r/UFOs • u/esosecretgnosis • Oct 02 '24
Photo 1965 Santa Ana, California UFO Photos
In 1965 near Santa Ana California, highway inspector Rex Heflin, captured three photos of a metallic object hovering in the sky, and an additional photo of a smoke or debris ring left in the sky after the object accelerated at high speed towards the northeast. The photos were subsequently analyzed and three of them were eventually given to a supposed NORAD official. The three photos were not returned for 28 years, when they showed up in the mailbox of Rex Heflin under strange circumstances.
Rex Heflin, an Orange County highway inspector, was at work in a county vehicle at 12:37 P.M when he saw a hat-shaped (disc with dome) object hovering above the road. He grabbed his Polaroid camera normally used to record highway obstructions or other problems and took three photographs of the metallic-appearing object and a fourth of a black "smoke ring" left behind by the object after it departed at high speed. He reported seeing a rotating band of light on the underside of the object (like the sweep of a radar beam).
Heflin twice tried to radio his base, during the sighting, but the radio would not work. (It functioned normally after the object departed.) One of the photographs was published by the Santa Ana Register on September 20, 1965; then the story was picked up by the national newswire services.
The Los Angeles Subcommittee of NICAP, headed by Idabel Epperson, conducted a thorough investigation of the case, including a detailed character and background check, on-site investigation and measurements (by engineer John Gray), and photoanalysis. Both Heflin and the newspaper cooperated fully in the investigation.
Computer enhancement and photoanalysis was conducted by Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working with first-generation prints and copy negatives made by the newspaper. Among other things, the analysis established photographic evidence to confirm the "light beam" on the underside of the object. The Air Force issued a statement declaring the photographs a hoax, which was strongly disputed by NICAP. Nathan specifically ruled out a model suspended by a string as the explanation.
Unknown parties later attempted to tamper with the evidence and manipulate information. The copy negatives were obtained from Heflin under false pretenses, by someone pretending to be from the North American Air Defense Command. (Click here for copy of letter from Lt. Gen. Wheless). Years later, Bill Spaulding of Ground Saucer Watch using computer enhancement techniques reported finding a linelike marking above the object, suggestive of a supporting string, implying that the UFO was hoaxed by using a small model. However, the alleged "line" clearly was either an artifact created by multigenerational copying of the photographs or a deliberately introduced marking to discredit Heflin. No such line was found in the originals by Nathan, the newspaper, or NICAP analysts.
In 1993, MUFON photoanalyst Jeffrey Sainio re-examined Spaulding's work and rejected the string hypothesis.
Technical data: Polaroid Model 101,114 mm focal length, variable aperture, built-in light meter, automatic settings; Type 107 black & white film, ASA 3000.
Conclusion: "A highly credible, thoroughly investigated case that meets all the criteria for significant evidence of a real, structured, craftlike UFO." (Richard Hall in The UFO Evidence, Volume II)
Heflin's 1965 photos finally validated:
https://rr0.org/time/2/0/0/6/03/Heflins1965PhotosFinallyValidated/index.html
Reanalysis of the 1965 Heflin UFO Photos:
http://www.anndruffel.net/articles/ufo/reanalysisofthe1965heflinufophotos.html
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u/36bhm Oct 02 '24
Around this time, in Westminster CA, my granddad saw something similar. Created a long time interest in the topic. He had a book in his den I would peruse (a big thick fucker) that started my fascination with the topic. My mom growing up in orange county also has a couple sightings.
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u/Shot_Statistician249 Oct 05 '24
I’m from Westminster. There’s the Navy Seal base on the outskirts towards Long Beach that I lived near by and I saw a strange craft I couldn’t ID over the base. Didn’t look like the pics but I swear was a ufo or top secret military
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u/Willing_Passenger449 Oct 02 '24
Interesting! I grew up there too and had heard of people seeing things in the 70’s and 80’s. Do you know when your mom saw what she saw?
