Distinctly Montana Magazine

26 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 3 I N 1950, AMERICA WAS IN THE GRIP OF FLYING SAUCER MANIA. It was only three years since 1947, a watershed year in which Kenneth Arnold saw mysterious discs sailing above Mount Rainier, and something initially reported to be a flying saucer crashed into the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. By the morning of August 15, 1950, when a Great Falls softball man- ager managed to take a few seconds of 16 mm color film of some- thing strange in the sky, America was in the grip of UFO fever. A post-war American public both wary of and excited by the pos- sibilities of new technologies had, in just a few short years, become utterly, irrevocably familiar with a strange new lingo made up of words like UFO and flying saucer, little green men and "aliens." So it's probably fair to say that Nick Mariana, manager of the Great Falls Electrics, and his 19-year-old secretary Virginia Rau- nig had heard of UFOs as they walked over the baseball field to check the wind direction ahead of an upcoming game. But it would be a stretch to say they expected to see a pair of them soaring at what seemed like an impossible speed through the blue sky, glinting in the bright morning light of late summer. This was seven years before the USSR sent Sputnik, the first manufactured satellite to orbit our planet, beeping into the ion- osphere. It was eight years before we would put our own satellite into space. In short, there were far fewer objects in the sky—es- pecially the daylit sky—than now. If it was in the sky, and if it wasn't an airplane or a dirigible, it was a bird, bug, or bat. Or a UFO, of course. You have to admire ole Nick Mariana. He was a man ahead of his time. Most people back then, finding themselves staring at something they didn't understand, something apparently flout- ing the laws of aerodynamics, didn't reach for their camera. This was well before the era of TikTok (or Tic Tac UAPs), and most people didn't have a camera at hand, to say nothing of the im- pulse to pick it up and point it at something. But our man Mar- iana happened to have a 16 mm color camera in his car. He ran to retrieve it, precious seconds ticking away as the pair of white objects barrelled through the sky. He managed to capture a few seconds of the objects as they traveled south out of the north- west. According to Mariana, speaking to an investigator for the 1956 documentary Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers, the objects were "fifty feet across" and "fifty yards apart" from each other. They had no wings, no appendag- es, and no apparent method of propulsion. He estimated their height at 5,000 feet, and noticed they seemed to be spinning. He whipped the camera into place, sighted the craft through the viewfinder, and began shooting. He managed to follow them as they passed behind a water tower, losing sight of them after they went behind the tower and into the blue sky to the south- east. He produced about 16 seconds of footage. He couldn't have known it then, but he had just filmed the first known UFO video, a genre that has become very familiar to Americans (and the world) in the 70 years since. Seconds later, two F-94 jets roared overhead, racing to the south. Just hours later, the Great Falls Evening Leader reported on the mystery, printing that Marianas "hopes to have photograph- ic proof for skeptics," and that the footage, once developed, "will verify what he hopes isn't failing eyesight," and concludes by saying that, as far as the question of the identity of the objects goes, the "high-flying baseball version may be more acceptable to Great Falls residents than 'flying saucers.'" by NICK MITCHELL Flying Saucers Flying Saucers Great falls! Great falls! When First Came to

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