About those historical UFO records

Somebody please give us a reason to care

The first seven photos in the National Archives’ brand new “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection” (UAPRC) show seven different camera angles of the quasi-famous and cheesy-looking UFO image above. A mechanic named Paul Villa shot the lot of them near Albuquerque in 1963.

“Clearly a hoax,” states researcher Rich Hoffman with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. “Hubcap shaped objects thrown in the air. Paul Villa claimed that three beings came out of these.” Hoffman’s verdict reflects the broad and longstanding consensus on the Villa pix, but you’d never know it here. The National Archives and Records Administration’s threadbare cutlines make no mention of the controversy and offer no explanation pro or con; instead, they merely let the images, uh, breathe.

But here’s the question: What are Villa’s photos doing in the UAPRC category labeled “Record Group 255: Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration”? How come there aren’t any actual NASA-generated photos here? Villa’s pictures are the sum total of the images in this category. Did he work for NASA? (No.)

I know, I know, NARA’s UFO archives are a work in progress and it’s unfair to be critical at this early stage, but shut up, I’m not done yet. There’s a film clip, separate and apart from the Villa stuff and not in the NASA category, that you probably shouldn’t watch if you’d rather savor every last precious minute of what’s left of your life. It’s slugged “USAF UFO Sightings, California 1952-1975 342-USAF-49377.” At just under 5 minutes, it plays like a contender in an undergraduate “experimental cinema” competition. It comes without audio, offers no context for its content, and makes no reference whatsoever to any “USAF UFO Sightings” in California.

Maybe they were all on acid

It takes 45 seconds of film leader to plow into the actual images. First up is a sequence that vintage-UFO history buffs might recognize if they squint hard enough. It’s the Delbert Newhouse footage from Tremonton, Utah, in 1952. And it created some drama back then because Newhouse was a trained Navy photography specialist who stopped his car because he knew weird when he saw it. What he shot was a fleet of distant white daylight orbs weaving cryptic patterns across a clear blue sky.

The snippet posted here, however, is missing the original’s sharp color and looks like it was shot at night. Furthermore, this footage is marred by a thick black vertical off-center bar, which wasn’t on the original. Still, the grain of age doesn’t detract from the contemporaneous verdict of Navy analysts – whatever Newhouse shot, it sure as hell wasn’t a flock of seagulls.

Next comes a closeup of a handheld pencil hovering over what looks like thread spools or maybe film editing equipment. Twenty seconds of additional leader take us to some not-so-subtle editorializing – a bird in flight, followed by a swarm of insects illuminated in the near-foreground. The film goes black, serves up a second helping of Tremonton, cranks more leader, and shows off more little white dots. And then it –

-- jumps to a 16-second clip of additional classic footage, from 1950, Great Falls, Montana. You can tell by the water tower, and the way the camera tracks two white orbs dashing behind it. The Air Force initially claimed that what civilian photographer Nick Mariani actually caught on camera were two jet fighters, not UFOs. Then-Project Blue Book director Ed Ruppelt, however, forced the USAF to retract its knee-jerk brushoff because the objects didn’t match anything in our arsenal.

Then comes the most bizarre segment of all, and it’s hard to tell if it’s from a Hollywood western or a cigarette ad. How this oddball cut actually made its way into this Air Force mashup is, apparently, sadly, lost to history.

Confused yet?

A cowboy in the saddle looks over his shoulder and talks with his teeth clenched tight around his smoke. He turns to the camera straight-up and takes a luxuriant drag from the butt. But as the shot pans right to left, a tiny and nearly invisible pale orb pops out of nowhere and appears to slide away from the right side of the guy’s face.

And in the grand finale of non sequiturs, we get a head-and-shoulders glimpse of a young woman in a red outfit, followed by another split-second flash of a different young woman with big hair. Then comes a signboard that reads “United States Air Force Optical Branch.” It takes all of two seconds to repeat the same exact sequence again before the words: “End of Reel 1.”

Badda-boom.

Not exactly “Un Chien Andalou,” but hey, props for the effort.

