The events that took place from 19 to 29 July 1952, dubbed the "Washington Carousel", are the most massive UFO sightings. They gave impetus to the development of ufology, while they have not yet received any refutation or clear evidence. The incident did not remain aloof from the attention of the general public; the highest circles of the Air Force, the CIA, astrophysicists, as well as President Harry Truman and scientist Albert Einstein took part in the discussion of those events. But after preliminary research, all the data was classified, and the head of the UFO study project died under mysterious circumstances.
Albert Einstein vs. the military
On the night of July 20, radars at the Washington airport recorded seven flying objects 25 kilometers from the capital. This immediately seemed strange, because the trajectory of their flight did not coincide with the trajectory of any civilian or military aircraft. The senior controller contacted the Air Force base and the military reported seeing strange objects approaching the capital, too. According to preliminary calculations, they flew at a speed of 2,000 miles per hour.
Already at four in the morning, strange objects hovered over the US Congress building and the White House. Dispatcher Howard Cocklin reported that they were emitting an orange glow. Military fighters were sent to patrol the airspace, but as soon as they approached the objects, they were removed at lightning speed. The pilots were ordered to return to base, but as soon as they did, the objects returned to their place. It was assumed that all radio communications were being listened to by intruders.
Skeptics argued that these were not aliens, but simply an optical illusion, a consequence of temperature inversion, but the supporters of this theory were in the minority. By day, all major publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, were already full of headlines about flying saucers. Even the serious Life magazine, which had previously been skeptical of aliens, exploded into a full spread longread. Society was on the brink of panic. The situation was repeated after the radio play by Orson Welles, when everyone believed in the beginning of the war with the Martians, the difference was that everything really happened.
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The situation got out of control, and in the following days, calls and letters from ordinary citizens who witnessed this phenomenon began to arrive at the US Air Force headquarters. President Harry Truman demanded that the matter be dealt with as quickly as possible. Attempts were even made to attack flying saucers, which were unsuccessful and displeased major scientists. Albert Einstein in his official statement said that if aliens move at such a speed (and by that time it had increased to 11,000 miles per hour), if they are so invulnerable, then they should not be provoked to retaliate, because their weapons are most likely, many times more perfect than all the weapons of a superpower, the consequences can be the most catastrophic.
USSR secret weapon
The year 1952 went down in history as the “year of the UFO,” and it became difficult in geopolitical terms. The confrontation between the United States and the USSR was increasing, the Korean War was in full swing. Experts from the CIA predicted a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and America, and one of the first cities that the Russians could strike, according to experts, was Washington.
The US military has suggested that these are Soviet nuclear ballistic missiles. However, experts abandoned this version, because the UFO's maneuverability was too perfect for missiles. The Soviet side declined to comment. Later it turned out that domestic researchers closely watched everything that was happening in the United States, and an international journalist who entered the White House diligently recorded everything in his notebooks, which later turned out to be the book "Washington Carousel", which went into perestroika.
"Blue Book" and the mysterious death of a ufologist
UFOs were such a debated topic that the first step taken by US officials was to ban any comments from the military to the press.
US Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, who directed the project from 1951-1953. Photo & copy; twitter.com / BlueBookBelieve
This indirectly influenced the development of science fiction, as well as the reflection of the theme in cinema. The directors of the exploitation genre shifted the emphasis from eroticism and horror to the topic of aliens, and director Ed Wood crossed the theme of zombies and flying saucers. But this was all fiction, and the data of scientists were made public much later.
For a long time all research was kept in folders classified as "top secret". Air Force Officer Edward Ruppelt, who led a similar but exhausted Project Gradge, was assigned to lead the Blue Book UFO study. He was an ardent supporter of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. And he rejected both the version with Soviet military developments and the opinion of the Air Force intelligence director, Major General John Samford, that "the so-called UFOs are nothing more than the inversion of air flows."
After the storm subsided (and the peak of UFO sightings was on July 29), Edward Ruppelt sat down to the book "Report on Unidentified Flying Objects", in which he intended to tell the whole truth about flying saucers. The most interesting thing began in the second half of the 50s, when Ruppelt changed his point of view to the opposite. He spoke on television with an official statement that all the talk about extraterrestrial civilizations is nothing more than nonsense of ufologists and that the most common point of view was just expressed by the leadership of the BBC.
He didn’t look good, it seemed as if he was speaking a memorized speech that someone had written for him. Ruppelt's colleague from the Air Phenomena Research Committee, Donald Keehou, was perplexed when he found several chapters cleanly rewritten in a signal copy of his book. Now the structure of the monograph was structured as follows: in the first half it was told about UFOs, and in the second, all ufological assumptions were criticized.
It was 1959, at the same time Ruppelt closed in on himself and broke off communication with his colleagues, and a year later he died of a heart attack at the age of 34. The Blue Book project was canceled in 1969, and all data was classified. Only in the 80s did information become publicly available and generated a new wave of interest in the topic and new versions of events. According to one of them, the "Washington Carousel" is a fake, an imitation of a UFO, the purpose of which is to distract people from pressing problems, the Korean war and raise Harry Truman's rating. Even so, this did not help the president - already in 1953 he was replaced by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Washington Carousel remains a mystery to this day. The term flap itself, which is translated as "carousel", means confusion, panic, excitement in society. Along with the Roswell incident, the "UFO crash in Kexburg," the Tehran incident of 1976, this is the most high-profile case in the history of UFO research. Last year, the BBC released the Blue Book series, which was produced by Robert Zemeckis.