🌊 The UAP Deep Dive

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It isn’t known where or when, but one day, a group of US Navy sailors watched a “small orange-red sphere” rapidly descend from a high altitude to 100-200 yards directly above their aircraft carrier.

“The UAPs [unidentified anomalous phenomena] appeared to emit a soft orange-red light which, bizarrely, did not illuminate the ocean or the flight deck of the CVN despite the visual appearance of intense luminosity,” a secret report in the Pentagon’s database allegedly says.

“The surface of the UAP was observed to be dynamic, ‘roiling like the surface of the sun.’”

Once the UAPs departed, those who saw them felt as though they snapped out of a trance.

What had they seen?

On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold recorded UFOs over the United States for the first time. He claimed to see a group of nine, shiny flying objects flying near Washington’s Mt. Rainier at speeds he estimated at 1,200+ miles an hour.

In the following months, similar reports came pouring in. None garnered more attention than one near Roswell, New Mexico, where a rancher named William Brazel discovered a strange array of debris scattered across his property – metallic fragments, rubber strips, and a material unlike anything he'd seen before. He alerted the US Army, which gathered the materials, confirmed their authenticity and published a press release: “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday.

A day later, though, the Army retracted the press release and said the “disc” was actually just part of a weather balloon. The story and the UFO craze soon died down. Between 1947 and 1951, the US Air Force chronicled a total of 615 UFO reports.

Then in 1952, something changed.

During a six-month period of 1952, the US Air Force received 717 UFO reports. “148 of the nation's leading newspapers carried a total of over 16,000 items about flying saucers," the Air Force official tasked with monitoring the reports said. 

The reports peaked in July, on the 19th of which staff at Washington, DC’s National Airport spotted seven unusual blips on their radar. 

"We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed,” one airport supervisor said. “Their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft." Elsewhere in the DC area, people spotted bright lights and objects moving through the sky in unusual ways. 

“Flying Objects Near Washington Spotted by Both Pilots and Radar,” the New York Times wrote at the time; “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL,” wrote Iowa’s Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Then exactly one week later, more objects were spotted and picked up by radar over the capital. One Air Force pilot recounted trying to overtake them but being unable to do so.

Three days later – at the Air Force’s most-attended press conference since World War 2 – two generals dismissed talk of UFOs. The radar blips were a result of weather-induced glitches, while the visual sightings were misidentified meteors, stars, and city lights.

Editor’s Note

A lot of readers sent in positive feedback about last weekend’s RFK deep dive, and many asked for a similar one on Tulsi Gabbard. We’re working on that and plan to have it out next weekend. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, we’d like to wish you a belated Happy Thanksgiving. We hope you were able to enjoy some time with your families as we were with ours. We are beyond grateful to count you as a reader. Thank you for your support of Roca.

–Max and Max

RocaNews co-founders