General McKee's Letters: 'The Flying Saucer Boom Has Started Again' (1952)

What this record is

This record is one folder from the personal papers of General William F. McKee: his correspondence with people whose surnames begin with U or V, from 1951 to 1967. It runs to 296 pages and was never classified. McKee spent six years as Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force from 1947, was later vice commander of Air Materiel Command, served as Vice Chief of Staff from 1962 until he retired in 1964, and then ran the Federal Aviation Agency. The folder reflects that career. It holds holiday notes and congratulations to fellow officers, thank-you letters, a 1956 letter to the president of United Air Lines about joining its 100,000 Mile Club, and correspondence addressed to, among others, Mrs. Vandenberg, Congressman Vinson and Dr. von Kármán, along with papers about an aerospace research conference. It was swept into the UAP transfer because of a single letter.

What it says about UFOs

One page of the 296 mentions UFOs: page 13 of the PDF. It is a carbon of a short personal letter dated July 28, 1952, from McKee, signing as a major general, to Brig. Gen. Edward H. Underhill, Deputy for Personnel, Far East Air Forces. Most of it is about a check for $23.06 that McKee enclosed to settle a favor. In the middle, he turns to the news:

“In addition to all of our other troubles, the flying saucer boom has started again. Even our radars are picking up unidentified objects. The press now thinks we are keeping a big secret from them.”

He then passes on a remark by a General whose name is partly garbled in the OCR but reads as Twining (Gen. Nathan F. Twining was Vice Chief of Staff at the time). A day or so earlier, McKee writes, Twining had said that people don’t seem to realize there are a few billion stars in the sky, with all their associated physical phenomena. The letter closes with thanks and the hope of visiting “Eddie” before long. There is nothing else about UFOs in the folder. A search for saucers, discs, unidentified objects and related terms turns up only this page.

Context

The date explains the tone. The letter was written between the two weekends of radar-visual sightings over Washington, D.C., on July 19–20 and July 26–27, 1952. The Air Force held its largest press conference since the Second World War on July 29, the day after the letter, with Maj. Gen. John Samford explaining the radar returns as temperature inversions. McKee’s “even our radars” and his line about the press are the private view from the Air Staff that week. See the Washington, D.C., sightings and the summer 1952 UFO wave.

Status

This is a senior officer’s offhand aside, not an intelligence document, and it should be read that way. It shows that the Washington radar reports were being talked about at the top of the Air Force, that the leadership felt the pressure of press suspicion, and that the attitude McKee shared with a friend was weary skepticism rather than alarm. It doesn’t show any investigation, finding or secret. The value is candor: a private letter, never meant for publication, in which the Air Staff’s line on saucers is the same as its public one.

Sources

• National Archives Catalog: Correspondence (U,V) from William F. McKee Personal Papers Collection, 1951–1967 (NAID 659965424)
• PDF of the full 296-page folder
• Series: Records from the Department of the Air Force Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (NAID 656595571)
• National Archives: UAP records in Record Group 615