Hi ATS!

For a future UFO image analysis project, I really would like your help finding informations about a specific old photographic case.

Here's the photo with the best resolution (640x349) I've found so far:



With the following statements:

(Picaco Park) Las Cruces, New Mexico- A New Mexico State University student took this photo of what he says is a UFO, while photographing land formations for a geology class. The picture was taken with a 4x5 press camera at F8 at 1/100/second. He said the object made no noise and disappeared as he looked down to change plates in the camera.

...and...

About 2:00pm on March 12th, 1967, A New Mexico State University student was hiking in a desert area near Picacho Peak, New Mexico, when he spotted a big round silvery object hovering in the air just above a rocky hill about 500 yards away. He prepared his 4" X 5" Press Camera, set it at F8 and 1/100 shutter speed, and snapped one good black and white picture of the object. It appeared stationary or was moving very little at the time of the photograph. He looked down to change the plates of his camera, needing only 3 seconds, but when he looked back to take another shot, the object was gone. He recalled smelling an electrical odor in the air too!

I especially would like to find if there's somewhere any better resolution for the photo.

Thanks everyone!

I have never seen that photo before, thank you for posting.

The first thing that struck me is how the saucer seems to be flying at an angle we rarely see(or maybe never).

It appears as if it is banking at a hard angle. What was the shutter speed for the cameras in the 60's?

Last thing I noticed was how it is between two large stone formations, maybe somebody ran a rope or the likes from one hill to another and had the object dangling on a line in between them? It is a cool pic, different than I am use to seeing these days. It's going to be interesting to see what the ATS collective thinks about it. S&F

Update:

The original source (thanks to my contact Ballester-Olmos) is the APRO Bulletin, March-April 1967, p 1.

The original photograph was published by APRO, which withheld the photographer´s name on request, and strangely it received no analysis in the following years. US engineer Larry Robinson believes it is simply a suction cup stuck to a car window, but it was just an opinion. (thanks to Ballester-Olmos for the informations)

A preliminary work on the best photo resolution reveals some interesting things nonetheless:



So, not a smoking gun yet, but IMO a strong clue to what it could be, i-e some sort of pendulum suspended by one or two strings (Though I wasn't able to see two after the enhancement...)

I looked for a Project Blue Book file on this case, but found nothing. Not too surprising- they seem to have been very spotty on filing cases. I've found no files on sightings refferenced in their own reports.

Did this photo receive any media attention? The newspapers and magazines were prinitng almost anything during the saucer fever of the 60s. Needless to say, many of these later were exposed as phonies.