WASHINGTON.

Andrews Air Force Base controllers picked up the same returns. The objects appeared over restricted airspace including the White House and the US Capitol. Commercial pilots in the air at the time, including Capital Airlines Captain Casey Pierman, reported seeing bright lights matching the radar returns.

USAF F-94 Starfire interceptors were scrambled from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware. As the jets entered the area, the unknown objects on radar appeared to disperse and accelerate; when the F-94s departed to refuel, the radar returns reappeared. The same pattern recurred on the night of July 26–27, 1952, with multi-radar contacts, multi-witness ground observation, and a second F-94 intercept attempt.

The Washington flyovers became a national news story. The Air Force responded with the largest press conference held by the service since the end of World War II, conducted on July 29, 1952 by Major General John Samford, Director of USAF Intelligence. Samford attributed the radar returns to temperature inversions and stated that no military threat had been detected. Several civilian and CAA radar specialists publicly disputed the inversion explanation; Senior Air Traffic Controller Harry Barnes, who had directly worked the targets, stated the inversions story was inadequate.

The Washington 1952 flyovers triggered a major institutional response within the US government. The CIA convened the Robertson Panel in early 1953 — a classified scientific panel that would set US public-affairs UFO policy for decades. The panel ultimately recommended that the Air Force "debunk" UFO reports to reduce public interest, a policy that arguably accelerated the loss of public trust on the subject. Washington 1952 thus marks both the highest-visibility US radar UFO event of the early Cold War and the beginning of formal US-government UFO suppression policy.