A

Hi everybody, this is Michael Ryan. We are on summer hiatus, but for the rest of the summer we are going to play the Best of UFO Talker Podcast. So enjoy today's episode. And as always, if you have a question or comment or something you would like to say to us, send your email to ufotalkerell.net foreign.

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You are listening to the UFO Talker podcast. Come with us as we explore UFOs from the past and the present. With insightful discussions, interviews and reviews, we will add our voice to the mysteries that have been seen in our skies and oceans for all of human history. Now, here is our host, Michael Ryan.

A

Welcome everybody, to the podcast. This is episode 32 from Studio 7H here in Ontario, Canada. On today's episode, Christine Scott and I are taking a deep dive into the Rex Heflin UFO photos from 1965. But before we get to that, there's a couple of things I want to talk about. I'm still recovering from the very bad flu that I got last week. How I made it through last week, I don't know. And how I did the podcast from last week, that's even further. It's a bigger mystery, but I'm feeling somewhat better. Although later today I'm taking a COVID test to find out if I actually have Covid. Somehow I made it through the entire pandemic without a cold or a flu or anything. And, well, there you go. So, as you may or may not know, different parts of the podcast are recorded at different times. It's not all recorded at the same moment. So the part where Christine and I do the deep dive into the Rex Heflin UFO photos, that has already been done and this part is done later and there is actually something I forgot and I left out which I'm going to include right now. Another little known part of the Rex Heflin photos was just a few days before Rex Heflin took pictures of the UFO. There was a Mr. And Mrs. Ralph Joseph who are on the Santa Ana freeway about approximately 10 miles from where Rex Heflin took his pictures. And they saw a large glowing object sitting on top of some power lines. And many cars had stopped on the shoulder of the freeway to take a look at what he had or what everybody was looking at. So that was one thing I wanted to add because it was an area that had UFO sightings before Rex Heflin and also after Rex Heflin. And we will be right back after this message.

C

And now for a moment in UFO history, it was a glorious morning in Richmond, Virginia. That day in April 1947, the James river was sparkling in the Sunshine. At the U.S. weather Bureau station, meteorologist Walter A. Manchesky and a few of his staff had launched a balloon. When it got high enough, they started to track it with their theodolite, which had a 25 times magnification. Walter saw a strange object through his theodolite. At first he thought it was the balloon, but this object was below the balloon and was a silver saucer shaped object that had a slight dome on top. Walter and his staff watched the UFO for 15 seconds. Just months before the Kenneth Arnold sighting in June 1947. Walter reported the sighting to his supervisor. This is one of many sightings when a UFO and a balloon were seen in the same area at the same time. Other similar sightings happened in Erie, New Mexico in 1949 and Yuma, Arizona in 1953.

