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This Project Blue Book file, released through The Black Vault, collects US Air Force records from 1950 to 1959 on the movie film Nicholas Mariana shot at Great Falls, Montana on 15 August 1950. It includes the OSI interview report, letters about borrowing and copying the film, and a 1956 Douglas Aircraft analysis. Blue Book's own findings were not consistent: one letter lists the cause as unknown, while later memos conclude the objects were probably two F-94 jets.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Visual study of the reprints, in both cinema projection and frame-byframe examination on a Recordak, an Iconolog and a traveling microscope revealed the following: The reprinted part of the 16mm film comprises about 280 frames. ** The first few frames had been torn from the rest in the original but apparently were spliced correctly for the reprinting. On many of the frames two bright white round dots stand out against the dark blue sky. They are largest and brightest on the first ten or twenty frames and gradually fade away until they can no longer be definitely made out beyond frame #225. Although there are numerous other dots, spots, and specks on many of the frames, most of them are less bright, less distinct and they appear at random; presumably they are blemishes caused by imperfections of the film or the processing. Against them the two UFO images are quite conspicuous and readily distinguished by their almost constant relative orientation and sharpness as well as by their steady movement across the landscape. The analysis of the trajectory of the two objects was carried out by tracing on an overlay vellum the relative motion of the objects with respect to fixed reference points, as far as such are visible, viz. from frame #65 to 255. The first 64 frames show no background but sky and horizontal power vlres. Beginning with frame #65, what looks like a ventilator duct on the roof of a concrete grain elevator comes into view; after frame #144 the struc ture of a water tower sweeps across the foreground, and finally the roof of a second grain elevator on the other side of the water tower enters the picture. These frames indicate the camera was in focus. Figure 3 is a composite trac ing of these landmarks together with the successive positions of the two IFO's. This figure is drawn like a panorama on the assumption that the photographer kept his stance without moving appreciably (which was reported by him and is well borne out by the constancy of the perspective). Apparent motion of the objects, under these conditions is then interpreted in terms of angular velocity of tracking. A similar overlay using the 35mm film was utilized in preparation of figure 5(a). The Montana film contains six independent pieces of information (as functions of time) which describes the UFO images, i.e. the two degrees of freedom of each dot (as depicted on two-dimensional film) and the apparent diameter of the developed image of each. In the analysis it was convenient to treat the UFO's as a system. Thus we chose as the four degrees of freedom of this system the azimuth and altitude of the mid-point on the line The Iconolog is a film projector similar to a Recordak but equipped with crosshairs manually movable across the screen and with digitized coordinate counters which can be read off without scaling or automatically printed by an electrical typewriter or punched on IBM card for further processing. It was developed by Douglas Aircraft Co. and is manufactured by Genisco Inc., Los Angeles 64, California. Also a reprinted 35mm film was analyzed and proved to yield somewhat more accurate results. However, four frames, viz: #177 to #180 were missing in the 35mm reel.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 114 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.