Strongly Disputed

The Holloman AFB Landing Film

Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, United States; promoted via Norton AFB, San Bernardino, California · 1974 · Film / government disclosure claim · United States

Real frame from the 14 October 1988 national television broadcast in which Robert Emenegger (left) and former Norton AFB audio-visual chief Paul Shartle (right) discussed the Holloman landing film. On this broadcast Shartle stated on the record that he had seen 16mm footage of a disc landing and three beings emerging. This is documentary television footage of the two witnesses making the claim, not a still from the alleged landing film, which has never been produced. (Original 1988 broadcast (aired with Mike Farrell); frame from the archival re-upload preserved on YouTube (video id xa0bUQtLux4).)

A Hollywood producer was promised Air Force film of a saucer landing at Holloman, the promise was pulled, and the only surviving clip turns out to be a plane.

What did witnesses see at Holloman Air Force Base?

There is no contemporaneous witness sighting at the core of this case. What exists is a chain of testimony about a film. In 1973 Robert Emenegger, then a vice president at Grey Advertising, and his partner Allan Sandler, a Los Angeles producer and businessman, were invited to Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, to discuss television specials for the Department of Defense. In that meeting the base audio-visual director, Paul Shartle, and an officer described as head of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations told them about a film of an alien craft landing at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

Shartle put his account on the record on national television on 14 October 1988, seated beside Emenegger. He said, "I saw footage of three disc-shaped crafts. One of the craft landed and two of them went away. Why did it land? It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods. A sliding door opened, a ramp was extended, and out came three aliens." He described them as "human sized," with "an odd gray complexion and a pronounced nose," wearing "tight fitting jumpsuits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices," and holding "a translator, I was told." He added that a Holloman base commander and another Air Force officer walked out to meet them.

Emenegger said the landing happened at 6 a.m. He was told the visitors were "doctors, professional types," that their eyes had vertical slits like a cat's and their mouths were thin and slit-like with no chins, and that during meetings afterward the military and the visitors discussed signals from an unfamiliar alien group. He was shown a landing site at the base and buildings (recorded as Buildings 383 and 1382, and in other tellings King-1 and a hangar) where meetings had supposedly been held over several days. The producers were promised motion-picture film of the landing, with the footage figure quoted variously as 600 feet, 2,300 feet, or 3,200 feet of 16mm, shot from two ground cameras and one helicopter.

A separate strand of testimony comes from astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, whose diaries, later published as "Forbidden Science," record an Air Force officer describing to him a roughly twelve-minute 16mm Holloman film in which an occupant carried a vertical staff with a spiral antenna. Decades later, in February 2023, filmmaker James Fox said on the Julian Dorey podcast that Allan Sandler had personally told him he watched three objects escorted by a jet, two peeling away while one wobbled to the ground, and beings emerging before the footage cut. Fox was careful to add, "I'm not saying what's true or what's not true. I'm just telling you what I was told by people who saw it, and claimed to have seen it."

What is the official explanation?

No official confirmation; the promised film was withdrawn and Shartle's superiors called it "theatrical footage" purchased for a training film; researchers tie the film promise to AFOSI disinformation (Richard Doty, Bennewitz operation)

What did the witnesses think it was?

Robert Emenegger, Allan Sandler, Paul Shartle, with second-hand corroboration logged by Jacques Vallee; story revived by James Fox

The dispute

The dispute has a hard, method-shown core and a softer institutional core. The hard core concerns the only surviving image, the brief "landing" clip in the 1974 documentary that is repeatedly claimed to be eight seconds of authentic Holloman UFO film slipped past the censors. In an independent analysis titled "The Holloman Landing: New Data," released in May 2023, a researcher fixed the exact camera position of the shot, identified the background mountain as Hershberger Peak near Alamogordo, and matched the Holloman runway markings, the berm, and individual clumps of vegetation to the documentary's own re-enactment footage of jets taking off. The features lined up frame-for-frame, which is only possible if both shots came from the same tripod-mounted camera on the same day. His conclusion is that the bright object is a plane coming in to land at Holloman, filmed alongside the staged reconstruction, and not a frame of any genuine UFO film. Other analysts, summarized on Metabunk, reach the same verdict by overlaying an F-4 Phantom on approach against the clip. This is a positive identification of the specific real-world object in the canonical image, which is why the case is Strongly Disputed rather than Barely.

