Hello, and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode, we're talking about the Mariana UFO incident.
That's correct, the Mariana UFO incident.
And this was a UFO sighting, and there was recording of it.
And this happened back in 1950 out in West central Montana.
Now, we could begin by looking at Wikipedia, just kind of an
outline of what happened, and then we'll get into another
article that goes into a little bit more detail.
It tells us that the Mariana UFO incident occurred August 1950 at
Great Falls, Mt. The film footage of the siding
is believed to be among the first ever taken of what came to
be called an unidentified flying object, or UFO.
The footage was investigated by the US Air Force and initially
found to be reflections from 2F-94 jet fighters, which was
later retracted. So you can see what happened.
The guy got the film of these flying saucers basically and the
of course this is 1950, what just after World War Two, I
think the Korean Ward already started.
They get the Air Force involved because I guess it would be an
Air Force Base out there and the first thing they do is just try
to cover everything up. They begin with the parallel
narrative. All these were two F-94 jet
fighters. Well that would have been easy
to disprove because they keep flight logs of those things.
Now it says that the incident happened at 11:29 AM on August
15th in 1950. Nick Mariana, he was a general
manager of the Great Falls Selectrics and this is a minor
League Baseball team and him and his 19 year old Secretary of
Virginia rounding. They were inspecting the empty
Legion Stadium baseball field before a game and a bright flash
of light caught Mariana's eye. According to his reports, he saw
two bright, silvery objects rotating while flying over Great
Falls at a speed he estimated to be 200 to 400 mph.
He believed that they were roughly 50 feet wide and 150
feet apart. Mariana rented his car to
retrieve a 16 millimeter movie camera and film the UFO's for 16
seconds. The camera could find the
objects and color, but could not record sound.
Rounding also witnessed the objects.
The day after Mariana sighting. The Great Falls Tribune, the
city's daily newspaper, described his sighting and the
film in an article, which is picked up by other media outlets
around the nation. For several weeks after the
sighting, Mariana showed his film to local community groups
like the Central Round Table Athletic Club.
So he'd filmed this thing, it got out there and people saw the
film. It's going to be important here
in a minute because we're going to talk about what happened to
that film. Now we find out that the Air
Force did their investigations, says.
After saying the film, a reporter for the Great Falls
Tribune called Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and
informed them of Mariana sighting and film now doesn't
sound like this reporter called them to ask him about air
traffic in the area. Sounds like he was being a good
little citizen and reporting this sighting to the to the Air
Force. You kind of see how media and
the military are working hand in hand because on it says US Air
Force Captain John P Reynoldsson interviewed Mariana at nearby
Malmstrom Air Force Base outside of Great Falls.
Now of course we know about the UFO activity that happened.
There were solace, you know. Years later when Marijuana and
Miss Rounding both told them they had seen 2 jet fighters
pass over the baseball stadium. Shortly after the sighting,
Brindleson felt that perhaps The Jets were the objects.
Mariana had seen a caption on film, with Mariana's permission.
Captain Brindleson's Oh, here you go man.
You don't. I don't think you really want to
turn your film over to these guys unless you have a copy.
With the Mariana's permission and Captain Brindleson sent the
film to Wright Patterson Air Force Base for analysis.
He told a reporter in Great Falls he picked up about 8 feet
of film in from Mariana. However, in his message to
Wright Patterson, he said that he was sending approximately 15
feet of moving picture film to the base for study.
According to UFO historian Jerome Clark, this discrepancy
was never cleared up at at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
The film was briefly examined and determined to be the
reflections from 2F-94 jet fighters that were known to be
flying over Great Falls at the time of Mariana sighting.
Lieutenant Colonel Ray W Taylor returned the film to Mariana
with a cover letter stating that our photo analysts were unable
to find anything identifiable of an of an unusual nature.
However, according to Air Force Officer Edward J Rupple, who
would become the supervisor of the Air Force's Project Blue
Book, an investigation into the UFO mystery 1951 in 1950, there
was no interest by the Air Force in the UFO.
So after a quick viewing, Project Grudge, a name like
Project Grudge, you know they're going to have an open mind, had
written them off as a reflections from 2F-94 jets,
fighter jets that were in the area.
Controversy soon arose when Mariana claimed that the 1st 35
seconds of his film, which he said most clearly, showed that
the UFO's as rotating disc, were missing.
