Mariana UFO incident

The Mariana UFO Incident occurred in August 1950 in Great Falls, Montana. The film footage of the sighting is believed to be among the first ever taken of what came to be called an unidentified flying object, and was investigated by the US Air Force.

At 11:25 am on August 15, 1950, Nick Mariana, the general manager of the Great Falls Electrics minor-league baseball team, and his nineteen-year-old secretary, Virginia Raunig, were inspecting the empty Legion Stadium baseball field before a game. The Electrics were a farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A bright flash caught Mariana's eye and, according to his reports, he saw two bright silvery objects, rotating while flying over Great Falls at a speed he estimated to be two hundred to four hundred miles per hour. He believed that they were roughly fifty feet wide and one hundred and fifty feet apart. Mariana ran to his car to retrieve his 16 mm movie camera and filmed the UFOs for sixteen seconds. The camera could film the objects in color, but could not record sound. Raunig also witnessed the objects. The day after Mariana's sighting, the Great Falls Tribune, the city's daily newspaper, described his sighting and the film in an article, which was picked up by other media outlets around the nation. For several weeks after the sighting, Mariana showed his film to local community groups, including the Central Roundtable Athletic Club.

After seeing the film, a reporter for the Great Falls Tribune called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and informed them of Mariana's sighting and film. U.S. Air Force Captain John P. Brynildsen interviewed Mariana at nearby Malmstrom AFB outside of Great Falls. When Mariana and Ms. Raunig both told him that they had seen two jet fighters pass over the baseball stadium shortly after the sighting, Brynildsen felt that perhaps the jets were the objects Mariana had seen and captured on film. With Mariana's permission, Capt. Brynildsen sent the film to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis. He told a reporter in Great Falls that he had "picked up about eight feet of film from Mariana." However, in his message to Wright-Patterson he said that he was sending "approximately fifteen feet of moving picture film" to the base for study. According to UFO historian Jerome Clark, this discrepancy was never cleared up.

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Wikipedia