A

Christine Scott and I are here and we're going to take another deep dive as we so like to do with these UFO cases. And so on this episode we're taking a deep dive into, into the Rex Heflin UFO photos. And you know, they have been around a long time and I was surprised because I had been aware of them for many, many years, as I'm sure Christine has. And after investigating it, taking our deep dive look into it, I have found, discovered things that I was, I can honestly say I was shocked. I, I never knew before. So I think this will happen to most of you out there who are listening now. So before we get started, I just want to kind of frame it, make a kind of a audio picture, if you will, of what happened. And so these photos were taken on Tuesday, August 3, 1965, and they were taken by Rex Heflin. And so he was 38 years old at the time. He was a, an Orange county highway maintenance engineer, which I guess is, I don't know if it was all of his job, but a lot of his job he would drive around and take pictures of road signs that needed to have like trees removed from in front of them or you know, if the sign fell down or, you know, any of those kind of things. So, because I've often heard people say, well, how do you just happen to have a camera with him? But that was part of his job. So having the camera with them was actually something he did, you know, every day. So these were taken roughly pretty close to Santa Ana, California. A little bit north of where he was was Tustin. A little bit south of where he was was the city of Irvine. So if you are familiar with the area, it's kind of right in there. So. So kind of, I'm gonna say south east of Los Angeles, but not by a long way, you know, probably, I don't know, 50, 60 miles, maybe, something like that. And he took the pictures at 1237. And there's a reason why we know it was 1237. And. But one of them was not because of Rex, because Rex didn't normally wear a watch. So, you know, this is a deep dive episode when I'm telling you if he often wore a watch or not. Okay, so you're getting your money's worth on this, on this program. But we actually know the time because this. These photos have been investigated by many, many groups. And so one of the groups that investigated them and they could tell from the pictures is the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. And they could tell by the shadows what time it was, which. Boy, I didn't even know that was possible, but it is. So that's how they know the time that he took it. The other thing you should know about this area, that in 1965, like a lot of areas in Orange county, it was not built up. So it was mainly farmland, wide open spaces. And that's what the pictures look like that he took. You can just see farm fields and that kind of thing. So now, of course, if you Google it now, it's very built up. It's kind of a mixture of an industrial area, a lot of homes. You know, there is no open spaces there anymore. And it looks like they've done something a little bit to the roads in that area. So our listeners, because I know we have a lot of listeners in that general area, if you could email us and we could maybe put it on a later show, is the road that he was on was called My Ford Road. And at that time, when he took the pictures, My Ford Road, or may for Myford, I may be too accentuating the. My Ford is. It went under the Santa Ana Freeway, which was about 300 yards from where he took the pictures. Now it looks like Myford Road. It doesn't go. It doesn't even go to the Santa Ana Freeway anymore. It kind of stops before you get there. So maybe some listeners out there could explain what has happened there. But also, and here's something else that you don't often hear anyone talk about is about a mile or half a mile north, roughly north of where he took the pictures, is the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro. And that was a very large Marine Kind of base where they had lots of helicopters and jet fighters. So we never called it that if you lived in, in Orange County. We just called it El Toro Marine Base is how we always referred to it. But it has the fancy name Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro. And that is where. Here's another little side note. All the presidents, when they came, come to Los Angeles, they land at or used to land at El Toro Marine Base. And that base had been around since World War II. They. It's been closed since July 2, 1999. But that's another interesting fact as to how close that base was. And of course, you know, as you can imagine, that base would have had radar and all those kind of things. And something else I want to talk to just before we get into it is the camera that he used. You don't very often hear much about his camera. So he actually had with him a Polaroid 101 land camera. And for a lot of the people below a certain age, they really won't be familiar with what a Polaroid camera was. You probably imagine that everything was a film camera back then. But Polaroids were different because when you took the picture, you kind of pulled it out of the back of the camera and by that pulling action, it spread the chemicals over the paper and it actually developed in, I think it was five minutes as I remember. And then you would see your picture like five or ten minutes later. So that was pretty unique even for those times. And so something to know about the Polaroid 101. It was built by Polaroid Corporation from 1964 to 1967. Here's something interesting and it kind of makes sense. This was their flagship camera, so it was their most expensive camera. And so as you can imagine, that's, you know, people in the government, that's what they're buying, the most expensive one. And at the time that Rex had it, it was about worth about $165. So that was a lot of money in 1965, like depending on where you work, that was a few weeks of pay. So he had a very high end camera. And if you look on after we have our episode today, if you look on the Internet, there's lots of sites that have pictures taken with this camera. And it actually took a very good picture because people are still using. You can buy the camera today on ebay for about the same amount of money actually. And there is a film available for it, color film. And people are showing their pictures, they've taken it. They're all very Nice. Like this is what, this wasn't a crappy camera with crappy lenses or anything. And it was an automatic exposure camera. So right next to the front lens there was a little smaller lens and that automatically did your exposure for you. And for people who know about photography, the exposure was shutter priority, as they say. And the shutters, the shutter on it went from anywhere from F8 to F42. So F42 was pretty unusual for camera in that era. That was, you know, an unusual F stop. And shutter speeds went from 1/1200th of a second up to 10 seconds. So also 1/1200th of a second, that was a very odd speed to have back then. You know, probably back then I'm thinking, you know, F or probably 1-500th. You know, those are probably more the kind of shutter speeds that you'd get back then. And Also it took 3,000 ASA black and white film. That's the film he had at the time. So that film is very sensitive to light. But yeah, that I didn't know a very expensive camera. He obviously knew how to use it. That's why the clarity of the pictures are actually so good. If you look at the, the, the mirror on the truck, it's, it's very sharp. And we'll get into this a little bit later how we know this. But the, when he took the pictures, it was in focus from 36 inches to infinity. That's kind of what it was set at. So I think I've painted a pretty good picture of everything he was using that day, what kind of day it was. You know, it was 75 Fahrenheit, it was a partly cloudy day, that kind of thing. And so he had pulled off to the side of the road on my Ford road, and he was, I think he was going to take some pictures of another, a sign that he saw branches in front of or something like that. So he also had a two way radio in his truck and he was just trying to communicate with his supervisor. And the supervisor's name was Herm Kimmel. And Herm was actually on the Santa Ana Freeway a mile away or something like that. And he was doing something there. So he's trying to communicate with him and he noticed that the radio was dead, he couldn't reach anyone. So this was very unusual. And as he's sitting there, out of the left side of his vision, he notices something flying in the air. There was a glint in the sky. So he looks over and that's when he sees the UFO. And it's about 700ft away, about 150ft in the air. And he. And he says the UFO is about 20ft wide. And how he knows this is the. He knows the width of the lanes, like how wide each lane is. And the UFO is crossing from his left to his right. So that is the perspective of what he's seen. So I always get confused when you see the pictures, I don't know if you're like me, Christine. You kind of get confused when you. You kind of see the first one and the second one and you can't really imagine, like, how is it flying, because it. It just looks odd. But that's how he knew the size of it. So picture number one, which he took through the windshield, that's when it was going from left to right. And he snaps that photo and then it kind of takes off to his right, but then goes a little bit south of the side of his truck just slightly. So that's where you see pictures two and three. That's why they're out of his.

D

The.

A

The side door of his truck that he was in. And that's kind of the sequence. So picture two is. The craft is slightly tilted up, so you can see the. The. The dark underside is slightly tipped up. There is something he sees now that. Okay, somehow over all of these years, I totally missed this. But he says as the craft is tipped up and the bottom is dark, he sees a very bright, kind of greenish white beam of light that extends from the middle of the craft to the rim of the craft and it is rotating clockwise, kind of like the spoke of a wheel. And it makes. And it comes back to the same spot every kind of two seconds. So I, I'd never ever heard that before.

D

And I thought, no, neither did I.