People in the Great Falls area who had viewed Mariana's film
supported his claim. They claimed that the missing
frames clearly showed the UFO's as spitting metallic disc with a
notch or band along their outer edges.
The Air Force personnel denied this accusation instead, and
insisted they had removed only a single frame of film which is
damaged in the analysis. So that's what they like to do.
They like to put a little lie in there, a little bit of the
truth. No, we didn't take out seven
feet of film, we just took out one frame.
Yes, sounds reasonable. Now it goes on and tells us.
In January 1951, Bob Constadine, a writer and UFO skeptic Reed
Debunker, wrote an article for Cosmopolitan magazine entitled
The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax.
It debunked the most famous UFO sightings to that date,
including Mariana's sighting and film.
Claiming that Constantine's article implied that he was a
liar, prankster, half wet crank, publicity hound, and fanatic
Mariana filed a lawsuit for slander against Constantine.
The lawsuit was eventually dropped in 1955.
You know, I understand why people read UFO articles and
listen to UFO podcast like this because it's fun and it's a
mystery and it's fun to talk about it and share experiences
with people. And you know, it's it's it's
harmless. What I don't understand is who
pays for the debunking material that's produced.
It seems like that if you didn't believe in UF O's or you really
just were completely closed off to the thought of UF O's, why
would you read an article about them?
I mean, I don't need to read an article debunking something that
I don't believe in. I mean, maybe once in a great
while, you know, but it's not something that I would consume
on a regular basis. What's the fun in that?
I could understand why people like to read articles about
UFO's and and you know, and watch UFO videos and listen to
UFO, you know, podcasts, because that's something that we enjoy.
It's kind of a positive, rewarding experience, but just
to set there and consume negativity all the time.
You think that would get a little bit boring?
So who's paying these guys even back in 1951?
How do you make a fulltime job? Being a UFO skeptic, that's that
seems suspect to me, I said later studies.
In July 1952, Captain and Ruppert was able to convince
Mariana to let the Air Force see the film for a more detailed
analysis. Mariana reluctantly agree, but
only after requiring the Air Force to sign an agreement that
they would not remove any frames of the film.
The film analyst at Wright Patterson Air Force Base
concluded that the objects in Mariana's film were not birds,
balloons, or meteors. The original conclusion that the
objects were reflections of the F-94 jets was also ruled out.
According to Rupert and his memoirs, the two jets were
weren't anywhere close to where the 2UFO's had been.
We studied each individual light and both appeared to, and both
appeared too steady to be reflections.
We drew a blank on the Montana movie.
It wasn't unknown. In January 1953, the Air Force
and CIA convened a committee, a promised scientist, to examine
the best cases collected by Project Blue Book, called the
Robertson Panel. After its chairman, physicist HP
Robertson, it viewed Mariana's UFO film.
The scientists judge that the objects in the film, or
reflections of aircraft known, have been in the area.
So they'll let the there's your scientists sit right there and
lie to your face. Now the Air Force came out and
had to retract that these things were airplanes said no way the
airplanes weren't around there. These reflections are far too
steady. These lights are far too steady
to be reflections off one of our airplanes.
And so how do we handle this bombshell revelation?
Well, we bring in an authority figure and he tells you don't
believe you're lying eyes. Now there was a thing called the
Baker analysis, and this is it was in 1954, Green Rouse
Productions decided to film a documentary movie about the UFL
phenomenon, and they asked Nick Mariana for the rights to use
his film in the documentary, and Mariana agreed.
So to analyze the film, they hired Robert ML Baker Junior, a
scientist and engineer for the Douglas Aircraft Company, and
Baker. He completed his analysis of
Mariana's film in early 1956, and he concluded that the
explanation that the objects were simply reflections from the
F-90 four's jet was quite strained.
In other words, no way. In 1968, Baker testified before
a congressional hearing on UF O's.
He commented on his analysis of the Mariana film.
He says preliminary analysis excluded most natural phenomena.
More detailed study indicated that the only remaining natural
phenomena candidate for the Utah film spurs in flight, and for
the Montana film it was airplane fuselage, reflections of the
Sun. After about 18 months of rather
detailed, albeit not continuous, studying using various film
measuring equipments at Douglas and UCLA, as well as analysis of
the photogrammatic experiment, it appeared that neither of
these natural phenomena explanations held any merit.
In 1969, Baker presented a paper at the A a USUFO panel organized
by Thornton Page and Carl Sagan. He discussed to Mariana film as
well as other films and photographs of UFOs.
