The navy soon asked for the Utah film. Specialists at the U.S. Navy photographic laboratory in Anacosta, Maryland, spent two months and nearly one thousand man-hours studying it frame by frame. They determined that if the objects were as much as five miles distant, they would have been moving at around 3,780 mph; if only one mile distant, then 472 mph. They ruled out natural phenomena and concluded that the objects were not reflecting sunlight, but instead were internally lighted spheres. Moreover, the lab concluded that “changes in the light’s intensity, among other things, eliminates the possibility that the images were aircraft or birds.” The objects, they said, were intelligently controlled vehicles of some kind—“unknown objects under intelligent control.” This clearly implied, but did not explicitly state (who would?) a nonhuman, extraterrestrial answer. Newhouse’s film became a featured piece of UFO evidence for the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel of January 1953.20
But Newhouse’s sighting was merely one of many that month. On July 5, two Florida pilots reported seeing a flying saucer hover above the AEC’s Hanford atomic plant in Richlands, Washington. Like the plant at Oak Ridge, the Hanford plant was a sensitive AEC nuclear installation that had been the scene of repeated UFO airspace violations. The UFO was said to be round and flat; it gained speed, reversed course, then quickly disappeared. The next day, the Dayton
At 3 A.M. on the thirteenth, during an evening of excellent visibility, a National Airlines pilot about sixty miles southwest of Washington, D.C., radioed CAA that a blue-white light was approaching him. It came to within two miles of his plane, then paced him off his left wing. Willing to try anything, the pilot turned on all of his lights, and the UFO took off “up and away like a star” at an estimated speed of 1,000 mph.22
ATIC received an “extremely accurate” report describing a UFO from the evening of the fourteenth by two Pan Am pilots near Langley AFB, Virginia. They witnessed a formation of six illuminated disc-like objects, appearing to be about one hundred feet in diameter, making incredible maneuvers at unbelievable speeds. One of the objects made a sharp turn below the airliner and was joined by two more discs. The objects accelerated away at a speed calculated by the pilots to be two hundred miles per minute (12,000 mph).23
The sheer quantity of good reports, preceded by a steady buildup throughout the spring, gave the military more than just something to think about. Ruppelt described rumors that in mid-July, the air force was braced for an invasion by flying saucers. “Had these rumormongers been at ATIC in mid-July they would have thought the invasion was already in full swing.”24
Around this time, Ruppelt talked for two hours about the buildup of UFO reports along the east coast of the United States with “a scientist, from an agency that I can’t name.” The scientist said to Ruppelt that they were “sitting right on top of a big keg full of loaded flying saucers.” He predicted that “within the next few days, they’re going to blow up and you’re going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sightings will occur in Washington or New York, probably Washington.” What was this man’s agency? How did he obtain this information? Did his remarks mean that UFOs were part of some secret military organization? Or that he knew the alien agenda? Or that he was a lucky guesser? Ruppelt did not answer these questions, nor has anyone else.25
THE WASHINGTON, D.C. SIGHTINGS
Washington, D.C. had already been the scene of UFO activity. But what happened for the next two weekends went far beyond anything up to that point. The Washington sightings were among the most compelling and dramatic UFO sightings in modern American history, and remain—despite any official pretense to the contrary—unsolved.26
