June 1945 - The Curious Case Of The Jack LeMonde UFO Photo

 

 

Photo of Jack LeMonde on horseback, 1945... and a strange 'visitor' in the distance

 

 

This is one of those UFO cases that leaves you scratching your head. Jack LeMonde was photographed on horseback near the Pickwick Riding stables in Burbank, California on a June morning in 1945. LeMonde was in full military uniform, having served in the South Pacific with the US Marine Corps. But something strange appeared in the photo, once developed. Dismissed at first as a defect, closer examination revealed rather detailed structure. The second thought was that perhaps the peculiar object floating in the sky behind LeMonde was some kind of street lamp, and the bright background had merely obscured the lamp pole, or perhaps it even hung from one of the power lines which are not visible in the photo, but assumedly run right along that same direction. But what kind of light fixture is attached directly to a power-line like that? No one could recall such an ornate street light or one like it, much less one that attached to a power-line. There was definitely something very strange about this object.

 

One can see in the second photo example, that there is some kind of building behind LeMonde to the left with an arched, decorative facade, probably an art deco gateway of some kind or perhaps a sign. But the strange object must be considerably farther away from LeMonde than the building judging by the graininess, suggesting certain distance. That would mean if it were a street lamp of some kind hanging from the powerline, it would be closer to LeMonde than the building, not farther away (or at best, of almost equal distance), and it is large enough that it would not appear grainy, like something considerably distant. Judging by the graininess and black levels of the telephone pole and trees in the far lower right of the photo, it appears to be almost equal in visual intensity with these very distant objects, if not more so.

 

Upper right: Part of an archway or perhaps a sign. Red lines indicate angle
of power/phone lines if they run along the roadside

 

 

The photo shows absolutely no indication of power or phone lines, poles or any kind of extension to explain the suspended object. It is very likely that the power/phone lines of the pole in the far right distance stop there and do not cross in font of where LeMonde and the horses are positioned, since there is not even the faintest trace of them anywhere in the image. Additionally, Pickwick stables was located in a very rural area, so limited power and phone lines would be likely, and ornate lighting fixtures very unlikely. In fact, using high contrast adjustment and a Photoshop tool to 'find edges' no immediately apparent, a distinct powerline or phoneline can be seen in the upper left portion of the picture, but clearly not related to the strange object whatsoever. One has to wonder why this phone or power line is visible, and the others invisible? Surely there would be some trace.

This mysterious object in the sky is very reminiscent of the Sutton photo of 1932, another case of a distinct and rather elaborate looking UFO, unseen at the time of the taking of the photo, yet photographed in a place where no such light fixture would have been; though many, upon seeing the photo, automatically assumed that is what it must be. In the Sutton case, even more so, as the image was taken along a very rural road, and the height of such a fixture, and judging the distance from the man in the photo, would make it truly enormous. Again, the black levels and grain of the object contrasted with foreground objects clearly places it at great height and considerable distance, with no trace of wire, line or pole.

 

Street Lamps On Power Lines

 

From the skeptical point of view, however, there is the simple possibility that a street lamp, fairly common in the 20s and 30s, hanging from power or trolley lines, is the object in question and the line/wire is simply not visible in the photograph(s). Though this is far more unlikely in the extremely rural Sutton photo, it is reasonably likely in the LeMonde image. Here are some examples of such lamps, which do bear a striking resemblence, if not virtually identical give or take a few very minor features:

 

 

 

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For more detailed information and analysis of the LeMonde UFO photo, see...
http://www.nidsci.org/news/lemonde.php

 

 

June 21, 1947 - Pre-Arnold/Pre-Roswell UFO Fleet Encounter

 

It was approximately 2pm when Harold A. Dahl, the captain of a coastguard patrol based on Tacoma, Washington, had his amazing UFO sighting.

 

Dahl and his crew of U.S. coastguards were patrolling the southern end of Puget Sound, Washington - a place abundant with islands and fjords - when they put the launch into an eastern bay off Maury Island, a small, thinly populated island some three miles from the mainland.

 

At the time there were two members of Dahl's crew, his son and a dog on board. As they entered the bay, Dahl looked up from the wheel and was startled to see "six very large doughnut-shaped machines" in the air. He judged them to be approximately 2000 feet up, virtually overhead, stationary and silent.

 

Intelligent Balloons?

Initially he thought they were balloons until one decided to descend, followed by the other five. This lone machine seemed to be in trouble. Dahl though - although the others closely followed it at a range of approximately 200 feet above.

 

It continued on a downwards movement until it was directly overhead, about 500 feet above the water. They remained totally silent and Dahl couldn't see any visible means of propulsion - they didn't appear to have any engines.

