Playing Around With Mariana / Great Falls Film

Just thought I'd poke around at the film a little bit and see if I could stabilize it. Somebody else might be able to do a better job than I. I was trying to see if they looked like jets or birds or rotating saucers. Just looks like blobs to me, although the one on the right seems to be significantly bigger than the one on the left. Also, you can kind of see "shadows" or something underneath them, and that gives them something that looks like depth. No wing shadows. Anyway. Make of it what you will. Something to tuck away in the ATS archives.

a reply to: Blue Shift

I was trying to see if they looked like jets or birds or rotating saucers.

The initial explanation wasn't that they were the full images of jets, it was that they were reflections off the jets, and if you've ever seen a reflection on an aircraft before you would know the shape of the reflection is nothing like the shape of the aircraft, so you might just see a bright spot in the reflection and wouldn't necessarily see any wings.

This reflection explanation seems to fit how the objects vanish, because as the angle of the reflection changes so can the intensity...I've seen this before myself, once when I thought I was seeing a UFO, which actually turned out to be an airplane reflection, which looked absolutely nothing like an airplane until the angle changed enough so the reflection vanished, similar to the way the UFOs in that video vanish.

The photographer might not have known they were jets, but they move exactly like jets would move and at the same estimated speed of the jets, which was unusual at that time because jets were new back then and people weren't used to seeing aircraft move as fast as jets. The Air Forces initial investigation concluded they were probably the two jets known to be flying in the area at the time.

Mariana UFO incident

At Wright-Patterson AFB the film was briefly examined and determined to be the reflections from two F-94 jet fighters that were known to be flying over Great Falls at the time of Mariana's sighting. Lt. Col. Ray W. Taylor returned the film to Mariana with a cover letter stating that "our photoanalysts were unable to find anything identifiable of an unusual nature". However, according to Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt, who would become the supervisor of the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigation into the UFO mystery in 1951, "in 1950 there was no interest [by the Air Force] in the UFO, 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".

The later so-called "debunkings" of the jets explanation are dubious at best and some of them even admit that they don't really rule out the jets explanation.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
The later so-called "debunkings" of the jets explanation are dubious at best and some of them even admit that they don't really rule out the jets explanation.

From what I made of the animation, I can see where the one on the right kind of has a vague "arrowhead" shape that points to the left. That could also suggest that it has a large tail section but is otherwise kind of saucer-shaped when viewed from a distance.

Although the proportions aren't exactly right -- the objects in the film are shorter -- that can likely be explained by the jets moving away from Mariana at an angle of 40 degrees or so.

It would be nice if there was a good clean wing shadow. A jet can certainly have a flash of light when it is at a certain angle from the sun, but that usually only lasts a couple of seconds. There are other reflections that last longer, but they tend to give a jet a "dumbbell" shape. The F-94s large wing-tip fuel tanks seem like they would be fairly obvious to spot, but hey... the first few seconds of the film were stolen by the MiBs, right?