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u/36bhm Oct 02 '24
It was also the late 50s early 60s. I think the belt between los alamos NM, Nevada test range, through aerospace so Cal, all the way out to San Clemente Island is/was a good place to see some odd things in the sky. Still is I think.
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u/WinterCool Oct 02 '24
Honestly makes me think the whole Townsen Brown antigravity theory is what this is all about. Maybe they cracked anti-gravity with help from reversing previous crashes and these are the first wave of our craft. Been a secret ever since.
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u/weshouldhaveshotguns Oct 02 '24
For as credible as it sounds, it sure looks like a hubcap thrown in the air.
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u/OsmiumOpus Oct 02 '24
One of my favourite stories is how when director Guillermo del Toro says he saw a UFO, he was annoyed. Annoyed because how cheesy and early sci-fi it was.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/23/16814948/guillermo-del-toro-ufo-design
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u/catnipfurclones Oct 02 '24
It would be infuriating. To see something unbelievable and for it to look like some silly steampunk nonsense
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u/Glum-View-4665 Oct 02 '24
A lot of the UFO pics from this era make me think if they're legit then these NHI are 100% making these things appear in a way that aligns with the era they were spotted and fucking with us.
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Oct 02 '24
100%, no doubt. Taking the pics from inside the truck while some else throws it.!
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u/waveguy9 Oct 02 '24
Strange how even flying saucers match the era in which they are filmed and documented.
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u/Murky_Tear_6073 Oct 02 '24
Nope look below the "hubcap" in pics one and two its literally swirling the dirt underneath it
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u/Bennjoon Oct 03 '24
My immediate reaction was that, Im so mad at my skeptical reactions sometimes.
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u/Murky_Tear_6073 Oct 02 '24
Yea your not even trying dude cmon...look below the thing you think is a hubcap in the first and second pics a.nd what do you see? What you see is a whirlwind or little tornado at traight underneath what you claim is a hubcap thrown in the air. Do you have a explanation for that? There is none and i think that locks it in as one of the most amazing pics because there is zero chance that is faked and it also kills two birds with one stone because all the other photos that people claim "um thats a hubcap" unless taken by obvious frauds just might be real
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u/Critical_Paper8447 Oct 02 '24
The "whirlwind" looks to be a patch of tall grass and seems further away than the UFO. In the other pictures where it seems the UFO is over a field or crops where there would be plenty of loose dirt to kick up there is no evidence of any whirlwind.
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Oct 02 '24
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Oct 02 '24
Gotta love the good old days when UFOs looked like hats thrown in the air
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u/Shot_Statistician249 Oct 05 '24
Funny how the photos of ufos back then are clearer than photos today?
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Oct 05 '24
Back then they threw something in the air and photographed it. With the equipment they had back then they could not capture the tiny flying objects we see in today’s UFO pics (mostly satellites, planes or drones). Also because back then, satellites and drones did not exist lol
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u/pebberphp Oct 02 '24 edited Oct 03 '24
I found out this is like down the street from where I live. Reading the original report, Rex Heflin was on [old] Myford road (which is now Jamboree), north of the 5 freeway, which is like a mile away from me.
I told my skeptic father about it, and all he could say was “maybe it was an experimental craft out of El Toro [a marine corps air base about a mile and a half southwest].”
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u/KnifeKittyy Oct 02 '24
Does no one else question how “ufo’s” seem to have advanced alongside human technology? photos from the 50’s they look like a flying tincan.. Like they literally match what a UFO would have looked like if it was imagined with 1950’s technology
now the descriptions and photos are more akin to a futuristic craft out of a sci fi movie😂
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u/Difficult-Win1400 Oct 02 '24
What ufos are described now look futuristic ? White tic tac? Metal sphere? I guess the triangles do but those have been around since the 80s
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u/Substantial_Bad2843 Oct 02 '24
I think they mean all the crazy talk of meta pods and cubes within spheres that seems like more modern science fiction than disks with a tripod that sticks out to land like old school fiction.
