Posted On: May 3, 2022

The year is 1952, the place, Langley, Virginia. Two civilian pilots reported seeing multiple glowing disks approaching at unnatural speeds a mile below the airliner. The Air Force was quick to dismiss these claims as fiction, despite the fact that these objects were tracked on radar and were given a very detailed description by professional observers.

On July 14^th, 1952, a DC-4 of Pan American Airways en route from New York to San Juan had a shocking encounter with unknown objects soaring through the air in strange formations. At approximately 19:12 hours, the pilots, First Officer William Nash, and Second Officer W.H. Fortenberry, witnessed what they believed were six glowing disks in the distance, coming towards them at tremendous speeds roughly one mile below the airliner, which was in the vicinity of the local Air Force Base.

These objects appeared to be a staggering 100 feet in diameter, and were flying in echelon formation like professional fighter pilots. Nash and Fortenberry had never seen anything like it, and questioned how a perfectly circular craft can make it into the sky. The leading disk, which apparently sighted their plane, slowed down abruptly, then the next two disks wobbled, after which all six of them “flipped up on edge”, allowing the pilots to estimate their thickness at about fifteen feet.

Was this perhaps their way of communicating? The small fleet of UFOs then lined up back in their original formation, the strange glow around them increasing as they performed this maneuver. Two additional disks, which seemingly came out of nowhere, appeared underneath the DC-4, glowing brightly as they joined the others up ahead. The disks, which now totaled eight, suddenly darkened, climbed to a high altitude, and disappeared at a speed calculated by the pilots to be 200 miles per minute.

Upon landing, the crew was interrogated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where a classified report describing these events was sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. A week later, on the night of July 26^th, UFOs were again sighted flying in a similar fashion, and were tracked on radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. These sightings made headlines throughout the world, yet the Air Force was rather dismissive of the whole affair.

General Edward Ruppelt, dryly commented that no one bothered to inform them about these sightings, even though military jets were dispatched to investigate, and the first they got to hear about it was when a headline story appeared the following morning. The government soon claimed that these observations were caused by temperature inversion. Behind the scenes, however a number of intelligence analysts believed that the UFOs might not be of terrestrial origin.

An FBI memorandum written a few days later revealed that Commander Boyd from Air Intelligence, armed with intensive research on the subject, advised that the sighted objects could possibly be from another planet. What do you think?

My Take: While there wasn’t a whole lot of physical evidence to back the pilots’ claim, the situation in itself didn’t seem entirely implausible. Keep in mind that these were professional observers with years of experience in the air, who gave a remarkably detailed and elaborate description of what they saw. The Air Force’s abrupt and nonchalant explanation of temperature inversion, I simply don’t buy it, that sounds like nothing more than a makeshift cover-up. Those pilots saw something that night, but that’s as far as we know.

SOURCES: Above Top Secret, 1988, Timothy Good

Posted On: May 3, 2022

The year is 1952, the place, Langley, Virginia. Two civilian pilots reported seeing multiple glowing disks approaching at unnatural speeds a mile below the airliner. The Air Force was quick to dismiss these claims as fiction, despite the fact that these objects were tracked on radar and were given a very detailed description by professional observers.

On July 14^th, 1952, a DC-4 of Pan American Airways en route from New York to San Juan had a shocking encounter with unknown objects soaring through the air in strange formations. At approximately 19:12 hours, the pilots, First Officer William Nash, and Second Officer W.H. Fortenberry, witnessed what they believed were six glowing disks in the distance, coming towards them at tremendous speeds roughly one mile below the airliner, which was in the vicinity of the local Air Force Base.

These objects appeared to be a staggering 100 feet in diameter, and were flying in echelon formation like professional fighter pilots. Nash and Fortenberry had never seen anything like it, and questioned how a perfectly circular craft can make it into the sky. The leading disk, which apparently sighted their plane, slowed down abruptly, then the next two disks wobbled, after which all six of them “flipped up on edge”, allowing the pilots to estimate their thickness at about fifteen feet.

Was this perhaps their way of communicating? The small fleet of UFOs then lined up back in their original formation, the strange glow around them increasing as they performed this maneuver. Two additional disks, which seemingly came out of nowhere, appeared underneath the DC-4, glowing brightly as they joined the others up ahead. The disks, which now totaled eight, suddenly darkened, climbed to a high altitude, and disappeared at a speed calculated by the pilots to be 200 miles per minute.

Upon landing, the crew was interrogated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where a classified report describing these events was sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. A week later, on the night of July 26^th, UFOs were again sighted flying in a similar fashion, and were tracked on radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. These sightings made headlines throughout the world, yet the Air Force was rather dismissive of the whole affair.

General Edward Ruppelt, dryly commented that no one bothered to inform them about these sightings, even though military jets were dispatched to investigate, and the first they got to hear about it was when a headline story appeared the following morning. The government soon claimed that these observations were caused by temperature inversion. Behind the scenes, however a number of intelligence analysts believed that the UFOs might not be of terrestrial origin.

An FBI memorandum written a few days later revealed that Commander Boyd from Air Intelligence, armed with intensive research on the subject, advised that the sighted objects could possibly be from another planet. What do you think?

My Take: While there wasn’t a whole lot of physical evidence to back the pilots’ claim, the situation in itself didn’t seem entirely implausible. Keep in mind that these were professional observers with years of experience in the air, who gave a remarkably detailed and elaborate description of what they saw. The Air Force’s abrupt and nonchalant explanation of temperature inversion, I simply don’t buy it, that sounds like nothing more than a makeshift cover-up. Those pilots saw something that night, but that’s as far as we know.

SOURCES: Above Top Secret, 1988, Timothy Good