On the night of July 19, 1952, at 11:40 PM, air traffic controller Edward Nugent at Washington National Airport observed a cluster of seven unidentified radar returns moving in formation about fifteen miles south-southwest of the capital. None of the contacts had filed flight plans and none were in restricted airspace. Within minutes, similar targets appeared on radarscopes at Andrews Air Force Base and at the airport tower. Airline pilots in the vicinity, including a Capital Airlines DC-4, visually confirmed bright lights moving at impossible speeds over the Potomac. The objects hovered over the White House and the Capitol Building before accelerating away at speeds reportedly exceeding 7,000 miles per hour.
Exactly one week later, on the night of July 26–27, the lights returned. Radar operators at National, Andrews, and Bolling all tracked multiple unknowns for hours. Two F-94 Starfire interceptors were scrambled from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware. As the jets approached, the lights blinked out. When the fighters ran low on fuel and turned for home, the objects reappeared on the scopes and resumed their maneuvers. One of the F-94 pilots, Captain John McHugo, reported being surrounded by the glowing objects.
The story dominated the front pages of every major American newspaper for days. On July 29, the Air Force held the largest press conference since World War II, in which Major General John Samford publicly attributed the sightings to temperature inversions that could create false radar echoes. Many of the radar operators and meteorologists involved rejected the explanation, and internal Air Force documents later showed the inversion theory was considered inadequate even at the time.
The Washington flyovers are widely regarded as the event that forced UFO reports from the realm of rumor into national-security discourse. They directly catalyzed the CIA's Robertson Panel of 1953 and reshaped Project Blue Book's mandate for the remainder of the decade.