Mariana UFO film

Mariana UFO film

Type	Case (motion-picture film)
Also known as	Montana movie; Mariana UFO incident
Date	About 11:29–11:30 a.m., 15 August 1950 (some investigators raised 5 August)
Place	Legion Stadium (Legion Park), Great Falls, Montana
Witnesses	Nick Mariana, general manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball team; his secretary, Virginia Raunig, 19
Film	16 mm colour, about 16 seconds, no sound
Verdicts	F-94 reflections (1950); unknown (1952); aircraft reflections (Robertson Panel, 1953); disputed since

The Mariana UFO film, also called the "Montana movie", is a 16-millimetre colour film shot on 15 August 1950 by Nick Mariana, general manager of the minor-league baseball team in Great Falls, Montana. It shows two bright, circular objects crossing the sky over the city, and is believed to be among the earliest motion-picture footage of what would soon be called unidentified flying objects.^[1][2]

The U.S. Air Force first concluded that Mariana had filmed sun reflections from two F-94 jet fighters, then retracted this in 1952 and listed the film as unknown, before a CIA-sponsored scientific panel endorsed the aircraft explanation again in 1953. Later studies, including one for the Condon Committee, reached conflicting conclusions, and Mariana's claim that frames were removed by the Air Force added to the controversy.^[1][2]

The sighting

At 11:29 a.m. on 15 August 1950, Nick Mariana, general manager of the Great Falls Electrics (the "Selectrics"), and his nineteen-year-old secretary, Virginia Raunig, were inspecting the empty Legion Stadium before a game. A bright flash caught Mariana's eye, and he saw two bright, silvery, rotating objects flying over the city — above the smelter stack of the Anaconda Copper Mining plant, according to the local paper — at what he estimated was 200 to 400 mph and about 5,000 feet. He judged them to be roughly 50 feet wide and 150 feet apart. He ran to his car for his 16 mm movie camera and filmed them for about sixteen seconds in colour; the camera recorded no sound. Raunig also saw the objects.^[1][3]

The film shows two large bright lights moving across a cloudless blue sky in echelon formation, without visible detail, appearing as large circular objects. At one point they pass behind a water tower, which later gave analysts a fixed reference point.^[2]

The same day the Great Falls Evening Leader reported the story light-heartedly, wondering whether the objects were the "long gone" home-run balls hit out of the park the night before, and noting that Mariana admitted he "could have been seeing things" but hoped his film would prove otherwise. The next day the Great Falls Tribune described the sighting and film, and the story was picked up by media across the country. For several weeks Mariana showed his film to local community groups, including the Central Roundtable Athletic Club.^[1][3]

The 1950 Air Force investigation

After seeing the film, a Tribune reporter called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Captain John P. Brynildsen interviewed Mariana at the nearby air base outside Great Falls (later Malmstrom). When Mariana and Raunig both said they had seen two jet fighters pass over the stadium shortly after the sighting, Brynildsen thought the jets might be what Mariana had filmed, and with Mariana's permission sent the film to Wright-Patterson. He told a reporter he had received about eight feet of film, but told Wright-Patterson he was sending about fifteen feet; according to the UFO historian Jerome Clark, this discrepancy was never explained.^[1]

At Wright-Patterson the film was briefly examined and attributed to reflections from two F-94 jets known to have been flying over Great Falls at the time. Lieutenant Colonel Ray W. Taylor returned it with a letter saying the "photoanalysts were unable to find anything identifiable of an unusual nature". Edward J. Ruppelt later wrote that in 1950 there was no interest in UFOs, so "after a quick viewing, Project Grudge had written them off as the reflections from two F-94 jet fighters that were in the area".^[1][2]

The missing frames

Controversy arose when Mariana said that the first thirty-five frames of his film — which, he said, most clearly showed the objects as rotating discs — were missing. People in Great Falls who had seen the film supported him, saying the missing frames showed spinning metallic discs with a "notch or band" around the edge. The Air Force denied this, saying it had removed only a single frame damaged during analysis.^[1]

