Eglin AFB - October 1973 - A Blast from the Past

A correspondent provides new details of an object that was seen over Eglin AFB in 1973, investigated by the Air Force, and was most definitely not Venus:

I was one of the technicians that observed the UFO on the referenced night. This is the first public reference I have seen since that night. I would like to know how I might be able to obtain further information or the file the USAF created that night if possible. I was interviewed by an officer following the incident. And far more than four of us were involved including the military police. Thanks for any assistance you may be able to provide.

My Reply:

The source traces back to a UFO researcher Robert D Boyd, page 237 of a book or journal titled 'A Comparative Unit' published in 1985. However I can find no trace of such a book on the web and I suppose the title is truncated. Do you have any detail about the sighting you can add?

His report:

Here is a description as best as I can recall from this incident. My intent here is to provide this for documentation however I know that the Air Force knew far more than I that night. I would hope to get a chance to have them tell me face to face what they knew before I get to old. I still maintain contact with the co-worker. 

Eglin AFB October 17, 1973, approximately 0415 hrs

It was around 0415 hrs and myself, and others were on duty at Eglin AFB Hospital. The night was clear and no clouds were present. A co-worker received a call and I heard him say, “Really, OK, We will be right down”. The co-worker asked me to follow him and we took off running down the steps then the first floor hall way to the emergency room. I am thinking we are going to come in on an emergency. Instead I continue to follow my co-worker out the ER doors to the outside parking lot on the North Side of the hospital grounds. 

Before us was, a security police truck and several people identified as two security police and other hospital personnel. One of the security police was on the radio speaking to someone, unknown, and asking if, “they had seen it or picked it up”. At that time one of the hospital staff told my co-worker to look at a bright light in the night sky to the east. I recall looking at the light and thinking it was a bright star. The person who spoke with my co-worker commented that it was a UFO that had been over the hospital before they called us and had moved to the spot we were now looking at. 

Eglin Night Sky to the East, 17 October 1973, 04:15 - Moon is up and Jupiter - Venus not involved!

After what seemed like several minutes we returned to the second floor and informed our other co-worker of what we had witnessed and took her to a second floor window where we all could still plainly see the bright object. Within a minute of looking out the window the bright light suddenly moved to a position about 200 – 300 feet east of us or directly out the window. What we witnessed can only be described as unfathomable to any one who has never witnessed an event such as this. The object can be described as approximately two or three stories in height and approximately 200 to 300 feet in length. A building was present just below the object which allowed a scale for comparison. 

It appeared to be metallic because of the luster like surface and a dark silver color. Lights appeared to be around it but not like lights I had ever seen, i.e., more of a translucent light. I can almost say a window like panel was in place but again not like anything we would see here on earth. I had a certain feeling that whatever was in the object could see us as well. There was no noise and it floated with ease and unwavering. 

In the distance was a C-130 with a search light scanning the land in front and below. As it was night it was easy to see the light. Parking lot lights also accentuated the object. The C-130 approached from the east and as it got closer to the object the object shifted left (north) approximately 200 feet. Again no noise and the speed, was instant. The shift from one position to the other was immeasurable. No disturbance occurred, around the object, i.e., no wind, no noise, shaking, etc. I recall the C-130 turning as if it knew where the object was and continue on its approach. As the C-130 search light came closer and almost on the object the object went up at an angle to the southeast and disappeared outside our vision into space. The time it took to go from that point to out of sight was possibly a second or less.

The whole event from the call my co-worker took to the moment the object left our vision was possibly 20 minutes. The time of the event from going to the window and seeing the object leave was approximately 5 minutes. We were stunned at what had happened.

We reported the event to others shortly after the occurrence. As our shift ended that morning around 0700 hrs I was interviewed by a couple of officers who took the information. I do not recall the names of those officers.

