User:Saltysquid223/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the idea of a UFO incident was interesting to me, even though I do not believe in the existence of aliens. It matters because every event should be accurately documented, even a strange one such as this. My preliminary impression of it was that seeing the different perspectives on what happened, like the Air Force's and the CIA's, provided an adequate summary of their official responses to the event.

Evaluate the article
The article's opening sentence, "From July 12 to 29, 1952, a series of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings were reported in Washington, D.C., and later became known as the Washington flap, the Washington National Airport Sightings, or the Invasion of Washington", concisely summarizes what it is about. The links to other Wikipedia articles are helpful in the event that the reader wants to learn more. While it does not include a brief description of the article's main sections, it mentions the Air Force, which is one of the main focuses throughout the article. Content is relevant to the topic. Nothing is mentioned aside from the UFO incident, Washington, D.C., and the CIA.

The article is neutral on its stance towards the existence of aliens. While there are snippets from interviews and novels on those who believed the objects on the radar were aliens, the phenomenon of temperature inversion was mentioned a few times. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, temperature inversion is defined as, "an increase of temperature with height through a layer of air" (Merriam-Webster). The article states that in this case, the inversion made unusual signals on the radar appear that air traffic controllers and some Air Force members assumed to be UFOs.

The sources are current given the time that the event happened in 1952, having been written between 1955 and 2001. The authors are Jerome Clark, Susan Michaels, Curtis Peebles, Kevin D. Randle, and Edward J. Ruppelt. Finding information about the authors is more difficult than I thought it would be. For Susan Michaels specifically, I am unable to find anything about her except the book she wrote, nothing to do with her appearance. The link for The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt works, it is a website that archives the original work.

For the most part, the article is well-written and easy to read. Some punctuation to space things out is needed. An example of that is the sentence, "At one point both radar centers at National Airport and the radar at Andrews Air Force Base were tracking an object hovering over a radio beacon. The object vanished in all three radar centers at the same time". A clearer rewording would be: ''At one point, both centers were tracking an object hovering over a radio beacon. It vanished from the National Airport's two radars, and the Andrews Air Force Base's one at the same time.''

In the article, there are only two uses of images and media. The first, at the top of the page, is a bird's eye view of the Washington National Airport (nowadays called the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport). Because it is portrait oriented and therefore sideways, it is somewhat difficult to see unless the reader were to tilt their head or screen. The caption, however, is accurate - "Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on the Potomac River". The second is a video from a press conference in 1952. One of the people being interviewed is an Air Force Major General, John Samford. The closed captions for the video, while they accurately gather all the words, are inconsistently spaced at times. This makes it difficult to keep up with what the speaker is saying.

“Temperature inversion.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/temperature%20inversion. Accessed 11 Sep. 2023.