Film Analysis of Unidentified Objects, 1950, 1952 — Department of War File
This file contains a memorandum relating to the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center’s assessment of two films allegedly depicting unidentified airborne objects, captured in Montana and Utah in 1950 and 1952, respectively. The file documents the Center’s analytic process, assumptions…
Incident Overview
In 1950 and 1952, in Montana, Utah, the Department of War preserved a documentary record that was declassified and published on August 7, 2026 as part of the fifth tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
What the government released
This file contains a memorandum relating to the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center’s assessment of two films allegedly depicting unidentified airborne objects, captured in Montana and Utah in 1950 and 1952, respectively. The file documents the Center’s analytic process, assumptions that constrained its confidence level, tentative conclusions, and recommendations for future research. The Center assessed, generally, that the objects depicted in the film demonstrated characteristics that were inconsistent with those of natural phenomena or commonly known aerospace technologies. The memorandum documents the Center’s recommendation for a more well-resourced investigation to corroborate its presumptive findings, citing a lack of funding and personnel. The accompanying charts compare the film’s luminosity with the apparent angular size of the phenomena, using contemporary mathematical modeling and photogrammetric analysis techniques.
Primary-source excerpt
Drawn directly from the released document: “Although they presented certain natural phenomena theories to explain the cause of the objects under certain conditions they were not able to do so under the conditions during which the photography was taken, nor were they able to recognize these objects as man made.”
The case in this archive
This document is a primary source for the Great Falls film of 1950, the Tremonton film of 1952, and the Robertson Panel that reviewed them, written up here at length from the contemporary record. The file and the case history are worth reading against each other: the document is narrower and more cautious than the account that grew up around it, which is usually the point.
Status of the case
This is an archival document, and it should be read as one. It records what a particular office believed, or was willing to commit to paper, on the day it was written — not a present-day finding. The mid-century investigations worked from witness testimony, sparse instrumentation, and the strategic anxieties of the early Cold War, and the great majority of the sightings they catalogued were eventually attributed to aircraft, balloons, astronomical objects, and misidentification. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no modern determination about the incidents described here, and the document’s release is not an endorsement of the conclusions inside it. Its value is as evidence of how the United States government investigated the question, and of what it chose to keep.