Just before the two lights got abreast of the two men they made a 180-degree turn and started back toward the spot where they had first been seen.  As they turned, the two lights seemed to “jockey for position in the formation.”  About this time a third light came out of the west and joined the first two; then as the three UFO’s climbed out of the area toward the south, several more lights joined the formation.  The entire episode had lasted only three minutes.

The only possible solution to the sighting was that the two men had seen airplanes.  We investigated this report and found that there were several B-26’s from Langley AFB in the area at the time of the sighting, but none of the B-26 pilots remembered being over Hampton Roads.  In fact, all of them had generally stayed well south of Norfolk until about 10:30P.M. because of thunderstorm activity northwest of Langley.  Then there were other factors—­the observers heard no sound and they were away from all city noises, aircraft don’t carry just one or two amber lights, and the distance between the two lights was such that had they been on an airplane the airplane would have been huge or very close to the observers.  And last, but not least, the man from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a very famous aerodynamicist and of such professional stature that if he said the lights weren’t airplanes they weren’t.

This then was the big build-up to the first Washington national sighting and the reason why my friend predicted that the Air Force was sitting on a big powder keg of loaded flying saucers.

When the keg blew the best laid schemes of the mice and men at ATIC, they went the way best laid schemes are supposed to.  The first one of the highly publicized Washington national sightings started, according to the CAA’s logbook at the airport, at 11:40P.M. on the night of July 19 when two radars at National Airport picked up eight unidentified targets east and south of Andrews AFB.  The targets weren’t airplanes because they would loaf along at 100 to 130 miles an hour then suddenly accelerate to “fantastically high speeds” and leave the area.  During the night the crews of several airliners saw mysterious lights in the same locations that the radars showed the targets; tower operators also saw lights, and jet fighters were brought in.

But nobody bothered to tell Air Force Intelligence about the sighting.  When reporters began to call intelligence and ask about the big sighting behind the headlines, INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS OVER WASHINGTON, D.C., they were told that no one had ever heard of such a sighting.  In the next edition the headlines were supplemented by, AIR FORCE WONT TALK.

Thus intelligence was notified about the first Washington national sighting.

I heard about the sighting about ten o’clock Monday morning when Colonel Donald Bower and I got off an airliner from Dayton and I bought a newspaper in the lobby of the Washington National Airport Terminal Building.  I called the Pentagon from the airport and talked to Major Dewey Fournet, but all he knew was what he’d read in the papers.  He told me that he had called the intelligence officer at Bolling AFB and that he was making an investigation.  We would get a preliminary official report by noon.