UFO's Over Monument Valley

Shot with a Mamiya 645 and the 80mm lens, the last six shots on the roll all had a sort of swirly splotch in the sky. The first nine frames were fine. Oddly enough, the splotches are about the same size and shape, and in approximately the same location on each of the frames. There are no other issues anywhere else in the frames. Being the last six frames, these would have been on the outer edge of the reel. The chemicals were Tetenal E6. The batch is fairly fresh, but has had a number of rolls successfully run thru it. I tried re-blixing one frame but it made no difference.

I am firmly convinced these are alien craft which are invisible to the naked eye, but visible on transparency film. Let me be the first to welcome our new robot overlords.

Insects, close to the lens?

Or the alien overlord, of course.

I know a hotel owner in Joshua Tree, Ca. He had Youtube posts he told me to review of his security footage that had proof of UFO activity that many flock to see in and around the national park area. Each video I watched was easy enough to see a spider or other bug crawling across the lens. Obviously it was very distorted for the closeness and could be perceived as whatever an individual envisioned.
As a firm believer that there are others out there whose to say there is not. The USAF Project Blue Book reports had mixed and unexplained events during it's time.
As a good friend told me one time maybe we got here by being dropped off by others. Like, they stopped here in their travels at a rest stop and we broke free from our leashes in the pet area...

I agree, flying insects, motion blurred and well out of focus. NSA could probably deconvolve this and identify whether it was a common fly or something less mundane -- but then they'd have to kill you.

The ghost of John Ford.

Not in front of lens, between lens and film.

I remember "Project Blue Book"....as a pre-teen I went to a flying saucer-oriented convention that centered on it. Got a great hat there, can't find it.... apparently aliens abduct hats.

Stay off the peyote.

BobD said:

The ghost of John Ford.

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...and John Wayne.

Clean your lens and filter

I saw a real UFO quite close and in detail. Had just lifted my head out from under my 8X10 darkcloth, and happened to look up, and there it was right overhead - huge and completely silent. Big bulbous nose like a Star Trek Klingon warship, stubby wings and biggest engines I've ever seen. Fortunately, my nephew was along and got a 35mm snapshot of it. I thought to myself, There goes a billion dollars worth of carbon fiber; and the huge size of the four engines was probably due to them being specially sound muffled, with no vapor trail either. Probably a one-of-a-kind test bomber from the classified base in the desert below, and prior to when they finally settled on the B1 as their production stealth. We were at 11,000 feet at the time, in an area where such tests were known to occur. Could clearly make out the USN logo on it, so Navy funded, not Airforce, which isn't surprising either. There was a special Naval "weather observatory" near the 14,000 summit about ten miles away, linked to a huge field of radar discs way down below, allegedly capable of tracking even stealth craft. Unforgettable.

You need to use a kit with a separate bleach and fixer!

OK, here's my UFO story, such as it is. Some friends and I were driving along at night on a country road, and saw something odd in the night air. We parked the car, and saw several dots of light in a row moving across the sky. Then we noticed what appeared to be obviously a plane that was headed directly towards the string of lights.

Suddenly, all the little lights moved up as one. It was much too quick for any known plane or helicopter. After the plane passed, the lights moved back to where they were, stayed there for several minutes, then quickly got smaller and smaller as they rapidly accelerated away until they disappeared.

But you know, that could have been just about anything, who knows? To me, it's not a real UFO unless there's some hard proof. Otherwise: mushrooms, booze, fatigue etc are probably what happens. Just having a lot of people that see the same thing is not proof either.

Fireflies?

Nevertheless those photos look like a movie scene.

DREW WILEY said:

Big bulbous nose like a Star Trek Klingon warship, stubby wings and biggest engines I've ever seen.

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That's an odd combination. There were a number of bombers and transport aircraft fitted with near-spherical tracking domes, either for laser weapon test installations (about the time the F-117 and B-1 were starting production), but I don't recall any with stubby wings. Big engines implies high bypass turbofans, again common on large transports -- but stubby wings don't fit that category at all. Tempting to suggest it was a helicopter (many attack helicopters have stubby "wings" for mounting weapons, and a spherical tracking unit under the nose), but those are generally quite noisy...

Conventional aerodynamic science cannot be applied to extraterrestrial vehicles.

Donald Qualls said:

That's an odd combination. There were a number of bombers and transport aircraft fitted with near-spherical tracking domes, either for laser weapon test installations (about the time the F-117 and B-1 were starting production), but I don't recall any with stubby wings. Big engines implies high bypass turbofans, again common on large transports -- but stubby wings don't fit that category at all. Tempting to suggest it was a helicopter (many attack helicopters have stubby "wings" for mounting weapons, and a spherical tracking unit under the nose), but those are generally quite noisy...

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Maybe that bulbous plane they used to transport the shuttle on top.

