Chapter 2: Cold War skies

Chapter 2 moves to the Cold War. Over several nights in July 1952, radar operators at Washington’s National Airport and at Andrews air base tracked unknown targets near the capital. Jet fighters were sent up, and while the jets were there the targets vanished. At a press conference on 29 July, Air Force Major General Samford blamed a temperature inversion, a layer of warm air that can bend radar beams and produce false targets. From 1952 to 1969 the Air Force collected reports in Project Blue Book, which logged 12,618 sightings and left 701 of them unidentified. Its conclusions were that none had threatened national security and that there was no evidence of vehicles from other worlds; the project closed in December 1969. Some of the sightings had an answer the public could not be told at the time: according to the US National Reconnaissance Office, some were flights of the secret U-2 and A-12 spy planes. You guess what the Air Force blamed, how many reports stayed unidentified, and how much secrecy fed the stories.