UFOs over Washington DC, 1952 and a meditation on implications

The iconic photograph

1952 was another of those weird years.  Probably the most famous incident of that year is the one pictured in the photograph.  But, as with the strange year of 1973, there were also reports of strange beings, the most famous of these being the Flatwoods Monster.

The monster and a witness.

What had happened that year that might draw a parallel with the 1973 events?  Were there anxieties in the air at that time?

Well, it was the 1950s.  The United States was in the midst of a "Red Scare."  Atomic and nuclear weapons had been developed and demonstrated by the end of the 2nd World War.  The Cold War was in full swing.  The House Committee on Un-American Activities was active.  The USSR was demonstrating prowess in the space race, launching things before the Americans did.  People took the idea of nuclear annihilation pretty seriously, building fallout shelters beneath their homes.  I think it's fair to say that these were anxious times.

But it might be just as fair to say that anxious times are always with us.

What I found interesting about the events in 1952 are detailed in the wiki link to the UFOs over DC.  Here's an extended excerpt:

The sightings of July 26–27 also made front-page headlines, and even led President Harry Truman to personally call Capt. Ruppelt and ask for an explanation of the sightings. Ruppelt, remembering the conversation he had with Capt. James, told the President that the sightings might have been caused by temperature inversion, in which a layer of warm, moist air covers a layer of cool, dry air closer to the ground. This condition can cause radar signals to bend and give false returns. However, Ruppelt had not yet interviewed any of the witnesses or conducted a formal investigation (Michaels, 22).

CIA historian Gerald Haines, in his 1997 history of the CIA's involvement with UFOs, also mentions Truman's concern. "A massive buildup of sightings over the United States in 1952, especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration. On 19 and 20 July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked mysterious blips. On 27 July, the blips reappeared." [1]

White House concern may possibly have resulted in an order to shoot down the UFOs, reported in various International News Service (INS) stories on July 29, 1952. E.g., one such story reported that "jet pilots have been placed on a 24-hour nationwide 'alert against the flying saucers' with orders to 'shoot them down' if they ignore orders to land." An Air Force public information officer, Lt. Col. Moncel Monte, confirmed the directive stating, "The jet pilots are, and have been, under orders to investigate unidentified objects and to shoot them down if they can't talk them down." It was further stated that no pilot had been able to get close enough to take a shot at a “flying saucer”, as the objects would disappear or speed away as soon as an interceptor approached, sometimes outflying their pilots by “as much as a thousand miles an hour.”

(Note: There was a book released a few years ago by a man named Frank Feschino that tied the "shoot down" order with the events of the Flatwoods Monster.  Most investigators seem to have thought the connection was spurious.)

What these events do show us, however, is the state of mind of folks about anomalous events at that early period.  In a memo to Walter Bedell Smith (which you will have seen Richard Dolan reference in a previous post if you watched the video), the author writes:

"The Central Intelligence Agency has reviewed the current situation concerning unidentified flying objects which have created extensive speculation in the press and have been the subject of concern to Government organizations... Since 1947, approximately 2,000 official reports of sightings have been received and of these, about 20% are as yet unexplained."

"It is my view that this situation has possible implications for our national security which transcend the interests of a single service. A broader, coordinated effort should be initiated to develop a firm scientific understanding of the several phenomena which apparently are involved in these reports..."

Also from the same report, the part the Dolan likes to quote:

"At this time, the reports of incidents convince us that there is something going on that must have immediate attention.... sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles."

This runs quite a bit counter to what officials would have you believe was the case.  The standard line is, "UFOs are not a national security concern."

I have a hunch the very purpose of the UFOs and creature incursions was, at that time, to demonstrate, not so much to the general public, but to officialdom, that these intelligences could do whatever they damn well pleased and the military/political establishment couldn't do a thing about it.

As time went on, this sort of demonstration continued at nuclear weapon sites and other military installations.

