One of the classics of Fortean phenomena is things falling mysteriously from the sky. Whether it’s bright balls of fire, creatures living or dead, rocks or inappropriately colored precipitation, they’re the kind of events that occupied a sizable chuck of The Book of the Damned, the compendium of all things strange complied by Charles Fort. Most places are fortunate enough to only be listed once as victims of Fortean events. If the author were still compiling stories today, the latest edition would have the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in it twice – once for the famous meteor that blasted over the city on February 15, 2013, (and whose chunk allegedly has mystical lifting powers) and the other for the mysterious green snow which fell this week and has some who remember the falling superbolide wondering if they’re related. Are they?

“Precipitation with a pronounced green tint fell on the section of the Ural road near the entrance to Chelyabinsk, between the gardens and the village of Slavino. Atypical type of snow lies directly along the highway, in fact, 400 meters from the border of the city, and a kilometer from the Kashtak Bor.”

The Kurs Dela Russian media site posted a video of the green snow (see it here) on January 12 and it was immediately picked up by other sites and Twitter feeds. As usual, the tweets are more interesting.

“Green snow in the Chelyabinsk region appeared to cheer up Chelyabinsk residents who showed signs of depression due to a long winter.”

“Why not cosmic dust? Or seaweed? Or is it just an optical illusion? Someone sees green snow, and someone – snow is the color of money sawn on the “installation” of filters. (Google translation)”

Is it green meteor dust?

And some see a logical and typically Russian explanation.

“The regional Ministry of Ecology explained the green snow in Chelyabinsk. A strange color rainfall at the entrance to the city from the side of Yekaterinburg was recently discovered by citizens. On Monday, January 13, department specialists left the site and came to the conclusion that the snow turned green due to dust from a nearby granite quarry.”

And, like any good Russian government agency, the Ministry of Ecology points out that the green snow is not just safe, it’s all-natural.

“This dust does not pose a threat to public health. These are particles of natural materials and rocks.”

Perhaps Chelyabinsk would get an honorable mention, or at least an asterisk, in an updated Book of the Damned. In 2017, the snow in the city also turned green. That time, the cause was also somewhat ‘natural’ – a green food coloring that leaked from a collector at a paper mill which uses it to make … remember, this is Siberia … green toilet paper.

The Great 2020 Green Snowfall of Chelyabinsk appears to be due to dust caused by blasting at the local granite quarry. Green dust from granite? It’s no wonder the locals who have lived through the mysterious dome-lifting meteor and a previous green snow are skeptical.

Fortunately, they can console themselves with a fresh roll of green toilet paper.

Today’s article is the final installment of my 3-part feature concerning why I believe that many cryptozoological creatures – such as Bigfoot, lake monsters, the Dogman, and the Alien Big Cats of the U.K.  – are actually supernatural in nature and should not be a part of Cryptozoology. Today, I’m focusing on the Chupacabra of Puerto Rico. It was in the mid-1990s that the phenomenon of the chupacabra exploded all across Puerto Rico. So far as can be determined, the menacing creature first surfaced in March 1995. That was when numerous animals were found slaughtered in the towns of Morovis (located in central Puerto Rico) and Orocovis, which is situated within the aforementioned La Cordillera Central mountain range. Locals were plunged into states of near-hysteria by the attacks, which reportedly left animals dead, with strange marks on their necks, and a distinct lack of blood in their corpses. Since many of the early attacks were on goats, the term, “chupacabra,” was created. It means, in Spanish, goat-sucker.

Vampires were on the loose; monstrous vampires. Reports of strange killings soon began to surface from other parts of the island. The creatures were clearly on the move. The death-rate increased even more. The population was on edge and the media had something new and sensational to report on. It was a turbulent and strange time. But, what, exactly, was responsible for all the killings? Yes, there were plenty of dead animals but, unfortunately, there was no solid, eyewitness testimony relative to the killers themselves. That is, until August 1995, when a woman named Madelyne Tolentino – who lived in Canovanas, which is close to the northeast coast of Puerto Rico – changed everything. Tolentino’s description of the creature she encountered, close to her mother’s home, was disturbing, to say the very least. It was a description eagerly embraced by the island’s media and by investigators of monsters and mysteries.