 

Metallic Craft

Dahl reckoned they were each about 100 feet in diameter and each had a hole in its center, about 25 feet in diameter. The clouds were low and thundery, but when the sunlight broke through, Dahl noted that it reflected from the metallic surfaces of the strange craft. However, there was not one brilliance, but many.

 

In addition, the craft appeared to have what appeared to be 'portholes' equally spaced around the outside of their hulls. Dahl also reported what looked like dark and circular windows on the inside and bottoms of them.

 

Dahl later said, "Fearing that the central and lowermost machine was going to crash in the bay, we pulled our boat over to the beach and got out our harbor patrol camera. I took four photos of these balloons, as I still thought they were. All the time, the five were circling around the one which was stationery. Five minutes passed, and then one of the circling machines detached itself from the formation and came right down to the stationery one. It seemed to touch it, and stayed motionless for about four minutes.Then we heard a dull thud, and the central craft spewed out what looked like thousands of newspapers from the inside of its center. But these falling fragments turned out to be a white type of very light metal that fluttered to earth, and also fell into the bay. The machine then seemed to hail on us in the bay, and over the beach, black and darker type metals, which hit the beach and the bay. All these latter fragments seemed molten. Steam rose when they hit the water. We ran for shelter under a cliff and got behind logs. My son's arm was hit by a falling fragment of metal, and our dog was killed. Then the rain of metal stopped. The strange craft silently lifted and went westward towards the Pacific. All the time, the center one remained in the formation. We found the fallen metal too hot to touch, for some time. But when it cooled, we loaded a large number of pieces into our launch."

 

Electrical Malfunctions

When he climbed back towards the launch, Dahl found that his radio refused to work.

 

"When I started out on patrol, my radio had been in perfect order. But now, the static was so great, I could not make contact with our shore station! Yet the weather could not have caused all that interference. Our wheel-house had been hit by the rain of metal, and damaged. I started up the engines and returned to Tacoma, where my boy had to be attended in hospital. I reported the adventure to my superior officer, Mr Fred L. Chrisman; but I could see he did not believe me! I gave him the camera and the films and also the metal fragments we had collected in the island. Later, Chrisman went out to the island to look for the 20 tones of metal which I judged had been spewed from the strange machine. When my films were developed, they showed the strange aircraft, but the negatives were covered with white spots, as though they had been exposed to some radiation."

 

Apparently specimens of the strange metal were taken to Chicago University for analysis, who described them as "metal that had fallen from a great height in the sky and landed in sand."

 

Strange Geology!

Some skeptics have said that Maury Island is rich in this type of metal as geological and natural deposits. Further analysis reported that the metal was an alloy of calcium, iron, zinc, and titanium. Also present were aluminum, manganese, copper, magnesium, silicon, nickel, lead, strontium and chromium together with traces of silver, tin and cadmium. This seems a very remarkable alloy to be found in a natural state all over Maury Island.

 

One odd note added, was that the content of calcium was unusually high and that it had not been oxidized, as it does when heated - in terrestrial conditions.

 

Cosmic Protection

One theory which was put forward at the time was that the calcium had been cast into the hull of the strange machines to absorb the lethal cosmic rays out in space beyond our earth's orbit.

 

Enter the Men in Black

Not only is this story extremely fascinating, if only by pre-dating similar events - the metal seems similar to that allegedly recovered the following month at the Roswell crash site. However, the following day Dahl was interrogated by what could be one of the first incidents involving MIB (Men in Black):

 

According to Dahl, the following morning a strange man drove to his house and got out of a black Buick car of sedan type. He was dressed in a dark suit, was around 40 years old and in Dahl's words, looked like "an insurance agent".

 

Dahl got out his own car and drove downtown - with the stranger following him. Why he didn't use the stranger's car for a lift is not recorded.

 

Threatening Warnings

Over breakfast in a hotel, Dahl was asked some curious 'personal' questions;

 

Stranger: "Are you happy at your job, and in your family?"

Dahl: "What the blazes are you getting at?"

 

At this point, the stranger merely gave a peculiar smile and proceeded to tell Dahl of the previous events on Maury Island. This conversation puzzled Dahl as, so far, he had not told anyone about his experience and there had been no one on the island apart from his crew - and he did not think they had been talking.

 

"Mr Dahl," said the stranger, still smiling, "you had better forget what you have seen, and stop talking. Silence is the best thing for you and your family. You have seen what you ought not to have seen!" The stranger then abruptly got up and left the hotel.