"The fingerprints are not those of any human being"

Stumbled upon this clipping in my files from 4 January 1978. This case is included in Albert Rosales' humanoid encounters database, but reflects an unusual blend of an alien encounter, poltergeist phenomena, and police verification…

Hundreds of UFO Photographs?
or
"I found this on my film when I got home"

Until the digital revolution photographs were considered the 'gold standard' of UFO evidence - after all, 'seeing was believing'. Photographs of UFO's were subjected to all kinds of analysis, by government laboratories, including those of the CIA for the Condon Report. But in the end there were none so remarkable they could not be explained away by doubters.

The Tremonton film's objects were considered by Hill to be proof of the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft, but the Condon Report found them to be consistent with sea gulls. The CIA found in the Condon Report that the McMinnville object photographs constituted "… one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses". Years later UFO researchers pretty well positively ID'd the object as the side-view mirror of a 1937 Ford truck. General Dynamics 'Chief Designer' Boyd Bushman had a special interest in the photograph of the Santa Ana Saucer, but the Condon Report concluded it was a shot of a suspended lens cap and our more detailed recent analysis confirms that. And so it goes.

In going outside to make a few dozen digital photographs of sky and landscape backgrounds for the illustrative pictures on the UFO DNA site, I inadvertently took several pictures of "UFO's", just as intriguing as those that glut Internet sites. It turns out the sky is full of things - bugs, birds, motes, airplanes - that you don't even notice in taking the picture, but loom out big time in modern thousands-of-pixels digital photographs. There was a pretty high percentage of pictures with such objects in them - pictures taken for another purpose entirely.



 

This is a very disc-shaped object. It's actually just some kind of bug, passing close by the lens.

 

A black triangle - or a bird in flight?

 

This I knew was an airplane flying high above. But it's interesting how it photographs - in most images the wings are invisible, and you just have a classic 'cylinder'.

 

Aircraft contrail pictures produced a variety of interesting images. Sometimes the aircraft was visible as a dot on the end, sometimes not.

Boosting the dynamic range on a contrail, or any image, produces spectacular 'night' images.

 

 After discovering these on pictures taken for another purpose, next step could only be to toss a few objects in the air and see how they photographed. A total of two minutes was spent looking for appropriately-shaped objects in the back yard. This is a plastic trash can lid. It looks just about as authentic as some of the most 'impressive' saucer photos.

A simple paper plate was also very impressive. What is interesting is how dark the white plate photographs in overcast conditions.

Of course, in this digital age, seeing is no longer believing. UFO report sights and Youtube are awash with photographs and videos of saucers, a few of them genuine, a lot of them 'I was looking at my pictures and this thing that I didn't see at the time was on it'. The fakes range in sophistication from awful to utterly spectacular (using the latest digital rendering technology).

So if UFO pictures can be easily faked or simply be pictures of common objects, and if experts can't tell the difference, then what's the evidence value of a UFO picture or film? In the current world, none.

Photography does however play an important part in proving or disproving UFO's however. In our modern world, nearly everybody has a digital camera in their cell phone. Hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras watch our streets, banks, and any facility of any importance. There are even dozens of always-operating surveillance cameras recording the sky day and night, set to capture imagery of UFO's. According to polls, there should be nearly a hundred close encounters with UFO's a night in the USA alone. Where are these pictures?

If there is a car chase, a burst water main, bad weather, a tornado, a plane crash - any rare event at all that is of the slightest news interest - there is amateur video of it. The Chelyabinsk meteor fall showed the enormous video coverage of a real physical event. Where are the hundreds of cell phone movies of close encounters? Where are the thousands of surveillance videos of nocturnal lights and daylight discs?

This is the greatest evidence that UFO's in fact do not exist, at least nowhere except the perception of the observer…. whether a psychological phenomena, or an intersection of our reality with another dimension of a multiverse, whatever they are, they don't register on film or video cameras...

