Unknown

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

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

Pass one, how this reads as entirely ordinary. The case splits cleanly into two things, and the skeptical reading collapses both. The first is the short "landing" clip that actually appears in the 1974 documentary "UFOs: Past, Present and Future" and is paraded online as eight authentic seconds of Holloman UFO film slipped past the censors. That clip is the only physical artifact, and it has a positive, method-shown identification. In "The Holloman Landing: New Data" (May 2023) a researcher fixed the exact camera position, identified the background peak 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 shots of jets taking off. The features lined up frame-for-frame, which is only possible if the "landing" shot and the staged shots came off the same tripod-mounted camera on the same day. He concluded the bright object is a plane coming in to land at Holloman, not a frame of any genuine film, a reading echoed by analysts on Metabunk who overlay an F-4 Phantom on approach against the clip. The second thing is the promised reel, the 600 to 3,200 feet that was offered to Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler 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." Researchers Jerome Clark, Greg Bishop, and Mark Pilkington place the whole episode inside Air Force Office of Special Investigations disinformation activity, noting that AFOSI agent Richard Doty dangled the same nonexistent 1964 Holloman landing film in front of producer Linda Moulton Howe in 1983, 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. The ordinary explanation is a re-enactment plane shot plus an intelligence dangle that conditioned sincere people to believe in footage that was never handed over.

Pass two, what survives that. The two strands of the debunk do not reach the same target. The clip identification is real and it closes the clip, but Robert Emenegger never claimed that eight-second documentary shot was THE Holloman film, and it is widely treated as re-enactment footage with at most a few authorized frames. Metabunk's own thread frames the debunk as aimed at "the claim that that is footage proof," not at the event, and the 2023 analyst himself stressed that debunking the clip "does not prove the landing did not happen." So the positive identification lands on a peripheral artifact, not on the thing that makes this case notable. The core claim is a suppressed reel of a genuine landing, described in close detail by Shartle on national television on 14 October 1988, three disc-shaped craft, one oscillating to the ground on three pods, a ramp, three human-sized beings, corroborated in outline by Sandler to James Fox and logged secondhand by Jacques Vallee. That reel has never been seen, recovered, or matched to any real-world object. Closing a side clip does not touch it. The disinformation reading is a serious counter-narrative, and it is the reason this is not a verified unknown, but it rests on an institutional inference, the "signature of bait," not on a shown method that resolves what those men say they watched. All three principals held to their accounts to the end, and reaffirmed to James Fox that the film exists.

The weighing. This is not Verified Unexplained, because nothing here is authenticated and the disinformation hypothesis is a live, reasonable account of why the film was promised and pulled. It is also not Strongly Disputed, and the reason is specific. That tier needs a confession or recantation, a recovered prop or rig tied to this event, or a positive identification of the central claim. None of the three is present. No principal ever confessed or walked anything back. No prop or staging rig for the landing has ever been produced. And the only positive identification on offer, the plane in the documentary clip, is an identification of the peripheral artifact, not of the suppressed reel that carries the case. The disinformation prong is institutional and circumstantial by its own admission, conceding it rests on testimony alone and stops short of a verified mundane account of the entire affair. What is left is a case carried by sincere, consistent, on-record testimony, with no official story that closes it and no proof that confirms it. That is the definition of Unknown.