Artist’s depiction of a chupacabra (wikipedia)

Tolentino told journalists and researchers that the creature was around three feet in height, bipedal, ran in a weird, hopping fashion, had large black eyes, bony fingers on each hand, overly long arms and legs, and a kind of feathery line running down its back. Or, it appeared to Tolentino to be a feathery line: a young boy employed by Tolentino’s husband claimed that he saw the beast up close and personal and maintained that the feathers were, in reality, sharp spines. The boy also said that the creature possessed a mouthful of vicious-looking fangs. Not only did the people know of the chupacabra and its predations, they also now knew what it looked like: something straight out of their worst nightmares. As the years progressed, so did the attacks. And so did the weird cases, that suggest the chupacabra are supernatural beasts.

Here are a couple of examples from my many trips to Puerto Rico. There is a longstanding story of a UFO crashing in the heart of Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rain-forest in February 1984. I know that, because the basics of the account have reached me on three occasions over the past decade. It was early one morning when a large, circular-shaped object slammed into the ground, immediately after flying over the rain forest in a decidedly erratic fashion. To prevent people from learning the truth of the matter, a diversionary tactic was put into place that the UFO was a meteorite. Personnel from NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the CIA were soon on the scene – in part, to scoop up the pummeled body-p arts of a couple of dead chupacabras, whose lives came to sudden and bloody ends when the alien craft hurtled violently into the forest at high speed. That’s how the story goes, anyway.

There is another reason why I am so intrigued by the potential UFO link to the chupacabra controversy. It’s because of something that happened back in 2004. Shortly after my Proof Positive shoot was completed for the SyFy Channel, I spoke with a woman who had her own encounter with a UFO, but in a location where a chupacabra was seen only days later. As Rosario told me, it was early March 2000, and she was working in a grove near the foot of El Yunque where she picked plantains. Her attention was suddenly drawn to a deep, resonating hum, one that was coming from directly above her.  Looking up, Rosario was startled to see a black, triangular-shaped object – about 25 to 35 feet in length – that was hovering overhead at a height estimated to be around 90 to 120 feet, and which had a glossy, shiny surface. Surprise and amazement turned to shock when a pencil-thin beam of light shot out of the base of the craft, fanned out, and enveloped Rosario in a pink glow.

For what almost seemed like an eternity, Rosario was rooted to the spot, while her mind was flooded with images of widespread nuclear destruction and environmental collapse in the Earth’s near-future. The final image was of a large, bald head with huge, black eyes and that closely resembled the alien face on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s 1987 best-selling book, Communion – which Rosario was inexplicably drawn to read in the immediate aftermath. Suddenly, the light retracted and the flying triangle rose into the sky, heading slowly towards the heart of the rain forest. Interestingly, in the wake of the encounter, Rosario developed an overwhelming interest in environmental issues, and quite literally overnight – after a lifetime of eating meat – became a staunch advocate of vegetarianism.

That was not all: three days later, and only a couple of hundred feet from where Rosario was working on that fateful day, two girls spotted a chupacabra of the bipedal, spiked and decidedly menacing kind. The beast spotted them, too. Evidently, however, it was a monster on a mission, since, after peering at them for a few moments it fell down on all-fours and bounded away into the heavy undergrowth. It was an event that – due to both the time-frame and the proximity – led Rosario to conclude the chupacabra was somehow linked to the UFO phenomenon. Me, too.

In a new analysis of an old meteorite, scientists were able to identify the oldest material that’s ever been found on Earth. They discovered stardust that’s been dated back to 7 billion years ago.

On September 28, 1969, near Murchison, Victoria, Australia, a huge 220 pound (100 kilograms) meteorite struck the Earth. Scientists discovered that the meteorite contained interstellar dust that was made from presolar grains (dust grains that are much older than our sun) created by dying stars. In fact, the presolar grains ranged in age from around 4 million years older than our sun to 3 billion years older. Our sun was created 4.6 billion years ago.

