The Washington Flap of 1952: How Unidentified Objects Over the Capital Stumped Radar, Pilots, and the Pentagon
About this episode
The episode discusses the mysterious UFO sightings over Washington D.C. in 1952, detailing radar and pilot accounts of the event.
On the sultry summer night of July 19th, 1952, something extraordinary began unfolding in the skies above the nation's capital, an event that would come to be known as the Washington D.C. UFO incident, or as newspapers of the era breathlessly dubbed it, the Washington Flap. It was just before midnight when air traffic controllers at Washington National Airport noticed something peculiar on their radar screens. Seven unidentified blips appeared, moving in ways that defied conventional aircraft behavior. They would hover motionlessly, then suddenly accelerate to speeds estimated at over seven thousand miles per hour, only to stop again on a dime. Senior air traffic controller Harry Barnes later described his astonishment, noting that these were not weather anomalies or equipment malfunctions, but solid, trackable objects behaving in ways no known aircraft of that era could replicate. As the radar operators watched in growing disbelief, control towers at nearby Andrews Air Force Base independently confirmed similar readings on their own equipment. This was not an isolated glitch. Multiple radar stations, separated by miles, were simultaneously tracking the same inexplicable objects…
Topics covered
- UFO sightings
- 1952 Washington incident
- radar phenomena
- aviation
- government response
Keywords
- UFO
- Washington D.C.
- radar
- aviation
- 1952
- unidentified objects
- air traffic control
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Washington National Airport, Andrews Air Force Base
Places: Washington D.C.
More episodes of Unexplained Phenomena Daily
- Here's a short headline option: The Liberty Bell 7 Mystery: How an Exploding Hatch Nearly Drowned an Astronaut and Puzzled NASA for Decades
- The Face on Mars: How a 1976 Viking Photo Sparked a Decades-Long Mystery That Still Captivates Believers Today
- The Great Fire of Rome: Six Days of Destruction and a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery That Still Refuses to Die
- SS Poet: The Cargo Ship That Vanished Without a Trace in 1980
- **Mexico City's 1991 Eclipse: Hundreds Filmed Mysterious Metallic Objects During Totality**
- **The Roswell Incident: When a Flying Disc Crashed in New Mexico and Sparked America's Greatest UFO Mystery**
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Unexplained Phenomena Daily podcast page.