A bizarre photograph from my youth -- has anyone else ever heard of something similar?

When I was a kid, 5 or 6 I think, my father showed me a strange photo and told me the very weird story behind it. It was an aerial picture taken from the back of his friend's two-man biplane of my grandparents's home, something he was taking just because he thought it would be interesting to have aerial photos of the area around their home. Most of it was just a standard aerial photograph, but in the upper left corner of the photograph was something that I've still never seen a credible explanation for to this day. There appeared to be something flying beneath their plane, something that I've struggled to describe in my own words and have always fallen back on my father's description of, that being the appearance of some sort of covered wagon floating in the sky, covered in a dark green aura. It looked like no aircraft I have ever seen in my entire life, but it had a striking level of detail that could be made out, that would have been remarkable if it was possible to decipher what on Earth I was actually seeing. Neither my father nor his friend saw anything in the sky that day, and they had no idea what was on their camera film until they had them processed the day afterward.

Unfortunately, the photograph was lost by the time I was 9 or 10 due to us moving house. My father swore until his dying day that it vanished under mysterious circumstances and that there was nowhere it could have gone, but my family has always been terribly disorganized and I don't find it hard to believe it merely got lost in the shuffle at some point. I would love to try and track down any other copies of the photo that may have existed of it, but considering the fact that both my father and the pilot that day are both long dead now, and I know nothing about the other man, not even his name, the possibility of me finding another copy of said picture seems like a lost cause. But what strikes me about this particular image is that, in all of my browsing of UFO encounters, photographs, sketches, et cetera, I have never before encountered anything that was in any way similar to the object I saw in that photograph, nor any with such bizarre detail.

I know that the story's nothing more than a story without the picture in question, but that's irrelevant -- I really just want to know if anybody else has ever heard of or seen anything similar, because it's something that's bothered me since I was little more than a wee one.

a reply to: DavidDuchovny


Could you do a sketch of what it looked like and post it for us?

a reply to: DavidDuchovny

Year the photo was taken and approximate location?

a reply to: carewemust

I don't know the exact year, but it was before I was born, sometime around the early to mid 80s, and it was taken over Orefield, Pennsylvania, just outside of the Allentown/Bethlehem area.

a reply to: DavidDuchovny
If nobody actually saw the object, then one has to wonder what shows up could be an artifact of some sort in the processing. There are a lot of Apollo photos of the moon with some kind of "UFO" or "thing" in them which is apparently due to something in the camera itself, so that is a case where the astronaut photographers would not have seen the thing. It was apparently some kind of contamination, and it formed a detailed shape, to me it looks like it might be a dead bug. Other types of imaging defects might not show as much detail, like bubbles on the negative during processing but those or other blemishes on film did happen and sometimes people wondered what the object was in the sky that they didn't notice when taking the photo, it was a processing blemish.

This report talks about such a possibility from a 1981 UFO case and other UFO cases in general when the photographer or other witnesses didn't see the UFO at the time the photo was taken:

www.scientificexploration.org...

there was some concern that a film defect or blemish may have been introduced during processings, and there was considerable discussion concerning the crucial point that an object that had appeared on the photograph was apparently not seen by the photographer or by her companions. The picture was taken with a single-lens reflex camera, which means that the object must have been in the field of view of the viewing screen as the photograph was being taken.

a reply to: KansasGirl



I'm no artist by any definition of the word, but that's about what I recall. It had an irregularly shaped top, one that looked oddly cloth-like in texture, with a lower base attached beneath it, and flowing 'frills' of a sort towards the front and back. There were dark-colored stripes going across the entirety of the top part, and it was cloaked in that green aura I described. I hope this helps somewhat -- the picture I drew makes it look like an attack by the Killer Hamburger People from Pluto

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'm a true and through skeptic at heart, and my father had a lifelong love of photography that he in part passed down to me -- I'm very much aware of what camera blemishes and film defects look like. There was a shocking, incredible level of detail to this object, and every other picture taken with that same roll of film came out completely fine.

My father scoffed at the idea what I brought it up to him, but the idea that I always had as a kid was that the sort of "aura" around it was some kind of cloaking field that made it invisible to the naked eye, but the process of capturing the photograph mixed with whatever other factors may have been at play that day, the reflection of the sun, the altitude, maybe just a very lucky moment to have taken the shot, allowed the camera to capture an image of it.

If it was some sort of blemish or film defect, it was one of the strangest I have ever seen.

5 or 6 years old.

That's pretty young to be depending upon a memory.

a reply to: Phage

5 or 6 was simply when the story was first relayed to me -- I viewed the photograph many times in the ensuing 3-4 years. It fascinated me, and I spent a lot of trying to come up with ideas about what it was when I was a kid.

a reply to: DavidDuchovny

Ah.

Your drawing doesn't look much like a covered wagon, in any case, but it does remind me of one of these:

Probably not one.

a reply to: Phage

See, I'm a horrible artist, so it gives the impression that the frill-like things were on the sides of it, when they were further down on the lower side of it. The upper part was much more concave than I how I drew it as well, but it's a difficult thing to draw. The shape was very irregular as I've said.

a reply to: DavidDuchovny

This reminds me of something similar to what Bob Lazar drew, alleging it depicted one of 9 ETV's held at the alleged S4 base at Papoose Lake (13 mi. south of Area 51)

I think he called it an Amoeba craft or "fuzzy" craft

I will see if I can find his drawings and see if it looks anything like what you are trying to remember

originally posted by: DavidDuchovny
a reply to: carewemust

I don't know the exact year, but it was before I was born, sometime around the early to mid 80s, and it was taken over Orefield, Pennsylvania, just outside of the Allentown/Bethlehem area.