This little jewel also resides in the National Archives’ UAP Records Collection. Caretaker of the nation’s official memory since 1934, NARA has been dispatched on an unenviable records-gathering mission by lawmakers who no longer trust the executive branch to give us the truth about UFOs.

In fact, the UAPRC is the consolation prize from last year’s doomed congressional campaign to subject the three-letter agencies to a level of scrutiny they’ve never had to endure before (at least, not on the UFO front). The meat in the bun – a Senate bill to establish an independent panel to review classified UFO material for release, fortified with eminent domain provisions – got tossed by a couple of powerful House committee leaders in December. The skeletal remains of those aspirations are nestled in Sections 1841-43 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. There are two key components.

First, NARA was and is charged with consolidating all “government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence” already languishing in the federal archives. According to a report this year, the Archives have already digitized 65,778 records from Project Blue Book alone. But NARA’s directive isn’t confined to government paper. No UAP records “created by a person or entity outside the Federal Government,” state the marching orders, “shall be withheld, redacted, postponed for public disclosure, or reclassified.”

Ergo, Paul Villa.

Do not attempt to hold your breath

But the second part is potentially interesting. Or it could be, if the six designated Senate and House committees take their oversight obligations to the UAPRC seriously. According to the mandate, “Each head of a Government office” is required to “identify and organize” previously undisclosed UAP records within that office, and to prepare them for “transmission” to NARA within “300 days” of the enactment of the 2024 NDAA.

In other words, we’re a month away from the day when federal agencies are required to comply with the law and tell NARA what they’re prepared to release to its UAP Collection. But October 18 or thereabouts is just the notification deadline, not for delivering the goods.

During a career supporting Army Materiel Command, SCU co-founder Rich Hoffman learned a few things about what it takes for the feds to swing a ship around. He predicts “it will take another year before we see much of anything” in the UAPRC. Fortunately, a little rationalization goes a long way:

“I attended a presentation that was entitled ‘Government at the Speed of Thought.’ I retitled it, ‘Thought at the Speed of Government’ and quickly recognized that nothing would ever happen quickly and we would be in deep shit by now if that were ever to be the case.”

So no, don’t expect an avalanche of fascinating new links anytime soon. And don’t expect any clarity about things like “USAF UFO Sightings, California” either. Clarity isn’t really NARA’s job. If you’re looking for lucid interpretations of UAPRC’s entries, you might stand a better chance consulting an astrologer.

“What we’ve done at the National Archives is, we maintain them exactly as we received them from the Air Force,” says NARA Executive for Research Services Chris Naylor, “and we are digitizing them and making them available online.”

I don’t understand

There’s a link in Records Group 342 labeled “471.6 Guided Missiles, 1 July 1952.” Click through 14 largely meaningless pages of PDF documents and there’s not one mention of guided missiles. Or wait, maybe there was – but three pages in that package were/are faded into virtual illegibility. There was something about an “Unidentified Celestial Object” on one page, but on yet another there’s a dismissal of the incident without filling us in on what, exactly, got dismissed: “A followup investigation . . . disclosed that source of this report could not verify previous statements which appeared to be possible fabrications, hallucinations or hearsay.”

Badda-bing.

Mr. Naylor?

“‘Guided Missiles’ – that was the file designation at the originating agency,” Naylor says. “We’re not adding any information, we are presenting it as it was maintained at the time. Decimal 471.6 is the decimal file within Records Group 342 that covered the topic ‘guided missiles,’ so that’s why it has that title.”

Obviously the Records Collection is at the mercy of federal agencies’ arbitrary filing systems and their willingness to cooperate. Got it. Let’s go find some lipstick for this pig. Here’s something from the UAPRC section labeled “RG 330 Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” It’s a black-and-white video clip from 1962. By rights it should be in the “Guided Missiles” section, but, well, get over it. The cutline offers a brief synopsis:

“This film contains aerial coverage of a flight of Atlas F (Test 103) at the Atlantic Missile Range. It shows the missile in flight, then breaking up, with the camera holding on the nose cone, with a smaller object in flight above and behind the nose cone on a parallel path. (Note: one experiment aboard Test 103 was decoy nose cone.).”

