On August 15, 1950, a couple in Great Falls, Montana—Nick Mariana and his secretary (then girlfriend)—were preparing to play mini-golf. But that afternoon, something even stranger happened: they captured what is considered the first color UFO photo in human history.

📍 Location	📅 Date	🔍 Category
Great Falls, Montana, USA	1950-08-15	Photographic Evidence

Nick Mariana, general manager of the Great Falls baseball team, was filming the area around the ballpark with a 16mm color movie camera that day. When his lens turned to the sky, he spotted two shiny silver objects flying overhead at high speed. He immediately aimed the camera at these objects and captured about 16 seconds of color footage.

He described the objects as “perfectly round,” with no visible wings or tail fins, looking like “two saucers stacked together.” They made no sound at all, streaked across the sky at an estimated speed exceeding 500 miles per hour, and then suddenly vanished at an angle that “defied physics.”

Mariana promptly submitted the film to the U.S. Air Force for analysis. However, investigators from the Air Force’s Project Blue Book gave conflicting assessments of the footage—some analysts believed it was genuine, while others argued it was merely sunlight reflecting off birds or aircraft.

In the 1960s, renowned UFO researchers Dr. James McDonald and Dr. J. Allen Hynek re-examined the film. McDonald conducted precise optical analysis using modern methods, concluding that “the flight path and speed of the objects in the film cannot be explained by any known aircraft.” Although Hynek was typically cautious, he acknowledged that this case “deserves serious consideration.”

Today, Mariana’s original 16mm film remains preserved in UFO research archives, one of the very few pieces of UFO video evidence that has been seriously studied by mainstream academia. Although NASA’s 2023 UAP research team did not directly review this footage, its existence serves as a constant reminder to the scientific community: the UFO phenomenon is not new—it has been seriously documented at least since the 1950s.

📚 Sources

• Project Blue Book, “Mariana Film Analysis” (1950), U.S. Air Force
• McDonald, J.E. “A Critical Analysis of the Mariana Film” (1966), AIAA Paper
• Ruppelt, E. “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” (1956), Doubleday