Atlas F (Test 103) UFO Film (1962) NAID: 614788

[Giddierone]

Is this possibly a new comment about UFOs made to look old?

I think it's more to do with how the National Archives is keyworded. The report on the missile test includes the words "origin or identification could not be determined" and so someone (perhaps quite recently) has slapped a "Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Sighting" title on the record and a vauge description of the UFO that doesn't appear to align with anything in the film unless you try really hard to see orbs or "craft" etc (see times stamps in #1)

Given that the film is jaw-droppingly high-res and lengthy in comparison with any recent release from promoters of grainy military UFO footage this seems like it needs some better context added before its high noon drop.

 

[MapperGuy]

I think it's more to do with how the National Archives is keyworded. The report on the missile test includes the words "origin or identification could not be determined" and so someone (perhaps quite recently) has slapped a "Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Sighting" title on the record and a vauge description of the UFO that doesn't appear to align with anything in the film unless you try really hard to see orbs or "craft" etc (see times stamps in #1)

Given that the film is jaw-droppingly high-res and lengthy in comparison with any recent release from promoters of grainy military UFO footage this seems like it needs some better context added before its high noon drop.

If I try to do a word search on the declassified report on the missile flight I can find the word "identified", when I search for the word "unidentified" I get no hits.

My guess is that someone was just doing word searches of declassified documents like this looking for reports that mentioned things not identified, but not doing an in-depth analysis of each hit. With all of the documents found being labeled with the heading Unidentified Flying Object, for others to take a closer look at later. A not unreasonable procedure when doing an initial sweep for documents and films of potential interest.

That the result can be misleading is obvious, the unidentified things were seen during the boost phase of the flight and the film only shows part of the reentry phase of the flight. It would take a scan of all the things the archives has with this same tag, Unidentified Flying Objects, to figure out how useful that tag actually is, and if it is being misused to inflate the the numbers of reports.

 

[Mendel]

Is this possibly a new comment about UFOs made to look old?

Generally speaking, a document created in 1962 can't have been digitized in 1962, because obviously the technology did not exist back then. So any digital uploads of such documents must be much more recent than the documents themselves. This does not (of itself) imply that they are fake.

 

[Giddierone]

That the result can be misleading is obvious, the unidentified things were seen during the boost phase of the flight and the film only shows part of the reentry phase of the flight

Yes, and the description is misleading since it appears to refer to the UFO of the film title - but doesn't.

It shows the missile in flight, then breaking up, with the camera holding on the nose cone, with a smaller object in flight above and behind the nose cone on a parallel path.

I think this is a general problem of archiving where the keyworder doesn't have even basic tools available to caption images or verify the accuracy of descriptions provided to them. For example this image from the STS-64 mission has this description:

Uderexposed photographic documentation of stars viewed from the Space Shuttle Discovery during STS-64.

But if you simply change the brightness / contrast of the image you can clearly see it's not stars (or a TR-3B) at all but one of the astronauts during the spacewalk.
Source: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/22843113

 

[Eburacum]

I always liked how the energy beam retracts back into the UFO when it stops firing... see 1:26 to 1:28

That is because it is an 'animated simulation', based on Jacob's remembered impressions of the actual film (which he only saw a few times back in 1964). The large caption in that Larry King clip obscures the smaller caption on the simulation clip (shown below).
Not a particularly competent animation, either.

 

[Eburacum]

One explanation for Jacob's 'UFO attacking an Atlas missile' account is that the launch included a decoy warhead with sub-units attached by nylon strings; it seems possible to me that the nylon strings may have produced some sort of glowing beam-like effect in the rarefied upper atmosphere, and that could have been mistaken for laser beams. Note that real laser beams would have been invisible in such conditions.


From Tim Printy's article on this event; see
http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/bigsur.htm

 

[Todd Feinman]

Interesting idea! i would think that the missile engineers would have been consulted about the event before they dragged Bob in there, though.. I should have mentioned with the video that it was an animation. I don't think that was clear in the Larry King segment. Eburacum knew that.

 

[Eburacum]

Another article, this time by (the late) Joel Carpenter gives a lot more detail about the case. This is also from Tim Printy's Sunlite magazine.
http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite6_4.pdf
Here is a copy of a frame from a film taken at the time, probably (but not definitely) the same film seen by Bob Jacobs and Florenz Mansmann.
The details are very poor, but that is what one would expect from a film taken at 700 nautical miles range.

The HIRS plume is a burst of gas from a separation rocket on the ATLAS booster; the AZ/EL DISP is an azimuth/elevation display in the telescope system, the RV is the reentry vehicle, and all the rest are decoys associated with this test, and which were probably responsible for the UFO described by Jacobs.

 

[Todd Feinman]

Another article, this time by (the late) Joel Carpenter gives a lot more detail about the case. This is also from Tim Printy's Sunlite magazine.
http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite6_4.pdf
Here is a copy of a frame from a film taken at the time, probably (but not definitely) the same film seen by Bob Jacobs and Florenz Mansmann.
The details are very poor, but that is what one would expect from a film taken at 700 nautical miles range.

The HIRS plume is a burst of gas from a separation rocket on the ATLAS booster; the AZ/EL DISP is an azimuth/elevation display in the telescope system, the RV is the reentry vehicle, and all the rest are decoys associated with this test, and which were probably responsible for the UFO described by Jacobs.

Thanks! I hadn't seen that before. It's a plausible explanation.

 

[deirdre]

Thanks! I hadn't seen that before. It's a plausible explanation.

since you guys have been discussing a completely separate incident to this thread title, is this something useful the moderators should split into its own thread so that others can see this "plausible explanation"?

 

[Giddierone]

since you guys have been discussing a completely separate incident to this thread title, is this something useful the moderators should split into its own thread so that others can see this "plausible explanation"?

There's a thread here: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ex...ting-down-icbm-reenactment.11883/#post-253419

 

[Giddierone]

Just a visual reference using the coordinates and range from the DTIC report to show where the film was shot.

They say it came down close to the target centre (blue pin marker) near to Ascension Island.

 

[Giddierone]

Update to #1

I asked the National Archives where the video title and description came from and after a bit of back and forth where they at first indicated they may have come from Defense Visual Information Distribution Imagery agency (DVIDS) - they didn't - NA managed to find the Master Card for the current record (attached).

Unfortunately it doesn't have a date and we're still none the wiser as to which agency (such as the DTIC) created it or when.

But it contains an additional sentence which is not in the current record (they've since updated it and it will be live soon):

(NOTE: one experiment aboard Test 103 was decoy nose cone.)

The assumption appears to be that this light seen between 4:43-6:04 was taken to be a UFO by someone along the records way, even though there is no corresponding literature that anyone has been able to produce to say it's anything other than part of the rentry vehicle/payload burning up.