Today in UFO History
- worldwideufohistor
- Aug 15
- 2 min read
August 15, 1950 - Great Falls, Montana, USA:
The Mariana UFO Incident
The Mariana UFO Incident, also known as the Great Falls UFO Film, is one of the earliest and most important UFO cases involving motion-picture footage. It occurred on August 15, 1950, in Great Falls, Montana, when Nicholas “Nick” Mariana, general manager of the Great Falls Electrics minor-league baseball team, reportedly filmed two brilliant objects crossing the daytime sky.
At about 11:30 a.m., Mariana was inspecting the empty Legion Stadium when a bright flash caught his attention. Looking upward, he saw two intensely luminous, silvery objects moving together across the sky. He described them as appearing like polished metal and said they were rotating or otherwise changing their reflective appearance as they traveled.
Mariana quickly retrieved a 16-mm movie camera from his car and managed to film the objects before they disappeared into the distance. The resulting color footage shows two bright, roughly circular points of light traveling steadily across a blue sky, sometimes passing behind foreground structures as Mariana attempted to follow them with the camera.
The film soon attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force, which investigated it through Project Grudge, the predecessor of Project Blue Book. Air Force investigators initially proposed that Mariana had probably filmed two F-94 jet fighters known to have been in the area. Mariana rejected this explanation, insisting that the objects looked nothing like aircraft and that no wings, fuselages, tails, or conventional aircraft shapes were visible.
The case became more controversial because Mariana claimed that when the Air Force returned his film, a portion of the original footage was missing. According to Mariana, the missing frames were the clearest part of the film and showed the objects at their largest, including their apparent rotating or metallic appearance. The Air Force disputed the implication that important footage had been deliberately removed.
The surviving film was subsequently examined several times. Analysts considered conventional explanations including aircraft, balloons, reflections, and optical effects, but the case remained disputed. The Air Force eventually classified the objects as aircraft, while later UFO researchers argued that the photographic evidence did not conclusively support that identification.
The footage received even greater exposure when portions appeared in the 1956 documentary Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers. Along with the later 1952 Tremonton, Utah film, Mariana's footage became one of the best-known pieces of early cinematic UFO evidence.
More than 75 years later, the Mariana film remains historically significant not because it conclusively proves what crossed the Montana sky, but because it represents an unusually early case in which an unexplained aerial sighting was captured on color motion-picture film and subsequently subjected to official military analysis.
Comments