A

I thought, okay, so this is such a great part of the account. How does this get missed? Like, when you think about all the times this has been covered, Right? So he mentions that and. Oh, I. While we're kind of talking about all this great new information, so the bulk of the information that we're talking about we have actually got from a paper called the Real reanalysis of the 1965 Heflin UFO photos that was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 14, Number 4 in 2000. And that was written by Ann our, You know, Ann Druffle, my hero, and also Robert M. Wood and Eric Kelson. So they did a lot of research. And I'll put a link to that on in the show notes, because if you're interested at all, that is Very well worth reading. So that was picture two. The craft is slightly tipped up. And then as it continued on it, he took picture number three. And picture number three, it's starting to fly north, so away from his truck and towards the Santa Ana Freeway. And then as he. As it actually crossed the Santa Ana Freeway, so. Which would have been fairly busy at that time of the day. So he can't have been the only one that actually saw these. And so it flew kind of more north. More north, probably 600 yards, something like that. And he said it started to gain speed and also altitude. And that's when he took the fourth picture. It crossed back over my Ford road, and it left this bluish black smoke ring. And then it really took off and it left the scene. So he then drove up the 400 or 600 yards or so. He drove kind of north. So my Ford road doesn't actually exactly run totally north. It's kind of askew. So it's a kind of a northeast kind of a drive that he would have taken. And so he takes. He drives 4 to 600 yards north, and he pulls his truck over again, gets out of the truck, and that's when he takes a picture of the smoke ring. We'll talk about that a little bit later for sure. But he puts the pictures away, and he continues on with his work. And it wasn't till later in the day when he gets back to the office, that he actually shows people the photos. And I think, Christine, you've got a lot to say on that.

D

Yeah, they. The first thing is, he assumed because they were so close to El Toro, he thought it was an experimental aircraft. He thought he photographed an experimental plane. Am I supposed to be talking about this? And when he showed the Polaroids to colleagues, they thought he had photographed a ufo. But because number number four was so different with the smoke ring, the first three photos showed a clear sky. They were very clear. And because there was some cloud cover around the smoke ring, a lot of people, even his colleagues, were a little skeptical about that photo. And the. The one thing I'm going to say about these photos to our listeners, even if you don't know the name Rex Heflin, you have seen these pictures.

A

Oh, yeah, yeah.

D

I guarantee you, when you see them, they. They will immediately register in your consciousness. Because they were the. These are the classic UFO photos from the 60s.

A

Yeah.

D

I mean, not even that, because he never got any copyright on them. They were freely shared. In fact, if you Google this case or you Google his name, the first Thing that comes up are not only these beautiful pictures he took, but heck, people are selling framed copies of them everywhere. They're not even their photos to sell.

A

I know. Well, it. That is something that is kind of weird because the people who think it was a hoax, and we'll get a lot deeper into the hoax aspect later, but for people who think he was just out to make money, so he never copyrighted these pictures and never made a dime off these pictures, and they have been seen everywhere. I mean, there's a lot of other people making money off of his pictures other than him. And like, like you said, Chris, he thought it was an experimental aircraft, so he didn't think, oh, I'm shooting a picture of a ufo. This is from El Toro Marine Base. It never dawned on him that it was a ufo. It wasn't until, like you're saying, his co workers who said, wow, okay, so that's a ufo. That's not anything.

D

Well, a funny thing I thought of with this, because I've seen Independence Day a. A squillion times. El Toro is the base that Will Smith scrambles out of, isn't it?

A

You know what? You've stumped me. You've. You stumped me.

D

I think it is because I think. I think he scrambles out of El Toro when.

A

So if you know, the year Independence Day was made, that we might be able to say, because El Toro closed in 1999.

D

Yeah, I think Independence Day was 97.

A

Okay.

D

I think it was slightly earlier, but. But for some reason, you know, somebody keeps. Doesn't Robert Loggia tell Will Smith, sorry, son, there's nothing left at El Toro. I just want to get back to my friends. No, no, son, there's nothing left.

A

I know. I know that. Okay. It's too bad we didn't have assistants here who could be busily looking this up.

D

Yeah. And I thought, oh, I should have looked this up beforehand. And the other thing, speaking of popular consciousness, I'll just deviate here for a minute. Another thing I should have looked up. You probably know this. What year did the Invaders come out?

A

That was 67, because it was a replacement episode. So I'm going to say. Or a replacement series. So I'm going to say it was just after. It was in January 67, I'm going to say. So that was a couple of years later.

D

Because if you're like me, and I know I am, as they say, do you not think his photo informed the design of the ships on the Invaders?

A

You're exactly right, because so you know, as our. We've both done research into the show and things have dawned on both of us that we thought, wow, we never connected these two dots.

D

Yeah, there's a lot of connected.

A

So 100% the UFO from the invaders. It was lifted from Rex Heflin's photos. And another reason probably why it is because, as we've discussed, he didn't copyright them, so. No, the studio, Quinn Martin Productions, probably felt totally emboldened to just copy the heck out of that because he's got no rights to it, so.

D

No. And, and I mean, it's such. Just a classic design.

A

It is.

D

Full stop.

A

Yeah.

D

Yeah. I, I am convinced if, if Rex

A

had taken these, had taken these pictures after the show, everyone would have said he copied. Yeah, the, the, the craft from Invaders, but it's the other way around. It was two years before. So, yeah, it's. It's uncanny how they look exactly like it.

D

Yeah.

