Do You Love Mysteries?

Image courtesy NASA If you were born before 1960, you not only knew about the Space Race, you were sitting there with your nose pressed against the boob tube as the Mercury Seven rocketed into space, followed by the new crew who manned the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft as they worked out the kinks involved in beating the Russians to the Moon.   What was less well known about American astronauts is that a number of them reported UFOs that they observed in space.  

Image courtesy flickr In August of 1953, Captain Ruppelt at Project blue Book asked to be reassigned when his staff was reduced from ten to two.   A paragraph from Wikipedia sums up the prevailing attitude at the time. Most who succeeded him as Blue Book director exhibited either apathy or outright hostility to the subject of UFOs or were hampered by a lack of funding and official support. UFO investigators often regard Ruppelt's brief tenure at Blue Book as the high-water mark of public Air Force investigations of UFOs, when UFO investigations were treated seriously and had support at high levels.  Thereafter, Project Blue Book descended into a new "Dark Ages" from which many UFO investigators argue it never emerged.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book

Image courtesy flickr Most UFO skeptics say that if beings from other worlds were visiting Earth, why don’t they simply land on the White House lawn.  While ET has yet to do the Hollywood treatment, they did the next best thing not once but twice in 1952. That’s right, on the evenings of July 20 and 27, 1952 numerous UFO’s were tracked on radar, seen by eyewitnesses on the ground and chased by fighter planes sent up to intercept them over Washington DC.  Both incidents were hard for the government to play down once the national press quickly got wind of the fact that UFO’s were buzzing the White House and the Capitol building.