him at his home in Dayton late on July 26, asking what the Air Force planned to do.

“I have no idea what the Air Force is doing,” Ruppelt told the reporter. “In all probability it’s doing nothing.”

He soon confirmed as much. After calling the Pentagon, Ruppelt sent military officers to investigate. Navy radar specialist Lt. John Holcomb and Maj. Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon’s liaison for Project Blue Book, hurried to National Airport’s control tower.

There they found the same radar operators who had tracked the blips the week before. Now the screens showed more than a dozen targets scattered across the region, from northern Virginia to Andrews.

This time, the officers watched firsthand as several fighters, including Patterson’s, chased after the mysterious craft that night.

Holcomb and Fournet considered the possibility of a temperature inversion, observing targets for hours in the tower and speaking with controllers. Holcomb, the radar expert, confirmed with the airport weather center a slight inversion was present, but he didn’t think it was strong enough to produce such convincing radar targets.

Fournet later reported to Ruppelt no one in the tower believed the blips were weather-related. Operators insisted they were tracking unidentifiable, solid metal objects.

Ruppelt arrived in Washington on UFO business Monday morning to find every major paper splashed with headlines about saucers. In the lobby of his hotel, reporters cornered him with questions about the mysterious intrusions in the capital.

The Air Force found itself flooded with telegrams, letters and calls from the public demanding information. As the Pentagon tried to tamp down speculation and ignore the press, newspapers ran alarmist headlines and printed rumors of alien aircraft.

“SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL,” ran on the front page of The Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa, in bold lettering on July 29, 1952. “Air Force Confirmation of Strange Lights In Sky Puts All Bases on Alert,” a headline in the Daily-Times Advocate in Escondido, California, read the day before.

Even Albert Einstein weighed in. “Those people have seen something,” the Times Herald of Washington, DC, reported the influential thinker saying on July 30, 1952. “What it is I do not know, and I am not curious to know.”

The consecutive weekends of sightings were dubbed the “Washington Flap,” and the public’s hunger for more details became so great, the fast-approaching 1952 presidential election and Summer Olympics were denied precious space on front pages.

The modern UFO era had begun five years earlier, when civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold from Boise, Idaho, described seeing nine disks flying around Mount Rainier “like a saucer skipping across water.” Newspapers seized on the phrase as readers became captivated by the mystery.

By 1952, UFO sightings were a national fixation, and Project Blue Book logged a record number of reported sightings. Ruppelt later estimated in just six months, 148 major newspapers published more than 16,000 stories about unidentified objects.

Even Patterson joined the frenzy, recounting his mad dash to reporters the morning after landing. “I saw several bright lights,” he told them. “I was at maximum speed, but I had no closing speed.”

Before long, public cries for answers were echoed by the White House. President Harry Truman’s Air Force aide, Brig. Gen. Robert Landry, called Ruppelt on Tuesday to ask what he thought whizzed over DC just days before. Ruppelt could only offer theories as an investigation was yet to resolve.

By afternoon, with the demand for clarity reaching a fever pitch, Air Force Director of Intelligence Maj. Gen. John Samford convened the largest and longest Air Force news conference since World War II.

Samford, flanked by Ruppelt and other intelligence officers in room 3E-869 of the Pentagon, offered there was “about a 50/50” chance the blips were a result of a temperature inversion warping the radar waves. He skillfully sidestepped reporters’ clarifying questions for more than an hour, rejecting claims of a cover-up or hostile reconnaissance.

Holcomb and Fournet, the only military officials who had witnessed the radar returns in the tower, were notably absent.

The authoritative tone from the Air Force panel seemed to placate the press, even though officials never actually offered a definitive explanation. Still, headlines were reassuring readers the mysterious blips were nothing more than weather phenomena.

But the Air Force’s files tell a different story.

The eventual investigation found temperature inversions happened almost every night in DC during the summer of 1952. Yet the unexplained radar returns appeared only a few times.

Ruppelt also found some pilots suspected the lights they saw were reflections, and investigators didn’t disagree — until they talked to the radar operators. The director found himself returning to the fact these were experienced specialists who knew the difference between a phantom return and a solid, fast-moving object.

Over those two weekends, three top-notch facilities tracked the same targets they said were legit. Before interceptors like Patterson’s were scrambled to intercept, controllers told investigators they confirmed their equipment was operating properly and received visual confirmation from commercial airliners there were lights in the sky where they tracked blips on radar.

Ultimately, the Washington sightings were officially classified as “unknowns” in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book records.

More than 70 years later, still with no determined cause for the dozen coordinated radar returns or for the bright, maneuvering lights pilots saw firsthand, the classification never changed. Even among UFO researchers, there isn’t a clear consensus on what happened in July 1952.

“Something was in the air, and it was not just a temperature inversion,” Kevin Randle, a prominent ufologist, retired military pilot and author of “Invasion Washington: UFOs Over the Capitol,” told CNN.

“Yes, it is certainly possible that the men in various radar facilities at Washington National (Airport) and at Andrews could have been fooled,” Randle wrote in his book. “That does not explain the visual sightings from all the other locations, nor does it explain the interceptor pilot’s or airline pilots’ experiences.”

Blue Book investigated 12,618 UFO sightings from 1947 until the project was terminated in 1969. Of those, 701 sightings remain unidentified, including whatever streaked and hovered over the nation’s capital in July 1952.

The Air Force has said it hasn’t seen evidence to suggest unidentified sightings represent “technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge,” nor indications the sightings were “extraterrestrial vehicles.”

“Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations by the Air Force,” the military branch has said.

Today, efforts to officially address unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs – the modern government term for UFOs – are handled by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office inside the Department of Defense after it was established in 2022.

The office conducts research and collects and publishes data, using details from sightings across decades to assess “whether contemporary UAP reports point to conventional explanations or something potentially anomalous,” Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough told CNN.

“By reexamining historical UAP reports with modern scientific knowledge and data, AARO can shed new light on old UAP cases and continuously refine its analytic framework and methodology,” she said.

UAPs are spotted in American skies by pilots every single day, Americans for Safe Aerospace founder Ryan Graves told CNN. The former Navy fighter pilot has testified before Congress about his own unexplained aerial encounters, and advocates for greater UAP transparency and whistleblower protections through his organization connecting pilots with official reporting channels.

“I have no doubt that (Patterson) was confident that there were truly objects up there that he was pursuing,” Graves said. “But it can be lonely up there, and I imagine that the amount of confusion, uncertainty he had was exceptional.”

Ironically, Graves said, it is the same, dangerous problem for pilots today who see the inexplicable. Even with modern tools, pilots are “still left without the context to understand or with procedures to mitigate these threats.”

In 2025, Americans for Safe Aerospace had its biggest year with more than 700 UAP reports, up from just over 300 in 2024. Graves said the goal for 2026 is to create a globally agreed-upon UAP reporting standard, developed with aviation and government partners across continents, to make pilot encounter data comparable and usable.

While the prominent UAP whistleblower highlights the potential threats of these sightings, skeptics often focus on ordinary explanations for UAPs like weather phenomena, drones and faulty radar, questioning implications of foreign adversaries or nonhuman intelligence.

But for now, the Air Force – which spent 20 years of resources combing through UAP sightings nationwide – says anyone wishing to report an unexplained object should simply contact local law enforcement.