BOOKS - The year 1952 found the country on high alert.
A wave of UFO sightings over Washington D.C. led top military brass to get tough. According to a Feb 18th blog article by a writer with Florida’s Herald Tribune, a startling revelation is made.
On July 29, the United States Air Force placed jet pilots “on a 24 hour nationwide alert against ‘flying saucers’ with orders to shoot them down if they refused to land,” according to the article.
Author Frank Feschino, in his 2007 book, “Shoot Them Down,” seeks to elaborate on the drama surrounding these sightings by exploring accounts of downed military aircraft. In fact, Feschino — through detailed research — hypothesizes that domestic military air casualities over the United States from 1951-56 were nearly as high as they were in the Korean War during “roughly half the same time period.”
The former head of the government’s formal study of unidentified flying objects, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, said after the 1952 wave of sightings had calmed down, that UFO’s weren’t something to play around with. In fact, the Herald Tribune article quotes Ruppelt as saying, “There have been other and more lurid duels of death. That’s what everybody missed.”