A

I'm just going to throw quickly another uncanny bit of trivia in here. And on episode two of UFO Talker, I talk about my sighting of a ufo and so I saw it with my mom and we didn't really write down the date, the time or anything like that. So I'm not exactly sure of the year. I would say it was not later than 67. It could have been 65, like somewhere in there. But another, you know, connecting the dots that didn't dawn on me till recently is Rex Halflin's UFO and the UFO I saw are very similar. You know, I don't know why it took me so many years to think about it, but as I was researching this, I thought, could I have seen what he took a picture of later in the day that even you very well might have. That sent a chill up my spine. But as I worked it out, Rex took this in August. I have a vivid memory of this. We saw our sighting at night and I think eight o', clock, I'm going to say, but eight o' clock at night in the. The only way it could be dark is, and that's how I remember my sighting, is it would have been the winter months because at 8 o' clock during the summer, it would not be dark in Southern California like most places that have, you know, in the summer the sun stays out longer, so it can't. It couldn't have been the same day because, you know, it just wouldn't have worked out because mine was a dark sighting at 8. His was during the day. But, you know, maybe it was the same craft lurking around they were on a mission in Southern California. But I thought I would throw that in there just to. And also another. This is. I don't know if this is here nor there, but the street I grew up on, the cross street at the top of my street, it was called Edinger Avenue. And for anyone who lives in that area, you'll be very familiar with Edinger in Huntington Beach. That's where I grew up. And as I was looking on Google Maps to find out where Rex Heflin had seen his taking his pictures, I. A few blocks away, there's a street called Edinger. And I thought, okay, well that can't be my Edinger, because it's just in a different direction than what I remember. So I pulled out on Google and kind of followed where I lived. And it is the same street. It just takes a lot of weird, amazing. Takes a lot of weird turns and there's a hard right turned in there somewhere. But I thought, wow, what is. That's a coincidence. You know, just if I just walked out to the end of my street as a kid and followed that street, I would be exactly where. Where Rex has taken his picture. So I think it's roughly about a 20 minute drive from where I grew up. Roughly, something like that. So that's my weird connection to. To the Rex Heflin picture. The photos.

D

Yeah. 2023. You're doing a show about it?

A

Yes. Yeah. Really odd. So just. Yeah, just continue on with what you were saying about.

D

Well, basically right after Rex showed the pictures to everyone a few weeks, people were really interested. And his relatives gave the photos which he had lent them to the Santa Ana Register. Which newspaper in Orange County. A reporter from the Register checked with El Toro. El Toro base denied any UFO reports it received. They said, no, we don't have an experimental craft. But copies of his first three photos made from his originals by the Register's chief photographer, Clay T. Miller, were published for the first time in that newspaper. September 20, 1985. An objective account.

A

65.

D

Yeah. 65. Sorry, what did I say?

A

I thought you said 85.

D

Oh.

A

And I thought, wow, that's Back to the Future. I don't know how we get.

D

Yeah, we are time traveling tonight, so. But Heflin was never asked. Again, we're getting into copyright here. He was never asked for permission to print the photos.

A

I know that's crazy when you think about it.

D

Yeah.

A

Like, even in that day and age, they were well aware of copyright.

E

And even after that, they were subsequently published in journals and magazines. He never copyrighted them or asked for any kind of reimbursement. And they ever. They even turned up in the 1966 Junior Encyclopedia Britannica with a pick under spacecraft.

A

So. Right, exactly at that time. And as you point out,

D

a lot

A

of people are making copies. So, you know, there was several copies by this point. And so right around this time where they had been published, that's when the ball really started rolling. So right after that, they were probably from. From El Toro is some Marine Corps intelligence officers came to Heflin's house and they interviewed him and they asked if they could borrow his photos. And so he got them back.

E

Yeah, they were returned.

A

They returned. Yeah. And then shortly after that, the US Air Force contacted Heflin and they began an official investigation. And the officer that came out to him was Captain Charles Reichmuth. And he interviewed Heflin for almost three hours. Like, you know, they weren't kidding around anymore. And something that I'm sure, Christine, you came across this as well as I have, I was not aware of this is both the Marine Corps intelligence officers and Charles Reichmuth, they really investigated.

E

Oh, they did, yeah, they did.

A

They just didn't, you know, say, how come you're not wearing a watch today? That kind of thing. Like they went to his work.

E

Yeah, character. They did a character dive.

A

Yeah, they interviewed lots of people. He worked with his neighbors. They went back into his history. Like, oh, yeah, he was investigated.

E

And also around this time, NICAP became involved with National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon headed by biophysicist Leslie K. Calbroon, later Isabel Epperson and of course the Queen Anne Ruffle.

A

Yes. I think at some point, like everyone in ufology is involved with.

E

There's, there's prints all over this. Everybody's fingerprints are on this. Yeah.

A

And so one thing that's kind of discouraging is so when Captain Reichmuth, he did his report, if you actually read his report, it. It's mainly kind of favorable to Rex Heflin. He believes in his character. All, you know, all that kind of stuff he actually wrote in the report, and I'm quoting it says from all appearances, he, Heflin is not attempting to perpetuate a hoax. Yeah, but that is not the conclusion that blue book came up with.

E

No, no. They said it was a photo of a 9 inch vapor pan, which I'm not even sure what a vapor pan is. Do you know what a vapor pan is?