Murchison meteorite

Philipp Heck, who is the Robert A. Pritzker Associate Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, as well as the lead author of the study (which can be read in full here), said that this is the first time ever that presolar grains have been found on Earth and it’s because volcanism and plate tectonics as well as other Earthly processes heated up and modified any presolar dust that would have already been here during the early stages of when our planet was forming.

He told Live Science that the large asteroid that produced the Murchison meteorite is “an almost-inert piece of rock that formed from the solar nebula and hasn’t changed since then.” While the majority of presolar grains are approximately 1 micron in length, the ones that were found on the Murchison meteorite were between 2 and 30 microns in length. “We call them ‘boulders’,” Heck stated, adding, “We can see them with an optical microscope.”

Murchison meteorite

In their study, Heck and his colleagues looked at 40 “boulders” by grinding up parts of the meteorite and added acid which caused minerals and silicates to dissolve, leaving the presolar grains which are resistant to acid. The team then measured how much cosmic rays were exposed to the grains while they were in space for billions of years in order to find out how old they were. They found that around 60% of the grains date back to between 4.6 billion and 4.9 billion years ago and could have been the result of a “little baby boom” from stars being born approximately 7 billion years ago in our galaxy. In fact, many astronomers have found evidence supporting a large spike in star formations around 7 billion years ago.

“And then it took about two to two-and-a-half billion years for those stars to become dust producing,” Heck said, adding, “When a star forms, it doesn’t produce dust. During most of its life, the star doesn’t produce dust. The stars only produce dust at the end of their lives.”

Everyone knows that Superman is indestructible … except when exposed to green kryptonite from his home planet of Krypton. Everyone knows that tardigrades – those eight-legged micro-animals found living in the most hostile locations, including outer space – are indestructible too. Well, now these little super-beings have their own kryptonite … and, like Superman’s, this deadly and destructive force comes from their own home planet. What … or who … wants to kill these cute little water bears?

“A research group from Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen has just shown that tardigrades are very vulnerable to long-term high temperature exposures.”

Wait a minute, you tardigrade experts shout. Tardigrades have been found living in hot springs and near hot vents on the ocean floor. That’s true, and Ricardo Neves and Nadja Møbjerg, researchers at the University of Copenhagen and authors of a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, point out that desiccated tardigrades (which have their water removed but can still be revived) can survive temperatures up to 151°C (300°F) for up to half an hour. Not surprisingly, active tardigrades require lower temperatures, but how low?

“Rather surprisingly the researchers estimated that for non-acclimated active tardigrades the median lethal temperature is 37.1°C (98.78 F), though a short acclimation periods leads to a small but significant increase of the median lethal temperature to 37.6°C (99.68 F).”

That’s not much higher that the human normal temperature of 98.6 F. According to the university press release on the study, it’s also not much higher than the currently measured maximum temperature in Denmark of 36.4°C (97.52 F). Why are tardigrade researchers in Copenhagen so interested in the maximum temperature of Denmark? You can see where this is heading.

“Global warming, a major aspect of climate change, is already causing a wide range of negative impacts on many habitats of our planet. It is thus of the utmost importance to understand how rising temperatures may affect animal health and welfare.”

What better animal to subject to rising temperatures than the most indestructible creature on the planet, the tardigrade? The research was done on tardigrades found in roof gutters in Nivå, Denmark – in other words, living right alongside humans, not in some hot spring. NASA reports that the average surface temperature for the year 2017 was 58.62 F (14.9 C) and, unless you live in a nice, cool cave where you don’t get any news reports, it’s been rising steadily for years.

Wait a minute, you desperately shout one more time. Didn’t the study find that tardigrades can acclimate themselves to tolerating higher temperatures for longer periods? That’s true, says Neves, but “exposure-time is clearly a limiting factor that constrains their tolerance to high temperatures.” That’s why the study concludes that climate change, and global warming in particular, is the tardigrade’s kryptonite.

“Indeed, although tardigrades are able to tolerate a diverse set of severe environmental conditions, their endurance to high temperatures is noticeably limited and this might actually be the Achilles heel of these otherwise super-resistant animals.”

Are we doomed? If the tardigrades are, you already know the answer. If only they could fly like Superman and reverse the spin of the Earth to take us back to a time when climate change was not a problem … or at least to a time where we could make better decisions on how humans affect their planet.

