The air force was not the only service investigating UFOs. Navy pilots reported many. On June 24, a cigar-shaped UFO paced a United Airlines plane for twenty minutes about one hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. The object was seen by the plane’s crew, as well as the crews of another commercial airliner and a navy transport plane. The navy pilot saw the UFO for three minutes. He described it as dark gray and giving the appearance of a faint, shimmering, heat radiation at the tail end. He estimated the object’s altitude at between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand feet, and moving at 1,000 to 1,500 mph. The object changed direction while he had it in view. The crews of the three planes discussed the matter with two CAA ground stations. Another navy sighting occurred July 11. Two navy aircraft crews near Osceola, Arkansas, saw a domed, disc-shaped object pass before them; the sighting was confirmed by airborne radar. The object first appeared to be a round ball ahead and to the left of their plane. It crossed their flight path and looked like “a shiny, shallow bowl turned upside down.” Around this time, Keyhoe’s friend Adm. Delmar Fahrney told him privately, “There have been too many convincing reports, and if the flying saucers do exist they must be interplanetary. Certainly neither we nor the Russians have anything remotely like them.”59
The U.S. Army was also interested in UFOs. A July 30 memorandum from Maj. U. G. Carlan stated that objects from this date were being seen over the Hanford Atomic Energy Commission Plant. Air force fighter squadrons and the FBI were alerted to the matter. AEC stated that “the investigation is continuing, and complete details will be forwarded later.”60
The FBI and CIA continued their interest. An August memo received by FBI Headquarters was titled, “Summary of Aerial Phenomena in New Mexico.” The memo discussed the ongoing green fireball phenomena and noted that OSI was concerned with the continued appearance of unexplained phenomena in the vicinity of sensitive installations in New Mexico. The memo reiterated that Lincoln La Paz did not believe the objects to be meteors.61
Meanwhile, the CIA was collecting reports about UFOs overseas. An August 4 report described a sighting from a ship in the north Atlantic en route from Nova Scotia to an eastern U.S. port. The object was fifty to one hundred feet above the water, initially moving at about 25 mph, appeared to be about ten feet in diameter, of a shiny aluminum color, and cylindrical-shaped. It made no noise and wobbled slightly, disappeared over the horizon, then reappeared. The ship’s captain was among the three witnesses and observed the object at about a mile away through binoculars for ninety seconds. He described it as “the like of which I have never seen before.” Shortly after the men sighted the object, it rapidly accelerated and traveled away at a “tremendous rate of speed.” One of the other witnesses described the sighting as “one of the most frightening experiences I have ever had.” The CIA report concluded that
it is quite evident to the intelligence officers who interviewed these men that they had certainly seen some very unusual object which they could not identify but was just as certainly not any conventional type of aircraft.62
THE MONTANA FILM
The year 1950 was not only the year of a first-rate photograph of a UFO (actually two, by the Trents), but of a startling sighting caught on 16 mm movie camera film. The man operating the camera was Nicholas “Nick” Mariana, general manager of a local baseball team in Great Falls, Montana. The exact date of the sighting is unclear, the main candidate being August 5, although several researchers lean toward the fifteenth. While inspecting a baseball field prior to a game, Mariana saw two odd, bright lights. He retrieved his movie camera and began to film the objects, which were now moving. He captured them passing behind a water tower, which provided a frame of reference for measuring distance, size, altitude, azimuth, and approximate speed.
Excited by what he had captured on film, Mariana sent it out immediately for development. He showed the film to various civic groups during September and October, and met with an air force officer in October, who took it for analysis. Upon returning his film, the air force said that two jet interceptors had been in the area when the film was taken and might have been responsible for the sighting. Mariana disagreed, as he (and his secretary, who was with him during the filming) claimed to see the jets in another part of the sky.
