The Mariana UFO Film

Great Falls, Montana. Summer, 1950. The city's ballpark, Legion Park, sat roughly 3 miles from Great Falls Air Force Base. Nick Mariana was general manager of the local ball club. He had graduated in journalism from Montana State University and served in the Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1945. Later investigators called him reliable and trustworthy.

August 15, 1950. About 11:30 in the morning. Mariana walked to the grandstand to check the wind direction before a game. He saw two bright lights, stationary in the sky.

About 30 seconds later he ran to his car. It took him five to eight seconds to load his 16 mm camera with Kodachrome color film. By then the lights were moving. They slid toward the southwest, one ahead of the other, and passed behind the water tower. "An occasional vibration seemed to momentarily tilt them," he said, "after which they would instantly correct their level plane." They were disk-shaped and bright, with an aluminum quality, and they seemed to rotate. Later he said they looked "like two new dimes in the sky."

He estimated they were 50 feet across, 3 feet thick and about 50 yards apart, moving at about 200 mph. In 1952 he raised the speed to more than 400 mph. His 19-year-old secretary, Virginia Raunig, rushed outside with him. A minute or two after the objects disappeared, the witnesses saw two jets in another part of the sky.

Mariana gave the film to Captain John P. Brynildsen of Great Falls AFB. First he made the Air Force sign an agreement not to remove any frames. In October 1950 an AP story reported that the film was "too dark to distinguish any recognisable objects." Project Grudge took a quick look and wrote the objects off as reflections from two F-94 jet fighters.

When the film came back, Mariana said the first 30 to 35 frames were gone. Those frames, he said, showed larger images with a notch or band that revealed the objects rotating in unison. The Air Force said it had asked to remove one frame only, because the sprockets were damaged. Researcher Barry Greenwood later pointed to a discrepancy. Brynildsen had described the film as 15 feet long, and also as 8 feet. The National Archives copy today runs a little over six feet. In January 1951, Bob Considine's Cosmopolitan article "The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax" came out. Mariana sued, then dropped the suit in September 1955. No investigating body ever concluded that the film was a hoax.

In July 1952, Ruppelt of Project Blue Book had the film reanalysed at Wright-Patterson. The analysts ruled out birds, balloons and meteors. They rejected the jets too. "We drew a blank on the Montana Movie, it was an unknown," Ruppelt wrote. In January 1953 the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel screened the film alongside the Tremonton, Utah film. It judged the objects to be reflections of aircraft known to have been in the area. Robert M. L. Baker Jr. of Douglas Aircraft called the F-94 explanation "quite strained."

In the Condon Committee's study the film became Case 47. William K. Hartmann ruled out balloons, because the objects moved against the wind. He also ruled out birds and meteors. "The case remains unexplained," he wrote, though aircraft "cannot be entirely ruled out." When Roy Craig interviewed Raunig in 1967, she remembered seeing only one object. His colleague David Saunders called the case "the one sighting of all time that did more than any other single case to convince me that there is something to the UFO problem." According to Kevin Randle, the Air Force labelled it "possible aircraft" and let it go.

The footage reached cinemas in 1956 in the United Artists film Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers, with Mariana on camera. In 2008 the town's ball club became the Great Falls Voyagers, with an alien mascot named Orbit. On 15 August 2025 the club marked the 75th anniversary of the sighting.