The Wednesday Mystery ... Updated

John Keel noted that a disproportionate number of UFO sightings occurred on Wednesday evening. This was true when he was studying them in the 1960's, but was not true over the long term. Remarkably, the peak day for UFO sightings has migrated over the decades, an average of one day per week per decade until the 1990's. Thereafter it moved to Sunday in the 1990's, then firmly to Saturday in the 2000's and the 2010's:

The same cycle occurs for every category of sightings. How to explain this?

The skeptic would say it just reflects the source of the reports. Most reports in the 1950's and 1960's were from local newspapers or to the US Air Force. Most Air Force staff worked Monday to Friday. Local newspapers had only skeleton staffs working on weekends. With no one there to take an initial phone call of a report, callers may have given up. From the late 1990's most UFO sightings were self-reported on the Internet. This shifted the primary days to the weekends, when more people were in the outdoors and had the chance for a sighting. Furthermore, over the decades, the world became increasingly urbanized and desk-bound. There were fewer farmers, ranchers, and workers out and about on weekdays.

On the other hand, this does not necessarily explain the steady progression through the week until the advent of internet self-reporting. Even if sightings had followed the earlier trend, they would have moved to the weekend in the 1990s and 2000s anyway. The movement of one day over a 10 year period would indicate a gain in some kind of UFO daily time cycle 1/3,652.5 = 0.0273785% = 23.65 seconds greater than the length of an earth day.... which does not evidently correspond to any known celestial or earthly time variation.

Maybe we're not looking at this with enough granularity. Let's look at what day of the week was the day for peak sightings by calendar year rather than decade:

Here we see three things: an evident cycle of around 5.5 years for the sightings to cycle through the week; the no weekend effect until after the closing of Project Blue Book in 1967; and the flatlining at Sunday sightings after the introduction of internet self-reporting.

Now what has a 5.5 year cycle? It doesn't seem to correspond to any relationship between the earth and other planets in our solar system. There are two candidates, however:

• The radio star Eta Carinae , called a 'true astrophysical mystery'.

• The 5.5 year offset between the 11-year cycle of the large-scale solar magnetic field and the 11-year sunspot cycle

Any other suggestions?

Chiles Redux 

Reconstruction of the actual view of the object as seen from the DC-3 cabin

What is referred to as the Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter involved a night sighting from a DC-3 of a cigar-shaped object in 1948. This case has been considered one of the 'classic unknowns' of UFO history. However a detailed analysis of this sighting, taken together with other sightings the same evening, clearly show it was an earth-grazing fireball. It was not a nearby object traveling at 700 mph half a mile away and 500 feet above the Chiles' aircraft, but a disintegrating meteor, passing 80 miles away at 90,000 feet at a speed of 18 miles/second. If we go back to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) original reports (available at the Project Blue Book Archive) and plot the bearings and altitudes of the objects sighted on that night, no other conclusion can be reached.

In 1948, earth-grazing fireballs were not recognized by science. The AFOSI investigators did not get the information in the terms later standard for scientific analysis. They asked the witnesses to estimate the distance, size, and speed of a luminous object sighted at night. This required the implicit assumption that it was the size of man-made objects and flying at speeds and altitudes contemporary aircraft might achieve. Later standard Blue Book forms would ask the observers to estimate the apparent size (compared to the moon), the elevation above the horizon, and the direction and duration of a sighting. This kind of information could then be analyzed to determine if it matched a small, slow, close object or a much faster, larger object farther away.

Based on the assumptions that the mundane speeds and distances reported were correct and the 'fact' repeated over and over that 'it couldn't be a meteor because meteors do not fly horizontally' AFOSI convinced themselves it was an extraterrestrial object.

The sightings of that evening were:

• Eastern Air Lines pilot Feldvary, Trip 573, reported sighting an object from his DC-3, flying from Washington DC to Raleigh, North Carolina. It was some time after he had checked in with Blackstone control at 0219. He estimated the time at about 0230. The object was traveling about 20 deg over the western horizon, at a heading of around 230 deg (e.g. slightly west from his heading of 215 deg), and travelled through an arc of 80 degrees. Although no duration was given, it seemed to have 'terrific speed'.

