Looking up: The Great Falls, Montana UFO case

It never hurts to revisit some classic UFO cases, especially when they involve photographic evidence.

Hard-line UFO skeptics often complain that photos of UFOs are less than convincing, because photos can be faked, and in this technologically sophisticated age, there’s no question that they indeed can be. But for at least two solid reasons, this is no argument against the existence of UFOs.

For one thing, this age of advanced technology provides not only powerful methods of faking photos, but also powerful techniques by which photo analysts can detect and expose such fakery.

For another thing, many of our most solid photos and motion pictures of UFOs date back to times when modern methods of faking photos did not exist yet. Such is the case, for example, with the Great Falls, Montana UFO film of Aug. 5, 1950.

On that date, Great Falls’ baseball team manager Nick Mariana was inspecting the baseball field in preparation for an upcoming local ballgame, when a remarkable thing occurred. He and his secretary Virginia Raunig, who accompanied him on the inspection tour, saw a flash of light in the sky, off in the distance. Yelling at his secretary to look at the sight there, he dashed to his car to retrieve his movie camera, then started filming, seeing now that the objects were disk-shaped and moving fast. While Mariana filmed and Virginia Raunig watched, the objects flew behind a water tower, then moved away out of sight. The whole episode took only a few seconds.

It’s difficult to watch this film without being impressed. There’s no doubt in my mind that the objects were anomalous. However, when the Air Force examined the film, their analysts ended up trying to excuse the whole business by saying that there were two jet planes in the area at the time, and that this was probably what Mariana and his secretary had observed. Never mind that Mariana and Raunig had seen the two jet intercepts too, in a different place in the sky, and knew that the jets and the circular silver objects were different.

Mariana would later say that when the Air Force returned his film to him, some frames had been removed from the beginning of the film. The Air Force claimed that only a few frames had been trimmed off because of damaged sprockets, but Mariana insisted it was more than that. In fact, Mariana’s son once told me that a significant chunk of footage had been removed from the film because it showed the objects closer up, and showed that those disks were spinning. And at any rate, modern photo analysts, having examined the film closely and carefully, have declared that the objects in the sky were decidedly not conventional aircraft.

This case illustrates the adage that quite often the older photos are the best. But the secret keepers never seem to stop trying to obscure the truth. It must be disheartening for them to realize how true a photo can be.