The Paul Villa Saucer Photos
The Villa photographs are some of the most beautiful saucer pictures ever taken, which is part of why they failed. An Albuquerque mechanic produced crisp color photos of a domed disc floating over the Rio Grande valley and a story of two-hour conversations with its crew. Then Project Blue Book noticed that a tree branch passed in front of a craft that was supposed to be hundreds of feet away.
What did witnesses see at Rio Grande valley near Albuquerque?
Two famous sets of color photographs showing a domed metallic disc hovering low over trees and desert scrub. For the Easter Sunday 1965 shots, Apolinar "Paul" Villa claimed a craft roughly 150 feet across whose three occupants from the constellation Coma Berenices spoke with him for nearly two hours in Spanish, English and telepathy.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
US Air Force Project Blue Book examined the photographs and its photo analysis concluded flatly that they are a hoax. The key finding: in one frame a leafless tree branch passes in front of the supposedly distant craft, proving the object was a small model close to the camera. Depth-of-field analysis put the "craft" at roughly 20 inches across.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Villa, an Albuquerque mechanic, said he had been telepathically guided since childhood and was invited to prearranged meetings specifically to photograph the ships. He maintained the story to his dying day and never appeared to profit from it.
Is the Paul Villa Saucer Photos real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one: a method-shown debunk of the strongest kind, with Blue Book's branch-behind-object finding, visible suspension line in at least one image, a reflection matching Villa's own truck fender, and analysts matching the model's proportions to a Volkswagen engine cooling fan. Pass two: nothing in the imagery survives pass one. Verdict: Discredited. Kept in the archive because the Villa discs are among the most-recirculated "vintage UFO photos" online, usually stripped of the analysis that settled them.
Sources
- www.metabunk.org/threads/apolinar-paul-villa-ufo-photos-albuquerque-nm-june-16-1963.13359/
- ufologie.patrickgross.org/ce3/1965-04-18-usa-bernalillo.htm
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
