The UFO files extract

range near Portsmouth he spotted what he at first thought was a ‘flying
saucer’ in the distance.
‘Visibility was good, there being a cloudless sky and bright sunshine. The
object was located and held by a telescope and gave the appearance of
being a circular shining disc moving on a regular flight path. It was only
after observation had been kept for several minutes, and the altitude of the
object changed so that it did not reflect the sunlight to the observer’s eye,
that it was identified as being a perfectly normal aircraft.’ ( DEFE 44 /119 )
Sceptics and believers
During the summer of 1952 there was a new wave of sightings across the
world. In America more than 500 sightings were reported to the United
States Air Force in July alone, leading future CIA director Major General
Charles P. Cabell to launch a new UFO project, Blue Book, under the con-
trol of the Air Technical Intelligence Center with Captain Ruppelt as its
director.
For the Americans, the most alarming of these sightings occurred in the
US capital,Washington DC. On 19 and 20 July 1952, strange moving blips
appeared on radars at Washington’s National Airport and at Andrews Air
Force Base.The phenomena reappeared the following weekend, sometimes
moving slowly, then reversing and moving off at incredible speed. Aircraft
were scrambled, but the crews saw nothing, despite being vectored towards
targets that were visible on ground radar. At the same time, civilian aircrew
and ground controllers reported seeing strange lights whilst the phenom-
ena were visible on radar.These events alarmed the Truman administration
and led the New York Times to demand why ‘a jet fighter of Air Defence
Command, capable of a speed of 600 miles an hour, failed to catch one of
the “objects”’.18
A huge press conference was called at the Pentagon as officials moved to
calm public fears. High-ranking figures, including the director of United
States Air Force intelligence, Major General John Samford, reassured the
assembled media the radar blips were probably the result of temperature
inversions created by the hot summer weather.These types of unusual con-
ditions, he said, could produce false echoes on radar screens.
Samford’s public reassurances followed those given to authority figures
in private: President Harry Truman himself had been sufficiently concerned
to phone Captain Ruppelt asking for an explanation. And Truman was not
the only national leader who read the newspaper headlines. On 28 July, the
day before the Washington press conference, the British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill had sent a memo to his Secretary of State for Air and
copied it to Lord Cherwell, one of his most trusted scientific advisors.This
demanded:
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