A

I am not sure what that is, but they were. They said it was thrown from 15 to 20ft away from the camera. And they labeled his pictures as a hoax. So I think that's why there's this yin and yang over Heflin's pictures over this year. Like, depending on what you've read, you either think they're a hoax or they're real, or you're not sure. There's kind of a. Like a. You're not. It's just all over the place. The. In the opinion. Right.

E

Well, also, because of the shape. You know, that. That's also the classic era of dang.

D

Throwing a pie pan in front of the camera.

E

Or like, great Barker. Did he hop cap. He drove around in his car with, you know, whatever, a hubcap on the end of a fishing line and got his friend to film it and sold it as real footage. So just the shape, I think, lends itself to people going, nah, that's a hubcat. He threw it.

D

You know, but, you know, we. With.

E

The first thing we had heard was about the lights. Well, I never heard that before.

A

I know. And that was in.

E

Yeah.

A

An affidavit he signed, like. So this wasn't just someone's. You know, I remember he said this. No, he. This was in an authorized statement he made to one of the investigators. And I think that guy was from nicap. I. If I'm not mistaken. But also. And if we don't have, you know, enough military involved already, we actually have. With Rex Heflin, we have a Men in Black.

E

Yeah.

A

Story connected to him. This. This. These photos have everything they do.

E

And it didn't happen to him just once. Oh, no, not just once. First was September 20th. A man representing himself as a NORAD colonel phoned Heflin, and then two men in civilian clothes came to his door. He didn't look too closely at the ID because he'd been talking to so many people. You know, he thought it was part of a joint investigation, and he thought

D

the ID Looked similar to, you know,

E

El Toro investigation, and they wanted the photos. And of course, you know, he's been cooperating with everybody, handed them over, and

D

they never came back.

A

I know.

D

Until.

A

Well, so the. The other thing is. And this is weird, so like, norad, to my knowledge, they don't have investigating officers that no would come out to your house or that. It's not that kind of a. An organization. And I've heard this NORAD reference many other times, not just with. With Heflin, but, you know, many other years and many other stories. There's. The people are from norad, and I always Think, boy, we should do a deep dive into that one day.

E

Why are they picking up what they do?

D

It's in the name.

A

And then the other men in black was. It happened a couple years later.

D

Yep. October 11, 1967. Another guy identifying himself as Captain C.H. edmonds, wearing an u. S. Air force uniform and his ID Looks similar to the phony NORAD one, showed up at his house again and asked him a bunch of questions. It was funny because when this guy came to Rex's house, he was listening to his hi fi, and he noticed the hi fi sounded kind of weird. And he also noticed a purplish glow coming from the back of the man's car.

A

Okay, this is x files now.

E

Yeah.

D

And he. He thought he was being secretly recorded. And again, both of these guys flashed a phony kind of salmon and green colored ID Similar to the NORAD one that, of course, he. He mistook. He said, well, it looks like the el Toro idea. I don't know. Aren't you guys all cooperating? I'm. I'm cooperating.

A

And he. And he was also. They were standing on the porch. He never invited them in.

E

Yes, that's right.

A

And he always thought it was odd, you know, what the. The questions were? The questions were very personal, not your typical kind of questions. And I think he phoned a friend of his from NICAP right after this and asked them, what do you think this is all about? Like, he was starting to get concerned about who these people were. We're just showing up. But also around this time, like, one or two years later, another hero of ours probably is scientist James McDonald.

E

Yes.

A

So that's when he got interested. Was around 67. And if you know about James McDonald. When James McDonald is interested in your story, okay, Batting down the hatches, he is like a pit bull on getting in. Like, he doesn't stop till he. Till he gets every, you know, square inch of information he can. I think there's another thing we should mention right here, so the listeners don't lose track. Is the fourth picture, the one with the smoke ring? So for whatever reason, Halflin didn't like that photo because no one believed it. And he thought I. Every time I show it, no one believes me. So he kind of withdrew that from the group. So that picture never got loaned out to all the air force people and the marines that were coming. So the. The men from norad, they didn't get all four. They only got three. And so he always had the. The fourth photo that never left his possession.

E

And that Was that. And that with McDonald was the disputed photograph.

A

It is that.

E

Yeah.

A

It's very interesting when you read about McDonald's methodology. And he so believed the photos, the first three and all that, but he couldn't believe that the fourth picture was. Was. He believed it was. Certainly wasn't taken at the same time and. Yeah, because skeptical of the photo in general.

D

Well, because the first three are so

E

beautiful and clear and just precise and they're all shot against a perfectly clear sky. But the fourth photograph of the smoke ring seems to have clouds in the background.

