The Tremonton Film

Background

The film arrived during the busiest summer yet for Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s UFO office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, run by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt. Later that July, radar-visual sightings over Washington, D.C., made headlines.

Delbert C. Newhouse was an experienced Navy photographer and warrant officer. Blue Book records reviewed in the 1960s credit him with 19 years of service and more than 1,000 hours on aerial photography missions; Ruppelt’s 1956 memoir gives larger figures. He was driving his wife and two children west from Washington, D.C. Sources disagree on the destination: Ruppelt said Oakland, California, but Newhouse’s own 1952 letter to the Air Force, quoted in the later Colorado study, said Portland, Oregon.

Newhouse did not rush to report what he had filmed. About five weeks later, in a letter dated August 11, 1952, he sent the footage to the Air Force through Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, offering it ‘for whatever value it may have’ to the saucer investigation.

What was reported

The sighting took place late in the morning, about seven miles north of Tremonton. According to Newhouse’s letter, he stopped the car, took his camera out of a suitcase in the trunk, loaded it in a hurry and shot roughly 30 feet of film. He used a hand-held 16mm Bell and Howell with a 3-inch telephoto lens, and partway through he stopped the lens down to improve contrast. He wrote that with no reference point in the sky he could not estimate the objects’ speed, size, altitude or distance. Near the end, he said, one object reversed course, and he held the camera still and let it cross the frame several times.

In a September 1952 interview with an Air Force intelligence officer, Newhouse said he heard no sound and saw no exhaust or contrails, and he gave his opinion that the light came from reflection. The more vivid description of gun-metal objects shaped like two stacked saucers appears in interviews about 1955 with Robert M. L. Baker Jr., an analyst at Douglas Aircraft. The Colorado study’s investigator said he could find no record of it in the 1952 file.

Investigations and official findings

Ruppelt took the reels to the Air Force photo laboratory at Wright Field. According to his memoir, after several weeks the lab could say only that the objects were not airplanes or balloons and that it did not think they were birds. The film then went to the Navy’s Photographic Interpretation Laboratory at Anacostia, in Washington, D.C., which reportedly spent about 1,000 man-hours plotting the objects’ motion and brightness frame by frame. Its report concluded they were light sources rather than reflections. It calculated a speed of about 650 mph, but only after arbitrarily assuming the objects were five miles away.

The CIA-sponsored panel led by physicist H. P. Robertson, which met from January 14 to 17, 1953, heard the Navy team in person. Its report said the members admired the effort but could not accept the conclusions. Among their reasons: a rounded object could reflect sunlight without blinking, the brightness readings were taken from a duplicate rather than the original film, and the measuring method looked faulty. According to Ruppelt, one panelist also suggested that Newhouse may have panned the camera without realizing it, which would invalidate the speed figures.

In 1968 the Air Force–funded University of Colorado study, led by Edward Condon, re-examined the film as Case 49. Its investigator, William K. Hartmann, provisionally identified the objects as birds. After driving through Utah that August and watching flocks of white birds milling in the sky, he wrote that he now regarded them as identified.

Explanations and debate

The bird explanation rests on several points. Gulls are common around the Great Salt Lake. Hartmann calculated that bird-sized objects about 2,000 feet away would sit at the limit of what the eye or the lens could resolve and would be moving at roughly 40 to 55 mph. He also argued that the flaring and fading of the lights looked like birds wheeling in sunlight. Ruppelt later watched gulls soaring high over San Francisco and saw ‘a strong resemblance’, though he added that he was not sure this was the answer.

Doubters point to the Navy lab’s detailed analysis, and to Baker’s 1955 study, which found that no single natural explanation fully accounted for the film. Newhouse also maintained that he had seen the objects at closer range, before filming began. Hartmann himself criticized a 1963 book by the skeptics Donald Menzel and Lyle Boyd that dismissed the footage as ‘very badly photographed birds’. He said the images were small but relatively sharp, so poor photography could not explain why they were hard to identify.

Why it still matters

The case shows how a handful of bright dots could receive different verdicts from military labs, a secret scientific panel and a university study. The footage reached a wide audience in the 1956 United Artists semi-documentary Unidentified Flying Objects, and Newhouse later served as a private adviser to the civilian group NICAP. The Robertson Panel’s broader recommendations, including a public education effort aimed at reducing interest in saucers, shaped Air Force handling of UFO reports for years.