Flying Saucers Found In Maryland!
The Glen Burnie Incident: the Air Force's Second Officially Announced Flying Saucer Capture
It was one of the oddest incidents of the early Flying Saucer era, with all the elements of a pulp magazine potboiler: a revolutionary flying machine created in a secret workshop by a shadowy inventor, a nationwide manhunt by military intelligence agents, rumors of stock swindles and a flurry of sensational headlines.
One afternoon in August 1949, a group of Air Force special agents and officers of the Maryland State Police broke into a shed on a farm near Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore, and discovered two bizarre disk-shaped experimental airplanes. By the next morning, newspapers all across the country carried the shocking announcement by an Air Force official that the devices were probably the "original prototypes of the flying saucer," and that the Air Force was staging a massive manhunt for their missing inventor. The two year old flying saucer mystery seemed to be on the verge of a solution. But a few hours later, Air Force Headquarters in Washington issued an adamant denial that the Glen Burnie disk-planes had any connection to the flying saucer phenomenon -- or that flying saucers even existed at all. Within a few days the excitement blew over and the strange objects, along with their shadowy creator, lapsed back into obscurity.
What was behind this bizarre three-day episode? Was the Glen Burnie Incident a media hoax, some sort of bungled intelligence operation -- or more ominously, another example of a massive Air Force coverup of the truth about flying saucers?
A version of this article originally appeared in Strange Magazine