1952 Washington DC UFO incident: full transcription
// Why This Isn’t An Outlier
This document isn’t an isolated case. It’s the same institutional habit the record shows repeating for eighty years.
Build the capability quietly. Use it at a scale the public never approved. Account for it only once a court forces the paperwork into daylight. The Classified Record traces that exact pattern from a 1946 screening memo to the 3.4 million warrantless searches the FBI ran in a single year, using the government’s own documents, not speculation.
Get the book on Amazon →Object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail... unlike anything I had ever seen before. It took off at an unbelievable speed.
The radar targets were not shapeless blobs such as one gets from ground returns under anomalous propagation. I was certain the unknown radar blips were solid targets.
A massive buildup of sightings over the United States in 1952, especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration. On 19 and 20 July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked mysterious blips. On 27 July, the blips reappeared. The volume of reporting itself, not the objects, was assessed as the genuine national security vulnerability, since a hostile actor could flood the same channels with false reports to mask a real attack.
This transcription covers the core witness testimony and the CIA's own account of its 1952 memo, drawn from the agency's official history published in Studies in Intelligence. The Robertson Panel's own full report, convened as a direct result of this memo, is covered in full on this site's Robertson Panel page.
Document: CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence memorandum to Director Walter B. Smith, September 24, 1952.
Source: Gerald K. Haines, "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90," Studies in Intelligence, 1997.
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