Salem Coast Guard Air Station UFO Photograph

Summer 1952. America was in the middle of a flying saucer wave. Three days after this photograph, Washington, D.C. would have its own famous radar and visual sightings.

On Winter Island, in Salem, Massachusetts, stood Coast Guard Air Station Salem. It had been in service since 1935. In its photographic laboratory worked a 21-year-old Coast Guard photographer named Shell R. Alpert.

Wednesday, 16 July 1952. 09:35 in the morning. Alpert was at work. In his own words: "I was sitting in the photo office filing negatives with my back toward the window when I turned slightly in the direction of the window and noticed something bright outside." He looked again. "I observed the sky and saw what appeared to be several bright, almost brilliant lights slightly on the starboard side of the power plant smokestacks."

Four lights. Arranged in a V. They seemed to undulate, wavering in the sky on the station's west side. He watched for five or six seconds. Then he went for a camera. As he came back to the window the lights dimmed. They brightened again. He took a single photograph on 4x5 inch Super XX film, f/4.7 at 1/30 second, lens set to infinity. Then the lights vanished.

Alpert had called over Hospital Man 1st Class Thomas E. Flaherty. By Flaherty's own statement, he possibly saw a rapid luminous flash. Nothing more definite.

The print went to Alpert's superior. It was flown to Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, then sent to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and shown at the Pentagon. Statements were taken from both men. AFOSI special agent Richard W. Randall filed a report dated 21 July 1952. By the end of July the image had run in newspapers across North America, often with a note that the Air Force was checking whether it was genuine.

Project Blue Book, then headed by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, filed it as case 1501. In 1952 the ATIC Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory judged that the light source was inside the room and called the picture a probable hoax by double exposure. The lab noted that polished parked cars showed no reflections of the lights. An October 1963 re-analysis favoured internal reflections on the window instead, pointing out that the lights changed as Alpert moved and that the blobs were blurred although the lens was focused at infinity. The final Blue Book listing was Unexplained.

Alpert himself grew cautious. In a Coast Guard news release he spoke of "a quick flash" and allowed that "it could have been reflections from passing cars or from the ocean." In a formal statement, which some writers describe as a recantation made under pressure, he wrote: "I cannot, in all honesty, say that I saw objects or aircraft, merely some manner of lights." No hoaxer was ever named, and Blue Book itself dropped the double exposure theory.

The Salem Evening News has reprinted the photo several times, and it appears in the Time-Life book Secrets of the Unknown: The UFOs. David Halperin read it as two groups of four, one in the sky and one on the ground. Keith Mayerson painted it in 2023. The U.S. Coast Guard has shared it on its own social media account. Four soft blobs of light beside a Massachusetts smokestack remain one of the defining images of the 1952 wave.