 

Further Verifications

Kenneth Arnold later arrived on the scene after being asked to investigate the strange story. Arnold later interviewed Dahl's superior officer, Chrisman, who told his own fantastic story:-

 

Two days after Dahl had reported to me about these strange machines over Maury Island, I went out in the patrol launch. It was on the morning of June 23rd. I looked at some of the tons of metal on the beach. As I did so, one of the strange aircraft suddenly appeared from nowhere! It circled the bay, banked at an angle of 10 degrees, and shot up into the center of a cumulus cloud, high in the sky. I have never seen any aircraft before go into the center of such a cloud. It is very rough in there. The strange thing looked like a large inner tube to me. It was not squashed as Dahl had said. It had large portholes round the whole hull, and its brassy, golden surface seemed burled. I noticed, too, an observation window in it. When the sun shone on it, it was unusually brilliant. I picked up a load of the fragments of fallen metal and went back with them in the launch to Tacoma."

 

Military Investigations

Arnold then spoke to Lieutenant Frank Brown of the U.S. military intelligence, who had also seen the fragments of metal when he flew over the location in a B.29 bomber.

 

He sketched, for Arnold, photos that had come to intelligence. One of the sketches showed a photograph taken some three weeks previously by Wm. A. Rhodes over Phoenix, Arizona. It showed a strange vessel, looking like the heel of a shoe, ie. parabolic in shape, with a hole near one of the curves.

 

Rhodes had said that there were two tails of vapor trailing from the edges of the 'heel'. One even more remarkable picture shown to Arnold looked exactly like Arnold's own (famous) sighting of nine strange machines flying in formation on June 24th 1947.

 

The startling thing was that this picture was taken by a Captain F.W. Banner of the British barque, 'Lady of the Lake', in mid-ocean off the coast of Liberia on March 22nd, 1870 - 77 years BEFORE Arnold's sighting.

 

It looked like a half moon with a tail in it, or like a half-peak in the center of the disc. The object was flying against the wind and was visible for half an hour.

 

This account seems to have all the hallmarks of a classic sighting; strange metallic craft, fragments of strange metal recovered and even being followed by a MIB encounter.

(Source: http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/enigma/issue5/ufo.html )

 

 

 

 

June 24, 1947 - Kenneth Arnold's Famous UFO Sighting

 

PENDELTON, Ore., June 25 (AP) -- Nine bright saucer-like objects flying at "incredible speed" at 10,000 feet altitude were reported here today by Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, pilot who said he could not hazard a guess as to what they were.

 

Arnold, a United States Forest Service employee engaged in searching for a missing plane, said he sighted the mysterious objects yesterday at 3 P.M. They were flying between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, in Washington state, he said, and appeared to weave in and out of formation. Arnold said he clocked and estimated their speed at 1,200 miles an hour. [end]

Note: Arnold estimated the speed of the UFOs at around 1,200 mph, or, at 10,000 feet above sea level, Mach 1.63. The fastest aircraft in the military at that time topped out at 700 mph. It was not until 1962 that the Lockheed A-12 Blackbird took flight achieving Mach 3.2, at altitudes of 40,000 ft. or more.

 

Kenneth Arnold has been credited widely for having coined the term "Flying Saucer," but in reality, Arnold didn't see saucers. He described a one-piece, winged "heel" sort of craft, or a crescent with a domed top, and commented that their movement in the sky was like saucers "skipping" across water which reporters then drafted into the lexicon of contemporary lingo.

 

Nonetheless, what Arnold saw and described was certainly not conventional aircraft known to any civilians at that time, though we do know that Nazi Germany was working frantically on craft of similar design and shape just before the end of the war and may have perfected it, the knowledge then falling into the hands of the Allies. It is certainly possible that the US Government/Military had such advanced aircraft as part of blackops projects in '47, but we simply don't know. One then has to contend with the myriad of reports of alien pilots found at the Roswell (and other) crash sites, seen by many eye-witnesses, and the total similarity in the description of the crashed craft. It would be unlikely that the skies were being shared by men and extraterrestrials alike in the same kind of ships.

 

Authenticity and Source: Unknown. Apparent "Nazi" Saucer Photograph

 

For further material on Kenneth Arnold....

 

Click Here for a transcript of Edward R. Murrow's interview with Kenneth Arnold
Click Here to read Arnold's account in his own words, with diagrams (note the similarity in Arnold's diagram and the heel shaped craft below)

 

The Arnold-Roswell-Rhodes Craft Connection

 

These images, often called "the Roswell craft" photos, (as it is widely reported that the Roswell craft was not a saucer, but a "delta" winged craft) appeared in several Southwestern newspapers around the time of Arnold's sighting and match his basic description of a heel shaped, domed flyer; These images were photographed the same day as the Roswell crash which took place in the evening of July 7, 1947, just one state away, in New Mexico.