The institutional core is the promised film itself, the 600 to 3,200 feet that was offered and then withdrawn. Paul Shartle testified that his own superiors told him the material was "theatrical footage the Air Force has purchased to make a training film." The promise to Emenegger and Sandler was rescinded before release, and the producers were told to present Holloman as hypothetical. Researchers Jerome Clark, Greg Bishop, and Mark Pilkington place this inside the Air Force Office of Special Investigations disinformation activity of the late 1970s and early 1980s, noting that AFOSI agent Richard Doty dangled the same nonexistent 1964 Holloman landing film in front of producer Linda Moulton Howe in 1983, along with fabricated EBE documents, during the operation that drove physicist Paul Bennewitz to a breakdown. In each instance the film was promised and never delivered, which is the signature of bait rather than of suppressed evidence.

What the dispute does not do is prove a negative. No one has demonstrated that there was never any film, and the producers and Shartle were sincere witnesses who held to their accounts. The 2023 analyst himself stressed that debunking the clip does not prove the landing did not happen. The dispute closes the question of the surviving image, which is identifiable as a plane, and it strongly undermines the promised-film claim by tying it to a documented manipulation pattern, but the existence or nonexistence of a hidden reel rests on testimony alone. That is enough for Strongly Disputed and enough to recommend the case for discredit review, while stopping short of a verified mundane account of the entire affair.

Is the Holloman AFB Landing Film real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one, how this is entirely ordinary. The case splits into the promised film that no one has ever seen and the short "landing" clip that actually appears in the 1974 documentary and is paraded as the real eight seconds. The clip is the only physical artifact and it has a positive, method-shown identification. In "The Holloman Landing: New Data" (May 2023) a researcher located the exact camera position, matched the background peak to Hershberger Peak near Alamogordo, and matched the Holloman runway markings, berm, and individual patches of vegetation to the documentary's own re-enactment shots of jets taking off. The alignment was frame-perfect, proving the "landing" shot and the staged shots came from the same fixed tripod on the same day. He concluded the bright object is a plane landing at Holloman, not anomalous film, a reading echoed by analysts who overlay an F-4 Phantom on approach. The unseen "real" film fits a documented pattern: Shartle's superiors told him it was "theatrical footage the Air Force has purchased to make a training film," the promise was withdrawn, and the identical nonexistent Holloman film was later used by AFOSI agent Richard Doty as bait against Linda Moulton Howe inside the Bennewitz disinformation operation. Ordinary explanation, a re-enactment plane shot plus an intelligence dangle that conditioned witnesses to believe in footage that was never delivered.

Pass two, if some piece of it is real. The strongest version is that a genuine landing occurred, the government showed Emenegger and Sandler a real film, then pulled it during Watergate, leaving only a worthless distant clip in the documentary. Sincere, consistent, on-record testimony from Shartle and Sandler supports this, and even the analyst who debunked the clip stressed he was not claiming the landing never happened, only that this shot is not from the fabled film. The official handling, courting Hollywood producers and then yanking the material, reads either as a botched disclosure or as a deliberate manipulation, and the case sits on that knife edge.

This is not Verified Unexplained, because nothing here is authenticated. It is not merely Barely Disputed, because the dispute is not a soft psychological argument or an unproven reconstruction. The canonical clip has a positive identification of the specific real-world object, a plane landing at Holloman, demonstrated by recreating the exact camera position and matching the terrain and the documentary's own staged shots, and the surrounding film promise is tied to a documented disinformation mechanism with named agents. That clears the bar for Strongly Disputed. The proposedDiscredit flag is set for human review; the tier is Strongly Disputed.