A

Yeah. So this is something to do with. So in this report that we're quoting from, it kind of mentions that James McDonald actually didn't know a lot about photography. So you kind of imagine that if you're a scientist, I don't know why, but it's the stereotype that they just know everything, they know it all. And so he was. Got confused. So if you. If you know about photography, I know about photography, the explanation makes total sense. But if you don't know about photography, then it can be very confusing fusing. So the Polaroid 101 camera, which is the camera he had, had a little lens next to the main lens, and that was an automatic exposure sensor. And so the pictures that were taken inside the truck, if you look at the top, I don't. Maybe not the top third, but the top of the picture is the inside of the truck, which is dark. And then of course, outside the truck, it's obviously light. So these sensors, and especially back in the 60s, they weren't that sophisticated. So when you took the picture and you're telling the sensor there's a lot of dark and there's a lot of light. So what it tried to do was go halfway like, you know, to even out the picture. So not. They wanted to let in as much light for the dark part, but not quite enough to make it too overexposed on the light. So in a nutshell, what the sensor was doing was overexposing the sky. So if you had had light clouds or kind of more hazy clouds, which is typical for that area, I can tell you from growing up there, it was vastly overexposing the sky. So any kind of cloud detail would have got mainly lost and would have looked more white or clear. And then his fourth photo, when he got outside the truck later, so he's completely outside the truck now, the sensor is completely reading the light, so it's letting in way less light. So now you're seeing more detail in the sky and that's why you're seeing the, the clouds. So if you know about photography, that makes perfect sense. I've taken lots of pictures where the similar things happened. But if you don't know about photography, that would, would seem odd, like how come this looks all bright with no clouds and there's clouds in here. So that's the, the explanation of that. And a little bit later we're actually going to go into more of that to actually even make it more clear.

E

Yeah. And that was, that was the basis for McDonald's saying, well, I think these photos were taken at two different times because of this. So therefore. But again, a deep dive was taken into that with MacDonald and Heflin and two visiting BBC documentary documentarians tried to replicate the photos. And weird thing, I, I think at the time Heflin was kind of starting to get tired of everything maybe and had been kind of straight and narrow all the way along and, and started joking with the documentarians that he, he had five wives hidden away because I guess there was a throwaway question asked, are you religious? And, and he said, well, that has nothing to do with it. And I've got five wives.

A

Yeah. So he was kind of joking, but they kind of took him as being serious.

E

But, but the photo analysis, you know, at that point had determined there were no strings involved until the 1970s. GSW ground saucer watch, William Spalding claimed he found evidence of a string being involved.

C

Yes.

D

Yeah.

A

And that turned out to be because keep in mind, these were many generations of copies. So later it was determined that Spalding's copy was actually a copy of a copy of a copy and it was actually a crease in the photo or something mechanical that had been introduced. And that was definitely not in the originals.

E

No.

A

And so later in a letter I think from 1977, Spalding admitted that he could have. It could have been wrong. He didn't say he was wrong, but no, he said, he admitted that his, his investigation could have been in an error, which at least that is good because that was another source of someone saying it was a hoax. Right. That it didn't look right. There's also another investigator in there called Dr. Robert Nathan.

D

Yeah.

A

And he had done a lot of computer generated investigation into it, looking into the rail, getting down into the fine points of the photograph. And he noticed something that a lot of people had never noticed before is around the craft there was a, an unexpected blurriness that he said was not the cause of the craft moving or because any movement in the Camera. And he went on to speculate. And this was actually a lot of people agreed, scientists agreed with him is he speculated that this was the air around the craft being ionized. And you could see some of the particles of. On the craft flying, flying through the air. And something else they talked about in the photo. We haven't brought this up yet either, and I was unaware of this is the people who really investigated the photograph noticed there is a black band around the top part of it. And they speculated that those were. That was a lot of smog particles being collected by the craft and it had come off and that had formed the smoke ring.

D

The smoke ring, yeah. It was the disintegration of the black band around the disk, which is really distinctive.

A

Yes. And photos, until I looked at it, I was not aware of that either. I'd somehow missed that over these years. And when you look at their enhanced and enlarged photographs, you can actually see these black particles being trailed by the craft. I had never seen that before. And so that is very interesting. And it. It lends itself to the propulsion system. You can even gather, like what was the propulsion system they were using. So, boy, I had never known you could glean all of these facts. No, no. From just those. The pictures. But one thing I want to mention now is in 2008, there. There's a TV show called UFO Hunters, and it's actually one of my. I can highly recommend this series. One of the best series on UFOs. And its main host was William Burns, who at one point was publisher and editor of UFO magazine. And he has always been into UFOs.

D

It's.

A

He's a. He talks a lot of conventions and that kind of thing. And so on this show, they take a deep dive into the Rex Heflin photos and they come up with some information that has never been talked about before. And one of them is they had on a. One of the original Polaroid engineers, and it was a fellow named Ted McClelland. And so he helped William Burns. And this was all. You can see it on the show. It's from season two, episode seven. And they dispel a whole bunch of people who had said they had debunked it and it was a hoax for, you know, all these reasons. So one of them was someone. I don't have his name on top of my head. He said, you could not have taken these pictures in the 20 seconds or so that Heflin said he took the first three pictures in. And so they actually went to the area and they had the exact same camera. And they, they timed it to see if you could take pictures. So they did. They took all three pictures in 17 seconds.

E

Wow.

