On each night that there was a sighting there was a temperature inversion but it was never strong enough to affect the radar the way inversions normally do.  On each occasion I checked the strength of the inversion according to the methods used by the Air Defense Command Weather Forecast Center.

Then there was another interesting fact:  hardly a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn’t an inversion in Washington, yet the slow-moving, “solid” radar targets appeared on only a few nights.

But the one big factor on the pro side of the question is the people involved—­good radar men—­men who deal in human lives.  Each day they use their radar to bring thousands of people into Washington National Airport and with a responsibility like this they should know a real target from a weather target.

So the Washington National Airport Sightings are still unknowns.

Had the press been aware of some of the other UFO activity in the United States during this period, the Washington sightings might not have been the center of interest.  True, they could be classed as good reports but they were not the best that we were getting.  In fact, less than six hours after the ladies and gentlemen of the press said “Thank you” to General Samford for his press conference, and before the UFO’s could read the newspapers and find out that they were natural phenomena, one of them came down across the Canadian border into Michigan.  The incident that occurred that night was one of those that even the most ardent skeptic would have difficulty explaining.  I’ve heard a lot of them try and I’ve heard them all fail.

At nine-forty on the evening of the twenty-ninth an Air Defense Command radar station in central Michigan started to get plots on a target that was coming straight south across Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron at 625 miles an hour.  A quick check of flight plans on file showed that it was an unidentified target.

Three F-94’s were in the area just northeast of the radar station, so the ground controller called one of the F-94’s and told the pilot to intercept the unidentified target.  The F-94 pilot started climbing out of the practice area on an intercept heading that the ground controller gave him.  When the F-94 was at 20,000 feet, the ground controller told the pilot to turn to the right and he would be on the target.  The pilot started to bring the F-94 around and at that instant both he and the radar operator in the back seat saw that they were turning toward a large bluish-white light, “many times larger than a star.”  In the next second or two the light “took on a reddish tinge, and slowly began to get smaller, as if it were moving away.”  Just then the ground controller called and said that he still had both the F-94 and the unidentified target on his scope and that the target had just made a tight 180-degree turn.  The turn was too tight for a jet, and at the speed the target was traveling it would