• Eastern Air Lines pilot Mansfield, Trip 571/23, reported sighting an object from his DC-3, flying from waypoint Blackstone to Greensboro, North Carolina. It was also some time after he checked in with Blackstone. He also estimated the time as 0230 (it may be he discussed the sighting with Feldvary and assumed the same time). The object was traveling 'in a horizontal direction, slightly above the horizon, at a heading of around 210 deg (e.g. slightly east from his heading of 240 deg). He did not report the arc of travel, but said it was only in sight for 3 seconds. This was probably a good estimate of the duration of the sighting, since the object "…was brighter than any I have seen before…" and he couldn't have avoided seeing it immediately as it began to flare in the large right side cockpit window of a DC-3.

At the time of these two sightings, Feldvary was flying about 60 miles east of Mansfield. So clearly the object had to be a considerable distance west of both aircraft to be low on the western horizon for both of them. If we average the two bearings reported, the object would have a bearing of 220 degrees, which is consistent with a bearing west of Feldvary and east of Mansfield.

• Eastern Air Lines crew Chiles and Whitted, Trip 576, were en route from Houston to Atlanta, 25 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, on a bearing of 50 deg when the famous sighting occurred. A strange object was sighted 'coming toward us at a high rate of speed'. It was flying straight and level, and created no noise or turbulence. It passed to the right side of the DC-3, at what they estimated as a distance of half a mile, a speed of 700 mph, at an altitude of 500 feet above their 5000 foot level. The object seemed to be 100 feet long, cigar shaped with rows of brilliantly illuminated portholes, with a stream of red fire trailing behind. What this translates to in objective terms was an object approaching at a bearing of 230 deg, at an elevation of 12 deg above the horizon, with an apparent size at closest approach of 3.4 deg (about seven times larger than the full moon). The object was only in view for at least 5 and not more than 10 seconds. Of course the close view in which details were seen would have been only for an instant as the object flashed by. The actual view from the cockpit at closest approach, as shown above, was rather mundane compared to the typical artists concepts of the encounter.

• Air Force contract employee Massey sighted a cigar shaped object with a trail of flame from the aircraft ramp at Robins AFB, near Macon Georgia. Unfortunately he was not asked the elevation of what he saw above the horizon. He saw it first 'overhead'. This apparently meant in the sky to the west of his position, since although he stated he was facing north, he didn't see it come 'out of the north' and people normally watch things in their field of vision, not straight above them. It then traveled in a southwest direction, until disappearing in the distance. He estimated the object to be traveling straight and level at 700 mph, an altitude of 3000 feet, and having the 'size of a B-29'. He estimated the duration as 20 seconds and the time of the sighting as 0140 or 0150 based on the departure time of an aircraft he was preparing (this one-hour difference from the other sightings is not commented on by AFOSI, although they considered this the same sighting as Chiles). Massey was asked if the thought it was a meteor and said no, because 'a shooting star falls perpendicular. This object was on a straight and level plane'. Massey claimed to have seen V-1's in flight and even a V-2 launch in World War II, the latter 'during the Battle of the Bulge'. This was perhaps possible. V-2 Gruppe Sued operated within 50 miles of the front lines near the south Ardennes in November-December 1944 before being moved behind the Rhine.

Putting together in terms of the positions and bearings of the aircraft and the objects sighted, and the locations of the observers, the following consistent result is obtained:

Plotting of the four sightings show a consistent course for the object

Which is clearly the track of what science now knows as an Earth-grazing fireball. Such rare events were only accepted by science in 1972 when one was actually photographed and filmed as it flew over Utah.

AFOSI's assessment was that the first two sightings were of a different event - because the object was 'meteor-like', travelled at 'terrific speed', and flew 'parallel to the horizon', which was seen as different from the other two (which were reported as flying at 700 mph by 'trained observers'). They did not seem to notice that the bearing of the object sighted in the first two sightings was the same as that observed by Chiles and Massey, or that estimates of the size and distance of an object at night would be based on it being a conventional object, not something unknown to science or popular culture at the time.

