ight lights flying across the blue sky in an echelon
formation. There were no clouds in the movie to give an indication of
the UFO's speed, but at one time they passed behind a water tower.
The lights didn't show any detail; they appeared to be large circular
objects.

Mariana had sent his movies to the Air Force back in 1950, but in
1950 there was no interest in the UFO so, after a quick viewing,
Project Grudge had written them off as "the reflections from two F-94
jet fighters that were in the area."

In 1952, at the request of the Pentagon, I reopened the
investigation of the Montana Movie. Working through an intelligence
officer at the Great Falls AFB, I had Mariana reinterrogated and
obtained a copy of his movie, which I sent to the photo lab.

When the photo lab got the movie, they had a little something to
work with because the two UFO's had passed behind a reference point,
the water tower. Their calculations quickly confirmed that the
objects were not birds, balloons, or meteors. Balloons drift with the
wind and the wind was not blowing in the direction that the two UFO's
were traveling. No exact speeds could be measured, but the lab could
determine that the lights were traveling too fast to be birds and too
slow to be meteors.

This left airplanes as the only answer. The intelligence officer at
Great Falls had dug through huge stacks of files and found that only
two airplanes, two F-94's, were near the city during the sighting and
that they had landed about two minutes afterwards. Both Mariana and
his secretary, who had also seen the UFO's, had said that the two
jets had appeared in another part of the sky only a minute or two
after the two UFO's had disappeared in the southeast. This in itself
would eliminate the jets as candidates for the UFO's, but we wanted
to double-check. The two circular lights didn't look like F-94's, but
anyone who has done any flying can tell you that an airplane so far
away that it can't be seen can suddenly catch the sun's rays and make
a brilliant flash.

First we studied the flight paths of the two F-94's. We knew the
landing pattern that was being used on the day of the sighting, and
we knew when the two F-94's landed. The two jets just weren't
anywhere close to where the two UFO's had been. Next we studied each
individual light and both appeared to be too steady to be reflections.

We drew a blank on the Montana Movie--it was an unknown.

We also drew a blank on the Tre