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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.
“Cooper”6 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
On the other hand, the photographs shown in Appendix II do seem to indicate that airplane reflections might possibly look like the images shown on the film. Of course, balloons, shiny insects etc. or for that matter any bright light source in the sky subtending a small angle would also give rise to such images. The fact that the images do fade is reminiscent of airplane reflective phenomena, although any non-isotropic or variable intensity radiative source could fade in like manner. The discrepancy in the azimuth heading for sun reflection might be decreased by large cross winds (they could conceivably reorient the plane's direction by about 6 $ ^{\circ} $ ) but the angular discrepancy still exists and along with the image size, remains a thorn in the side of the airplane reflection hypothesis.
The author acknowledges with regret that, despite the considerable amount of effort spent on the analysis of the evidence and circumstances of the "Montana UFO Case", no clearcut conclusion could be brought out. The indecision as to what these objects may have been must be ascribed to the conflict which remains between some details of the photographic material evidence and the uncertainty of some of the reported observations and witness accounts. Whether a better clarification of the recorded phenomenon could have been attained by a more searching investigation on the spot at the time, still remains difficult to assess.
3/24/56
R. M. L. Baker, Jr.
* This footnote applies to ** on page 5 of this report.
According to Ruppelt, cf. p. 237, ref. (14), "Both and his secretary . . . had said that the two jets had appeared in another part of the sky only a minute or two after the two UFO's had dis- appeared in the southeast. This in itself would eliminate the jets as candidates for the UFO . . . . We knew the landing pattern that was being used on the day of the sighting, and we knew when the two 794's landed. The two jets just weren't anywhere close to where the two UFO's had been." 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.