I see lots of info on ghosts and other paranormal activities around Orefield, but nothing about UFO's in the early to mid 1980's. In 1974 there was a big UFO story nearby.
www.ignaciodarnaude.com...

a reply to: DavidDuchovny

Could it be something lightweight floating on the wind? It reminds me of those old style bonnets women used to wear. Mayhe blown off a clothesline and made from some green fabric with frills?

Or just a piece of some other lightweight material?

If nobody on the plane saw it, I guess it must have been pretty small.

I know this is the boring explanation.

a reply to: beetee

It was VERY large in the photograph -- roughly the size of a quarter on the 6x4 print it was on. It didn't look like something that was blowing in the wind. It was very uniform in its consistency, and did not look wind-ruffled at all. By "green aura", I do not mean it was simply faintly green colored -- it looked literally like the thing was surrounded by this uniformly colored dark-green forcefield. I don't like describing it like that because it makes an already difficult to believe story even more incredulous, but that's what it looked like to me. It was inside of this jade-green shield.

Frankly, the only logical explanation I've come up with to explain it without it being some freak coincidence unbelievable blemish or printing error is that it was an invisible aircraft, but that's barely logical because it looks like no other aircraft I've ever seen.

originally posted by: DavidDuchovny
a reply to: KansasGirl

I'm no artist by any definition of the word, but that's about what I recall. It had an irregularly shaped top, one that looked oddly cloth-like in texture, with a lower base attached beneath it, and flowing 'frills' of a sort towards the front and back. There were dark-colored stripes going across the entirety of the top part, and it was cloaked in that green aura I described. I hope this helps somewhat -- the picture I drew makes it look like an attack by the Killer Hamburger People from Pluto

AWESOME!! Thanks for drawing it for us! Interesting. The dark green aura detail is pretty fascinating too. Hopefully this visual will help us to suss this mystery out.

ETA: The flowing frills down the side of the thing sounds like a fish. I'm not saying it was a fish OBVIOUSLY, but just that it made me think of fish and how they "breathe" by water flowing through them by way of the gills/frills.

a reply to: DavidDuchovny
The aura could be consistent with some type of blemish, for example a bubble could cause distortions around where the edges of the bubble were.

Anyway this "UFO" was photographed by the Costa Rica government which likely rules out a hoax.
It reminds me of your story, in that it was photographed from an airplane and nobody in the airplane saw it. Also there were photos taken 20 seconds before and 20 seconds after this and nothing unusual appeared in either one of those photos so someone estimated the object would have to have been traveling at supersonic speeds to only appear in this photo and not the others. Therefore a real physical object should have made a sonic boom, but it didn't, so it's unlikely to be a real physical object, but nobody has figured out what it is to this day, that I know of.

Location: Lago de Cote, Costa Rica
Date: September 4th, 1971

UFO photos: Lago de Cote

originally posted by: DavidDuchovny
a reply to: carewemust

I don't know the exact year, but it was before I was born, sometime around the early to mid 80s, and it was taken over Orefield, Pennsylvania, just outside of the Allentown/Bethlehem area.

Perhaps the film was archived in your area. Vintage Aerial has quite a collection spanning back 50 years. Please not this quote from their site.

Please understand, however, that while our process is state-of-the-art, the photograph itself was taken with a film camera by a person in a small plane, up to 50 years ago. We do not retouch or sharpen the image. The art of each photo lies in part in its untouched authenticity.

Just thought I would toss out a possibility. In searching for our own vintage aerial photos, I discovered one of the oldest but there was a distinct and distracting blemish artifact on the film, so we chose one that did not have that distortion. Yet, it was there in archive as the original.

Perhaps, you would be able to locate the photo you speak of with image artifact as well.

a reply to: DavidDuchovny

I lived in Potter County PA in the 70's and our neighbors had a UFO land in their cow field. The local newspaper had pictures of the landing site and interviews with many locals who saw the lights. We had seen lights many nights before but didn't realize what we had possibly seen. Maybe the paper can help you locate some info? I think it is now the leader-enterprise out of Coudersport PA
Good Luck with your search!
MP

a reply to: DavidDuchovny

Thanks for the interesting story.

Reminds me of the UK's Nick Pope story of having the best UFO photo he'd ever seen (from the 1990 'Calvine' case in the Scottish Highlands, and not seen by the public aside from a newspaper editor who liaised with the MoD) displayed over his 'UFO desk' at the Ministry Of Defence... only for it to disappear years later and never to be seen again - aside from a very, VERY bad photocopy on FOIA files.

An artist's impression of the original:



And the crappy photocopy:




Frustrating, eh?

By the way, did your father specifically show you this photo, or did you have to point it out whilst perusing an entire set of pics? I assume the former.

And did he or his friend ever show it to anybody else? I'm assuming he didn't approach the USAF.