Of the severalthousand pages on UFOs that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified into the public domain, very few make any kind of deep reference to encounters with a U.K. connection attached to them. There is, however, one case in particular that really stands out. It is dated November 18, 1976. The one-page-long report is titled “Aerial Observation of Intense Source of Light.” An interesting title, to say the very least. It is a document that was prepared by the CIA’s Domestic Collection Division. The report starts as follows: “An unusual incident was observed during a 10 September 1976 British European Airways (BEA) flight (number 831) Moscow to London. Between 1800 and 1900 hours, the aircraft was cruising at an altitude of approximately 33 thousand feet (9,900 meters), apparently inside the border of Lithuania, when a blinding light was observed off the starboard flight path of the aircraft.”

The CIA continued: “The light’s distance was estimated to be approximately 10 to 15 miles (16 to 24 kilometers) off of the aircraft’s path and approximately five to six thousand feet (1,500 to 1,800 meters) below the aircraft, somewhat above a lower cloud layer. The light, which resembled a sodium vapor lamp (yellowish in color), and which was too intense to view directly for any period of time, completely lit the top of the lower cloud layer, giving it a glowing cast.”

The CIA writer of the once-classified report had more to report: “The light was of such interest that the BEA pilot came onto the aircraft’s intercom network, stated that he was somewhat concerned over its presence, and said he had asked the Soviet authorities for an identification of its source. The Soviet authorities came back with a negative identification response, suggesting that he should not ask questions. The light was observed for approximately 10 to 15 minutes, until the aircraft had flown past and left the light source behind.”

And, that’s where the report ends. So, what was the source of the strange light? The fact that the details of the encounter were logged in the CIA’s UFO files makes sense. It is important to note, though, that just because the report was filed under “UFOs,” doesn’t mean that the crew of Flight 831 encountered something extraterrestrial. I would suggest that the most important line in the whole document is the one that reads like this: “The Soviet authorities came back with a negative identification response, suggesting that he should not ask questions [italics mine].” This suggests – to me, at least – that while the crew of the British European Airways plane were baffled by what they had seen, the Russians may have known exactly what they had seen. Now, let’s move onto something that may have relevance to that 1976 incident.

Don’t ask questions.

In 1999, Gerald K. Haines – in his position as the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office – wrote a paper titled “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.” It’s now in the public domain, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. It can be read at the CIA’s website. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper, which is focused on the 1970s-1980s. Haines wrote: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects [italics mine].” Perhaps that mysterious “light” was some kind of Russian device, the very kind that fell into the category Gerald Haines referred to. Namely, something that was perceived as a UFO, but which was actually a secret Soviet vehicle.

UFOs are seen all over the world, by people from all walks of life, and some of these cases have managed to cement themselves into the annals of great unsolved cases. Such incidents are especially intriguing when they take place over well-monitored airspace or internationally recognized landmarks, and one of these cases is the time that a fleet of UFOs blatantly invaded airspace over Washington D.C., mocking all attempts to catch them and parking over the White House.

At 11:40 PM on July 19, 1952, an air-traffic controller by the name of Edward Nugent was on duty at Washington National Airport at Washington D.C. on an otherwise uneventlful night when his attention was drawn to something rather strange and alarming popping up on his radar screen. There, only about 15 miles south-southwest of the city were seven anomalous blips, in an area where there was no scheduled traffic at the time. As Nugent watched he soon became aware that whatever these objects were, they were not following established flight paths, and this was alarming enough that he called his superior, Harry Barnes, who was also startled by the radar images.