But I don't think that's all that is going on with the strange tales that we uncover.  In between the "flaps" there is always a steady drip of encounters and strange goings on.  And I note that there is something of a difference in some encounter reports.

For instance, why is it that some creatures emit some sort of "field" that causes witnesses to become aware of, and frightened of, the creature before it is spotted, but other creatures do not emit this field?

The field has the effect of exerting control over the witness.  Some strange creatures seem to want that control before an encounter can occur.  Others don't seem to need it.  There is an implication in that.

I submit that most UFO encounters are aimed at officialdom, even if they are also part of a "desensitization program" aimed at the general public.  It is striking that UFO encounters, while they seem always to have been with us, really took off after the demonstration of nuclear power at the end of the 2nd World War.

My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that there are two things that we experience as UFOs and cryptoterrestrials.  One of them really isn't from around here -- maybe from another planet or planets.  And I submit that of these there may be who knows how many factions.

But there's another that is more familiar, and more intimately intertwined with humanity.  I believe they have been here all along.  I think they assume the guise of the other sort to keep us confused.  While I don't know that the first sort doesn't resort to manipulation of human beings, I do know that the second sort does.

Now I could be completely wrong about this, but if you have been a regular reader, you know about my dreams and how they show two factions at odds with one another.  Sometimes this looks sort of biblical, as in angels vs. demons.  Other times, it looks more like different factions of another sort -- exactly what, I don't know.  But it doesn't seem too hard to imagine that the very idea of angels and demons may descend from this age old struggle between two factions for some kind of control over the earth.

Let's go Star Trek with it for a minute.  Remember that in the Star Trek mythos, there is something called the Prime Directive which forbids interference in the affairs of primitive worlds.  If you remember your original Star Trek, you might recall an episode when Kirk decided to cross the Prime Directive on a certain planet because the Klingons had.  And this caused the Klingons to go further, so then Kirk has to go further, and an arms race ensues, pretty much fouling up the primitive world.

It's for situations like that one that the Prime Directive would have been formulated in the first place.

Now, if you are a really regular reader, you know by now that I don't think our creative products are always solely generated by the personal unconscious.  I think that sometimes, and probably more often than anyone would be comfortable acknowledging, the things we watch on TV, or see on the big screen, or hear in our iPods have been generated with the assistance of the cryptoterrestrials themselves.  I think that the cryptos can fairly easily insert themselves right into our dreamspace without our even knowing it.

So I doubt it's any accident that The Day the Earth Stood Still came out in 1951.  And I doubt that Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas came up with their myth-creating ideas solely by themselves.  I suspect that this might be so because, as a poet and songwriter, I experienced receiving creative ideas from a source that seemed to be outside the self.

So, to my mind, these outward displays of UFOs and creatures are of a piece with the inward experiences of all of us -- both our own personal experiences and those that we share in our entertainments.

Now, after that extended aside, let's return to the matter of the way officials seem to have responded to the events of 1952.  I think the declassified memos make clear that these people did not know what they were dealing with yet.  If Roswell gave us a crashed saucer, it seems that these folks know nothing about it, as they are still in speculating mode.  And its striking that the recommendation is to create "a broader, coordinated effort," if in fact such a thing had already been built in the 1940s.

To my mind, these declassified documents pretty well destroy the idea that whatever happened at Roswell included alien bodies or identifiable craft, but your mileage may vary.  It is true that this could be a misdirection, though if it is, it precedes the FOIA by a decade.  Would these folks have any reason to be worried that their communication might become public?  I doubt it.

I would further suggest that whatever did drop at Roswell was "planted" there, not wrecked.  Another in a long line of manipulations.

Lastly, I suggest that the United States government knows very little more now than they did in 1952.  Which is not to say that I don't think they've turned up lots of evidence and such since then.  By now, though, they must be as familiar with the manipulative nature of some of these events as we are.

I really don't think that we are very close to solving the mystery just yet.