Donald Keyhoe in True Magazine

Considering the objects' relative position, just before thev vanished, this last

From a controller's original sketch, some saucer movements July 20 on Washington radarscope are diagrammed above. At A, seven blips appeared suddenly. Two moved (B) near White House, one near Capitol. At C, one fled a north-westbound: airliner (indicated by row of blips}. Later (D) ten flocked at Andrews Field. E illustrates a saucer's right-angle turn compared with curving turn of ordinary aircraft.

would require a speed of from 5,000 to 7,000 m.p.h. At the time, this seemed unbelievable to Barnes and the other controllers. But Captain Pierman later confirmed the objects' tremendous speed.

"They'd go up and down at terrific speed, or streak off and disappear. Between Washington and Martinsburg, we saw six of these fast-moving lights. [Control Center radar showed them at the same position.] I don't know what they were, but they weren't shooting stars." [Another confirmation of the visitors' incredible speed came later that night, from the Washington tower. Operator Joe Zacko had been watching the A.S.R. scope when one of the mystery objects abruptly appeared just west of Andrews Field. Unlike the slower M.E.W., the A.S.R, with its 28-r.p.m. antenna, can track extremely high speeds. As Zacko watched, fascinated, the blips made a bright streak or trail, heading north-northeast toward Riverdale. Then the trail ended as swiftly as it had come.

Howard Cocklin, hastily called over by Zacko, also saw the bright trail. Together they figured the object's speed from its trace.

It had been making two miles per second- 7,200 m.p.h.

"It was as if it had descended rapidly, almost vertically," Cocklin told me later. "That would bring it suddenly into the A.S.R. beam area, it seemed to level off for those few seconds, and then abruptly ascend out of the beam again."

Barnes and his men saw another significant maneuver that night. When they vectored a pilot toward one of the lighted objects, the strange blip disappeared. Then in a few seconds it reappeared behind the plane, Barnes commented, "If it was the same one-and I think it was - that was another of those high-speed vanishing acts between sweeps."

(The same maneuver was reported from Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, on July 29. On this occasion a mysterious disk-sighted by numerous ground observers-was seen to whip around at terrific speed behind jet planes sent up in intercept it.)

At 3 a.m., two Air Force jets, brought in from another mission, roared down over Washington. Just before they arrived, all the strange blips left the scope. Coincidence or not, as soon as the jets headed back for their base, the visitors reappeared and again swarmed over Washington. One, simultaneously plotted by the Center, Andrews Field, and the Washington tower, followed an airliner to within four miles of the airport, as the pilot watched its light. At one time, ten of the "saucers" were over Andrews Field, then at daybreak they were gone. The shaken controllers, for the most part, agreed they had tracked solid objects capable of fantastic maneuvers.

"I'm positive they were guided by some intelligence," Barnes has since told me. ''If no planes were in the air, the things would fly over the most likely points of interest-Andrews Field, the aircraft plain at Riverdale, the Monument, ov the Capitol. One or two circled our radio beacons. But as soon as an airliner took off. several would dart across and start in follow, as if to look it over."

On July 26, in the early evening, an eerie red-lighted object flashed over Key West, Florida, A destroyer-escort quickly put to sea, and the Navy announced it would try to find the answer. Then official silence fell.

That same evening at 9:08 p.m.. the Washington Center, still jittery, had another call from its unknown visitors. Again, the control tower and Andrews
Field radar confirmed the blips. As before, the mystery objects hovered, made sharp turns, reversed, and vanished from scopes. Pilots, too, and ground observers watched the lights race off.

Of four pilots who saw the fast-moving lights, one was flying a jet interceptor. This pilot, Lieutenant William L, Patterson, on seeing tour lights, went after one at full throttle.

"I was at my top speed." he said on landing, "but I couldn't close in." His plane's maximum speed was better than 600 m.p.h.

When the story of these weird events broke, combined with full details of the July 20 sightings. the Air Force was flooded with demands for an explanation. Reluctantly, since Air Technical Intelligence at Dayton had not even begun its evaluation, Air Force officials in Washington released a public statement: since some radar reports were due to temperature inversion, this might explain the Washington sightings, including the odd lights.

Until then, few people except scientists, radarmen and Weather Bureau experts had ever heard of inversions. In itself, a temperature inversion is a simple effect.
Ordinarily, air gets colder as the altitude increases, but under certain conditions there may be layers of warm air with cooler air underneath. Such inversions are common on the desert. At night, or when clouds suddenly shadow the hot ground, the surface quickly cools off. Air in contact with the ground also cools fairly quickly, but above this there is still a warm layer, its height and thickness varying with conditions. On top of this warm layer, the air becomes cool again, increasingly with altitude.
Since light moves slower in a denser medium, its rays are refracted, or bent, as they pass from the warm to cold air. It is this which causes "lake" mirages on deserts, or a watery sheen that appears ahead as you drive on a heated road, in both these cases, the hot-cold layer retracts light waves from above the horizon, and these "bent" waves are simply reflecting the sky.

A spoon in a glass of water also illustrates the principle of refraction. Seen from a certain angle, the spoon appears to be bent sharply-a result of the different densities of air and water.

Like light, radar waves move slower in a denser medium, and are bent by refraction. Under certain conditions, this can be caused when the waves strike layers of air with different temperatures.

According to Dr. Donald H. Menzel, of Harvard University, this effect explains many flying saucers, both the lights and radar blips. It is Menzel's belief that observers have merely seen reflections, either of ground lights-or of stars. The moon, or the sun. In the same way, he says, radar '"saucers" are simply ground objects picked up by deflected radar beams and shown on scopes as strange blips.