Tremonton

Tremonton and the Newhouse Film

On 2 July 1952 Navy chief petty officer Delbert Newhouse was driving through Utah with his family, stopped, and filmed a dozen bright objects moving erratically high in the sky. Newhouse was a Navy photographer with thousands of hours behind a camera, which is what made the film matter. The Navy laboratory at Anacostia measured the brightness frame by frame and concluded the objects were neither aircraft nor birds. The Robertson Panel revisited it in 1953 and said: seagulls. Newhouse maintained to the end that before he got the camera out he had seen the objects closer, and that they were discs. The film sits in the archives as a case where the experts differed not over the data but over how to read it.