DOW-UAP-D098: The U.S. Navy's Film Analysis of the Utah and Montana Movies, 1953

Source file: DOW-UAP-D098_Film-Analysis-of-Unidentified-Objects_1953.pdf Originating agency: U.S. Department of War; U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center, Photogrammetry Division, Evaluation Department Document type: Progress report to the Director of Naval Intelligence (OP-322H4D), with a Bureau of Aeronautics (BUAER) route sheet and Charts 2-13 Date: May 1953 (the films themselves: Montana 1950; Utah 2 July 1952) Classification: CONFIDENTIAL / SECURITY INFORMATION (declassified; Authority NND C7005) Page count: 23 (the substantive text runs to seven pages; the remainder are charts) VIRIN: 260807-D-D0360-1087 PURSUE Release: 5

Summary

This is the progress report submitted by the Officer in Charge of the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center to the Director of Naval Intelligence, under the subject line "Interpretation of Movies of Unidentified Objects." It summarizes the scientific analysis performed by the Center's Photogrammetry Division on two 16mm color motion pictures.

The first film was shot in Utah on 2 July 1952 and referred for analysis at the request of the U.S. Air Force in a letter of 27 October 1952, together with roughly thirty feet of processed film and a list of guiding questions. The second was shot in Montana in 1950 and referred in a separate Air Force request of 24 November 1952. This report supersedes an earlier Center letter of 5 December 1952 and presents the final analysis.

The central finding is unambiguously worded. After measurements of position, light density, velocity and acceleration, the analysis group concludes that whether the images are light sources or reflective surfaces, "the objects are of a nature which we are not able to identify in terms of natural phenomena or commonly known man-made objects." Birds, aircraft and balloons are explicitly ruled out on the basis of the computed acceleration and velocity.

Research Article

Background: two films that reached the Navy's desk

The document opens with its administrative referral chain, and that chain matters in itself. The Navy did not initiate this examination; the U.S. Air Force asked the Navy's photographic interpretation center to analyze the films. The reason is straightforward: NAVPIC was the most capable photo-interpretation body available to the government at the time, equipped with measurement apparatus that the Project Blue Book office at Wright-Patterson did not have.

The first request, dated 27 October 1952, concerned the film shot in Utah on 2 July 1952 and enclosed approximately thirty feet of processed 16mm color motion picture film along with a list of questions intended to guide the type of analysis required. The second request, of 24 November 1952, added the film shot in Montana in 1950.

In the standard historiography of the subject, these two films are identified as two of the most famous UFO motion pictures of the twentieth century: the Utah film of 2 July 1952 is associated with footage shot by Navy chief photographer Delbert Newhouse near Tremonton, Utah, and the 1950 Montana film with footage shot by Nicholas Mariana at Great Falls. It is worth stressing that the memorandum itself names neither the photographers nor the towns, and refers to the films only by state and date. The identification is offered here as accepted historical context, not as the content of the document.

Method: photogrammetry and densitometry

The bulk of the memorandum is given over to a meticulous description of measurement technique, and it is precisely this technical detail that gives the document its weight. The Utah film, it reports, arrived in poor shape: "The film exposed in Utah is in very poor condition; dry, brittle, and with a tendency to break." It was therefore duplicated first in order to preserve it, and in the duplication process some color correction was made to permit better viewing of the objects.

To prepare plots of the objects, a stop-frame projector was rigidly mounted at a fixed distance from a finely ground glass screen. The magnification was 22 times, giving a format size 14.2 inches wide, which provided a shadow-free image on which overlay plots could be made. The film was divided into three parts according to exposure conditions: Part I shot at f8, Part II at f16 with a panning motion, and Part III at f16 with the camera held steady. Three definite groups of lights were observed throughout.

The densitometric measurements were taken with a Densichron Model 2150 manufactured by the Welch Scientific Company, with a scale range of 0-3. The background sky was measured at several places and the density set to 3.0; variations in background densities were on the order of 0.02 and were regarded as uniform. Three readings were made of each of seven objects in Part I and of the single object in Part III, while readings were made of the entire Montana film.

The document also records the limits of its own method with some candor. The objects varied in size, so that at minimum sizes the probe was measuring the entire object and at maximum size only a portion of it. Furthermore, the film used for the investigation was a duplicate of a copy, which raised the question of whether the central portions of the objects had been burnt out in duplication processing. Comparison readings between clear areas and the objects found a minimum difference of 0.4, indicating that relative luminosity could still be obtained with the procedure used.

Ruling out the conventional explanations

The section headed "Answers to Questions" is the heart of the document. It is structured as a direct response to the questions posed by the Air Force, weighing the alternative explanations one by one and rejecting them.

The first possibility considered was a reflecting surface. The analysis found a correlation between luminosity and apparent size, which might be consistent with reflection. But the possibility was rejected: the objects were viewed continuously on the film for approximately 90 seconds and through an angle of approximately 60 degrees, and under those conditions, photographed at 16 frames per second, blinking would be expected. The absence of blinking argues against a reflective surface. The memorandum adds that this premise "would permit highly reflective balloons or spheroids to be a possibility. However, the velocity and acceleration computations rule this possibility out."

A second variant was then considered: light reflected off a highly reflective surface onto an atmospheric screen, where a slight angular turn would appear as high acceleration. This too was judged not probable, because of the sun angle and atmospheric conditions reported at the time of photography, and because of the variations in luminosity, which under those conditions would have remained constant.

