I was 12 years old and I wS a paperboy for the Washington Star. It was a cold wet Sunday morning and you had to be careful to keep the paper dry and to put it inside the customers storm doors instead of just tossing it on the porch. It was very windy and at one house a branch broke off a tree and landed right in front of me. Had it hit me I would have been badly injured. I remember watching cartoons later that morning and the local news broke in to say that there had been a plane crash on Loudoun County and that the plane was trying to land at Dulles. At the time it was the worst airline crash in American history.
On a side note that area was very rural back then. State Route 7 was the was and is the main highway through that area. All the locals knew about the government facility but locally in the DC area most people didn't know it existed until that day. Now you have two farm breweries onbthe mountainside as well as a portion of the Appalachian Trail. There is also a memorial marker to the victims of the crash.