Trementon, Utah: The controversial Delbert Newhouse film of 1952.

It happened around 11:10 a.m, on July 2, 1952. Delbert C. Newhouse, a U.S. Navy chief petty officer and a noted aerial photographer, was driving along on a highway about 7 miles north of Trementon, Utah, when his wife noticed something strange in the sky. He pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out of the car. At an estimated 10,000 foot altitude he could see 12 to 14 strange objects, shaped like “two pie pans, one inverted on top of the other,” clustered in a loose formation, just “milling around.” By the time that Newhouse had unpacked his 16-mm movie camera with telephoto lens the objects were farther away, little more than shiny points of light. He took 75 seconds of film (some 1200 frames) of the objects. While the mysterious shiny objects moved off and disappeared in the western sky, one of them had broken from the group and disappeared in the east.

The film was studied initially by the Photo-Reconnaissance Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. According to Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book at that time, the lab reported that the objects in the Newhouse film were not airplane nor balloons, and they didn’t think they were birds. After this a frame-by-frame analysis was done by the U.S. Navy’s Photo Interpretation Laboratory in Anacostia, Maryland. They reportedly concluded that changes in the lights’ intensity, as well as other aspects, eliminated in their minds the possibility that the “objects” were conventional aircraft or birds.

A few years later, in 1955, Robert M. L. Baker, Jr., a recognized computer and aeronautical scientist with Douglas Aircraft Company, was asked to re-analyze the footage. He even re-interviewed Newhouse, who described to Baker how when he first stepped out of the car the objects were directly overhead. In fact, he stated that they were “gun metal colored objects shaped like two saucers, one inverted on top of the other.”

By 1956, the Air Force decided to re-analyze the film (which that year had been shown in a UFO documentary produced by Greene-Rouse Motion Picture Studios), and decided the objects were simply seagulls. This, in fact, was what viewers of the film had felt was the explanation as voiced at the CIA sponsored Robertson Panel meeting in Washington, D.C., back in January 1953.

Years later, The Condon Committee came to side with the Robertson Panel’s verdict on the Newhouse film.

But Capt. Ruppelt felt Newhouse was very credible and kept an open mind about the story. He noted that when he questioned Newhouse sometime later about the sea gull explanation, Newhouse pointed out that when he and his family first got out of their car, the objects were then much closer and they were plainly seen as disk-shaped objects. They were certainly not birds.

The Navy photo analysts had spent an estimated 1000 hours studying the Newhouse footage, while the Robertson Panel was a 12-hour discussion panel, which reviewed a lot of other things in addition to that particular film. It certainly sounds as though the Panel evaluation of the film was hardly a true scientific evaluation of that matter.

Reference:

The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning. Vol. 2:L-Z. Second Edition, by Jerome Clark. Omnigraphics, Inc. 1998. ISBN: 0-7808-0097-4.