A UFO Photo Roundup from the Weird and Wild West
Curious and fascinating pictures of UAPs and other unusual aerial phenomena over the American West…
Roswell. Area 51. Kenneth Arnold’s early sighting of “flying saucers” near Mt. Rainier.
The American West is no stranger to UFO lore, as I needn’t remind any of my readers. And I’ve endeavored to show often enough in this Substack that the place is positively lousy with alien interlopers…that is, if aliens they be.
The truth is, they might not be extraterrestrials at all—they might represent just about anything, including inter-dimensional explorers or mysterious “ultraterrestrials,” emissaries from an advanced (but decidedly human) breakaway civilization, time travelers from the distant past or future, or even the technologically sophisticated denizens of the Hollow Earth, for all I know.
Either way, the skies of the Great American West have been home to weird and inexplicable UAPs long before some too-clever-by-half Pentagon official dreamed up that unwieldy and unnecessary new acronym. And the funny thing is, we don’t only have to rely on second-hand reports and eyewitness testimony.
Because we’ve got photographs—quite a few of them, in fact. Photographs of strange lights, weird discs, and bizarre objects hovering over the majestic mountains and vast deserts of the western states. There’s a veritable bonanza out there of pictorial evidence of otherworldly visitations to this part of the country; I thought it would be edifying, to say the least, to take a look at some of the more interesting of these photos…some famous, some not so famous.
So, without further ado, here’s a rundown—in no particular order—of some of the more intriguing historic photos of UFOs, UAPs, and every other kind of UST (that’s “Unidentified Soaring Thingamajig,” for those in the know) that consented to have its picture snapped while cruising the big skies of the western United States:
10. Holloman Air Development Center, 1957
First up on our list is a well-known photograph that depicts a strange light looming over the mountains and desert landscape of New Mexico—in fact, directly above Holloman Air Development Center (HADC), a testing range hosted by Holloman Air Force Base in the Tularosa Basin of south-central New Mexico.
It was captured on October 16, 1957, at around 1:30 PM, by Ella Louise Fortune, who was a nurse at the small community of Three Rivers, on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation in the Sacramento Mountains. Ms. Fortune claimed that she was driving along Highway 54 that day when she saw the object hovering over the base for approximately fifteen minutes; she took the picture of the motionless daytime UFO, which remains one of the better ones on record.
Was it some sort of early experimental military technology? A stealth project of some kind? Or perhaps something back-engineered from the downed spacecraft recovered near Corona, New Mexico (the famous “Roswell” crash) or even Aztec—one of the dozen or so off-world craft reportedly in the hands of the US government, as claimed by whistleblower David Grusch?
Or, more disturbingly, maybe the object was a genuine otherworldly UFO—one that was unusually interested in the goings-on at the American Air Force base, or one that wished to demonstrate its superiority by appearing unmolested in the skies over such a base…to “beard the lion in his den,” so to speak.
Either way, so far as we know, the Holloman UFO was never seen again.
9. The Cave Junction UFO, 1926-27
Our next entry is what some consider to be one of the oldest photographs of a UFO on record.
It was purportedly taken in either 1926 or 1927, near Cave Junction, Oregon—a quaint little community in Oregon’s Illinois Valley, and better known for the nearby Oregon Caves, whence of course it draws its name. The exact location of this encounter is unknown; it appears mountainous, and perhaps it was in the neighboring Siskiyou Range.
In any case, we’re told the picture was snapped by a volunteer fireman, who reportedly wrote the following when recalling the incident years later: “Our question is: have you heard of this thing, and if so, do you have this picture or others like [it]? I, for one, would like to remind myself and some of the guys here that I may be getting on in years, but I’m still of sound mind and body. Again, it happened around 1927 or 1926.”
The picture depicts what can only be described as a classic kind of “hat-shaped” flying saucer, hovering ominously over a picturesque western mountainside. It’s said that the photograph was examined by experts, and declared authentic; others, however, remain skeptical, citing the unusual clarity of the image of the flying disc in such an early photograph.
Now it could be a fake; it could even be the fireman’s own hat tossed into the air—but to what end? Flying saucers didn’t even become a “thing” until two decades later. It is intriguing, however, that the first “flying saucer” sighting occurred in this same general neck of the woods.
But if the Cave Junction UFO Photograph is genuine, it begs the significant question: what was it doing nosing around in the Siskiyou Mountains of eastern Oregon? And did the volunteer fireman who snapped this photograph, and whatever crew he may have been a part of, narrowly escape a Travis Walton-like abduction?