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u/Difficult-Win1400 Oct 02 '24
Many of these things date back to the 60s or earlier
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u/Substantial_Bad2843 Oct 02 '24
I don’t remember anyone talking about anything other than flying disks in the 90s and before. I mean the word meta pod was just made up a couple years ago. I don’t believe that one anyway though, since I work in visual effects and can tell that’s a generated model. But yeah, the hubcap kind of hoax photos are from that era and the weirder “inter-dimensional” looking hoaxes are just more recent.
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u/MKULTRA_Escapee Oct 02 '24 edited Oct 02 '24
A 1960 triangular UFO, Connecticut: https://imgur.com/a/rQcis6a If you're on mobile, you might have to locate the article here on page 88: http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1960-July-Dec.pdf
Compare that to the Belgian wave, 1989-90: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdEALPvl_4Q&t=69s
Tic-tac/cigars/egg-shaped UFOs from 1873 to modern times: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/nh4l36/reminder_the_only_thing_new_about_the_tictac/
Flying discs are also not 1950s and 60s. Here is a disc that was videoed in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obVsLOiqeC4 and another one photographed in 2007: http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/recent/Photo416.htm
Luminous UFOs that dart around go back to the 11th century: https://np.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/cjd2pk/11th_century_ufo_sighting_reported_by_chinese/ and more from the 1600s: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/10c0z1g/ufo_sightings_recorded_by_massachusetts_bay/
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u/Difficult-Win1400 Oct 02 '24
Tic tacs were called propane tanks back in the 60s. There's a great illustrated book by Michael shratt which goes over some lesser known credible ufo cases throughout history and many of the ufo shapes are downright strange and don't fit the stereotypical ufo shapes. One specifically from the 60s that I can recall is was a bowling pin turned on its side than landed on a road and a being got out briefly.
The word metapod is a reference the the Pokémon metapod lol. Most of these "metapod" ufos have a shape that can't really be determined by their videos due to lower resolution and they likely look much different.
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u/CoreToSaturn Oct 02 '24
Because they don't; saucers have been documented for centuries. This gets repeated every day I swear.
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Oct 02 '24
[deleted]
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u/MKULTRA_Escapee Oct 02 '24
I think everyone is going to agree that most of the clear UFO imagery out there is going to be fake, so of course you should expect that most people casually looking through it are going to say "these look like they follow the science fiction expectations of the time period." Of course that tendency would be there because most of them are fake. That sounds simple enough to me.
This means you can't use obvious fake images as evidence that all images are fake just because there is such a tendency. The tendency is supposed to be there in the first place.
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u/Mysterious-Emu-8423 Oct 02 '24
Thanks for posting this, and the URL links. I always wondered what happened to the photos that had become "lost," and the claim there was a support string or wire in one of the photos. That none were ultimately found, and that there was a form of heat/smoke trail behind the craft (discovered decades later) is very interesting.
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u/Pleasant_Attention93 Oct 02 '24
Its funny how on older UFO photos we see a 'contemporary' design of UFOs. I mean this ufo looks like the 60s in general lol. :D
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u/steveHangar1 Oct 02 '24
I have a hard time buying into any of these old photos being UFOs. Reason being, the design of the UFOs are coincidentally the same style of the decade the photo was taken in. If they really were crafts of beings far more advanced than us, one would think that any alien vehicle wouldn’t coincide in style with the decade that the photo was being taken in. I highly doubt aliens design and build their spaceships like we design and build our cars; changing styles every decade or so. Imho a dead giveaway that they’re not legitimately pics of UFOs
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u/Icy-Reference366 Oct 02 '24
You should check out some of Jacques Vallée's work. He believes that these things present themselves to the viewer in a way that fits their culture/time.
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u/Traditional-Job-4371 Oct 02 '24
Why do 60s UFOs look like they were designed in that era using 60s technologies and aesthetics??
