Fort Belvoir Black Ring Photographs (Condon Case 50)

Fort Belvoir, Virginia. September 1957. A U.S. Army private worked there as a draftsman with the Post Engineers. The Condon Report never names him. It calls him Pvt. X.

Approximately 9 a.m. Pvt. X was in one of several buildings facing a parking lot. Someone from outside called for the men to come out and see the curious object approaching overhead. He and several others came out in time to see "a dark, ringshaped object approaching in the north." He ran to his car for his Kodak Brownie while about 15 people reportedly watched.

The ring was very black, with no reflection. Pvt. X thought it "seemed solid," as opposed to being "like smoke." He judged it about 60 ft. in diameter and five to six feet thick. It moved high above the treetops but below the clouds, horizontally and continuously, faster than the clouds behind it. It did not stop or hover.

He took six photographs. Between the second and third, the ring began to be "engulfed in smoke." He could not remember exactly how and thought he had been busy winding the film. White cloud closed around the ring until only a pale, disk-shaped cloud drifted on. The sighting lasted not more than five minutes.

Pvt. X believed the object was connected with some sort of test or experiment. Perhaps it should not have been photographed. He made no report at the base. He developed the film about a month later, at home. Over the years he moved five or six times, and the original negatives were lost.

Spring 1966. He showed the prints to a friend, who sent them to NICAP. Dr James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona became interested in mid-1966 and called them to the attention of the Condon Committee.

The astronomer William K. Hartmann took the case. Tree parallax showed all six frames came from one spot, while cloud motion confirmed their order. The spacing of the ring against the clouds fit a genuine sequence, not a fake, though radial striations on photo 2, like "iron filings near a magnet," left a question of retouching unresolved. Hartmann found the ring moving in the same direction and at about the same angular speed as the background clouds, suggesting that it was drifting with the wind. His size estimates, from about 260 to 300 ft up to about 500 ft, dwarfed the witness's 60 ft.

Then officers at the base saw the pictures. Sergeant-Major A. M. Wagner identified them at once, unprompted, as a cloud produced by "atomic bomb simulation demonstrations." Five 55-gallon drums of gasoline, diesel fuel, TNT and white phosphorus were arranged in a circle and detonated. The top of the mushroom cloud formed a stable black vortex ring that drifted away. Sergeant-Major Husted added that the white phosphorus smoke eventually enveloped the black vortex, which occasionally held together as long as 40 min.

The Condon Report lists Case 50 as positively identified. Project Blue Book never handled it, because no report was made in 1957.

Hartmann drew a wider lesson from the nine-year delay, which he attributed to the witness's fear of ridicule or reprimand. That, he wrote, "testifies to the reality of the 'hidden data' problem in UFO studies." Not every reader accepts the verdict. In 2013 Scott Waring read the white cloud as a UFO hiding itself. And when a ring-shaped UFO was reported over Disneyland in 2020, Fort Belvoir was cited all over again.