8. Ward, Colorado, 1929
The old gold-mining camp of Ward, Colorado was at one time the richest town in the state; located in Boulder County, and full of place names like “Gold Hill,” “Gold Lake,” and “Miser’s Dream,” it’s no surprise that this diminutive home rule municipality played an outsized role in the great Colorado Gold Rush of the 1860s.
And perhaps it was this wealth of precious metals that drew the attention of an extraterrestrial visitor in April of 1929—a visitor who forms the subject of what may be another claimant to the honor of being one of the oldest UFO photographs ever captured.
Hetty Pline, who discovered this photograph among her father’s effects, describes what she calls the “Incident at the Ward Sawmill”:
“This photo was taken by my father Edward Pline at the sawmill in Ward where we lived at the time, I think it was 1929. I was about six years old then. My father was there to photograph the sawmill for some reason or another, and as he was taking the photo, he described a ‘terrible thunderous bellow,’ and a large round thing as big as a very large boulder that moved through the air above them.
You can see it in the picture. None of the sawmill workers saw the thing in the photo, but they all heard the sound and felt the ground shudder. Later in my life I tried researching the incident at the County Historical Society, but I did not find any references to it. My father passed on a few years after the incident, and I have not found any surviving sawmill workers from that time…”
The photo, which is not of the best quality, does indeed seem to show a flying saucer of some kind hovering above the tree-covered hill in the background. Perhaps the object was looking for deposits of gold or silver; maybe it was simply curious about the logging industry in late 1920s Colorado. Whatever it was, it remains one of the earliest photographically documented UFOs…ahem, I meant to say UAPs.
7. The Rhodes Phoenix Disc, 1947
Shortly after Kenneth Arnold’s famous “flying saucer” sighting (the objects actually resembled a kind of silvery crescent) in 1947, several photographs of something allegedly very similar were snapped by William Albert Rhodes in the skies over Phoenix, Arizona.
By July 7 of that year, a UFO flap of sorts was brewing over Phoenix, with numerous witnesses claiming to have seen strange objects in the sky. It all came to a head when Rhodes, an amateur astronomer, captured what the Arizona Republic described as “the first clearly recorded photographs of what is believed to be a mysterious ‘flying disc’ which has 33 states in America and even a few foreign countries on edge with its peculiar activities.”
“…William A. Rhodes,” the newspaper continues, “…was on his way to his workshop in the rear of his home when he heard the distinctive ‘whoosh’ of what he believed to be a P-80 Shooting Star jet-propelled plane.
Rhodes snatched a camera from his workshop bench and by the time he reached a small mound at the rear of his home, the object had circled once and was banking in tight circles to the south at an altitude of approximately 1,000 feet, he said.”
The FBI was interested in the matter, dispatching a special agent (accompanied by an Army counter-intelligence officer) to interview Rhodes and obtain copies of the photographs. Perhaps this was an early visitation by the Men in Black? In any case, the Air Force was also intrigued, and the Phoenix Disc was included in Project Blue Book.
Ultimately, the government concluded that the photographs had captured nothing otherworldly at all—merely some windblown trash. Or perhaps it was a deliberate hoax—fabricated by Rhodes to coincide with theories that flying saucers were actually advanced, atomic-powered Soviet aircraft. Or maybe the photographer wanted to capitalize on Arnold’s recent sighting, and the longstanding “Shaver Mystery”—with its lore of Lemuria, the Hollow Earth, and subterraneous civilizations—that was running in Raymond Palmer’s Amazing Stories.
Maybe.
Or just maybe Bill Rhodes saw and photographed exactly what he said he did: a weird, advanced, and decidedly nonhuman spacecraft describing fantastic evolutions in the skies above Phoenix, Arizona.
I’ll let you decide for yourself.
6. The Mysterious UFOs of Oregon, 1960s-1970s (?)
Not a damn thing about these photos would hold up in a court of law.
For one thing, there’s no chain of custody; we have no idea who took them, or exactly when or where. Handed over for safekeeping to MUFON researcher William Puckett, (or so we’re told) these photographs of some rather spiffy UFOs were purportedly discovered in 2008 by an anonymous woman amidst her stepmother’s effects in an unused storage room.
And that’s about all that can be said for them. As far as further details, it’s believed that the image of the Adamski-esque UFO on the bottom right was taken sometime in the 1960s, somewhere along Wagner Creek Road near Medford, Oregon.1
Who knows? Maybe it’s actually one of those “Haunebu” Nazi UFOs you hear so much about. As for the elaborate flying saucer in the black-and-white photo—it’s almost certainly some kind of mothership.