Baker concluded that the Mariana film was unidentifiable.
He emphasized the importance of improving the quality of
photographic data before speculating about the nature of
UF O's. So in other words, we can't
explain it, let's just not talk about it.
Now. We have the Condo report in
1966, and this is a government established report that was
funded for the study of UFL phenomena and it was located at
the University of Colorado at Boulder.
There, and chaired by Edward U Condon, a prominent A prominent
physicist, the committee's researchers decided to
reinvestigate Mariana's UFO film.
The Condon Committee assigned to investigators to study the case,
Roy Craig. He was a physicist who was
generally skeptical of UF O's, and David Saunders, a
psychologist who had long been interested in a Mariana UFO
incident. Now Saunders and Craig, they
soon added a new problem to the case.
They were not sure whether the film had been taken on August
5th or August 15th, 1950. After interviewing Mariana, the
two researchers came to different conclusions about the
film. Craig Now wait a minute.
This would seem easy to figure out to me.
They could just go back and find out when the baseball game
happened that should have been recorded.
Craig remains skeptical of Mariana's claims that 35 frames
have been removed from the footage.
Well, of course the comment I considered the most significant,
which Mariana's ex secretary made to me during a telephone
interview when I pressed for information or beliefs regarding
clipping of the film by the Air Force, the very hesitant comment
was what you have to remember is all this that Nick Mariana is a
promoter. That comment was adequate to
close our conversation and his memoirs.
Greg also wrote that I would not like to have I would not like to
have to defend Dr. Saunders conviction that Mariana's film
is strong evidence that we have extraterrestrial visitors.
However, Saunders thought that the Mariana film was a crucial
case in the Colorado Project's case file.
Impressed by Baker's analysis, Saunders was suspicious of the
discrepancy over the missing frames at the beginning of the
Mariana film. He was particularly concerned
with reports that the 1st 3 seconds of the film that were
missing clearly indicated the objects were spinning disk.
He came to the conclusion that Mariana's film was the one
sighting of all time that did more than any single case.
That convinced me that there is something to the UFO problem.
Well, you see there that they're definitely viewing this thing as
a problem and I think the solution to them is just to
cover it up. It tells us here that copies of
Mariana's film currently reside in the US National Archive.
It is still featured in documentaries, television
programs, and shared online. The film continues to be
debated. Since Mariana sighting, over 100
other UFO sightings have been made in Great Falls, Mt, making
it one of the most active locations for UFO sightings in
North America. I could explain something.
In 2008, the minor League Baseball team in Great Falls was
renamed the Great Falls Voyagers and honor of the Mariana UFO
incident. Wow, that's.
I think that's just a spectacular recording actually
there, I mean they filmed this thing, they got it on film.
And then of course 1950, they trust the government.
So they go ahead and let them have access to this, to this
movie reel and guess what? It comes back incomplete.
Now here's another article on it kind of goes into some more
detail and this is from journal-news.com dot pH.
The title says the strange saga of the Mariana UFO footage and
then this one here has some color pictures of.
It is also a black and white reel of this that's you can get
a link to put this on the Buy me a Coffee website.
As always, thanks to the people that donate over there at the
Buy me a coffee. That's great.
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It helps the program Now. This article is written by Britt
Swanzer, dated August 30th, 2021.
It looks like it might have been reuploaded on the on November
13th, but it says UFO videos and footage have come and gone over
the years, ranging from the somewhat compelling to the
downright obviously fake. In more recent times, the white
availability of Photoshop and other means of document, photos
and footage is made such evidence all but pointless.
But there was a time before the advent of computer trickery when
photos and footage can be taken more at face value and one of
the more astounding of the pieces of footage of a UFO from
the time there's not only one of the earliest films of a UFO but
also one of the most intriguing and off discussed.
It's important to remember this guy.
You have two witnesses here and this little gals with him and
you know he just films it right there in front of her.
So there was no possibility that this film had been doctored.
And it was, it was a movie. So it would have been pretty
nice possible for this guy to really have done that himself.
So I don't think it was ever argued that the film wasn't, you
know, authentically filmed. It was just, it was just the
argument was about the content of the film, what they were
filming. And he says it was UF O's.
He says the first part of that film was missing.
That clearly showed that it was UF O's.
And then of course the military came along later and said no,
those are fighter, fighter planes and which they had to
retract that statement. And then after they retracted,
they reinvestigated and say, well, they must have been
airplanes. Well, this is 1950, You didn't
have the air traffic like you did today.
