The Jack LeMonde Horseback Photograph
A souvenir snapshot of a young Marine on horseback outside Burbank's Pickwick Riding stables sat in a family album for over fifty years before anyone noticed the small domed disc hanging in the sky behind him. When it finally surfaced in 2000, it briefly carried the title of the best pre-Arnold UFO photograph ever taken. Then a French researcher turned up the contrast and found a wire.
What did witnesses see at Pickwick Riding stables area?
The photo shows Jack LeMonde, a pseudonym for a twice-wounded US Marine home on leave, sitting on a horse near the Pickwick Riding stables in Burbank on a June morning in 1945. Between his torso and the horse's neck, well above the background terrain, is a small object with a flat underside and a domed top, sharply resolved against the sky. The camera was LeMonde's own German Voigtlander with a Carl Zeiss lens, shot at roughly f-11 and 1/50th of a second on Kodak 120 film, and the optics were good enough that the object shows visible structure under magnification.
What is the official explanation?
No government agency ever examined this photograph. It was taken two years before the words flying saucer existed and did not surface publicly until February 2000, when it appeared on the CAUS website run by attorney Peter Gersten. The only brush with the official apparatus came secondhand: investigator John Alexander consulted a retired member of the FBI's Special Photographic Unit for guidance on dating the print, and was told the paper archives needed for authentication no longer exist and that only a destructive emulsion test could date it chemically.
What did the witnesses think it was?
LeMonde told investigators the photo was taken by his father, a motion picture producer with serious technical experience, while LeMonde was home on leave from the Pacific in June 1945. The family noticed the odd shape when the film came back, wrote it off as a distant airplane or a speck on the negative, and filed the print in the family album. LeMonde rediscovered it more than fifty years later while scanning family photos after his father's death, enlarged the blemish, and realized what it looked like. He refused all payment, saying money would contaminate the photo's authenticity, and kept his real name out of it to protect his professional reputation. The original negative is missing.
Is the Jack LeMonde Horseback Photograph real? The two-pass assessment
First pass, the case for it. John Alexander of the National Institute for Discovery Science borrowed the original contact print in March 2000 and examined it with Peter Stankiewicz, a former US Air Force photo analyst who ran the largest photographic laboratory in Las Vegas. Under a microscope, down to the grain level, they found no supporting structure, no anachronisms, no signs of manipulation, and lighting angles consistent across the frame. The sharpness ruled out a thrown object at 1/50th of a second. When readers suggested a street light, Alexander pushed back with specifics: Burbank's 1945 streetlights sat on granitized concrete posts of a different design, no post is visible, and a drive-in theater sign behind the horse gives a height reference putting the object well in the background. Second pass, the case against. In March 2006 the French researcher Jerome Beau published an analysis on RR0 showing that simply adjusting the contrast and brightness of the digitized image reveals a faint thread crossing the sky exactly through the object's position, a result independently illustrated by James Neff. That is a named analyst applying a repeatable method to this specific image, and it lends real weight to the mundane reading: a radial-reflector lamp suspended from an overhead wire, a common fixture in 1930s and 1940s California. The negative is gone, the witness is pseudonymous, and the print cannot be dated without destroying it, so neither side can close the case. Verdict: a genuinely puzzling image with a serious, method-based wire finding against it. Disputed.
Sources
- web.archive.org/web/20000511091013/http://www.nidsci.org/news/lemonde.html
- web.archive.org/web/20000620191653/http://www.nidsci.org/news/lemonde_commentary.html
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/1940s/photo81.htm
- rr0.org/Dossier/1945_LeMonde/
- web.archive.org/web/20111018075424/http://ufoupdateslist.com/2006/mar/m12-004.shtml
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in USA