So, did this anonymous woman’s stepmother have a direct line to our “Space Brothers”? Either that or she was a skilled photographic faker.
5. Flying Saucers Over Albuquerque, 1960s
In the early 1960s, a mechanic by the name of Apolinar “Paul” Villa, Jr., of Peralta, New Mexico, made telepathic contact with extraterrestrial visitors from an unnamed system in the constellation Coma Berenices.
The beings were friendly and gracious, and permitted Paul to photograph their spacecraft, and even consented to explain how it worked. On Easter Sunday, April 18, 1965, the beings telepathically instructed Paul to visit Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque, where he caught another photo of their flying saucer—photogenically framed with the rugged Sandias in the background.
He also said that the spacecraft demonstrated a laser on that occasion which triggered a small brush fire. Maybe that explains all those pesky wildfires in western states.
The US Air Force and Project Blue Book, however, determined that Paul’s photos were nothing but clever hoaxes; they determined that the “flying saucer” depicted in at least one image was a mere model that was only twenty inches in diameter and seven inches high.
Be that as it may, there’s nothing to preclude the remote but very distinct possibility that Paul Villa’s extraterrestrial contacts were themselves diminutive creatures, perhaps from a high-gravity world, with physical dimensions entirely proportionate to their miniature spacecraft.
In other words, that they were little green men—with the emphasis on little…
4. George Adamski’s Encounter in the Desert, 1952
In late 1952, George Adamski, the famous UFO contactee—or, according to others, occultism-adjacent flim-flam man—had an encounter with the Venusian known as “Orthon.” It was during this and subsequent encounters that Adamski snapped a series of photographs that have since become infamous.
It shows what is purported to be a Venusian “scout craft,” a kind of landing and reconnaissance vehicle that the inhabitants of the Morning Star dispatch from their much larger, cigar-shaped motherships. Adamski’s meeting with Orthon and the inhabitants of other planets in the solar system occurred somewhere in the Colorado Desert of southern California, near the dusty, tumbleweed-choked town of Desert Center.
Adamski’s photographs include distorted images of the cylindrical mothercraft, as well as the so-called “Chicken Brooder” UFO, the aforementioned Venusian scout craft, which does indeed resemble the top portion of contemporary gas lanterns or poultry warming devices.
Without question, the photos have gone down in history as among the most famous UFO images of the western United States and, indeed, of the entire world. Adamski and his pictures were even deemed worthy of investigation by no less than the FBI and the US Air Force’s Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book; both concluded that he was a fraudster and that his photographs were fakes.
And maybe they’re right…hell, they’re almost certainly right.
But maybe there’s a chance they weren’t right at all—that Adamski really did see alien visitors from Venus, and photographed their actual spacecraft. Maybe crazy George Adamski wasn’t so crazy after all, and what he saw wasn’t really from our universe. Maybe he was vouchsafed a glimpse of an alternate universe, or parallel dimension, one in which all the planets of the solar system were inhabited by advanced humanoid creatures—like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, or from the science-fiction tales of famed New Mexican writer Jack Williamson.
And maybe those civilizations designed interplanetary scout craft that just so happen to look an awful lot like an old General Electric infrared lamp. What of it? It’s their damn universe and they’re entitled to design their spacecraft any damn way they wish; it’s none of my business.
Anyhow, that’s the explanation I prefer. And there’s no UFO skeptic or smarmy cynic anywhere in this universe who’s going to tell me otherwise…
3. The Remains of “Snippy,” 1967
While it’s not technically a picture of a UFO, by any stretch of the imagination, this famous photo of “Snippy” (actually, we’re told the three-year-old Appaloosa’s name was really “Lady,” with Snippy being the name of its mother) depicts the first known instance of a phenomenon that would later become inextricably associated with ufology: cattle mutilation.
So it may come as something of a surprise that the first “cattle mutilation” actually involved a horse. But it’s the truth, and “Snippy” or “Lady” or whatever the poor thing was called turned up on September 1, 1967, in a condition decidedly worse for wear. This was in Alamosa County, in the rugged, high-altitude San Luis Valley—what Christopher O’Brien rightly calls the “Mysterious Valley,” on account of its plentiful paranormal and ufological phenomena, including saucer bases under Blanca Peak and the phantom horses of the Great Sand Dunes.