So obviously the parallel narrative here didn't stick.
It didn't stick the first time. It didn't stick the second time.
Now the author tells us on August 15th, 1950, an unassuming
minor League Baseball manager by the name of Nick Mariana of
Great Falls, Mt was going about a usual day.
On this day he went to the baseball stadium to inspect the
site before a big game for his team, the Great Falls Electrics,
and it was completely routine. No no reason to suspect that the
day was about to get very strange indeed.
He was there with his 19 year old Secretary of Virginia
rounding, and as they went about their inspection at around 11:30
AM, a bright flash in the sky caught Mariana's attention.
When he looked up, he saw two bright silvery objects that
seemed to be rotating and speeding along at an estimated
speed of between 200 and 400 mph, with each of the objects
around 50 feet in diameter. Rounding had seen the strange
objects as well, and for a few moments they just stared in
disbelief. Incredibly, Mariana was able to
overcome his awe and fascination long enough to remember that he
had a 16 millimeter camera back at his car and he ran to get it.
Upon returning to the field, the anonymous objects were still up
there, moving in a formation and keeping a steady distance of
around 50 to 100 feet between them.
Mariana stared up at his camera and was able to take 16 seconds
of collar footage of the mysterious objects which the
very next day was doing the rounds in the news appearing in
the local paper, the Great Falls Tribune, and from there it would
attract a great amount of attention from all over.
The footage went on to get nationwide coverage, with
Mariana further spraying the word through private showings at
various local community groups. At the time, UFO's were a hot
topic, with the late 1940s really kicking off the craze of
the flying saucers and stories about alien invasions all the
rage. So what was being called the
Mariana footage really hit a nerve and sparked much
excitement, controversy and fear.
At the time, the footage was a pretty big deal and then says
you can see some of the footage here and there's a link you can
go to that. It's pretty neat actually.
Now among those who took an interest in the footage was the
US Air Force and the US Air Force Captain John P Brindelson
arrived in Great Falls to interview Mariana on the
incident. He would learn that both of the
witnesses had also seen 2 jet fighters fly over the stadium
shortly after taking the footage, which they has had
assumed to be the military perhaps pursuing the objects.
This was a curious detail as it suggested to Brindleson that
perhaps what they had seen were just the two jets.
He managed to procure a portion of the footage and sent it to
Wright Patterson Air Force Base for analysis, where it was
quickly written off as merely the reflections of the two F 94
fighters. That were officially confirmed
to have been flying over at the time.
However, this explanation did not set well with everyone.
Now I think the author might have made a mistake here.
He says he managed to produce a portion of the footage.
You're not going to send the guy part of the footage, as it was
said in the other article that they sent the footage and
Mariana says hey, I didn't get it all back, you cut off the 1st
3 seconds, which makes sense. In 1952, the United States
government had launched an official investigation into into
unidentified flying objects called Project Blue Book, which
evolved from another study of UFO started in 1949 called
Project Grudge. Although Project Grudge had
agreed that the Mariana footage was just fighter jets, when Air
Force officer Edward J Rupert took the reins of the newly
emitted Project Blue Book, he wasn't so sure, thinking that
perhaps the footage had been written off prematurely.
Interestingly, as all this was going on, Mariana would complain
that sections of the footage he had submitted to the Air Force
were missing, specifically frames which proved that the
objects were rotating or spinning, something the military
denied. Well, pretty clearly he gave him
the film okay and the first part of the film.
That's what those are. First five seconds or so, or
three seconds. That's where he that's where he
has the best shot of these flying saucers.
The rest of the community saw it, but he said yeah, we saw
that he gives the film to the military and it comes back
without the 1st 3 seconds. Now what do you think happened
to it? I mean, come on.
Rupo was not only able to arrange for another more
detailed analysis to be done in the film, but but also get
Mariana's permission to resubmit the footage again.
This time, analysts came back with the conclusion that the
objects seen in the film were not birds, balloons, or meteors.
They also ruled out the original idea that these were just F-94
jets. Ruipol was also able to
ascertain that The Jets were nowhere near the stadium at the
time of the sighting, making it even less likely that they could
have accounted for what was seen in the film.
Whereas the first analysis had quickly explained it all away,
this time the Air Force had no choice, but they can see that it
was an unknown. In 1954, the footage was under
the microscope again when it was used in a UFO documentary for
Green Rouse Productions. The documentary hired a
scientist and engineer for the Douglas Aircraft Company by the
name of ML Baker Junior to take a look at the film.
