Ruppelt wanted to stay in Washington to investigate the case but the bureaucracy got in the way. Ruppelt's orders didn't allow for an overnight stay. He tried to get them amended, but failed. He was warned that if he remained in Washington, even if on official business, he would be considered as absent without leave. Ruppelt had no choice but to return to Ohio without talking to anyone about the sightings.
A week later, almost to the minute, with the same crew on duty, the UFOs returned. About 10:30 P.M. the same radar operators who had been on duty the week before again spotted several slow moving targets. This time the controllers carefully marked each of the unidentifieds. When they were all marked, they called the Andrews AFB radar facility. The unidentified targets were on their scope too.
An hour later, with targets being tracked continually, the controllers called for interceptors. Al Chop, the Pentagon spokesman for the UFO project, told me, that he was in communication with the main basement command post at the Pentagon. He requested that interceptors be sent. As a civilian, he could only make the request and then wait for the flag officer (general or admiral) in command at the Pentagon to make the official decision.
As happened the week before, there was a delay, but by midnight, two F-94s were on station over Washington. At that point, the reporters who had assembled to observe the situation were asked, by Chop, to leave the radar room at National Airport because classified radio and intercept procedures would be in operation.
Although that fact was well reported, Ruppelt in his book, wrote, "I knew this was absurd because any radio ham worth his salt could build equipment and listen in on any intercept. The real reason for the press dismissal, I learned, was that not a few people in the radar room were positive that this night would be the big night in UFO history — the night when a pilot would close in on and get a good look at a UFO — and they didn't want the press to be in on it."
Major Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon liaison between the UFO project in Dayton and the intelligence community in Washington was at National Airport. Also there were Al Chop, a public information officer and Naval Lieutenant Holcomb, an electronics specialist assigned to the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence.
With those men watching, as well as the controllers at various facilities using various radars, the F-94s arrived. And the UFOs vanished from the scopes immediately. The jets were vectored to the last known position of the UFOs, but even though visibility was unrestricted in the area, the pilots could see nothing. The fighters made a systematic search of the area, but since they could find nothing, they returned to their base.
Chop told me, "The minute the first two interceptors appeared on our scope all our unknowns disappeared. It was like they just wiped them all off. All our other flights, all the known flights were still on the scope… We watched these two planes leave. When they were out of our range, immediately we got our UFOs back."
Later, Air Force officers would learn that as the fighters appeared over Washington, people in the area of Langley Air Force Base, Virginia spotted weird lights in the sky. An F-94, in the area on a routine mission was diverted to search for the light. The pilot saw it and turned toward it, but it disappeared "like somebody turning off a light bulb."
The pilot continued the intercept and did get a radar lock on the now unlighted and unseen target. That was broken by the object as it sped away. The fighter continued the pursuit, obtaining two more radar locks on the object, but each time the locks were broken.
The scene then shifted back to Washington National. Again the Air Defense Command was alerted and again fighters were sent. This time the pilots were able to see the objects, vectored toward them by the air traffic controllers. But the fighters couldn't close on the lights. The pilots saw no external details, other than lights where the radar suggested that something should be seen.
After several minutes of failure to close on a target, one of them was spotted lopping along. A fighter piloted by Lieutenant William Patterson turned, kicked in the afterburner and tried to catch the object. It disappeared before Patterson could see much of anything.
Interviewed the next day, Patterson said, "I tried to make contact with the bogies below one thousand feet, but they [the controllers] vectored us around. I saw several bright lights. I was at my maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them. I was vectored into new objects. Later I chased a single bright light which I estimated about ten miles away. I lost visual contact with it…"
Al Chop remembered this intercept, as did Dewey Fournet. Chop said, "The flight controllers had directed him to them [the unknowns]. We had a little cluster of them. Five or six of them and he suddenly reports that he sees some lights… He said they are very brilliant blue-white lights. He was going try to close in to get a better look… he flew into the area where they were clustered and he reported they were all around him."
Chop said that he, along with the others in the radar room, watched the intercept on the radar scope. What the pilot was telling them, they could see on the radar.
Patterson had to break off the intercept, though there were still lights in the sky and objects on the scope. According to Chop, the pilot radioed that he was running low on fuel. He turned so that he could head back to his base.
Chop said that the last of the objects disappeared from the scope about the time the sun came up. Ruppelt later quizzed Fournet about the activities that night. According to Ruppelt, Fournet and Holcomb, the radar expert, were convinced the targets were solid, metallic objects. Fournet told Ruppelt that there were weather related targets on the scopes, but the controllers were ignoring them. Everyone was convinced that the targets were real.
At 4:00 P.M., in Washington D.C., Major General John A. Samford, Chief of Air Intelligence, held a press conference. Of that press conference, Ruppelt wrote, "General Samford made an honest attempt to straighten out the Washington National Sightings, but the cards were stacked against him. He had to hedge on many answers to questions from the press because he didn't know the answers. This hedging gave the impression that he was trying to cover up something more than just the fact his people fouled up in not fully investigating the sightings. Then he brought in Captain Roy James from ATIC to handle all the queries about radar. James didn't do any better because he'd just arrived in Washington that morning and didn't know very much more about the sightings than he'd read in the papers. Major Dewey Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who had been at the airport during the sightings, were extremely conspicuous by their absence… " As was the Pentagon spokesman on UFOs, Al Chop.
From that point, it seems that there was an explanation for the Washington National sightings. Samford, during the conference, backed up by the radar expert, James, suggested that there was a temperature inversion over Washington. That became the explanation for the radar sightings but the truth is that there is no explanation. The temperature inversion simply doesn't work, especially when it is remembered that there were both radar and visual observations. But the Air Force officers were happy. The news media had an answer and the sightings could be ignored. Ironically, the sightings were carried as unidentified in the Project Blue Book files.
Ten years later, long after Ed Ruppelt had left Blue Book and the Air Force, there was another series of sightings, this time in the desert southwest. The object interacted with the environment, it was seen on radar, and fighters from two separate Air Force bases were scrambled to intercept. Project Blue Book officers would explain the sightings but as happened so often in the past, that explanation is inadequate.