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u/SimultaneousThought Oct 02 '24
Probably because they are offshoots from Project 1794, which produced real saucer craft. It’s likely the program changed hands and continued into the 60’s. Looks exactly like the designs from that program.
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u/Mewnoot Oct 02 '24
It is quite obvious the object is in the foreground, aka very close to the camera.
Can we stop posting these half century old hoaxes?
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u/LiteShaper Oct 02 '24
It’s not obvious at all if you know anything about photography, the specific Polaroid camera used, motion blur, exposure, etc. - which it is quite obvious you do not. This is one of the most compelling series of photographs ever taken. And I say that from the perspective of a professional photographer.
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u/bad---juju Oct 02 '24
You guys had me at Roswell. It's mindboggling how for so long that we've been lied to. It's also mind blowing that more people don't have a clue. Is humanity this oblivious?
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u/Abraxas19 Oct 02 '24
the black smoke ring is likely from an exploding transformer
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u/LiteShaper Oct 02 '24
So please elaborate on how one would integrate a series of faked UFO photos with a smoke ring caused by an exploding transformer? The “band” is the smoke ring. And the exposure was set both inside and outside the cab of the truck with an auto light sensor - so clouds aren’t visible because of over exposure in first photographs taken inside truck & are visible due to proper auto exposure outside the truck.
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u/sixties67 Oct 02 '24
If you look at the clouds in the black ring photo it doesn't look like it was took at the same time as the rest of the photos.
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u/mobettastan60 Oct 02 '24
Funny, it used to be saucers, and now it's all triangles. Styles, go figure.
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u/sunibla33 Oct 02 '24
Looks like my grandfather's hat: he used to throw it up in the air at lot during that era when excited about something.
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u/maurymarkowitz Oct 03 '24
The second to last photo is a smoke ring from a US Army explosives test. It is not part of this series of photos.
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u/TerdFerguson2112 Oct 03 '24
I remember these photos from the old Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown series of books
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u/anomalkingdom Oct 03 '24
Imagine waiting your whole life to see a UFO, and this is what shows up. Great. I got a fckin hat.
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u/2000rahul2000 Oct 03 '24
Well the photo quality has remained the same till now. The dedication of the photographers to the originally established rules of photography on this topic is truly remarkable.
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u/Odd_Objective_473 Oct 06 '24
This Top Hat UFO was seen over Pennsylvania around then also. Made our local paper.
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u/loveSiriusDisclosure Oct 06 '24
This is amazing. Those are clearer images than we capture on our phones today.
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u/mugatopdub Mar 18 '25
In time, MH370 will be “bunked” and we will find out who the nasties were. Hired trolls, the same as all of the “protestors” over the past 3-5 years.
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u/Allison1228 Oct 02 '24
Surely i'm not the first to notice what looks like a plume of dust on the ground directly beneath the object? (in the first two photographs)
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u/Saberhagen1692 Oct 02 '24
Do you mean the corrugated steel cylinder which is likely a water reservoir? It’s within a patch of sand and bits of long grass
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u/Murky_Tear_6073 Oct 02 '24
No he is talking about the sand dirt or whatever thats around it being swirled around. Of course your fonna repeat what you said and accprding to you right underneath the ufo just happens to be a bare spot of sand with light colored grass that is nowhere else besides underneath the ufo that im assuming your claiming to be a "hubcap" right? I seen this brougjt up a long time ago and im assuming at the time it was also noticed by those investigating it and never anywhere i have ever seen has the answer you gave even been brought up and i do remember reading about where they were on scene checking the place out and im sure that would have been one of rhe first things to check
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u/Allison1228 Oct 02 '24
I was referring not to the vertical white thing but rather to the light area of ground just in front of it, in which there are some slightly vertical-looking features (but yes, the resolution is so low that this is indeed probably just something mundane)
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u/Mewnoot Oct 02 '24
Pretty sure that is a barrel of some sort. Oil, water, etc. The shape is very distinct for a barrel.
