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.
No comments:
Post a Comment