It was so odd that they reportedly checked to see that the radar was even functioning properly, and when there turned out to be nothing wrong with it they called air control towers at both their own airport and nearby Andrews Air Force Base to learn that air-traffic controllers there in both locations were also registering the anomalous blips. In addition, a controller at National Airport’s radar-equipped control tower claimed to have made actual visual confirmation of a bright light in the distance that suddenly shot away at “incredible speed.” A controller at Andrews AFB also spotted what he called an “orange ball of fire trailing a tail,” and airline pilot Captain S.C. “Casey” Pierman was waiting for takeoff at one of National Airport’s runways when he would claim to have seen a series of fast-moving lights in the sky that looked “white, tailless, fast-moving lights like falling stars without tails.” Staff Sgt. Charles Davenport at Andrews AFB also saw an orange-red light to the south, of which he said “it would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude . . . this happened several times.” Nugent and Barnes did not actually see the objects, but with the radar blips and sightings reports knew that something very weird was going on, with Barnes later saying of these radar blips:

We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed . . . their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft. They acted like a bunch of small kids out playing. It was helter-skelter, as if directed by some innate curiosity. At times, they moved as a group or cluster, at other times as individuals.

As several independent radar operators looked on, two of the blips could clearly be seen to approach the White House, where they appeared to hover for some time before moving off again, while another one did the same over the Capitol and yet another hovered over a radio beacon. The mysterious objects then simultaneously vanished from radar for a time, before appearing once again to orchestrate a series of impressive aerial maneuvers that were far beyond what any known aircraft was capable of, making 90 degree turns, speeding up and slowing down with amazing speed and precision, and even abruptly going in reverse.

All of this strangeness over the U.S. capital was enough to cause quite a panic, and two United States Air Force F-94 Starfire jet fighters were scrambled and sent from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware to investigate. However, as soon as the jets entered Washington D.C. air space the objects vanished once again. The confused jets circled around until they ran low on fuel and had to head back, and rather oddly as soon as they were gone the strange phenomena started right back up again, almost as if they had been waiting for the jets to leave. The anomalies proceeded to lurk in the area before vanishing for good at approximately 5:30 AM. The incident would soon be slashed all over the front page of newspapers nationwide with sensational headlines like “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL!” and “Jets Chase D.C. Sky Ghosts!” and considering that this was in the midst of a major flap of UFO sightings all over the country people were in a bit of a mass hysteria over it, with talk of an alien invasion being seriously discussed among the populace.

It was one of these papers that alerted USAF Captain Edward J. Ruppelt to what was going on, which is odd considering that he was the supervisor of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book official investigation into UFO sightings and also just so happened to have been in Washington at the time. It was very strange that he would not have been told about the incident, and things got even weirder when he tried to get out to the scene of it all, but was refused permission to use a staff car, instead told to take a taxi cab on his own dime. Frustrated and not a little irritated by the military bureaucracy he was facing, Ruppelt gave up and flew back to his headquarters at Dayton, Ohio without gaining any further information. However, it would soon become apparent that the UFOs of Washington D.C. were not gone after all.

The following week, at around 8 PM on July 26, 1952, the crew of a National Airlines flight into Washington radioed in that they had observed some anomalous lights in the sky above their plane, and right after this report was made mystery blips began showing up on radar at Nation Airport and Andrew AFB, and they had apparently brought friends. This time there were reportedly at least a dozen objects, and there were once again sightings of something strange in the sky, such as that made by USAF master sergeant Charles E. Cummings, who said of them, “these lights did not have the characteristics of shooting stars. There was [sic] no trails . . . they traveled faster than any shooting star I have ever seen.”

These lights once again began a series of insane maneuvers, slowing down to a stop, blasting off to speeds of up to 7,000 mph, performing sharp turns, and reversing, and considering the reports of visual confirmation of the objects coming in aircraft were scrambled again. At around 11:30 PM, two F-94 jets were once again sent to engage the targets, this time guided in by radar operators, but the blips seemed to be very evasive and then vanished again. As they headed back the blips reappeared and the jets turned back around to engage. One of the pilots was unable to get a visual on the mystery objects, but the other, Lieutenant William Patterson, did see two of the objects and gave chase but was unable to match their speed, of which he has said:

I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet. I saw several bright lights. I was at maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.

At the same time this was going on there were several reports of aircraft in the area also seeing anomalous darting or streaking lights. These reports of what seemed to be physical solid objects was contrary to a theory that had been going around, which was that the radar blips were being caused by a temperature inversion, which basically entails a layer of warm air forming in the low atmosphere, which traps cooler air beneath and can bounce radar signals back towards the source. However, although there had apparently been a slight temperature inversion recorded that evening, it was doubted that it was strong enough to produce such strong radar returns to fool experienced operators, and with the visual sightings involved air-traffic control were convinced that they were dealing with physical, solid objects. Eerily, one of the objects would once again hover directly over the White House at an altitude of 1,700 feet before vanishing off of radar. The objects eventually left and did not return.