The sighting was sensationalized by the press in books, including that ghost-written for one-time Project Blue Book commander Ruppelt. The sighting was later embellished, with the object coming 'within 700 feet', the aircraft being 'buffeted by turbulence', Chiles having to 'swerve to avoid collision'. None of which was in the original report…

In fact the original sighting report is rather mundane. The object was only in sight for perhaps only 5 seconds, was seen to be about seven times the size of a full moon (but only for a second at closest approach), appeared to be coming head on but then passed the aircraft to the right, at a closes approach estimated at half a mile, and caused no noise or turbulence. Based on this brief glimpse, Chiles and Whitted produced these sketches (considerably more informative than the later 'cleaned up' versions):

Today, after many movies about asteroid impacts, and especially the very real Chelyabinsk event, no other conclusion would have been reached by the observers or investigators but that this was a meteor. The cigar-shaped (dark, unseen) form was defined by the brilliant 'windows' on the object, which were undoubtedly the object disintegrating into glowing fragments as it passed through the atmosphere.

Complete article at UFO DNA

Heflin, Again

The Heflin UFO sighting and photographs are one of the classic UFO cases. Heflin was a highway maintenance engineer for California's Orange County. In 1965 he produced a series of four Polaroid photographs, showing a hat-shaped UFO travelling across a road just south of the Santa Ana Freeway, and the smoke ring left after its departure from the area. He estimated the object to be 30 feet in diameter and 700 feet away as it crossed the road in front of him. A new take on the photo analysis is provided below, which again concludes they are fakes. But completely obscured in the accounts to date were the extraordinary nature of a nearby military installation, its relationship to the location of the sighting, and the unusual interest by aerospace contractors in the photographs.

The Location

What was then known as Marine Corps Air Facility Santa Ana was located less than a mile southwest of the sighting location. The base originally began operations in 1942 as a US Navy lighter-than-air (LTA) vertical-takeoff-and landing (VTOL) airship base. Two immense hangars, Buildings 29 and 29, were built. Each hangar was 189 feet high, 1,088 feet long and 297 feet wide. They are registered as historical monuments and remain to this day among the largest wooden structures ever built. They can be seen for miles from the ground, tens of miles from any nearby elevation and from as far away as visibility will allow from the air. The Heflin investigators, although mentioning other minor local military facilities, make no mention of this remarkable site just a mile away.

From 1951 the base was used by the US Marine Corps for helicopter training and operations. The layout was suited for VTOL operations and the cavern-like hangars were used as helicopter maintenance shelters.

Although today being engulfed by industrial parks and shopping malls, in 1965 the area was still largely open fields, allowing helicopter training in preparation for the buildup in Vietnam. A Marine history noted:

LTA has always been considered the ‘pearl’ of Marine Corps bases. In addition to its perfect location among the Southern California orange groves and proximity to all of the Southern California amenities, it also provides a nearly perfect environment for training helicopter pilots...The nearby Saddleback mountains and adjacent foothills have 13 confined area mountain landing sites that every PUI (Pilot Under Instruction) has learned to hate and love.

So we have a facility that is already built for VTOL operations, with enormous hangars where an experimental VTOL craft could be tested far from prying eyes. Now if we superimpose the excellent sketch in the Condon report on a 1972 aerial photo of the base and the sighting location, we find that the Heflin craft was first sighted at a position exactly at the base runway bearing, but coming from Building 28 or one of the adjacent turning circles. Heflin reported the craft seemed to have stability problems. After it recovered, it accelerated away - at the same heading as the heading from the base, and towards the Saddleback mountain landing training area used by the Marines:

As the UFO traveled, it maintained a relatively level altitude (150 ft.) in relation to the flat terrain, however the UFO acted similar to a gyroscope when losing its stability. The UFO continued moving away slowly gaining altitude, tipped its top toward me slightly. It seemed to gain stability, then it increased its velocity (speed) and altitude more rapidly leaving a deposit of smoke-like vapor….The UFO disappeared in a northern direction toward Saddleback Mountain.

