The Tremonton UFO Film (The Newhouse Film)

Summer 1952. America was in the middle of a wave of flying saucer reports. Delbert Clement Newhouse was driving west from Washington, D.C. with his wife Norma and their two children, Delbert Jr., 14, and Anne, 12. He was a U.S. Navy Chief Photographer and Chief Warrant Officer. He had 21 years of service and long experience in aerial photography.

Wednesday, July 2. About eleven in the morning. Highway 30S, some seven miles from Tremonton. The sky was clear and cloudless. Norma saw them first: "a group of objects in the sky, which she could not identify." Newhouse later described the shape as "two saucers", "one inverted over the other." They were "a bright silvery color." To him they looked the size of B-29s at 10,000 feet. No sound. No exhaust. No contrails.

The camera and film were in separate suitcases. It took two or three minutes to find them. By then the objects had drawn further away. He chose the three inch lens, set it at f/8 and filmed at sixteen frames per second. The objects were "milling about in a round formation and proceeding in a general westerly direction." Then "one of the objects reversed its course and proceeded away from the rest of the group." He let that lone object cross his field of view several times. It vanished to the east. The group disappeared over the western horizon.

"The film falls far short of what I saw with the naked eye," he said later.

Newhouse reported to the Air Force on August 11, 1952. His roughly 75 seconds of 16mm Kodachrome went to Project Blue Book under Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, and to the photo lab at Wright-Patterson. The Air Force analysts were "reasonably certain that the brightness of the images on the film exceeds that of any bird." The objects were "not spherical balloons."

The Navy Photographic Interpretation Laboratory at Anacostia spent about 1,000 man-hours on the film. Its analysts ruled out birds, balloons and aircraft. They suggested the objects might be "self-luminous." At an assumed distance of five miles, they calculated a mean velocity of 653.5 mph.

January 1953. The CIA's Robertson Panel watched the film. Luis Alvarez had it run several times. The panel decided the motions, sizes and brightnesses "strongly suggest birds, particularly after the Panel viewed a short film showing high reflectivity of seagulls in bright sunlight." J. Allen Hynek was in the room. He objected that "the change in light was too rapid for it to be birds in flight."

The argument never ended. Robert M. L. Baker Jr. of Douglas Aircraft wrote in 1956 that "no single hypothesis of a natural phenomenon yet suggested seems to completely account for the UFO involved." In 1968 William K. Hartmann of the Condon Committee watched bird flocks near Tremonton and provisionally identified the objects as "a flock of white birds." Sceptics also noted that the saucer description first appears on record in 1954. Newhouse's later claim that close-up footage had been cut is not supported by the records from 1952.

In 1956 Newhouse appeared as himself in the United Artists film UFO, and his footage was shown. On September 18, 2026, AARO and the Department of War released a new scan as DOW-UAP-PR159, together with the Blue Book file. Internal memos in that file showed officials had feared the Navy findings would cause "considerable public excitement." The release offered no new conclusion. It pointed to "limited detail and absence of fixed reference points." More than seventy years on, the film still shows what it showed in 1952. A handful of bright dots, and an argument.