[Scan-DC] Saturday night UFO scrambles Andrews jets??

[Steve Rigby]

Albert LaFrance wrote:

 > An interesting coincidence: this past weekend was the 50th
 > anniversary of one of the Washington National Airport UFO
 > sightings, which caused quite a stir in July 1952!

   Right you are.  The Post carried a good sized story on those
sightings a few days ago and interviewed retired air traffic
controllers who had witnessed those UFO's, giving some details of
their comms with pilots who also saw them at the same time.

   This reminds me of a UFO I saw a few years ago which I am
virtually certain was a meteor.  It was below the cloud cover on a
totally overcast night, so I knew it had to be quite low in altitude
when I spotted it at about midnight.  I called all around the area
to air traffic centers, but no one claimed to have seen anything
either visually or on radar.  I called Fairfax County Police while
listening to the scanner hoping to hear something, but dispatch told
me that no officers had reported anything.  Then, about 10 minutes
later, dispatch called me back and informed me that an officer near
where I had seen this thing could confirm my sighting.  He had
called the incident in by phone, not by radio, probably to avoid
ridicule, which was my guess at the time.

   The UFO, or meteor, if that was the case, was big, bright and
fiery, and likely hit the ground if it was that low according to an
astronomer friend of mine to whom I related the incident.  One
usually sees meteors at many thousands of feet in altitude, and ones
that are sighted below low cloud ceilings normally make it to the
ground.

   Steve