Unusual Interest

Now in the aftermath of the photographs becoming public, Heflin received some unusual contacts (aside from Marine Corps investigators, US Air Force investigators, Men in Black, NORAD, NICAP, Condon Report, and other UFO investigators!). The Condon Report notes:

Among numerous telephone calls, the witness says he received … one from … a man who identified himself as a representative of the Boeing Airplane Co. … The … man identified himself as an "engineer with the L.A. office of Boeing Aircraft… not representing Boeing, but personally interested, asked that his name not be mentioned or the fact that he had phoned. He also suggested that it might be better if [the witness] did not talk about the case …" Later "A letter came from a vice-president of McDonnell Aircraft, St. Louis, requesting technical information".

Forty years later, aerospace writer Nick Cook was interviewing Boyd Bushman, an engineer who was involved in heavily classified antigravity propulsion projects for Lockheed Martin. Cook noted, in his book The Hunt for Zero Point, page 254-255:

I spotted something among the collection of papers Bushman had given me. Tucked beneath the patents and company brochure material on weapons technology was a grainy photocopy of a UFO flying low over a straight stretch of desert road. A handwritten caption underneath identified the location as Santa Ana, California, and the date as 1966.

In 1965, according to his resume, Bushman was working as an engineer on the Redeye missile at General Dynamics at nearby Pomona, California.

This is all very interesting, but there is an obvious objection. Why would a heavily classified craft be tested in daylight from a Marine training base? One could theorize the craft was usually tested at night, but in this case went out of control in a daytime in-hangar test, and there was no choice but to let if fly out of the hangar on a course toward the usual landing test area?

Does the quick action of USAF investigators to discredit the photographs mean they were anxious to squelch the case to cover up the fact a classified craft had gotten loose? Can assertions by the Marines that nothing was tracked by radar be believed if this was the case? The Condon Report stated:

A check made by the Marine Corps investigators indicated that no UFO was observed on the Marine Corps Air Facility radar at the time of the reported UFO observation…the "Facility" referred to by the Air Force investigator is a relatively small base within direct sight of the Myford Road site, but contains only a sporadically used training radar installation. Marine officials interviewed 15 January 1968 were unable to determine whether radar was in service 3 August 1965.

One can wonder if it is fair to characterize a base with the some of the largest buildings in the world as a 'relatively small base'. Heflin himself noted the prevalence of Marine helicopter operations: "…the witness noted that nearby helicopters from the Marine Corps Air Facility could be heard, and that their noise could have drowned out sounds the UFO might have made…"

Even if the photographs were faked, we have an unusual interest from engineers in at least three aerospace companies in the event. Does this indicate there was industry scuttlebutt of some kind of a classified program with testing underway in Santa Ana…?

The Photographs

Conventional analysis has concentrated on the photographs. The official analyses concentrated on seeing if it was possible to fake the photographs, in which case they could be ignored as they proved nothing.

First up was US Air Force Foreign Technology Division "Photo Analysis Report 65-48" dated 14 August 1965. Controversially this report was dated one month before the photographs were made public. The Condon Report noted: "This raises the possibility, then, that without the knowledge of any of the principals, the Air Force was involved in the case less than two weeks after it happened… Officials of Project Blue Book informed the Colorado project in March 1968 that this question had been raised before, and that the Photo Analysis Report was in error, and that month should have read October".

Not mentioned but perhaps even more controversial was why FTD would be involved. At any rate, the report itself indicated that "…A test was conducted by the FTD Photo Analyst and Photo Processing personnel with the results shown on the attached photos… The object seen in the photographs was a 9" in diameter vaporizing tray, tossed in the air approximately 8 to 12 feet high at a distance from the camera of approximately 15 to 20 feet. The result of the test shows a surprising similarity between the object on the test photography and the object on photography."