A

So definitely I like to see this kind of proof because there's a lot of times, especially with debunkers, they will mention things. I believe it's just off the top of their head. So in that case, the guy said, well, yeah, you couldn't take three pictures in 20 seconds. But they're just saying it. It's not based on anything. It's just their feeling that you couldn't do that. And so they actually proved on the show you could do that. And they actually also go in to the TED clone, the Polaroid engineer. They go into a lot more detail on why pictures 2 and 3 looks like, or pictures 1, 2 and 3 look like. Their sky is very bright and cloudless. And why picture four, you can see clouds. So I, they really cover that and they, they actually show you in it. So if you want to have even more proof than what we've talked about, you can watch that episode and you can actually see what, what, what Ted is talking about. And also they do something which I think has never been done. They took a lot of James McDonald's calculations and informations. They actually went to the University of Arizona and got all of his. Made copies of his documents. And they gave all of these coordinates and all these specs to a computer graphics expert named Terrence Masson, very well known computer guy. And so they put all of the coordinates into the computer so, you know, all the coordinates of where the truck was, roughly that area, and also coordinates of what the truck, the picture in the truck looked like. And so what it does, and trust me, I'm not a computer expert, is this where you turn it on? But he had it on a big screen and they had the truck and the background kind of to like overlaid against each other. And so he explains in a lot better detail than I ever could that if Rex Halflin had just made these figures up like Rex Halflin said, the craft was approximately 20ft wide. It was approximately 150ft in the air and, and 700ft away, approximately. So if Rex Heflin had just picked these numbers out of the air, they, they will not match up in this computer schematic that this computer expert had put together. And so it was a dramatic moment when they overlaid the pictures against the reality of the area. And he said, so when I raise the contrast and you can actually see his photo, it should match up very Close to where a 20 foot object 150ft in the air and 700ft away would be. And so they raised it up and it matched about as close.

D

Wow.

A

As you could get it. Like it was actually a draw, a jaw dropping moment. Because I thought, wow, okay, like I don't. You couldn't get much closer. And the computer expert explained, he said, so if that was really a 9 inch saucer and it was really 15 or 20ft away, then that in the measurements Rex Head would not match up on the computer. It'd be wildly off and you would see that he had just made up those numbers and it was not possible. So it was extremely compelling computer evidence that what he said was exactly true. So I can highly recommend that episode. It's from UFO Hunters from 2008, season two, episode seven. So if you're very, very interested, you could watch that because that is like one more nail in the coffin of it not being a hoax. So I guess now we want to talk about something that if this story didn't have enough twists and turns and all that. So Rex Heflin, near the end of his career, he retires. And this I never knew he had to actually retire because he got an illness which outside workers in California or particularly Southern California are very susceptible to. So policemen, firemen, people are out there. And it has something to do with breathing in the gas fumes all the time. And I think. Yeah, I think you've got the actual name of it.

D

Tetraethylene Lead. Tetraethylene lead in his bone marrow, which. Which we. You can just say. Lead poisoning.

A

Yes.

D

Yeah. And it's occupational hazard. No treatment and no cure. And unfortunately he was having financial trouble because his pension had been cut off. Because I completely forgot about this. Orange county went bankrupt.

A

I know, yeah, that seems impossible to

D

happen now, but yeah, because you think, oh, you know, pension. The guy's got a good pension. But the biggest surprise, in 1993, he got a mysterious phone call from a woman. Go look in your mailbox. And there were the stolen photos.

A

I know.

D

Complete with his.

E

He recognized his own markings on the

D

back and never knew who returned them, where they came from. And how many was that 28 years later?

A

Something like that. And yeah, that rarely gets talked about. And you have to think to yourself, okay, who were these guys? And they had them so long and then they returned them. Like, if these were just people who were pretenders, like they weren't even in the military or anything like that, like wouldn't they have Just kept them or thrown them away or whatever. Like, they would remember, oh, we got to give these back. Like, oh, yeah, you know, 28 years later. And they'd have to look, search him because he had moved to Northern California. And so in 93, you know, they don't have things on the Internet like we have now. It would have been a lot harder to find where he moved. Like, your job isn't giving out your, you know, your. Where you've moved to, to anybody, that kind of thing. So it makes you really wonder, who are these people? And, yeah, they were so easily able to track him down.

D

Yeah.

A

And when the woman had phoned, so the original time when she phoned, he didn't. He thought it was a hoax. He thought, oh, someone's just phoned me to rile me up or whatever. He didn't make any connection between the UFO photos and that. That type of thing. And so 30 minutes later, she phoned again and said, have you checked your mailbox lately? And so this time he thought, oh, what's this about? So, like, as you mentioned, when he checked, he was shocked. And they had the same writing, like he wrote on the backs of them. The numbers, it was all in his handwriting, the same ink. So he knew it was the same. The same pictures. So you can really speculate on what happened.

D

Like.

A

Like, yeah, you know, to me, it lends a lot more credence that there are, like, men in black or some element in the government. Like, to me, it seems more like this has to be an element of the government, because if these are just goofballs impersonating military people, I don't think they're giving the photos back. They're not really. They're not really saying it's okay, it's time we give them back. Ah, come on, you know.

E

Well, yeah, this is your reg. This is your classic regular. Guy sees something he can't explain, takes a picture, and things ensue, you know, like. Like. Like poor Lonnie Zamora. I mean, these are professional men who have a pretty good reputation and aren't known for goofing around reporting something, and

D

look what happens to them.

A

I know, it doesn't make any sense. It's one of the more curious things that have ever happened in a UFO story. It seems like this story has it all. It's got all the. It does the twists and the turns. So we're just going to talk about a little bit of why we don't think that Rex Heflin hoaxed these photos and here's something else that never gets discussed, especially even when people talk about it being hoaxed. So if these photos are hoaxed, it requires there, there to be at least two people because someone took a picture from inside the truck and that means someone else had to be throwing the hubcap or whatever it was. So that's two people now.

E

Yeah.

