What happened
Driving north from Tremonton, Utah, on 2 July 1952 with his family, Navy Warrant Officer Delbert Newhouse, a veteran aerial photographer with more than a thousand hours of photo missions, pulled over when his wife pointed out a group of bright objects in a cloudless sky. He described ten or twelve shining objects milling about in a rough formation. Grabbing his 16 mm camera with a telephoto lens from the luggage, he shot about thirty feet of colour film, holding the camera still as one object broke away from the group and headed off on its own. The objects flared and faded and gave no reference points for distance. Newhouse sent the film to the Air Force. After weeks of study, the Wright Field photo lab told Project Blue Book it did not know what the objects were. A Navy lab then concluded they were self-luminous and not birds or aircraft, before the CIA-convened Robertson Panel decided they were probably seagulls.
The original account
Driving from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Ore., on the morning of 2 July my wife noticed a group of objects in the sky that she could not identify. She asked me to stop the car and look. There was a group of about ten or twelve objects - that bore no relation to anything I had seen before - milling about in a rough formation and proceeding in a westerly direction.
Statement by Delbert C. Newhouse to Project Blue Book, 11 August 1952, as quoted in the Condon Report, Case 49 (US government record)
The official explanation
The Robertson Panel rejected the Navy analysis, criticising its use of a duplicate film, its light-intensity method and its failure to remove hand jitter, and judged the motions, sizes and brightness strongly suggestive of birds after viewing film of gulls in sunlight. William Hartmann's Condon analysis agreed the objects were probably gulls: white gulls live in the area, bird-sized objects about 2,000 feet away would sit at the limit of resolution, and their wheeling and flaring fit soaring birds.
The anomalous case
The photographer was a trained Navy aerial photographer who, according to Air Force records, had over 1,000 hours on photo missions, and he filmed carefully with a telephoto lens. Ruppelt wrote that after several weeks the Air Force's Wright Field lab said the objects were not airplanes or balloons, and that they did not think they were birds; fighter pilots who watched the film said no airplane could do what the objects were doing. The Navy's Photographic Interpretation Laboratory spent about two months on a frame-by-frame study and, Ruppelt wrote, concluded the objects were intelligently controlled vehicles, not airplanes or birds. The Robertson Panel itself said positive identification would need field tests with balloons and ornithologists; its bird verdict was reached without them. Even Hartmann's Condon analysis found the visual observations not satisfactorily explained by aircraft, chaff, insects or balloons.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Condon Report, Case 49: Tremonton, Utah - Movie Film report, files.ncas.org
- Robertson Panel report, January 1953 (Condon Report Appendix U) official, files.ncas.org
- Project BLUE BOOK records (National Archives, microfilm T-1206) official, archives.gov
Sources
- Condon Report (1969), Case 49: Tremonton, Utah - Movie Film National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
- The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956) Project Gutenberg
- Condon Report, Appendix U: Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs (Robertson Panel), January 1953 National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
Witness reports elsewhere
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