Since the crash was not reported as a UFO incident and did not involve any question of unidentified flying objects, ATIC was not asked to investigate the problem. The office of the Deputy Inspector General for Safety carried out a thorough inquiry and concluded that the crash had been an aircraft accident, probably caused by the pilot’s suffering an attack of vertigo. As for the two blips shown by radar, the night had been a stormy one and atmospheric conditions had been conducive to abnormal returns. The phantom echo had almost certainly been a secondary reflection produced by the jet itself, and it thus merged with the return from the jet and vanished with it when the plane hit the water. Solely on the basis of this radar phantom, some civilian saucer groups have tried to transform the Kinross crash into a UFO mystery with Air Force investigators as the villains, and have suggested that the ghost blip represented an alien spacecraft that happened to be cruising over Lake Michigan that night and attacked the jet for one of two reasons: 1) The saucer might have tried to avoid close contact with the jet by employing a “reversed G-field beam” (see _Chapter_ IX); colliding with this beam as with a stone wall, the jet crashed. 2) The saucer might have used the G-field to scoop the plane out of the air and take it aboard the spacecraft; the captured pilot might have been needed to teach the English language to his alien captors. _The “Invasion” of Washington, D.C._ The most famous of the radar phantoms are those that “invaded” Washington, D.C., on the nights of July 19 and July 26, 1952, and terrified a large number of radar operators, pilots, and Air Force officials who in a more normal emotional climate would have recognized the “invisible” flying saucers for what they were--radar angels produced by weather conditions[VIII-2]. All during July the eastern seaboard had suffered an unprecedented drought and heat wave. Lack of cloud cover produced intensely hot days and rapid radiative cooling of the earth’s surface at night. This situation, combined with the prevailing light winds, was ideal for the formation of low-level temperature inversions during the hours of darkness[VIII-5].