Emil Barnea's Hoia-Baciu UFO photographs, Cluj, Romania, 1968

In 1968 the Hoia-Baciu forest, just west of Cluj, was a popular Sunday outing place for people from Cluj. That year Romania was gripped by what the newspaper Adevărul later described as a UFO fever, with reports from the Banat mountains to Oradea.

Sunday, 18 August 1968. It was 36 °C, windless and nearly cloudless. Emil Barnea, 45, a construction technician and former army officer, was in a clearing that Romanian sources name as Poiana Rotundă. With him were his girlfriend, Zamfira Mattea, 34, and a couple who asked not to be named.

Mattea saw it first. She shouted. Barnea joined her and looked up.

Above the trees hung a large, round, metallic object. Silvery. Shining in the sun. It seemed to emit its own light as well as reflect the sunlight, and it made no noise. It flew in a straight line towards the north-east, wavered, then turned south-west and seemed to sink slowly, growing brighter. Barnea took photographs with his FED-2 camera. After about two minutes the object suddenly accelerated, climbing away until it vanished at the horizon.

Barnea used up the rest of the roll before developing it, so the frames were only seen later. Patrick Gross records four taken and three published. ASFAN counts five. In September 1968 engineer Florin Gheorghiță reconstructed the flight path and found that the altitude and size calculations matched the witnesses' estimates. He sent the photos to AGERPRES, the state news agency. Its photo specialist in Bucharest found "no trace of any trickery". On 18 September 1968 the story went out to major international agencies.

A Cluj newspaper photo-reporter and a commercial lab called the negatives "perfectly normal, without traces of falsification". University of Cluj technicians built scale models and concluded that the object, "in addition to reflecting the sunlight, was to also have emitted its own light". Ion Hobana, who met Barnea in 1968 and 1970, wrote: "This apparatus is matching no human-made apparatus". In Belgium, G. Delcorps found an "abnormal distribution of the shades and the light". In France, F. Lagarde's expert said the "shadows have absolutely nothing to do with sunlight".

The director of the Cluj observatory disagreed. He called it "either a mystification, or some weather balloons photographed in particular circumstances". A search for balloons or blimps in the area at that time found none. No confession, no documented debunking and no official finding have been located. The accounts still disagree on the details, from the time of day to the diameter, put anywhere from about 10 m to more than 30 m. Popular retellings say Barnea lost his job over the photos. The Romanian sources do not confirm it.

In 1973 Joseph M. Brill wrote up the case in Skylook, published by MUFON. Hobana and Weverbergh retold it in UFO's from Behind the Iron Curtain. In April 1977 the photos were shown at the First International UFO Congress in Acapulco. Gheorghiță compared them to the Santa Ana, California photograph of 3 August 1965.

These photographs are where the forest's UFO reputation began, along with its "Romanian Bermuda Triangle" nickname. Television crews still come, from Destination Truth to Expedition X.