some type of natural phenomenon, if one desires to take the
negative approach. Or, if you take the positive approach, they could
have been spaceships.

The next night radar at Washington National Airport picked up UFO's
and one of the most highly publicized sightings of UFO history was in
the making. It marked the beginning of the end of the Big Flap.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Washington Merry-Go-Round

No flying saucer report in the history of the UFO ever won more
world acclaim than the Washington National Sightings.

When radars at the Washington National Airport and at Andrews AFB,
both close to the nation's capital, picked up UFO's, the sightings
beat the Democratic National Convention out of headline space. They
created such a furor that I had inquiries from the office of the
President of the United States and from the press in London, Ottawa,
and Mexico City. A junior-sized riot was only narrowly averted in the
lobby of the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington when I refused to tell
U.S. newspaper reporters what I knew about the sightings.

Besides being the most highly publicized UFO sightings in the Air
Force annals, they were also the most monumentally fouled-up messes
that repose in the files. Although the Air Force said that the
incident had been fully investigated, the Civil Aeronautics Authority
wrote a formal report on the sightings, and numerous magazine writers
studied them, the complete story has never fully been told. The pros
have been left out of the con accounts, and the cons were neatly
overlooked by the pro writers.

For a year after the twin sightings we were still putting little
pieces in the puzzle.

In some aspects the Washington National Sightings could be classed
as a surprise--we used this as an excuse when things got fouled up--
but in other ways they weren't. A few days prior to the incident a
scientist, from an agency that I can't name, and I were talking about
the build-up of reports along the east coast of the United States. We
talked for about two hours, and I was ready to leave when he said
that he had one last comment to make--a prediction. From his study of
the UFO reports that he was getting from Air Force Headquarters, and
from discussions with his colleagues, he said that he thought that we
were sitting right on top of a big keg full of loaded flying saucers.
"Within the next few days," he told me, and I remember that he
punctuated his slow, deliberate remarks by hitting th