He also rejected the hypothesis that the objects were
reflections of fighter jets. Baker will conclude in
Congressional hearing on UF O's concerning of the Mariana
footage. It says preliminary analysis
excluded most of the natural phenomena.
More detailed study indicated that the only remaining natural
phenomena candidate for the Utah film was Birds in Flight, and
for the Montana film it was airplane fuselage, reflections
of the sun. After 18 months of other
detailed, albeit not continuous, study using various film
measuring equipment at Douglas and at the UCL and at UCLA, as
well as analysis of photogrammatic experiment, it
appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena
explanations had merit. Now the author tells us that in
the end Baker's in Baker's opinion, the objects were
unknown. For the next decade, the Mariana
footage was much discussed and debated.
And then in 1966, it became the subject of another official
investigation, this time by the Air Force Fund Study of the UFO
Phenomena, based at the University of Colorado Boulder
and run by physicist Doctor Edward U Condon.
This was called the Condon Report.
And the study looked at all manner of UFO reports.
And this time they had their sights set on the Mariana
footage. Condon recruited physicist Dr.
Roy Craig and psychologist Doctor David Sunders to
reexamine the footage and they would come up with mixed
results. Of course, we go through that
again. One of them says, hey, I can't
explain it. And the other one says, well,
this guy, you know, he was their promoter.
Look, nothing has ever been put forward to debunk this footage.
The simple case 1950 simpler times.
This guy, he manages the baseball team.
He's out there on the baseball field, checking the field out
before the game, making sure there's no debris on the field,
whatever, Everything is safe. He looks up.
She's a couple of flying saucers.
He remembers. He's got a he's got an old 16
millimeter or 8 millimeter, whatever it was back in his car,
he runs back. He gets his movie camera, points
it to the sky, starts filming. The 1st 3 seconds of this film
are amazing. You can actually see the flying
saucers very clearly, but then they begin to move across the
sky. After a couple seconds, he got
the film. He has the film developed the
next day at the drugstore, wherever, the camera store,
wherever. He films it out there in Great
Falls and he begins to show it to people.
He takes it to the newspaper. He shows all the local community
groups. This is 1950.
A lot of people didn't even have television yet.
So this is big news. What happens?
Well, one of the newspaper guys gets a hold of somebody in at
Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, says, hey, we got a
video, we've got, well, they wouldn't call them videos back
then. We have a movie of this UFO.
Well, guess what? The Air Force shows up.
Yeah. Can we have a look at that,
please? They take the film.
They return to film later. But the first three seconds were
missing. That's what he says.
What's the Air Force say? No problem.
We don't know what happened to that.
We don't have the film you gave us.
Even though they told one person that they got fifth.
They got what, 8 feet from him? Told somebody else.
I got 15 feet of real. So we see at the very beginning
there was deception involved in acquiring this evidence.
The chain of custody here is cloudy.
The chain of custody here is cloudy as soon as the government
gets involved. In the beginning, you have a guy
with another with a with a young 19 year old girl.
She watches him film the same with his with his little 1950
movie camera. He gets it developed right there
in town. He shows it to a bunch of
people. They all see it.
They say, yeah, this is what we saw and then the government
becomes involved. Hey, let us have a look at that
film he gives in the film. He's very trusting, doesn't even
keep a, doesn't even keep a copy for himself.
The film comes back. It's missing the 1st 3 seconds.
We're supposed to trust the government though, that nothing
happened to that 3 seconds of film.
Yes, that's never happened before with our government has
it? Until this day, people are still
arguing about, even though the parallel, the parallel
narrative, began shortly after that.
Shortly after seeing that film, the government tried to claim
that those were fighter jets. That didn't stand to reason.
So they reinvestigate. We can't explain it.
They reinvestigate. Well, it must have been
airplanes. It's 1950.
We know they weren't airplanes. So this is a classic UFO case
where you've got good evidence from the very beginning.
The evidence is tampered with or destroyed as soon as the
government gets injected into the equation.
And then the parallel narratives just keep piling on, even though
they don't hold up, and 16 years later, they're still trying to
inject parallel narratives on the same That was 1950.
Here we are 70 years later, still trying to inject parallel
narratives into the story. But the truth remains.
Even the video, even the recording that's left over
remains. Clearly not aircraft.
Until next time, this is UFO warning.
Over now.