The conclusion is framed as an explicit majority view: "It is the majority opinion of the group conducting this analysis that these images are light sources." That explanation accounts for the non-blinking and the variations in luminosity, but not for the velocity or acceleration factors. Hence the passage that is the core of the document: "In either case, light source or reflective surface, it appears as if the objects are of a nature which we are not able to identify in terms of natural phenomena or commonly known man-made objects."

The second question is answered in the same spirit. There is no indication of what kind of objects could have caused the images "except that they must be of a construction, design, and material not commonly known," and for the same reasons "birds, aircraft and balloons are ruled out."

Motion, shape and the numbers

The analysis describes both group and individual movement. Within a group, the objects appeared to move counter-clockwise along an elliptical or similar track. This yields the explanation for an effect visible in the film: when two objects crossed the camera line of sight they appeared to fuse into one, and as they continued along their paths it appeared as if one object had become two. This occurred at regular intervals, at approximately every twenty-fifth frame.

The determined shape is "oblate or disk shaped," the color blue-white, with maximum and minimum sizes of 98 and 16 feet. Those sizes rest explicitly on the assumption that the objects were five miles from the observer, and that assumption is itself reasoned: based on emulsion speed and focal length, an object 50 feet in diameter at five miles would be recorded on the film with sufficient resolution to identify major details, so if the objects had been closer, detail would have appeared.

The velocities and accelerations are the most striking part. A shift of 1mm per frame is computed as 3,780 mph at a range of five miles. From 55 measurements taken in Part III of the Utah film, the maximum and minimum velocities were 2,457 and 378 mph. The computed accelerations: maximum acceleration 21,168 mph/sec, or 965 g; minimum acceleration 1,104 mph/sec, or 50 g; maximum deceleration 32,448 mph/sec, or 1,479 g; and minimum deceleration 272 mph/sec, or 12 g.

The Montana film was considered the more reliable basis for these computations, for a clear methodological reason: terrestrial objects appeared in the frame and were held to as control, whereas the Utah film offered no ground reference. For the left object the maximum and minimum velocities were 1,304 and 361 mph, and for the right object 1,117 and 169 mph. In total, 322 measurements were made. The memorandum adds an intriguing note: the accelerations were observed to fall in multiples of approximately 12.5, "although no study has been conducted to determine this."

What the document concedes

The last two sections are perhaps the most honest in the entire file. Under "Discussion," it records that the preliminary data were shown to experts with the proper security clearance in the fields of astronomy and physics. The outcome: although they presented certain natural phenomena theories to explain the objects under certain conditions, "they were not able to do so under the conditions during which the photography was taken, nor were they able to recognize these objects as man-made."

An explicit admission of limits follows immediately. No attempt was made to corroborate the opinions presented, and "because of the lack of proper equipment, money and personnel, the investigation was limited." The Center notes that there are obvious tests that could prove or disprove some of the findings presented, and suggests that these be undertaken. The closing paragraph adds that a request of 16 February 1953 sought a spectrophotometric analysis of the Utah film, and that a preliminary plan of test is underway.

This, then, is a document whose conclusion is pointed but whose author marks out the boundaries of his own knowledge. It does not claim to have proven anything. It claims that an investigation conducted with the resources available failed to identify the objects, and that it ought to be continued.

Significance

The document's importance rests on three characteristics that rarely appear together in contemporary records. First, this is quantitative analysis rather than testimony: frame-by-frame measurements of light density, position and velocity, performed by a professional photo-interpretation organization, not a verbal description by an eyewitness. Second, the rejection of alternative explanations is reasoned and explicit rather than declarative: birds, aircraft and balloons are dismissed on the basis of computed acceleration, and reflection is dismissed on the basis of the absence of blinking across 90 seconds. Third, the document maintains a clear line between what was determined and what was never tested, and concedes that the binding constraint was budget and manpower.

The archive now also holds the founding documents of official UFO study on the Air Force side, including the joint Intelligence Study No. 203 and the Project Sign files released in PURSUE Release 4, and the broader Project Sign correspondence file DOW-UAP-D100 released in Release 5. Setting them side by side allows a direct comparison between the Air Force assessment, which struggled to reach a conclusion in the absence of physical evidence, and the assessment of the Navy's photographic center, which worked from the one medium it did have: the film itself.

Key People

Locations

Incidents

Notable Quotes

"Reference (a) is a request from U.S. Air Force for the interpretation of movies of unidentified objects taken in Utah, 2 July 1952." -- page 2

"It is the majority opinion of the group conducting this analysis that these images are light sources." -- page 4

"In either case, light source or reflective surface, it appears as if the objects are of a nature which we are not able to identify in terms of natural phenomena or commonly known man-made objects." -- page 4

"There is no indication of what kind of objects could have caused the images except that they must be of a construction, design, and material not commonly known. This is indicated by the computed acceleration rate and velocity. For the same reasons, birds, aircraft and balloons are ruled out." -- page 4

"The shape of the objects appears to be oblate or disk shaped, color; blue-white, and maximum and minimum size; 98 and 16 feet." -- page 5

"Maximum acceleration = 21,168 mph/sec = 965 g." -- page 6

"Although they presented certain natural phenomena theories to explain the cause of the objects under certain conditions they were not able to do so under the conditions during which the photography was taken, nor were they able to recognize these objects as man-made." -- page 7

"Because of the lack of proper equipment, money and personnel, the investigation was limited. There are obvious tests which can be conducted to prove or disprove some of the findings presented. It is suggested that these be undertaken." -- page 7