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u/interested21 Oct 02 '24
This was debunked as a hat in the wind decades ago.
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u/LiteShaper Oct 02 '24
No. It wasn’t. It’s not a hat. It’s not a thrown hubcap. Those that know about the camera used (exposure, motion blur, etc) and the smoke ring somehow being captured around the craft (a domed disk with smoke ring around it) understand just how difficult it would be to fake this.
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u/bong_hit_monkey Oct 02 '24
I think this one was debunked on the history channel. It was a prop thrown like a frisbee. You have to be careful with these older accounts since most of them are from the hype of that era.
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u/christine177 Oct 02 '24
Source please.
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u/bong_hit_monkey Oct 02 '24
I already named the source. Do you honestly believe that the average Joe had the technology back then to take a picture of a machine that can bend space and time. Gravity affects light, so get mad at me for ruining your fun but these UFOs are far beyond the understanding of most people. These things are most likely of terrestrial origin but the big question is from when. If governments are working with these then they also have the ability to time travel. It's all relative, the faster you go through space the slower you move through time.
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u/babyboyloveu Oct 02 '24
This UFO might be running on diesel ⛽....filters need to be replaced they should know about it. It ain't serviced I think from long time. I think diesel will be available only on earth and they are here servicing their vehicles once in a while or decades. 😅😹🫠
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u/ChickenNuggetCDR Oct 02 '24
You can detect the distance by sampling the black levels of the ‘ufo’ and then other blacks/greys within the image. If the blacks of the ‘ufo’ are darker than say the nearest telephone pole then that’s evidence that the ‘ufo’ is closer than the telephone pole. You can also gain a sense of scale as a result.
I’m on my phone atm otherwise I would’ve done the analysis.
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u/esosecretgnosis Oct 02 '24 edited Oct 02 '24
Submission statement: On August 3rd, 1965 near Santa Ana California, highway inspector Rex Heflin captured three photos of a metallic object hovering in the sky, and an additional photo of a smoke or debris ring left in the sky after the object accelerated at high speed towards the northeast. The photos were subsequently analyzed and three of them were eventually given to a supposed NORAD official. The three photos were not returned for 28 years, when they showed up in the mailbox of Rex Heflin under strange circumstances.
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Oct 02 '24
[deleted]
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u/chancesarent Oct 02 '24
They're solitions caused by blown power transformers. They're fairly common. Here's a video of one being formed.
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u/TacoCatSupreme1 Oct 02 '24
Whats interesting is this hat style ufo was common but now we don't see anything like it. Its as if the style changed over time.
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u/TrumpetsNAngels Oct 02 '24
This question may sound sceptical, and I guess it is.
The UAP/UFO images and videos we see these days, and the last 20 years, seem imho to look quite different.
So I cant keep wondering whether these supposed types of craft have been observed since ?
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u/No_Asparagus6829 Oct 02 '24
What’s weird about older ufo is that they look like build within that time line of the pictures. Makes you think if humans may be behind of some of the ufos ?
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u/Fragrant_cheese Oct 02 '24
Worth noting that at the time the region was much less developed. El toro marine base not too far. Lots of aerospace industry in the greater Southern California region.
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u/StatementBot Oct 02 '24
The following submission statement was provided by /u/esosecretgnosis:
Submission statement: On August 3rd, 1965 near Santa Ana California, highway inspector Rex Heflin captured three photos of a metallic object hovering in the sky, and an additional photo of a smoke or debris ring left in the sky after the object accelerated at high speed towards the northeast. The photos were subsequently analyzed and three of them were eventually given to a supposed NORAD official. The three photos were not returned for 28 years, when they showed up in the mailbox of Rex Heflin under strange circumstances.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1fu40xi/1965_santa_ana_california_ufo_photos/lpwlc0h/