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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - On the morning of July 29, 1952, Alexandrians opened their newspaper to a front-page headline that has aged remarkably well: "Eye-witness Story of 'Flying Saucers' Seen Along Alexandria-Clarendon Axis." The Alexandria Gazette reported that "flying saucers circled the Northern Virginia area again this morning" — the word "again" doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The sightings were not new. A week and a half earlier, an Alexandria man had reported seeing "a red cigar-shaped object" hovering over his house — about the size of a DC-7 airplane, he estimated. And Alexandria was not alone. The summer of 1952 was one of the most documented periods of UFO activity in American history, centered almost entirely on the Washington region.
On the nights of July 19 and July 26, radar operators at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked unidentified objects moving at extraordinary speeds over the capital. Jet interceptors were scrambled. The objects disappeared when the planes approached and reappeared when they left. The Air Force held what was, at the time, the largest press conference since World War II to address the sightings — and largely failed to explain them.
Seventy-four years later, the objects remain unidentified.