I think the technical term is now UAP instead of UFO. It means "unclear aerial penis," or something...

Your photo fits the description.

Alan Edward Klein said:

Maybe that bulbous plane they used to transport the shuttle on top.

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That was just a 747, every American is likely to recognize those since they started flying in about 1969. And they don't have stubby wings, though a shuttle mounted for transport surely did.

Donald - we knew someone with a high security classification at that time, and it took even him six months to identify the specific craft, given its 35mm picture. These things were tightly under wraps, especially the nature of the special carbon fiber itself, which was made on a high security site out in the middle of Nevada - another "UFO" rumor connection. First of all, that thing was unquestionably a jet plane, and a huge one, but unlike anything else I have ever seen. And it had no resemblance to a 747 or anything involved with the shuttle project. Who knows how many experimental stealth craft might have taken their turn in line for prototype testing? Yeah, I do know of one or two people with the answer, who were employed on that base, but they sure aren't talking. Much of it is still probably classified.

More on the fun side, I was once driving past Rachel Nevada, back when almost nothing was there, even phone service. It was the epicenter of alleged UFO activity, with the big Tonopah desert base and Area 51 further along, and all that alien nonsense. But right above that little trailer house hamlet amidst miles and miles of emptiness, there was a single turban cloud directly overhead, looking just like a stereotypical flying saucer. I sorta recall photographing that coincidence for fun, but haven't been able to relocate the negative. I was more interested in printing a 4x5 long lens shot of wild stallions under a huge impressive thunderhead later in the day, on the fringes of Area 51, where they're quite common but otherwise skittish.

DREW WILEY said:

I saw a real UFO quite close and in detail. Had just lifted my head out from under my 8X10 darkcloth, and happened to look up, and there it was right overhead - huge and completely silent. Big bulbous nose like a Star Trek Klingon warship, stubby wings and biggest engines I've ever seen. Fortunately, my nephew was along and got a 35mm snapshot of it. I thought to myself, There goes a billion dollars worth of carbon fiber; and the huge size of the four engines was probably due to them being specially sound muffled, with no vapor trail either. Probably a one-of-a-kind test bomber from the classified base in the desert below, and prior to when they finally settled on the B1 as their production stealth. We were at 11,000 feet at the time, in an area where such tests were known to occur. Could clearly make out the USN logo on it, so Navy funded, not Airforce, which isn't surprising either. There was a special Naval "weather observatory" near the 14,000 summit about ten miles away, linked to a huge field of radar discs way down below, allegedly capable of tracking even stealth craft. Unforgettable.

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Sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Dreamlifter

Absolutely not, cramej. No resemblance. This was not a big fat loud transport like we routinely see around here, to and from the AFB; and it sure as hell wasn't anything Boeing shiny aluminum. Couldn't hear the thing either coming or going, even though it was only about 200 feet above. It was as if just silently floating overhead. Any other jet could have been heard from 20 miles away in those circumstances. And there wasn't any other noise around to hinder that. I was on a very high desert mountain ridge. Like I already distinctly stated, it was eventually identified per specific model, but as a something highly classified, and probably one of a kind. And back then, aircraft grade carbon fiber was both extremely expensive, and for stealth purposes, itself highly secretive. The strange nose shape and blunt wing profiling was no doubt related to radar detection resistance; but it was not a "bat wing" design like the production Stealths.

Donald Qualls said:

That was just a 747, every American is likely to recognize those since they started flying in about 1969. And they don't have stubby wings, though a shuttle mounted for transport surely did.

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You're right., I was thinking of one of these.

Could it have anything to do with the full moon earlier this week?

My gosh. The thing was directly above us, and in an area known for experimental tests and test pilots. Zero resemblance to big transport planes, space shuttle whatever, or commercial airliners. But if you took a B52 and put a big bulbous nose on it, made the wings way wider and shorter, installed four enormous engines of unthinkable diameter, turned the entire thing into dark gray non-reflective carbon fiber, and made it completely silent and without even a vapor trail, that was my first impression. It was so low and close that we could even instantly identify the Navy logo and read numbers. But the 35mm snapshot itself didn't show those numbers clearly, so it took a lot of time for someone else with a security clearance to re-identify it.

Of course, that had no impact on anything really secret about that plane. They knew at least a few people might be around when they flew overhead. All kinds of general stealth experiments were already known or rumored in common science and aviation magazines; and who knows what actual spies found out? But the specifics were closely guarded secrets. The site of the special carbon fiber manufacture itself, out on the Nevada test range, became infamous for the terrible health effects to the workers, due to the burn pits and general cavalier mentality of the military supervision. And when an early B1-style experimental stealth crashed in Kern River canyon and started a small forest fire, by the time the Forest Service inspection choppers got there, the whole area was already cordoned off by the military, picking up every tiny piece of carbon fiber especially, along with all the rest of it. FS crews weren't even allowed in the perimeter.