The Utah Red UFO
In Summer 1966, near About 25 miles southwest of Provo, Utah, a brick-red object, flat on the bottom with a dome on top, photographed on two 35mm slides from the cockpit of a C-47 at about 11:00 in the morning by a retired US Air Force command pilot. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at About 25 miles southwest of Provo?
A brick-red object, flat on the bottom with a dome on top, photographed on two 35mm slides from the cockpit of a C-47 at about 11:00 in the morning by a retired US Air Force command pilot.
What is the official explanation?
This photograph turns out to have a real official paper trail: it is Case 7 of the 1968 Condon Report, the Air Force funded University of Colorado study. Condon investigators Craig and Levine noted the slide frame numbers seemed inconsistent with the pilot’s account and suggested the photos could show an ordinary object thrown into the air. This archive records that ruling without crediting it against the case: the Condon study was the apparatus’s designated closing argument, the report that shut down Project Blue Book, and under this archive’s method its attention to a case counts on the evidence-for side.
What did the witnesses think it was?
A retired USAF command pilot who submitted the two slides to the Condon Committee; researcher Patrick Gross has critiqued the Condon dismissal as scientifically thin.
Is the Utah Red UFO real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one: the frame-number inconsistency is a genuine documentation problem, and a thrown object cannot be excluded from two stills alone; no independent analysis has authenticated the slides. Pass two: a named-context witness (a career military pilot reporting through official channels), a documented place and season, and the fact that the apparatus’s own closing study selected this case and reached for a dismissive reading rather than leaving it open, which this archive logs as apparatus attention. Verdict: Unknown. The earlier version of this case file said independent documentation was thin; the correction is the opposite, the photo was traceable all along, to the official record.
Sources
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
