United States Navy photographer who took the Tremonton Film 1952. His own statement puts him about 7 miles north of Tremonton, Utah, at 1110 on 2 July 1952, with a handheld Bell & Howell Automaster and 3 inch telephoto lens at 16 frames per second. His wife noticed the objects first; he saw about ten or twelve milling about in a rough formation and exposed approximately thirty feet of 16mm Kodachrome. He sent the roll to the commanding officer at Hill Air Force Base on 11 August 1952, on the letterhead of the Aviation Supply Depot, Naval Supply Center, Oakland. The Air Force kept the original; in March 1954 the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center wrote that it had never held it and did not know where it was.
PURSUE Release 06 publishes the Navy’s own file on him, DOW-UAP-D104, 585 pages kept by the Bureau of Naval Personnel from 1942 to 1964, which never mentions the film. It places him at Oakland from February 1952 as assistant stock control officer for photographic materials, and on charged leave from 19 June to 7 July 1952, the date of the sighting included; neither leave form has a line for where he went. It traces his photographic career from the Naval School of Photography at Pensacola in 1935 through aerial mapping and motion picture work, and in 1948 and 1949 a tour at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as the Bureau of Aeronautics’ liaison with the Air Materiel Command for buying photographic items. It holds his own 1943 statement of approximately one thousand hours in the air on photographic missions, attached to a request the Navy refused; the Air Force recorded the same claim, over 1,000 hours, in 1952.
His rank moves across the records: Chief Photographer, a commissioned warrant rank, in the Navy’s papers; CPO in the Air Force’s; Chief Warrant Officer in the official description of the film transfer DOW-UAP-PR159. The personnel file is released unredacted, family names and home addresses included; this entry repeats none of it.
Connections
Tremonton Film 1952 · PURSUE · U.S. Navy · Naval Photographic Interpretation Center · Project Blue Book · Air Technical Intelligence Center · Wright-Patterson Air Force Base · Air Materiel Command