Since you seem to like the '52 DC "flap" so much care to reconcile the fact that there wasn't anything approaching a consensus among AF pilots as to visual description or whether there was even a "UFO" where that era's radar told them there was?
You're aware of that aren't you?
The DC sightings involved several incidents. Some involved radar tracking alone, sometimes confirmed by two separate radar tracking stations, and some involved radar/ground visual. The different times and the different aircraft mean different pilots were involved in different incidents at different times. So it's not surprising there was no consensus on individual incidents, because consensus would not have been possible to acheive given the circumstances. So that point isn't relevant.
What is relevant is that there was at least one incident when a radar target was visually confirmed by pilots and there was at least one such incident involving the vectoring of a jet to a target, which was seen by the pilot, who could not catch the object because of its "phenomenal speed".
In a newspaper interview, one pilot also reported seeing the objects around his jet and descibed them as glowing spheres.
For a long time I had not paid much attention to the DC sightings because they seemed to convoluted and the famous "lens flare" photo was the only evidence I'd seen. However after reviewing the case in more detail, and discovering the aforementioned details, it became apparent that there was much more to the DC flap than I had previously realized.
From E.J. Ruppelt:
"The controllers vectored the jets toward group after group of targets, but each time, before the jets could get close enough to see anything more than just a light, the targets had sped away.
Then one stayed put. The pilot saw a light right where the ARTC radar said a target was located; he cut in the F-94's afterburner and went after it, but just like the light that the F-94 had chased near Langley AFB, this one also disappeared."
From Wikipedia:
"Capt. John McHugo, the flight leader, was vectored towards the radar pips but saw nothing, despite repeated attempts (Peebles, 76). However, his wingman,
Lt. William Patterson, did see four white "glows" and chased them. Suddenly, the "glows" turned and surrounded his fighter. Patterson asked the control tower at National Airport what he should do; according to Chop, the tower's answer was "stunned silence". The four objects then sped away from Patterson's jet and disappeared."
Lastly, although radar technology then was not as advanced as today's, it still worked well enough to perform air traffic control at a major airport, and there were two different tracking stations involved, including military rardar. So it's not as though the people back then used stone knives and bearskins. Radar had been used by the US Navy since 1940.