 

William Rhodes Photos, Phoenix, AZ, July 7, 1947

 

 

 

 

June 5, 1955 - UFO Photographed Over Belgium

 

 

Three photographs were taken on June 5, 1955 at about 7:30 P.M. near Namur, Belgium. The witness indicated that he had visually seen a sharp gleam moving high in the sky without any noise and at high speed. He indicated that the gleam accompanied an object of discoidal shape leaving a white trail behind it. The second photograph: The witness stated that the object lost altitude, made a turn and then went upwards to reach his own vapor trail. The third photograph: The object joined its trail, the trail was dissipating, the UFO then accelerated and left, while luminous particles were ejected behind it.

(Source: http://www.ufocasebook.com/bestufopictures.html )

 

 

 

 

June 18, 1959 - UFO Photographed Over Waikiki

 

Here is one of the most breathtaking photos ever taken of a UFO, Joseph Sigel of Bellevue, Washington, took it June 18, 1959 in Waikiki, Hawaii, the same day that the blue book "unknown" case 6400 happened at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

 

The original is a color photograph. Saucer appears to have rounded top, and twinkling lights at bottom, giving window effect. Sent to Project Blue Book team. It was evaluated as sun glare on lens, though from shadows on shore sun seems to be at camera's rear.

 

Nevertheless, the photograph has been discussed at the UFO symposium for the Congressional Hearings of 1968 by Dr. Robert N. Sheppard, who pointed out possible similarities with other UFO photographs.

(Source:

http://www.chez.com/lesovnis/htm/bluepics59.htm )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 June 1966 - The Controversial Villa Photos

 

Now generally regarded as fakes after much analysis, the UFO photos of Apolinar 'Paul' Villa Jr. of Peralta, New Mexico, nonetheless have been widely circulated and touted as authentic in copious books and UFO magazines, and now the Web. They were, at least, some of the more impressive "flying saucer" fakes ever put to film. Villa began photographing his UFOs as early as 1963, and maintained that his story was true to his dying day, and never seemed to attempt to profit from his experiences, which involved full contact with alien beings which he said were more akin to angels, sent by God to help humanity as we approached the possibility of complete self-annihilation. Later Villa began producing photos of flying saucers that were only small, crude models, some with rather laughable tripod landing gear that resembled nothing more than a rod with a ball at the end. The little ships appeared to be sloppily painted silver and in many of the photos, inexplicable little silver balls were shown floating around the saucer, perhaps to help conceal the wires that upheld it.

 

 

He claimed he was instructed by the aliens on how to construct them, though it seems what really happened was, his later attempts at realism failed miserably and an explanation was needed for the obviously small, man-made silver saucers in his photos. Villas earlier shots showed what appeared to be considerably large craft floating in midair, which would have been a difficult trick to pull off for one man if they were not the result of a photographic trick. His earlier photos have a rather shocking realism to them, though almost every one features an elaborate saucer hovering conveniently between trees. The first to declare the Villa photos a fraud was Project Blue Book analysis, but since then others have also verified the apparent hoax. Villa died in 1981.

 

 

 

 

June 13, 1966 - Policeman Sees Strange Flying Machine In Road

 

The policeman who had observed an object over Milan on Mar. 17 saw an unidentified machine on the ground at a street intersection. He drove toward it with his headlights illuminating the object, which took off like an airplane, flying away to the southeast. Investigation by Selfridge AFB. - (Atic) This same officer was previously involved in the great Michigan UFO chase -- See the March edition of The Month In UFO History.

 

 

 

 

June 1967 - Astronauts Photograph UFO In Space

 

Astronauts Ed White (first American to walk in space) and James McDivitt were passing over Hawaii in a Gemini spacecraft when they saw a weird-looking metallic object. The UFO had long arms sticking out of it. McDivitt took pictures with a cine-camera. Those pictures have never been released.

 

 

 

 

June 7, 1973 - Strange Lights Photographed, France

Chantereine, France, 1973. Jean Marc Bisson, aged 16, took this photograph from the window of his residence in Chantereine in the Seine-et-Marne on June 7 between 9:30 P.M. and 10:00 P.M.

 

He was drawn to the window by the mewings of his she-cat, and there he saw strange gleams in the sky, coming from the Southeast and going towards the NorthEast, so he decided to grab his Kodak instamatic camera.

 

The largest of the gleams seen on this photographs had the apparent diameter equivalent to that of the Moon for its central part.

 

(Source: http://www.ufocasebook.com )

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