Splicing the Mainbrace, Part One
JENNY RANDLES looks back to 1952, the Cold War and a series of dramatic UFO sightings
September 2022 was a sad time for the UK. The sudden death of Queen Elizabeth II brought the nation to a standstill, but displayed how good we are at pageantry for these thankfully only once-in-a -generation events. Exactly 70 years ago – as the new Queen was learning the ropes with her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and plans were coming together for her coronation
– we faced a UFO-related trauma that still echoes today. At the time, new alliances were tested as the world order faced an emboldened USSR and a nascent nuclear threat – events that resonate with chilling symmetry seven decades later.
Concerns first grew in the USA that summer when events in Washington DC shocked the world and led to concerns that a hostile power might have developed a new super-weapon, perhaps a high-performance aircraft that could deliver a nuclear threat far and wide.
At the time, the US government renamed its UFO investigation from Project Grudge to Project Blue Book (the name it would retain until closure in 1969), with war hero Captain Edward J Ruppelt presiding over it from October 1951. Astronomer Dr J Allen Hynek remained the scientific consultant, and later told me that Ruppelt shared his desire to genuinely understand UFOs not, as was more usual in the USAF, to simply explain cases away as solved, even when they weren’t. Ruppelt was determined to look for the truth and enlisted the Battelle Memorial Institute to carry out a two-year statistical analysis of all the data.
However, he was unaware that a secret panel of scientists, headed by physicist
Dr HP Robertson, was being convened by the CIA. Robertson had secretly helped develop nuclear weapons during the war, and the panel was filled with weapons-linked scientists. They briefly considered putting in charge a person known to be skilled in “chicanery”. Such aims were hidden from Ruppelt and Hynek, who were invited by the CIA only to a few sessions as they lacked full ‘clearance’. The panel declined to await the study from Battelle, even though it was well advanced. Ruppelt had no idea that they had no interest in the data, only in dampening or controlling public interest in ‘flying saucers’.
Intelligence services were more deeply involved in the UFO mystery than ever in 1952, and Blue Book was to be used to explain it away. Hynek and Ruppelt were not made aware of plans drawn up by the CIA to find ways to control the public. The agency discussed employing Walt Disney to make cartoons diminishing the threat of UFOs. They aimed to “reduce or eliminate” the chance of the public taking UFOs seriously, even when cases were unresolved, and even monitored the then newly formed civilian UFO research groups. There are to this day some who even think the interference extended to the deliberate seeding of absurd hoaxes in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Battelle study into UFOs between 1952 and 1954 that Ruppelt initiated did deliver highly useful data. But Hynek told me it was made clear to him that even mentioning its existence, let alone findings, would mean instant dismissal from his role as head of Blue Book science. Battelle analysed, very cautiously, the best quality data – several thousand cases – and assessed the probability of resolution on a case-by-case basis. It found 2,199 cases with high-quality data with which the most effort was made to find an explanation. After categorising them, experts from multiple fields such as astronomy, radar and meteorology were brought in to suggest likely causes that could be eliminated. No case was deemed unexplained until all of the scientists looking at it had exhausted all options they could suggest. It was groundbreaking work.
Ten per cent of the Battelle cases were rated as both of the highest quality and unexplained – a number that matches what serious UFO research groups ever since have uncovered from greater global numbers. Battelle also found 22 per cent of its best cases were regarded as of high calibre on analysis, so were puzzling. Yet in the eventual release of the data the US government called such cases “a few surviving unknowns” and focused on the solved ones.
Against the background of all of these secret goings-on, Washington DC saw sightings visibly erupt. In July 1952 there was a spate of UFO events that led to alarm as it put the Pentagon and the White House in the apparent firing line (it had started in May with UFOs passing over a CIA garden party for senior officials in Langley, Virginia). Nobody knew what was happening, but UFOs came in close contact with civilian planes over DC and turned up on radar screens, baffling controllers. The UFOs were chased and observed by USAF jets sent to investigate. For a week in July 1952 these “coin like” shining objects were seen several times. They were not American or allied craft. This was the biggest UFO scare yet in the first decade of the phenomenon and you can see why it alarmed the CIA.
Ruppelt was quickly ordered back to Dayton, Ohio, by the Pentagon and told to take the bus around DC, not the usual staff car, to investigate. He was asked to come up with any answer that might help calm things down. In the end, after he was seen as being too open to the mystery, he was simply ordered to say “No Comment!”, then sent packing.
On 26 July 1952 the wave culminated in the biggest event yet. Multiple radar screens tracked objects that vanished when USAF interceptors were made airborne. When the planes returned to base, the UFOs reappeared over Langley, where they were seen from the ground by frustrated air crew. A scrambled aircraft finally obtained a radar lock-on, but then the UFO sped away.
Officially, these UFOs were later said to be “temperature inversion anomalies”. Many of the radar staff who tracked them never accepted this explanation, though it has its merits: such inversions do happen and can trigger sightings, but nobody has ever explained why such dramatic waves are not common.
However, this drama was just the overture to what happened next as Britain became the frontline of a new UFO wave...