Grand Blane, MichiganFebruary 1960

On February 13, 1960, a man in Grand Blanc, Michigan photographed what he thought might be an unidentified flying object when he was taking pictures of the moon through a homemade telescope. After the film was developed, he noticed blue-colored spots on some of the slides that had not been visible to him through the telescope. He said he had over thirty years of photography experience and believed the object was real, not a camera malfunction or a developing error.

The photographs eventually reached the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which forwarded them to the Air Force for analysis. The Air Force's Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center examined the slides carefully using magnifying equipment and the naked eye. The examiners found that only one slide contained anything unusual: several blue-colored areas, with one being more obvious than the others. However, the Air Force concluded that these blue spots were not real objects. Instead, experts believed they were damage to the photographic film (called the emulsion) that occurred during the developing process. The spots were likely caused by contamination from some foreign material during development, and when viewed from certain angles, they showed clear indentations consistent with film damage.

The Air Force made a point of noting that if the spot had actually been a spacecraft near the moon, it would have been approximately 21 miles long and 6.5 miles wide, which seemed implausible. They returned the slides to the photographer and concluded there was no evidence of an unidentified flying object. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, spanning 15 pages of microfilm.