The sighting, filmed by local baseball coach Nick Mariana, is believed to be among the first ever motion picture footage of what came to be called an unidentified flying object (UFO).
Mariana ran to his car to retrieve his 16 mm movie camera and filmed the UFOs for sixteen seconds.
For several weeks after the sighting, Mariana showed his film to local community groups, including the Central Roundtable Athletic Club.
U.S. Air Force Captain John P. Brynildsen interviewed Mariana at nearby Malmstrom AFB outside of Great Falls.
[3] At Wright-Patterson AFB the film was briefly examined and determined to be the reflections from two F-94 jet fighters that were known to be flying over Great Falls at the time of Mariana's sighting.
Lt. Col. Ray W. Taylor returned the film to Mariana with a cover letter stating that "our photoanalysts were unable to find anything identifiable of an unusual nature".
[1] Controversy soon arose when Mariana claimed that the first thirty-five frames of his film - which he said most clearly showed the UFOs as rotating disks - were missing.
They claimed that the missing frames clearly showed the UFOs as spinning, metallic disks with a "notch or band" along their outer edges.
The Air Force personnel denied this accusation, and insisted that they had removed only a single frame of film which was damaged in the analysis.
Mariana reluctantly agreed, but only after requiring the Air Force to sign an agreement that they would not remove any frames of the film.
According to Ruppelt in his memoirs: "The two jets weren't anywhere close to where the two UFOs had been... we studied each individual light and both appeared too steady to be reflections.
[5] In January 1953 the Air Force and CIA convened a committee of prominent scientists to examine the "best" cases collected by Project Blue Book.
After about 18 months of rather detailed, albeit not continuous, study using various film-measuring equipments [sic] at Douglas and at UCLA, as well as analysis of a photogrammetric experiment, it appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena explanations had merit.In 1969, Baker presented a paper at an AAAS UFO panel organized by Thornton Page and Carl Sagan.
Located at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and chaired by Edward U. Condon, a prominent physicist, the committee's researchers decided to "reinvestigate" Mariana's UFO film.
[11] In his memoirs, Craig also wrote that: "I would not like to have to defend Dr. Saunders's conviction that the Mariana film is strong evidence that we have extraterrestrial visitors".