By its very nature, this city must double as a hometown and a tourist town. Over the years, it has attracted many types of visitors. Occasionally, this has included some of what might be called visitors of the close-encounter kind. Although the ideal times to see the sites of this city are Spring and Autumn, these particular tourists seem to favor visiting during the sweltering heat of the month that just passed.

I had been on this planet just six months when others reportedly came here in a manner quite unlike you and I. They, apparently, arrived in vehicles of much greater speed and maneuverability than the F-94 jets sent to identify them. This was after they suddenly appeared on the radar screens at Washington National Airport and at Andrews and Bolling Air Force bases as unidentified flying objects. It was after the pilot of a nearby commercial flight reported watching six bright lights streaking across the sky, “like falling stars without tails.” A headline on the front page of The Washington Post read: “ ‘Saucer’ Outran Jet, Pilot Says; Air Force Puts Lid on Inquiry.”

This was July 26, 1952. Given Washington’s weather, our “visitors” may have been nothing more than that – weather. That is the official Air Force explanation. Those blips on the radar screens, those speedy lights in the sky, they were the results of temperature inversions.

A temperature inversion is when a layer of cold air is trapped under a layer of warm air – commonly occurring in extremely hot weather – causing radar beams to bounce down and make objects on the ground appear to be thousands of feet in the air. This same strange “weather” had happened just the week before, with experienced pilots chasing what they described as lights that were speeding, hovering, changing directions, vanishing at the approach of fighter-jets, and reappearing when the jets left. All of this happened while experienced air traffic controllers watched it play out on their radar scopes. We are to pay no attention to their reports, only to what their superiors say.

That line of reasoning is a persistent one. How else to view its resurrection fifty years later – to the day? Yes, on July 26, 2002 area radar detected an unidentified aircraft with which controllers were unable to establish contact. As reported by Steve Vogel in The Washington Post the next day “…NORAD was notified. When the F-16s carrying air-to-air missiles were launched from Andrews, the unidentified aircraft’s track faded from the radar.” This was reported by a military official speaking on condition of anonymity. The official line of the DC Air National Guard says the launch of the F-16s was “routine”. An area resident who told Vogel he went out to see why military jets were flying low over his home in the middle of the night was convinced what he saw was not routine. “It was this object, this light-blue object traveling at a phenomenal rate of speed,” he said. “This Air Force jet was behind it, chasing it, but the object was just leaving him in the dust.” I recounted all of this in a conversation with a friend a few evenings ago. Much to my surprise, I learned his wife thought it was not routine when she observed the object from their kitchen window.

John Kelly, writing in the Post in July, 2012 about the 1952 incident, sides with those who say it was just the weather, concluding “that asking whether there were any alien spacecraft over Washington in 1952 is like asking whether there were any witches in Salem, Mass., in 1692.” I admit his logic escapes me. Maybe it’s because of my tinfoil hat.