The Half Moon Bay Flying Discs
A photographer shooting black and white landscapes of the Half Moon Bay cliffs says people on the beach started yelling to look up. What he caught on film is four small dark shapes hanging over the surf line, and twenty years later nobody has ever properly examined the negatives.
What did witnesses see at Half Moon Bay beach?
Photographer Watson Morris was on the beach shooting black and white frames of the rocks when, by his account, beachgoers began shouting to look at the sky over the water. He describes three disc-type craft coming slowly over the rocks, the nearest seemingly no higher than about 200 feet, then moving out toward the water. The whole sighting lasted no more than 30 seconds. He says he fired off five or six frames and submitted the best one; the published image actually shows four small dark objects at different heights above the cliffs and shoreline.
What is the official explanation?
There is no official record. No FAA, military, or local agency comment exists for this event. The only nod toward an official explanation came from the witness himself, who wondered aloud whether the objects might be experimental craft out of Moffett Field, about 25 miles away. Nothing was ever confirmed.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Watson Morris, the named photographer, submitted the image and a first-person statement to Coast to Coast AM in February 2005: he had no idea what the objects were, everyone on the beach who saw them had a different explanation, and he invited others to make sense of the photo. The other beachgoers he describes were never identified or interviewed. He reported three discs; the frame shows four dark objects.
Is the Half Moon Bay Flying Discs real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, photographic artifacts: the four shapes are small, dark, slightly elongated blobs at varying altitudes, which is exactly how pelicans or cormorants render in a black and white landscape frame along this stretch of coast, and birds are the strongest mundane candidate. Lens flare is ruled out by the dark tone of the objects, and insects on the lens would not resolve as crisp distant shapes. What cuts against the bird reading is the witness account itself: a 30 second naked-eye observation by multiple people of slow disc-like craft is not how anyone experiences passing seabirds. But that account is uncorroborated, and the companion frames that could settle the question were never published. Pass two, provenance and verdict: the chain of custody is actually decent for an internet-era photo. The image was submitted with a named photographer and dated statement to Coast to Coast AM in February 2005, was catalogued by UFO Evidence as photo ID 367, and the case page was captured by the Wayback Machine by October 28, 2005, so the photo and story demonstrably predate later recirculation. What is missing is everything else: no negatives examined, no named analyst has applied any method to this imagery in either direction, no second witness ever traced, and the other four or five frames never surfaced. Verdict: Unknown. A genuinely unexamined photograph with a multi-witness claim attached, leaning mundane on pass one but with nothing solid enough to close it either way.
Sources
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/post2000/Photo367.htm
- web.archive.org/web/20051028051754/http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/post2000/Photo367.htm
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