DOW-UAP-PR159, Historical Film of Reported UFOs, Utah, 1952
This archival footage is a digitization of a 16mm print of Kodachrome color motion-picture film shot on a handheld Bell & Howell Auto Master camera near Tremonton, Utah, on July 2, 1952. U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse reported observing and filming a group of bright airborne objects and shortly thereafter submitted the footage to the U.S. Air Force. The film later became one of the visual cases reviewed by Project Blue Book, the 1952–1969 U.S. Air Force program that investigated the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The film’s limited detail and lack of fixed reference points prevented a conclusive resolution. From the 55-second mark onward, the film transitions to unrelated footage appearing to show a demonstration of sewing equipment. The presence of unrelated sewing-equipment footage suggests that the surviving footage may be a composite or reused print, though the available record does not establish how or when the materials came to be combined. As documented in records submitted with the film, contained in this collection under the title DOW-UAP-D102, the footage originally was paired with mountain scenery from Idaho, which is not preserved in this digitization.
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of DoD's 257 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the DoD agency block it ranks #125 of 257 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #244 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (244 of 450 by score), typical of recordings that are not instrumented military sensor captures.
Anomalousness Index: 57/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
Moving-image footage recorded on a camera rather than an instrumented military sensor platform. The rubric's photographic tier sits below instrumented military capture because a camera's footage offers no calibrated sensor data or second modality to help rule out artifacts. Unlike a still photograph, moving footage does preserve how the object moved over time.
The witness, U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, was a trained photographer whom the Air Force assessed as honest and reliable. That is a high witness-credibility tier, ranked in the rubric below astronaut, trained-aviator, and federal-agent testimony. This axis scores the witness, separately from how the objects were later interpreted.
Single-witness or single-instrument capture. This is the corroboration tier for the overwhelming majority of the PURSUE archive on the released metadata - the rubric records the honest limit of the underlying record rather than inferring multi-witness corroboration that the released summaries do not establish. A small number of files with an independent second witness or instrument score on the multi-witness/multi-instrument tier above this one.
No kinematic measurements - speed, acceleration, vector - are published in the released file with sufficient precision to score on the kinematic axis. The rubric does not infer kinematic anomaly from narrative observer estimates. Every file in the archive carries this value, which is itself an observation about the disclosure: kinematic-grade telemetry was not part of what was released.
A conventional candidate explanation has been considered but is not dispositive. Every file in the archive scores this way - reflecting that the underlying release metadata systematically caveats strong determinations in either direction. The released summaries warn against reading them as conclusive analytical judgments, and the rubric respects that.
War.gov's own summary of this record describes an official assessment that favors a conventional explanation while also stating that the record could not conclusively resolve the case. The rubric scores that between 'open after review' and 'resolved conventional': an agency reached a view, but the evidence does not settle it.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 57/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in DoD
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
DOW-UAP-PR024, Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2023
DOW-UAP-PR072, "ADMINISTRATIVE REVISION: IIR 1777 J0032 22 Kazakhstan - UAP in the vicinit…
DOW-UAP-PR106, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2020
DOW-UAP-PR108, Unresolved UAP Report, Western United States, 2020
DOW-UAP-PR109, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2015
DOW-UAP-PR110, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2020
Verification
SHA-256:
This hash is the SHA-256 of the file body war.gov served on the verification date above. War.gov has re-processed some file bodies since first release (re-compression + OCR, no content removed - see /changes); we re-verify and record the change rather than silently serve a stale hash. How to check this yourself →
Source (DVIDS): https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1023402/dow-uap-pr159-historical-film-reported-ufos-utah-1952
Direct video file: https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2609/DOD_111985807/DOD_111985807.mp4