Rhodes UFO photographs ("shoe-heel" photos), Phoenix, Arizona, 1947

Summer 1947. On 24 June, Kenneth Arnold had reported his famous sighting. On 8 July, Roswell would make its announcement. Between the two, in Phoenix, Arizona, lived William Albert Rhodes. He was an inventor, a musician, an amateur astronomer and a photographer.

Monday, 7 July 1947. About 4:00 p.m. Rhodes was walking to his home workshop. Then he heard a loud "whoosh." He thought it was a jet-propelled Lockheed P-80. What he saw was flat and gray, "the shape of a heel of a shoe, with a small hole in the center." After that first whoosh, it went completely silent. It made three passes over his home.

Rhodes grabbed his camera, a Kodak Brownie 120 box camera. The Air Force file describes the object spiraling down from about 5,000 feet to 2,000 feet. He took his first picture near the low point. Then it began to rapidly accelerate upwards at a 45-degree angle, and he took the second. It left two trails of vapor. The file put it at 20 to 30 feet across, with a visible canopy, moving at 400 to 600 miles per hour.

On 9 July, the Arizona Republic ran both pictures on its front page under the headline "Mystery 'Whatsis' Photographed over Phoenix." The FBI had obtained copies from the paper's managing editor the day before.

29 August 1947. CIC Special Agent George Fugate Jr. and FBI Special Agent Brower interviewed Rhodes. Brower was introduced only as a "representative of the United States Government," which the report itself called "a peculiar procedure." Rhodes handed over his prints and his negatives. Days later, a report noted that his "character and business affiliations are presently under investigation."

The negatives went to the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The case entered the files of Project Sign as Incident 40. J. Allen Hynek reviewed it and concluded that "no astronomical explanation seems possible." The same report warned: "There remains the strong possibility that the entire incident is spurious, and the invention of an excitable mind." Four expert photographers were consulted, and they disagreed.

In 1952, Rhodes was still trying to get his negatives back. Air Force Intelligence asked Project Blue Book to return them "soonest." Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt replied that the photos were "probably not authentic," said he was unsure the negatives had ever been received, and suggested Rhodes wanted to join "the picture selling bandwagon." Routing sheets from 1948 say otherwise.

The file's final words leaned on Dr. Irving Langmuir. He discounted the object as "merely paper swept up by the winds" after a thunderstorm. Yet Langmuir's own 1953 account of a tar paper saucer photo places the storm "out in Ohio." Blue Book's final classification was hoax. In 1988, Loren E. Gross suggested Rhodes might have faked the photos to match a Soviet "atomic-powered saucer" letter printed the same day.

Kevin Randle called the treatment a "smear campaign." Randle wrote: "I can see no reason for Rhodes to have faked them, it gained him nothing."

In 1998, Rhodes told KSAZ-TV: "They wanted to borrow the image, or borrow the negative, and all they said was we want to make a copy of it, and we'll bring it back." The negatives never came back. A print survives at Rice University. The pictures remain among the earliest photographs said to show a flying disc. The Debrief has cast the August visit as a possible early precedent for the Men in Black.