Documents / Report
This confidential progress report, dated 4 May 1953 and signed by L. W. Keith, went from the Navy's Photographic Interpretation Center to the Director of Naval Intelligence. It analyzes movies of unidentified objects filmed in Utah on 2 July 1952 and in Montana in 1950, which the U.S. Air Force had asked the Navy to interpret. Using plots, density readings and velocity estimates, the analysts judged the objects to be probably light sources that were disk shaped and moved at high speeds. They 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.
“Expedition X”1 page
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Serial: CONFIDENTIAL SECURITY INFORMATION Subj: Interpretation of Movies of Unidentified Objects progress report on b. Densitometric tests: Densitometric data were obtained with a Densichron, Model 2150 manufactured by the Welch Scientific Company. The Densichron has a scale range of 0-3. The procedure was to project each frame at approximately 22 times magnification onto a finely-grained-glass screen. The background (sky) was then measured at several places and the density set to 3.0 (variations in background densities were in the order of 0.02 and were regarded as uniform). A set of three readings were made of each of seven objects in Part I, and of the single object in Part III of the Utah Film. Readings were made of the entire Montana film. Enclosure (8a and 8b) are graphs of the density readings obtained of the two lower groups of objects in frames 1-129 of the Utah film. Enclosure (9) is a density graph of the single object (94 frames) in Part III. Enclosure (10) is a graph where six successive Densichron readings were averaged and advanced one reading each determinant. Of the Montana film, densities were plotted as above and are enclosures (11) and (12). The results of the density readings may be questioned in that these objects varied in size so that at the minimum sizes the densichron probe was measuring the entire object, and at the maximum size the probe was measuring only a portion of the objects. Because of this situation only the largest readings obtained by scanning the objects were used. It is understood that normal procedure would be to read the entire object. This was impossible with the equipment on hand. In addition the film, with which this investigation was conducted, is a duplicate of a copy. This raises the question as to whether the central portion of the objects were burnt out during the duplication processing. Density readings were made to compare the clear areas and the objects. It was found that the minimum difference is 0.4. This indicates that relative luminosity may still be obtained with the procedure used. Concurrent with the density readings, relative sizes of the objects were noted in order to correlate distance and luminosity. Enclosure (13) is a plot of the same object wherein the relationship of distance and luminosity can be detected in Utah film. ## 3. Answers to Questions. Answers keyed to the questions contained in enclosure (7) of reference (a) are hereby presented. They supercede those contained in reference (c) and present the final analysis.as requested.
Report, from the pursue collection. 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. 23 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.