The Mysteries of Blanca Peak, Part I
It’s time to return to one of the weirdest places in the Western United States—of course, I’m talking about the mysterious San Luis Valley, or “SLV” for short. In an earlier article we explored the Phantom Horses of the Great Sand Dunes, which represent one of the more ancient and endurin…
The Phantom Horses of the Great Sand Dunes
If you’ve never visited Colorado’s San Luis Valley, you don’t know what you’re missing. Located in southern Colorado, right up against the New Mexico border, the San Luis Valley is said to be the world’s largest alpine valley—and that’s not hard to believe, since it has an average elevation of over …
The remarkable photograph above, which looks to be at the foot of the Blanca Massif, shows Duane Martin, a forestry aid, performing a “radiological test” on the mutilated animal, accompanied by the horse’s owner, Berle Lewis, and a local school teacher, Leona Wellington.
2. The McMinnville UFO Photographs, 1950
These famous photographs once graced the cover of Life magazine, to say nothing of innumerable newspapers, and has long been reckoned one of the most well-known UFO photographs of all time.
It was taken from the Trent farm, near Sheridan, Oregon (McMinnville being the nearest town worthy of the name). The story goes that on the evening of May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent was returning to her house after feeding her rabbits when she spotted the flying disc moving at a slow speed. She shouted for her husband, Paul, who came out and watched the object for a time; finally, it dawned on him to go back and get his Kodak to snap some pictures, which he promptly did.
He managed to take two very famous photographs before the object sped off on whatever errand had brought it to the beautiful Willamette Valley in the first place.
As for the photographs? They depict a classic saucer-shaped vehicle of some sort. Skeptics say it’s just the side mirror from an old Ford, suspended from some power lines; believers say the two photos are of a genuine unidentified flying object.
I guess it all depends on the eye of the beholder.
It remains a mystery, but one thing’s for damn sure—these two photographs inspired the McMenamins UFO Fest, the second-largest UFO festival in the country (after the one in Roswell, of course) and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Maybe I’m just sentimental, but I like to imagine that the alien pilots of that flying saucer—whatever and wherever they might be—would be well pleased.
1. The Las Cruces Object, 1967
Finally, we come to a strange photograph from the place where it all began—in New Mexico, famous at least as much for its otherworldly UFO activity as it is for Walter White, Billy the Kid, and its world-renowned green chile.
This picture was allegedly snapped near Picacho Peak, a volcanic mountain just northwest of Las Cruces in the Mesilla Valley of southern New Mexico. According to the site UFO Evidence, the events surrounding the acquisition of this photograph were as follows:
“About 2:00pm on March 12th, 1967, a New Mexico State University student was hiking in a desert area near Picacho Peak, New Mexico, when he spotted a big round silvery object hovering in the air just above a rocky hill about 500 yards away. He prepared his 4” X 5” Press Camera, set it at F8 and 1/100 shutter speed, and snapped one good black and white picture of the object. It appeared stationary or was moving very little at the time of the photograph. He looked down to change the plates of his camera, needing only 3 seconds, but when he looked back to take another shot, the object was gone. He recalled smelling an electrical odor in the air too!”
Whatever the thing was, it permitted one good photograph of itself, and then disappeared—almost like it was camera shy. Perhaps it was similar to the spacecraft that Lonnie Zamora reported seeing three years earlier, near Socorro? Maybe it was looking for the remains of whatever crashed near Corona, NM, twenty years earlier?
I guess we’ll never know.
So what’s the lesson here, boys and girls? Always keep your camera—of the phone variety or otherwise—at the ready, because you never know when you’ll catch a chance sighting of a UFO, UAP, Soviet atom-plane, Nazi flying disc, Venusian scout ship, miniature flying saucer, mutilated mare, or God-knows-what-else in the big landscapes of the American West…or anywhere else, for that matter…
Intriguingly, the site UFO Evidence has a photo that looks eerily similar to this one—same Adamski-type saucer (see #4 below), hovering unconcernedly over what looks to be the identical countryside.
It gives a date of June 10, 1964, and includes this background info from whoever submitted the photo: “I did not take this pic. It was discovered by my sister in an old family bible. It was taken by her husband’s father but he had no more info than that.”
Notice the fading, the crinkles, and the cigarette burn—almost as if some chain-smoking experiencer brooded long hours over this photograph, puzzling to no avail over its meaning.
All in all, a mystery…
Phenomenal research and presentation. There must be something about that mountain air…
Hi, another fascinating article, looking again at the last photo, the one found in a bible (I'm sure something could be said about that) It looks similar to the George Adamski craft which for the longest time I have considered faked. Hope all is well with you.