The same figures appear in a Air Force release on 17 October 1965, except now they are characterized as coming from a careful analysis of the photo: "The camera was probably focused on a set distance and not on infinity as the terrain background was blurred… The center white stripe on the road and the object…have the same sharp image. Therefore it is believed that the object was on the same plane as the center white stripe (or closer) to the camera and could not possibly be the size quoted in the report. Using the width of the road as a factor, the size of the object was estimated to be approximately one to three feet in diameter and 15 to 20 feet above the ground." So it seemed that the rationale was 'backed into' based on a model test. In fact, examination of the photo does not show the background blurring the Air force statement alleged. Objects in the distance do fade into the haze, but they are not blurred.

The Condon Report did a different test: "In the course of my study I was able to simulate effectively the first three photographs by suspending a model [a camera lens cap] by a thread attached to a rod resting on the roof of a truck and photographing it. Without assuming the truth or untruth of the witness's story this has led me to conclude that the case is of little probative value…"

Both of these studies concluded that the photograph could be faked. However the methods and conclusions were different and contradictory. The Air Force used a thrown model 9" in diameter thrown 15 to 20 feet away, while the Condon investigator used a 3" lens cap suspended around 5 feet away. Normally a thrown object exhibits motion blur while a near object is out of focus if the background at infinity is in focus. However the Polaroid camera used had an uncommonly good depth of field and fast shutter speed (1/3000). It seems nothing in these analyses proved anything except that it was possible to make similar pictures using smaller nearby objects.

In 1967 researcher James McDonald believed the photographs represented a large, real object, except perhaps the last photograph of the smoke ring. McDonald became obsessed with studying how this photograph differed from the others, since if it was taken later at a different location in different weather, as he believed, it would undermine Heflin's credibility.

In 1975 an analysis concluded the photos were fake based on observation of a string supporting the object when the photos were enhanced. However this seems to have been an artifact in the particular copies of the photos analyzed. It does not appear in earlier or subsequent analyses of the original photos.

In 2000 a new digital analysis was conducted on the original Polaroid photos. This however emphasized enhancement by level equalization to bring out certain features on the base and exhaust from the object described by Heflin in his original description of the objects. No analysis was conducted on the distance of the object. A 'blur analysis' was promised for a second paper, still said to be forthcoming in 2006. However no such paper was ever produced, and in the meantime the originals have been withheld from research.

In 2005, a researcher noticed that the second and third Heflin photos could be considered as a single stereographic image since Heflin moved in the seat between the two images. Still some researchers didn't buy it or couldn't see it. Another look at this is provided below, which should convince skeptics.

By 2010 an acquaintance of Heflin named Edward Riddle reported that Heflin had told him that he had faked the photos using a model train wheel (Heflin was a known model train aficionado). Overlays of the photo with such wheels showed a good match.

A new examination by ufodna of the first photo considers the distance of the object according to the amount of haze. Items farther from a camera will generally have dimmer brights and lighter darks than those closer. A calibration is provided by the telephone poles, which are very dark indeed at the base; and the white stripe on the road median. Observing the darkest dark and lightest light at the distance of each pole provides a calibrated yardstick to measure the distance of other objects in the picture. The distance to the poles is known exactly thanks to the sketch of the site in the Condon report. The analysis proves the object is very close to the camera indeed:

An analysis of the parallax between the second and third pictures, similar to the 2005 3d image but showing the logic behind the conclusion, also proves without a doubt that the object was a small one, at the same distance from the camera as the rear view mirror:

The inevitable conclusion is the that Heflin photographs, as striking as they seem, and as sincere the photographer seemed, were fakes.

Now What?

So the photographs were evidently faked, but the sighting evoked extraordinary interest among aerospace contractors and many government agencies. Did Heflin accidentally initiate a hoax that seemed like a security breach to those who had a need to know about a government program?

Full article at UFO DNA