The Lake Powell 1998 Photograph
A silvery disc gliding through a cloud-stacked sky over red rock canyons, credited to Joe Clower at Lake Powell in April 1998, won first prize in UFO Magazine's first annual photo contest in 1999. The photographer was real. He was also a career fine artist, and one third of an art collaborative whose UFO Polaroid archive deliberately blurred the line between the factual and the fictional.
What did witnesses see at Near Lake Powell?
The photo shows an elongated metallic disc at mid-distance over desert canyon terrain under dramatic cumulus clouds. The ufoevidence.org catalog entry quotes Clower directly: photo taken near Lake Powell, Utah, using a 35mm disposable camera, no unusual circumstances at the time of the shooting, and notes the photo won first prize in UFO Magazine's first annual photo contest, Spring 1999. The entry's listed source is El Disco, with a link to the original eldisco.com slide.
What is the official explanation?
No official involvement of any kind. The photo's public life ran through UFO Magazine's photo contest and hobbyist archives, never through any investigative body.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Joe Clower (1937-2024) is the only named source, and he was not a random tourist. He was a Denver-based artist with an MFA from CU Boulder, exhibitions at the Whitney and the Denver Art Museum, and, from 1987 on, one third of El Disco, the collaborative whose UFO Polaroid archive Rule Gallery describes as documenting events both factual and presumed. His bland it-was-just-there caption is consistent with the project's deadpan method, and by his own account he saw nothing unusual at the time of shooting.
Is the Lake Powell 1998 Photograph real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the claim on its face: a well-composed single frame from a disposable camera with the photographer himself reporting nothing unusual at the time of shooting, meaning nobody, including the photographer, claims to have actually seen a UFO. That alone caps the case at a curiosity. Pass two, provenance: the image is slide 247 on the Wayback-archived eldisco.com, hosted in El Disco's own archive as lakepowell.jpg by April 2001 under Clower's own first-person caption, and ufoevidence.org itself credits El Disco as the source. Clower was a founding member of the collaborative, and Rule Gallery's 2025 exhibition frames the El Disco archive as contemporary art that documented events both factual and presumed, with the line deliberately blurred. A UFO photograph living inside its photographer's own fact-blurring art practice, entered by him into a UFO magazine contest, is a serious authenticity problem. What no one has done is demonstrate it: no analyst has shown the disc to be a model or an insertion, El Disco never declared the image a fabrication, and the gallery's own curator pointedly declines to say whether the photographs are real, a hoax, or a joke. This archive previously published the case as Discredited; under the site's rule that Discredited requires the imagery itself to be demonstrated false, that overstated the evidence and was corrected on 2026-06-12. Verdict: Disputed, leaning strongly toward an art-world intervention rather than a sighting, with the photographer's own no-sighting statement doing most of the damage.
Sources
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/latestadditions/Photo18.htm
- web.archive.org/web/20010425214212/http://www.eldisco.com/showslide.cfm?ID=247
- rulegallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/El-Disco-Charged-Particles-in-the-Vicinity-Press-Release-FINAL.docx
- rulegallery.com/exhibition/el-disco-charged-particles-in-the-vicinity-ufo/
- www.cpr.org/2025/03/06/colorado-arts-spotlight-ufos-denver-restaurant-week-first-friday/
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