Tuesday 25 February 2020

UFO Case Directory (Distant Encounters) (E-mail): “Subject: March 20, 1952, Centreville, Maryland.”


6 October 2005
(NICAP.org)

The whole UFO case report:
“Source: Ruppelt, Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 135-136

The report below sounds very similar to the March 20, 1952 sighting at Centerville, Maryland, by A.D. Hutchison of the CIA. This object took a vertical ‘jump’.

While I’d been in CaliforniaColonel Dunn had received a call from General Samford’s office. It seems that a few nights before, one of the top people in the Central Intelligence Agency was having a lawn party at his home just outside Alexandria, Virginia. A number of notable personages were in attendance and they had seen a flying saucer. The report had been passed down to Air Force intelligence, and due to the quality of the brass involved, it was ‘suggested’ that I get to Washington on the double and talk to the host of the party. I was at his office before 5:00 P.M. and got his report.

About ten o’clock in the evening he and two other people were standing near the edge of his yard talking; he happened to be facing south, looking off across the countryside. He digressed a bit from his story to explain that his home is on a hilltop in the country, and when looking south, he had a view of the entire countryside. While he was talking to the two other people he noticed a light. He had assumed it was an airplane and had casually watched it, but when the light got fairly close, the CIA man said that he suddenly realized there wasn’t any sound associated with it. If it were an airplane it would have been close enough for him to hear even above the hum of the guests’ conversations. He had actually quit talking and was looking at the light when it stopped for an instant and began to climb almost vertically. He said something to the other guests, and they looked up just in time to see the light finish its climb, stop, and level out. They all watched it travel level for a few seconds, then go into a nearly vertical dive, level out, and streak off to the east.

Most everyone at the party had seen the light before it disappeared, and within minutes several friendly arguments as to what it was had developed, I was told. One person thought it was a lighted balloon, and a retired general thought it was an airplane. To settle the arguments, they had made a few telephone calls. I might add that these people were such that the mention of their names on a telephone got quick results. Radar in the Washington area said that there had been no airplanes flying west to east south of Alexandria in the past hour. The weather station at Bolling AFB said that there were no balloons in the area, but as a double check the weather people looked at their records of high altitude winds. It couldn’t have been a balloon because none of the winds up to 65,000 feet were blowing from west to east – and to be able to see a light on a balloon, it has to be well below 65,000 feet; the man from CIA told me that they had even considered the possibility that the UFO was a meteor and that the had been due to some kind of an atmospheric distortion. But the light had been in sight too long to be a meteor. He added that an army chaplain and two teetotaler guests had also seen the light jump.

There wasn’t much left for me to do when I finished talking to the man. He and his guests had already made all of the checks that I’d have made. All I could do was go back to Dayton, write up his report, and stamp it ‘Unknown.’ 

Project Blue Book listed the case [BBU 1074] as “Unknown.”

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Satellite photo of Centreville, Maryland (tageo.com)
(tageo.com photo)