Tremonton's UFO (1952)
Happy Halloween Kolobians.
In nineteen fifty-two it seemed the citizens of the United States could hardly look into the sky without seeing a UFO. It had only been a few short years since Kenneth Arnold’s iconic flying saucer sighting and P-51 pilots were chasing orbs through the clouds, fleets of unidentified craft were invading D.C. airspace, and scores of amateur sighting reports were being shared in dozens of publications.
The military and intelligence services wanted to find out what the hell was going on. If they were aliens, it would be one of the most important (and dangerous) discoveries in human history. If they were Soviet airplanes the philosophical implications would be less profound, but the danger not lessened. Nuclear missile technology was still its infancy, leaving high-altitude bombers as the only delivery system for atomic weapons. Unimpeded airspace interdictions could portend an impending Soviet aerial strike.
To investigate, the United States Air Force started Project Blue Book, an attempt to systematize UFO reports and through that synthesize a consensus about the nature of the phenomenon. In 1953, one year after the program started, the Central Intelligence Agency convened the Robertson Panel to analyze the Air Force’s findings up to that point.Â
The CIA gathered some of the top minds in the field and poured over the most compelling sightings from Project Blue Book. Many of them were written reports, but the panel was drawn to two film strips of UFO sightings. One of them was captured over Tremonton, Utah.
The date was July 2nd, 1952. Navy Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse was driving with his wife from Washington D.C. to Portland, Oregon. As they approached the otherworldly landscape of the Great Salt Lake and its saline flats, Mrs. Newhouse pointed at some strange objects in the sky and asked Officer Newhouse to pull over the car.
When the couple stopped, they watched as a formation of a dozen shining objects wheeled about without a discernible pattern, other than the fact that they were slowly proceeding westward. Newhouse quickly opened the trunk of his car and grabbed his Kodachrome film camera. Miraculously, he was able to capture the objects for a few seconds before the film ran out. Then, as suddenly as the objects appeared, they faded into the sky. Click here to see the full 46-second film.
Realizing he had filmed something interesting, Newhouse developed the film and shipped it off to Hill Air Force Base, the sprawling air maintenance depot north of Salt Lake City. From there, the film found its way into the hands of Project Blue Book and eventually the Robertson Panel.Â
While on first glance the footage seemed compelling — it was, afterall, a moving picture in the era where UFO images were often grainy, out-of-focus, and without color — it did not take long for the panel to dismiss the sighting as a natural occurrence.
For one, it was impossible to tell how big the objects were or what altitude they were at. Newhouse would later claim that the objects were much lower in altitude before he started filming and were roughly the shape of a B-29 bomber. That would mean they climbed up to around 10,000 feet in the time between Newhouse first sighting them and starting his film. However, we would just have to take his word on that. The film could have just as easily shown small objects at a lower altitude.
This is ultimately the conclusion drawn by the Robertson Panel. After careful analysis, they concluded that the movie actually showed a flock of seagulls. Above a certain altitude, their white feathers would give off a strong glare. As they wheeled in the sky, they would seem like they were changing shape and could even look like they mysteriously vanished depending on the viewing angle.
Prosaic as a flock as seagulls might seem, it was not the first time seagulls had caused a paranormal myth to emerge in Utah. Visitors to the state have probably noticed the oddly common seagull motifs adorning every official building or location. It’s a weird thing for a landlocked state without any ocean access; you’d think a California gull would be a symbol more readily associated with, well… California. The iconography is not about ties to the water, but rather about a purported miracle that occurred in the first year of the Mormon colonization of Utah.
When the pioneers arrived in 1847 they followed the consistent hubris of American westward settlement, electing not to learn from the agricultural techniques of the indigenous people, instead attempting to import modes of production from the breadbasket states of the Midwest. Crops failed, land yielded little, and no experiments in cultish communal living could change the harsh realities of Mountain West life.
Most devastating were the bugs: the Mormon cricket. These gross little pests are endemic throughout the Wasatch front. For most of their existence they live in low-density groups scattered uniformly throughout the ranges. But occasionally they swarm together like a Biblical plague.
That’s what happened in 1848. The crickets can’t fly, but they can crawl, and suddenly a mass of the creepy insects covered the soil and started munching on the crops. It was a disaster. Faced with famine, the leaders prayed for God to abate the plague and keep the saints alive.
Suddenly, their prayers seemed to be answered. That June, a flock of seagulls descended out of the sky and began eating the crickets. As the legend goes, the seagulls weren’t even swallowing the bugs. They would swoop down, kill them with their beaks, throw up the remains, and go back for more. Ornithologists will recognize this as fairly common bird behavior, and it does leave one wondering how the pioneers would have been able to recognize that an individual seagull had done this. But whatever the case, the seagulls had saved the day, keeping the crops alive through the harvest season.
From that point on it was called the Miracle of the Gulls, and seagulls are portrayed everywhere throughout the state. The Miracle is touted as proof that God wanted the Saints to settle Utah and would do anything in his power to keep his people safe. Less well-known among church members is that the same thing happened every year after that. It is, after all, pretty normal behavior for crickets and birds.
Newhouse’s sighting could be seen as a 20th century iteration of the miracle on a small scale, filtered through the lens of 50s UFO paranoia. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe it wasn’t seagulls, but not UFOs, because it is very interesting that Newhouse mentioned B-29s when he described his sighting.
In the direction he was facing there is very little besides open desert and salt flats. On the other side of the expanse of dirt is Wendover, a dual town straddling the Utah - Nevada border. This town has an Air Force Base. During World War II it was used to train bomb crews, letting them practice their attack runs far away from habited areas, just in case things went wrong.Â
The most important unit training there was the 509th Composite Group. Their role was so secret that every other unit was removed from the base before the 509th’s gleaming B-29 bombers started touching down. The 509th was formed for only one mission: dropping the atomic bomb over Japan. Throughout the last years of the war, Tibbets and his crew flew their shining bomber through the Utah skies, preparing to unleash nuclear horror on a population for the first time.
While World War II ended soon afterwards, the testing out in the desert sands did not. Throughout the Cold War, the military flew their secret aviation programs through the skies. Cutting-edge machines like the U-2 and A-12 traveled over Utah, and presumably some of them caused UFO sightings. The desert was used for open-air chemical and bomb tests. Rocket engines were developed in alcoves hidden from the public. Radiation leaked into the atmosphere. There were a lot of spooky things going on. Did Newhouse accidently capture some sort of test? We will probably never know. It probably was seagulls, but you just have to wonder.
Undeterred by the Robertson Panel, Newhouse turned his footage into a documentary, becoming one of the first UFO documentaries.Â
As for Utah: strange lights continued to fly through the sky while the predominant religion taught that the cosmos were inhabited by divine extraterrestrial life living on a complicated hierarchy of planets.