Great Falls, Mont., August 1950August 1950

Around 11:30 a.m. on August 15, 1950, Nicholas Mariana, the general manager of the Great Falls Selectrics, a minor-league baseball team in Great Falls, Montana, was checking the wind at Legion Ball Park when he noticed two bright, silvery objects in the western sky. He called over his secretary, Virginia Raunig, who confirmed the sighting, and then ran to his car for the 16mm Revere movie camera he kept there.

Mariana captured roughly sixteen seconds of color footage of the two objects as they crossed the sky from west to east at high altitude before disappearing behind a water tower on the horizon. He later described them as round, metallic, and rotating, holding a constant distance from each other as they moved. Raunig corroborated the visual sighting but did not appear in the footage. The film was the first widely-circulated motion-picture evidence of unidentified aerial objects in the United States.

Mariana sent the film to the U.S. Air Force for analysis. Project Grudge, the institutional predecessor to Project Blue Book, returned its initial assessment that the objects were two F-94 Starfire jets from the nearby Great Falls Air Force Base, with sunlight reflecting off their canopies as they entered a landing pattern. Mariana publicly disputed the explanation, noting that two F-94s had landed at the base several minutes before he began filming, and that the objects he captured were behaving unlike conventional aircraft on approach.

When the film was eventually returned to Mariana, he reported that the first thirty to thirty-five frames were missing, including the portion he said showed the objects most clearly. The Air Force denied removing any frames and stated that the film was returned in the same condition received. The dispute over the missing footage became a central point of the case in subsequent civilian investigations and Congressional inquiries during the 1960s and 1970s.

Project Blue Book ultimately reclassified the Mariana film as "unknown," reversing the F-94 reflection conclusion after extended photogrammetric review by the Air Force's photographic technical unit at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The case file documents the full back-and-forth between Mariana, his attorney, and Air Force investigators across the early 1950s, as well as later requests from civilian researchers, journalists, and Senate offices seeking copies of the footage and the lab analyses.

The full case file (113 scanned pages of original correspondence, photogrammetric analyses, Air Force technical reports, and follow-up inquiries) is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.