A

And another factor is, so he was on duty, like he's doing his job. So it would have had to have been someone he worked with because, you know, his boss was also driving around in the area. So it's not like you can have your buddy in the, in the official maintenance truck and we're just driving around having a good old time. Like, you know, at any moment his boss said, oh, you know, I'm a mile away, I'll come meet you, or whatever. So you would have lost your job, you know, back then, if you.

E

And if, oh yeah, can you imagine?

A

And you know, because he had a higher up position, I don't think you would have wanted to lose this job, you know, especially back in those days. So.

E

No. And even his boss witnessed the radio silence. His boss experienced the same thing.

A

The same thing.

E

Yeah. And apparently other trucks in the area did too.

A

So, you know, it would require multiple people to perpetuate the hoax. And then also, if you were gonna hoax this, you know, I can see them throwing the hubcap, but you know, who is the guy who said, and let's take a picture of a smoke ring. Like, okay, now you're. How did you do that? Like, yeah, if you know anything about photography to make a smoke ring look the way that it did in this photo, that would not be easy, especially back in 1965. It's, it's, it's kind of odd to anyone. You wouldn't have thrown that in. So if it would have been Rex Halflin's buddy, let's do a smoke ring, Rex would have said, yeah, no, that's, that's. We're not.

D

Yeah. Be, be the actual expression blowing smoke rings. Dot, dot, dot, Right.

A

Big. And also here's something else. Smoke rings don't match a typical UFO sighting.

D

I know. Have you ever heard of it happening in any other.

A

I think it has. If you, you know, I was racking my brain because I wanted to get another. I have think I have heard of a smoke ring and a UFO sighting together before. But back then, if you were just a hoaxster and you wouldn't, you wouldn't have been thinking about that. There would be no way you would say, we'll take three pictures of the hubcap and then the fourth will be the nail. It'll be the smoke ring. They'll really believe us then. Yeah. So that makes totally, absolutely no sense. And then as we mentioned before, Rex made no dollars, zero dollars and zero cents from this. And he actually needed the money later in life.

D

Late in life.

A

Late in life. Like, there would have been plenty of reasons to, to, to make money. So one thing I think our deep dive has shown us is I had kind of always believed these photos were real.

D

Same.

A

But I, I could have been persuaded not to believe them. But after having this deep dive, they are a hundred percent real. Like, yeah, they are probably the most real and verified photos that have ever been taken of a ufo.

D

And yeah, and again, I will, I will say these are probably the most iconic UFO photos ever taken.

A

Yes. Yeah. So this was definitely worth our deep dive. We both learned things that we had never known before. And I'm sure many of the listeners will be surprised at a lot of what you have learned today. And I will put links to all of these sites that we have spoken about. They're all very interesting. And of course, my hero, Anne Druffle, this was, she was very interested in this case. Also, James, another one of my heroes, James McDonald, he did a lot of work on this case. A lot of work. Christina's. We're wrapping this up. We just want to mention that Rex Heflin passed away in 2005. And he never altered his story. He always stuck with it. He never said it was a hoax or I was just fooling all you guys or anything like that. And there's something I want to read that. And Druffle wrote about him and something about the pictures. So I'm going to read that. And that is going to be our exit from this great topic, which is really, you know, I, I didn't know there was this much to it. So I hope all our listeners enjoyed it. But let me just read this to you and it'll be the end of our segment on the Rex Heflin photos. So this is Anne Druffle writing this. Heflin entrusted his four original photos to me to be preserved in perpetuity for the use of the UFO field. Other scientists and researchers are awaiting their turn to reanalyze them. Dr. Kelson continues his studies, having given an update on the 2000 reanalysis at the 2004 NUFOC Convention, which is held yearly in Southern California. We thank Rex Heflin for his friendship and his good humored. Objective attitude during our 40 years of investigations of his comparable photos. We thank him for his willingness to give his photos to science with no thought of any benefit for himself in the near future. Rex, your invaluable and beautiful UFO photos will you yield more and more data and eventually we will learn all we can reveal about the UFO mystery. In the meantime, happy journey home.

F

Here are the Canadian Civil Aviation anomalies for the week of March 27 to March 31, 2023. On March 27, an aircraft approximately eight miles west of Burlington, Ontario reported encountering a couple of gold and white colored drones at approximately 3,000ft above sea level. On March 30 at the Calgary, Alberta airport, authorities contacted the tower and advised them of a bomb threat for a WestJet Boeing 737700 flying from Toronto International Airport to Calgary, Alberta International Airport. The aircraft landed safely at 23:16 Zulu time. The threat was later deemed non credible by security operations. Also on March 30, a Castle Aviation Saab 340B flying from Hamilton, Ontario to Akron Canton, Ohio advised they were targeted by a green laser at 13,000ft approximately four miles south southeast of Springvale, Ontario. Local police were notified there was no impact on operations and all flights proceeded to their destinations without further incident.

A

Well, that's our podcast for this week, so please share, follow and subscribe and do all of those good things to help spread the word about UFO Talker. And I can't believe it. I've made it through another episode with the flu. Boy, I deserve some brownie points for this. And until next time, this is Michael Ryan. Keep watching the skies.

F

You have been listening to the UFO Talker. If you have any questions or comments on this episode, you can email us@ufotalkerl.net or visit our website at ufotalker ca. You can support UFO Talker by using the Buy Me a Coffee app with links on our website and in the show notes. We appreciate every listener. Thank you for your support. This has been A Michael Ryan production 30.