That’s actually pretty accurate. For seven minutes and 30 seconds, the disintegrating Atlas package leaves blazing contrails and a river of debris glittering across a black background during its fiery descent toward the ocean. About halfway through, the camera — surprise! — abandons the plummeting payload and swings abruptly away to track what looks like another chunk of the Atlas. Like the other pieces, it follows its predecessors on the same angle of descent. Its glare projects a comet-like tail, briefly, not unlike the plume trailing the nose cone.

Then comes a twist.

Release the Kraken

Its contrail disappears and the thing reverses course – it heads in the opposite direction of the Atlas. For more than two minutes, the camera sticks with it until the object recedes into oblivion. Was this sucker mimicking the debris to get our attention? And did it really reverse itself? Or did the camera movement create an illusion? We may never know since there’s no explainer. But here’s the takeaway:

More than 60 years ago, the Air Force tagged this sequence as evidence of UFO activity. If something this obscure is worth publicizing, why not extend a good-faith gesture to the UAPRC and bolster its credibility by releasing the now-globally anticipated footage from the Big Sur Incident in 1964?

Bob Jacobs, the USAF veteran who officially filmed the encounter through a cutting-edge telescopic lens, has written extensively about what happened, and he discussed it at the National Press Club in 2021. The event was confirmed in writing by Jacobs’ commanding officer. No way this footage is lost; Luis Elizondo, the Imminent author and Pentagon whistleblower, has stated for record for he viewed it himself.

According to descriptions, a missile fitted with a dummy warhead goes streaking downrange toward a target zone in the Pacific when it draws the attention of your basic disc-shaped object. As the unarmed weapon speeds along at 10,000 mph or whatever, the UFO flies a literal circle around it, hitting the projectile from four different angles with beams of light. The stricken warhead goes into a death tumble. Jacobs and his boss say the film was confiscated by plainsuits, probably CIA.

A full accounting of official UFO history will necessarily bear a load of tedium and clutter, and make room for bogus events and hoaxes. Occasionally, they might even be interesting. But for the UAPRC to stay relevant, a few things need to happen quickly.

The Navy’s three now-famous UFO videos and Homeland Security’s declassified Aguadilla footage — all of which the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office refuses to publicly confront — need to be in the first batch of upcoming transfers. The Big Sur vid needs to be in there as well. If highlighting a 1962 missile encounter that nobody ever heard of serves the public interest, imagine how the ‘64 footage would advance that cause. Anyone who doesn’t want to see film of a real flying saucer shooting down a real warhead in flight, please wait outside.

The CIA should also produce the Roswell evidence sitting somewhere in its Historical Intelligence Collection. If they can’t find it, they should bring Chase Brandon in and put him in a room with a chair and a lightbulb. Remember that guy? The Agency’s one-time liaison to Hollywood? In 2012, the retired spook told the media how, during the Clinton administration, he discovered proof of the 1947 crash, tucked away in a box in the CIA’s own archives at Langley. Put him under oath — I haven’t seen an obit anywhere.

And while we’re at it, let’s get some sworn testimony from his former CIA boss and erstwhile Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. We could ask him why Chase Brandon, a subordinate, was able to stumble upon the Roswell gold mine when he, Gates, went on record in 2013 as having “never seen one shred of evidence or one report of any kind of UFO or remains or cadavers or anything.” And then we can ask Gates why one of his spyboss successors, John Brennan, went on record this way in 2018, a month after the New York Times scoop in 2017: “During the course of my career, both in the CIA as well as the White House, I was aware that there were endeavors to try to discern what some of these phenomena are.”

These are just a few things that rigorous congressional support for the UAPRC can dislodge. If the authors of Sections 1841-43 of the 2024 NDAA think they can sit back and trust “each head of a Government office” to fully comply with the law, they may as well stick a fork in it.