Delbert C Newhouse
PersonWitnessDelbert C Newhouse
PersonWitnessDelbert Newhouse was a career Navy photographer whose 1952 film of bright objects near Tremonton, Utah, divided military analysts and was later attributed to seabirds.
Delbert Newhouse was a career Navy photographer whose 1952 film of bright objects near Tremonton, Utah, divided military analysts and was later attributed to seabirds.
Delbert C. Newhouse was an American naval photographer who, on July 2, 1952, filmed a group of bright objects over northern Utah from a highway outside Tremonton. His roughly 75 seconds of 16mm footage became one of the most closely studied films of the early official UFO investigations. Air Force and Navy laboratories analyzed it, the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel screened it in January 1953, and the University of Colorado study revisited it in the late 1960s.
Newhouse spent his career in naval photography. His Navy personnel file, released in 2026, traces his rise through the Photographer's Mate rating to his retirement as a Chief Warrant Officer 4, then the highest warrant grade. At the time of the sighting he was a warrant officer serving as a chief photographer, and according to Edward Ruppelt, the officer then heading Project Blue Book, he had about 2,000 hours of flying time as an aerial photographer. Blue Book investigators described him as an expert photographer.
He was driving through northern Utah with his family when his wife pointed out the objects. In an August 1952 statement he described "a group of about ten or twelve objects" that "bore no relation to anything I had seen before," milling about in a rough formation while one reversed course and moved away from the rest. He filmed them with a Bell & Howell camera fitted with a three-inch telephoto lens, and he told investigators that the clear sky offered no reference for judging their size, distance or speed. In later accounts he said the objects looked like two saucers, one inverted on the other; the Colorado study noted that this description did not appear in his Blue Book statements.
The analyses split. Ruppelt wrote that the Air Force photo laboratory concluded, "We don't know what they are but they aren't airplanes or balloons, and we don't think they are birds." A Navy photo interpretation laboratory spent about 1,000 man-hours on the film and judged the objects "self-luminous" rather than reflections. The Robertson Panel rejected the Navy's methods and, after viewing comparison film of seagulls, said the motions "strongly suggest birds." Ruppelt himself wrote that he "couldn't agree that they were sea gulls." A 1956 study in the Blue Book file reached no firm conclusion before an Air Force memo adopted a seabird explanation, and William Hartmann of the Condon Committee provisionally identified the objects as birds, later citing his own 1968 observations of birds near Tremonton.
Newhouse later accepted an appointment as a special adviser to the civilian group NICAP, and Ruppelt, who interviewed him after leaving the Air Force, wrote that few witnesses "impressed me as much as Newhouse." On September 18, 2026, PURSUE UFO Files Release 06 published a digitized copy of the film with his Blue Book case file, a photo file and his personnel record. Journalist Ross Coulthart pointed to a passage in which Air Force analysts said they were "reasonably certain that the brightness of the images on the film exceeds that of any bird," arguing that the later gull explanation went beyond the analysis. The Tremonton film remains the defining record of Newhouse's career and one of the earliest cases in which trained military photo analysts disagreed over what an unidentified object was.
Explore a remarkable 1952 UFO sighting captured by a Navy photographer. Delbert Newhouse filmed mysterious saucer-shaped objects, a captivating glimpse into unexplained aerial phenomena. See the original footage and hear his account. Watch the full video https://t.co/kxPzRrIJ2p https://t.co/B9ON8JKf8t
[Retweeted] 🚨❓🛸 Breaking: What the Heck is Going On? 👽❓🚨 Senior White House Officials: We cannot find any copies of the DIA's AAWSAP records. Robert Bigelow: "We have copies of everything [from AAWSAP]." (Please spread this far and wide and tag the appropriate people. @DepDNILukas @StephenM @realDonaldTrump @BigelowPodcast @BigelowInst. Let's get these folks together.) ~ @ainsleyearhardt: "....is releasing new documents that might provide proof of extraterrestrial life, including decades-...
Fox News reports on September 18, 2026, on three newly released UAP videos: 1952: A digitized clip from the National Archives taken by Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse in Utah. The footage shows objects appearing to move in a "drone swarm" formation, long before drone technology existed. 2023: A law enforcement officer's smartphone video from Colorado shows multiple orbs hovering over a military installation for extended periods. 2025: Drone footage from over the Middle East captures six ob...
[Retweeted] Nearly 75 years on, a newly released @USAirForce UAP investigation file shows how readily USAF investigators sought to ignore the evidence of anomalous phenomena: • On 2 July 1952, Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, an experienced photographic specialist, filmed approximately 12–14 bright objects near Tremonton, Utah. Release 06 gives us not just another copy of the famous film, but the Project Blue Book documentation surrounding its technical analysis. The remarkable...
Nearly 75 years on, a newly released @USAirForce UAP investigation file shows how readily USAF investigators sought to ignore the evidence of anomalous phenomena: • On 2 July 1952, Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, an experienced photographic specialist, filmed approximately 12–14 bright objects near Tremonton, Utah. Release 06 gives us not just another copy of the famous film, but the Project Blue Book documentation surrounding its technical analysis. The remarkable part is the...
Peter Doocy on 1952 UFO's: "It looks like a drone swarm, but there were no known drones when this was taken in 1952!" 🛸👽🇺🇸 Newly released UAP footage digitized in 4K from the only known copy shows Navy aerial photographer Delbert Newhouse filming multiple unexplained objects moving across the Utah sky on July 2, 1952. Doocy said he was summoned to a West Wing office for a private briefing on files being shown publicly for the first time. A second clip recorded three years ago on a Colorad...
[Retweeted] 🚨❓🛸 Breaking: What the Heck is Going On? 👽❓🚨 Senior White House Officials: We cannot find any copies of the DIA's AAWSAP records. Robert Bigelow: "We have copies of everything [from AAWSAP]." (Please spread this far and wide and tag the appropriate people. @DepDNILukas @StephenM @realDonaldTrump @BigelowPodcast @BigelowInst. Let's get these folks together.) ~ @ainsleyearhardt: "....is releasing new documents that might provide proof of extraterrestrial life, including decades-...
A video featured in the Trump administration’s latest tranche of UFO files appears to have been around for decades, and even received the Hollywood treatment, despite claims it was a “never-before-seen” clip. The video was “revealed” on Friday as part of an exclusive Fox News segment by senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy. “I was summoned to an office in the West Wing yesterday for a private briefing about these files you are about to see on your screen for the first time ever,” an e...
[Retweeted] Newly released "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" footage reaches all the way back to 1952, and decades later, the government still can't definitively say what was captured. One newly digitized video filmed by Navy aerial photographer Delbert Newhouse appears to show multiple unexplained objects moving across the Utah sky. Other released material documents more recent unexplained sightings. The Pentagon says the cases in its UAP archive remain unresolved, with officials unable to...
[Retweeted] **Breaking** 1952 UFO Footage Release By The Pentagon 🇺🇸🛸👽 DOW-UAP-PR159, Historical Film of Reported UFOs, Utah, 1952 Delbert C. Newhouse, U.S. Navy photographer: “There was a group of about ten or twelve objects that bore no relation to anything I had seen before.” On 2 July 1952, Newhouse and his wife stopped seven miles north of Tremonton, Utah. He filmed the objects with a 16mm Bell & Howell camera and a 3-inch telephoto lens. Up close they looked “shaped like two saucers...
