Unknown

The Bryce Canyon Photo

Bryce Canyon, Utah · 7 June 1994 (miscaptioned "1997" in reposts) · Photograph · United States · Added 2026-06-11

This photo circulates in collections captioned "Bryce Canyon 1997," and almost everything about that caption is wrong except the canyon. The real story is better: a tourist named Roger Louie, two frames thirty seconds apart in 1994, an object in the second frame that he never saw with his eyes, and a UFO organization that promised an analysis and never delivered one.

What did witnesses see at Bryce Canyon?

A blurry whitish disc-shaped object low among the hoodoo rock formations, discovered only after film development. Tourist Roger Louie took two frames about thirty seconds apart from the canyon rim on the morning of 7 June 1994: the first shows nothing unusual, the second caught the object in the lower-left corner. He saw nothing at the time of exposure.

More footage and images of this sighting

Frame 2 at full width: the canyon view with the unidentified object in the lower-left corner, 7 June 1994 (Roger Louie's original case page).

What is the official explanation?

No government or park investigation. Louie hand-delivered prints to MUFON of Orange County in 1996; the chapter promised a formal analysis but never produced one in writing, and about a year later its head phoned Louie with an informal verdict that the object was a bald eagle.

What did the witnesses think it was?

Roger Louie, a vacationing amateur photographer who documented his own case meticulously on an early web page, camera settings included. He rejected the eagle explanation, arguing his shutter speed should have frozen a bird, and never claimed the object was a craft, only that it remained unidentified to him.

Is the Bryce Canyon Photo real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one: the motion blur, the object's absence from a frame thirty seconds earlier, and the fact that nothing was seen by eye are all consistent with a bird crossing the field of view, and the informal eagle verdict is a reasonable reading. But no analysis was ever published, so nothing is method-shown. Pass two: a disc form among the hoodoos with honest, named, self-documented provenance, which is rarer than the photo itself. Verdict: Unknown. No official narrative exists; the repost date of 1997 is wrong and this archive corrects it.