At 11:25a.m on August 5, 1950, in Great Falls, Montana, Nicholas Mariana shot nearly twenty seconds of film of two disc-shaped objects as they moved across the sky.

On some of the 250 frames the objects are seen passing behind the girders of a water tower, which gave film analysts as opportunity to measure the objects’ approximate altitude, speed, azimuth, distance, and size. It was also a sequence that would of been very difficult to have faked.

Mariana admitted that he had seen two jet fighters on their final approach to a nearby Air Force base just prior to his sighting of the objects, but insisted he knew the difference between the jets and the objects.

The Robertson Panel decided that Mariana did not know the difference – that he had filmed the jets.