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Tremonton, Utah, UFO Color Film of July 2, 1952:

When a Warrant Officer and Navy photographer named Delbert C. Newhouse and his wife were driving along a road seven miles from Tremonton and spotted a formation of brilliant metallic looking disc shaped objects, clear against a bright blue sky, you have an interesting sighting report by a qualified, reliable and educated observer.

When this Officer has the chance to use a 16mm camera and telephoto lens to shoot forty feet of film of the objects maneuvering, and submits it to Project Bluebook for evaluation, and when it is studied for three months at the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory of the Air Force Intelligence, and when the conclusion convince the head of project Bluebook that it does show unearthly flying machines, you have more than a good sighting report.

When the Bluebook team feels it is evidence of the reality of UFOs as extraterrestrial craft, and feels a scientific team should be gathered to look at the evidence, you may hope that this evidence will be made public. But if this scientific panel is set up by the CIA, then the film becomes merely evidence of... birds.

Here is the fully documented story.

Table of Contents:

Click! The events: the sighting, the filming, the witness, the analysis, a discussion.
Click! The transcript of 1956 filmed interview of the witness.
Click! The original account by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt of USAF's Project Blue Book.
Click! The Kevin Randle comments.
Click! The case as summarized by the French government GEPAN official UFO project in Note N.2.
Click! Analysis by the Air Force published by Greene-Rouse.
Click! Presentation by analyst Robert L. Baker at the hearings of the Committee on Science & Astronautics, 1968.
Click! The Robertson Panel conclusion.
Click! Thornton Page, Robertson Panel, additional comments.
Click! The Condon Report, case 49.
Click! November 27, 1957 letter to Keyhoe from AF Press Desk.
Click! A letter by Pr. James McDonald, May 4, 1970, to Arthur C. Lundahl.
Click! Extract of "Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis," by Paul R. Hill.
Click! Article: "Tremonton's bright, silvery saucers stand up as one of top-rated UFO sightings."
Click! Deseret News, 1996 press article.
Click! Frames from the film.
Click! MPEG movie of the film.
Click! References.
Frame from a compressed video version of the film.

Dr. Robert L. Baker:

Dr. Robert L. Baker, Jr., was a consultant to the Douglas Aircraft Company, former head of Lockheed's Astrodynamics Research Center, project officer on a number of classified Air Force projects, and (at the time) a senior scientist with the Computer Sciences Corporation.

Robert L. Baker wrote and presented the following text at the Hearings before the House Committee on Science & Astronautics, July 29, 1968, page 127:

My initial contact with anomalistic observational phenomena - AOP - came in 1954 when I was a consultant to Douglas Aircraft Co. in Santa Monica, Calif., serving as special assistant to Dr. W. B. Kiemperer, director of Douglas' research staff. The data consisted of two short film clips: one taken in Montana - termed by us as the Montana film-and one taken in Utah - called by us the Utah film. These films were provided to us by the Air Technical Intelligence Center - ATIC, now the Foreign Technology Division - FTD - at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; 35-millimeter prints were furnished by Green-Rouse Productions of Samuel Goldwyn Studios.

Both films had been taken by apparently reliable and unbiased men using amateur movie cameras and, in each case, there was a credible, substantiating witness present. The films exhibited the motion of rather fuzzy white dots, but the Montana film was remarkable in that foreground was visible on most of the frames.

Preliminary analysis excluded most natural phenomena. More detailed study indicated that the only remaining natural phenomenon candidate for the Utah film was birds in flight, and for the Montana film it was airplane fuselage reflections of the sun. After about 18 months of rather detailed, albeit not continuous, study using various film-measuring equipment at Douglas and at UCLA, as well as analysis of a photogrammetric experiment, it appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena explanations had merit, and a report was published by me (Baker [1956] )and forwarded to Brig. Gen. Harold E. Watson, commander, ATIC. Since the description of the circumstances of the filmings and the analyses of the data provided on the films is rather lengthy, and have since been published in the open literature, it does not seem unreasonable to repeat the analyses here.

(...)

To this date my analyses of anomalistic motion picture data have been rather ungratifying. Although I am convinced that many of the films indeed demonstrated the presence of anomalistic phenomena, they all have the characteristic of rather ill-defined blobs of light, and one can actually gain little insight into the real character of the phenomena. For example, linear distance, speed, and acceleration cannot be determined precisely, nor can size and mass. As I will discuss in a moment, this situation is not particularly surprising, since, without a special-purpose sensor system expressly designed to obtain information pertinent to anomalistic observational phenomena, or a general-purpose sensor system operated so as not to disregard such data, the chance for obtaining high-quality hard data is quite small.

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This page was last updated on March 28, 2002.