The lawsuit

In January 1951 the writer Bob Considine, a UFO skeptic, attacked the best-known sightings to date, including Mariana's, in a Cosmopolitan article titled "The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax". Saying the article implied he was "a liar, prankster, half-wit, crank, publicity hound and fanatic", Mariana sued Considine for slander. The suit was dropped in September 1955.^[1]

Ruppelt's reinvestigation

In July 1952, at the Pentagon's request, Captain Ruppelt, by then head of Project Blue Book, reopened the case. Through an intelligence officer at the Great Falls air base he had Mariana questioned again, and Mariana reluctantly lent the film once more — only after the Air Force signed an agreement not to remove any frames. Using the water tower as a reference, the photo laboratory at Wright-Patterson concluded that the objects were not birds, balloons or meteors: balloons drift with the wind, which was not blowing in the objects' direction, and the lights moved too fast for birds and too slow for meteors.^[1][2]

That left aircraft. The intelligence officer found that only two F-94s had been near the city, and that they landed about two minutes after the sighting. Mariana and Raunig had said they saw the jets in another part of the sky a minute or two after the objects disappeared in the southeast, which Ruppelt felt would itself rule them out, though a distant plane can suddenly flash in the sun. Studying the jets' landing pattern and timing, the analysts found that "the two jets just weren't anywhere close to where the two UFOs had been", and that both lights "appeared to be too steady to be reflections". "We drew a blank on the Montana Movie," Ruppelt wrote; "it was an unknown." He noted that the Montana film and the 1952 Tremonton, Utah, film were shown to intelligence officers at a conference at Kelly Air Force Base, and that Air Force and Navy photo laboratories had failed to explain them.^[1][2]

The Robertson Panel

In January 1953 the Air Force and the CIA convened a committee of prominent scientists, the Robertson Panel, chaired by the physicist H. P. Robertson, to examine Project Blue Book's best cases. After viewing Mariana's film, the panel judged that the objects were "reflections of aircraft known to have been in the area".^[1]

Later studies

Robert Baker's analysis

In 1954 Greene-Rouse Productions, making a documentary about UFOs, obtained the rights to use Mariana's footage and hired Robert M. L. Baker Jr., a scientist and engineer at Douglas Aircraft, to analyse it. Baker completed his study in early 1956, the year the documentary Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers was released with a re-enacted interview with Mariana, and concluded that the F-94 explanation was "quite strained". Testifying before a 1968 congressional hearing on UFOs, he said that after about 18 months of study with film-measuring equipment at Douglas and UCLA and a photogrammetric experiment, neither aircraft reflections for the Montana film nor birds for the Utah film appeared to have merit. At a 1969 AAAS panel on UFOs organised by Thornton Page and Carl Sagan, he called the Mariana film unidentifiable and stressed the need for better photographic data.^[1][3]

The Condon Committee

The University of Colorado's UFO study, chaired by the physicist Edward U. Condon, reinvestigated the film with two investigators: the physicist Roy Craig, generally sceptical of UFOs, and the psychologist David Saunders, long interested in the case. They found they could not be sure whether the film was taken on 5 or 15 August 1950, and came to opposite conclusions. Craig doubted the missing-frames claim, recalling that when he pressed Mariana's former secretary on it, she said hesitantly that "Nick Mariana is a promoter"; he later wrote that he would not like to defend Saunders's belief that the film was strong evidence of extraterrestrial visitors. Saunders, impressed by Baker's work and troubled by the missing first three seconds, called it "the one sighting of all time that did more than any other single case to convince me that there is something to the UFO problem".^[1]

The University of Arizona astronomer William Hartmann, who analysed the film for the Condon Report, concluded that "past investigations have left airplanes as the principal working hypothesis", and that "while it strains credibility to suppose that these were airplanes, the possibility nonetheless cannot be entirely ruled out", noting several independent arguments against airplane reflections.^[1]

Legacy

Copies of Mariana's film are held in the U.S. National Archives with the Project Blue Book records, and it still appears in documentaries and online. Great Falls has since had more than 100 reported UFO sightings, making it one of the most active UFO locations in North America, and in 2008 the city's minor-league baseball team, which Mariana had once managed, was renamed the Great Falls Voyagers in honour of the incident.^[1][3]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Mariana UFO film”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.