Documents / Report

Film Analysis of Unidentified Objects, 1953

U.S. Department of War · 1950 · 23 pages · text from the file's own layer

This confidential progress report from the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington, dated May 1953 and addressed to the Director of Naval Intelligence, analyzes motion picture film of unidentified objects. The footage was taken in Utah on 2 July 1952 and in Montana in 1950. Analysts used frame plots and densitometer readings, and most of the group judged the images to be light sources. They computed velocities and accelerations that ruled out birds, aircraft and balloons, and concluded the objects could not be identified as natural phenomena or commonly known man-made objects.

From the source: Release of 2026-08-07 Incident: 1950, 1952, Montana, Utah. This file contains a memorandum relating to the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center’s assessment of two films allegedly depicting unidentified airborne objects, captured in Montana and Utah in 1950 and 1952, respectively. The file documents the Center’s analytic process, assumptions that constrained its confidence level, tentative conclusions, and recommendations for future research. The Center assessed, generally, that the objects depicted in the film demonstrated characteristics that were inconsistent with those of natural phenomena or commonly known aerospace technologies. The memorandum documents the Center’s recommendation for a more well-resourced investigation to corroborate its presumptive findings, citing a lack of funding and personnel. The accompanying charts compare the film’s luminosity with the apparent angular size of the phenomena, using contemporary mathematical modeling and photogrammetric analysis techniques.

Open the PDF at page 11 Original source ↗
DOW-UAP-PR159 · video · 1952-07-02 Historical Film of Reported UFOs, Utah, 1952 This archival footage is a digitization of a 16mm print of Kodachrome color motion-picture film shot on a handheld Bell & Howell Auto Master camera near Tremonton, Utah, on July 2, 1952. U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse reported observing and filming a group of bright airborne objects and shortly thereafter submitted the footage to the U.S. Air Force. The film later became one of the visual cases reviewed by Project Blue Book, the 1952–1969 U.S. Air Force program that investigated the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The film’s limited detail and lack of fixed reference points prevented a conclusive resolution. From the 55-second mark onward, the film transitions to unrelated footage appearing to show a demonstration of sewing equipment. The presence of unrelated sewing-equipment footage suggests that the surviving footage may be a composite or reused print, though the available record does not establish how or when the materials came to be combined. As documented in records submitted with the film, contained in this collection under the title DOW-UAP-D102, the footage originally was paired with mountain scenery from Idaho, which is not preserved in this digitization. Download (76.1 MB)
_.' -r -~' -
1--.
- l ;_ .~ .:...
i '. •
f •
,---+--,__,_-'---!-----+--;---+ ~- ;
,t l • : • • -~---~~~~~ ~~-~=__;...c..;.;=-.t........!......:.1.~-.:_..:::_-1.__,'-.t........c...__.;..~-.l.-......_......_..:...,._.1....:...;:....:..;.--==~::...:.;:--;==-'--'--"'-''1...cc:;....-:;......:.:_.;.._...;.__-l-.,......:__.....,.c+_'---.f=-4--l---'t:......;:_-"--'---<-"+-....___;..__;_.,__ _;..__;:...._.;.,__ _t.__f-..;.;,.:+---=-.:.--..;._-4-~-.:.---::-_._--:,-+--':-_:_'---'..:_,,_.._-:-::= "--::'-:..f7"-',..._~--.'

Cases discussed

About this file

Report, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 23 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.