Once again the strange incident hit the news in a major way, and people were now starting to demand answers. The Air Force, still apparently not really sure what was going on themselves, struggled to come up with something to tell an increasingly nervous public living in a climate of a mass UFO mania going on at the time and Cold War anxiety, even as President Harry Truman himself demanded that the Air Force figure out what was happening. Pressed for time and needing to come up with something fast, the Air Force hastily assembled a press conference at the Pentagon on July 29, 1952, during which they remained extremely and frustratingly vague and obtuse about the situation, and force fed reporters the idea that this was all due to the temperature inversion weather phenomenon even as professionals watching groaned at this theory. UFO researcher Alejandro Rojas has said:

The investigators had ruled out the inversion. They had examined that situation. The radar operators said, ‘Inversions happen. We know what inversions look like. This is not an inversion. This is not the same thing at all.’

In other words, the Air Force was being deliberately evasive and just trying to get the press off their back and allay public fears to avoid a mass panic by giving everyone a nice, pat, easily understandable and digestable explanation. And it worked. Before long the public had fully accepted the weather theory, despite the fact that the Air Force itself knew that something very strange was going on, although what that was could not be determined. In the absence of any solid answers, the case was officially labelled as the result of radar reflections caused by temperature inversion, and the visual sightings that were made caused by nothing more mysterious than misidentified meteors, stars, city lights, flocks of birds, weather balloons, and Venus.

For his part, Project Bluebook’s Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was very skeptical of the temperature inversion theory, and when he was finally able to adequately interview the numerous witnesses, pilots, and air-traffic controllers involved he found that no one at all bought the official Air Force explanation. However, this investigation process would get a bit strange when some of the witnesses began to retract statements they had made, even when it didn’t make sense. For instance, one air-traffic control crew who claimed that they had seen “a huge fiery-orange sphere” suddenly changed their tune to say that it had just been a star, even though astronomical information showed that no star in the sky on that night would have been bright enough to account for what they said they had observed in their original report. Ruppelt also began to hear rumors that Air Force higher ups were intentionally approaching the witnesses and persuading them to not contradict the official explanation in the name of national security. In the end, he had the very strong impression that something was not quite right, and was more convinced than ever before that what had been experienced over Washington was no radar mirages and that it was perhaps being covered up.

Not long after the Washington D.C. incident, in January of 1953 the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would launch the Robertson Panel, which included top officials and scientists and went about trying to debunk UFO cases in the interest of stemming mass public panic and hysteria. The panel would recommend that Project Blue Book basically keep its mouth shut on truly inexplicable cases and spend more time publicly debunking UFO cases and stripping them of their mystique, and after this genuine unsolved cases were rarely discussed. However, the Washington UFO incident certainly ranks among these truly compelling cases in that it has never really had all aspects of it satisfactorily explained.

Here is a case that really checks off a lot of the boxes of a great UFO case surrounded by dark conspiracy. We have these objects being tracked on radar from several sources and also being visually observed by reliable, trained witnesses. We have these objects witnessed displaying very unusual behavior and properties not consistent with conventional aircraft. Then there is the hasty official attempt to explain it all away with a wave of the hand and what has been seen by most researchers as a flimsy hypothesis that doesn’t really fit all of the features ad evidence of the incident, as well as the specter lurking in the background of possible government intimidation of witnesses, and the Air Force’s clear desire to just sort of sweep it all away. Yet, although the official report still stands there are plenty of mysteries and unanswered questions orbiting the incident, and this has made the case very tenacious in the world of UFOlogy. What happened over Washington D.C. in July of 1952? Was this just a bunch of well-timed misidentifications and radar mirages or something else? The true answer has remained elusive and what has come to be known as the Washington flap, the Washington National Airport Sightings, or the Invasion of Washington remains mysterious.