1943 "smoking gun" photo of "Klingon" UFO

 Four years before the Modern UFO Era even began

   Before reading the story behind this photograph, the reader should go back and read my article on "The spooky night visit by 'Klingons' in rural East Tennessee" and the Klingon UFO update and artist's depiction that was published a few months ago on my Examiner page. In 1999 a Kingston, Tennessee man had a Close Encounter of the First Kind with an unbelievable-looking UFO that he said resembled a Klingon craft from Star Trek. My webmaster Rick Smith, an excellent graphics artist, did a drawing of this based on the witness's description to him over the phone. After seeing Rick's illustration, the witness said it captured very closely what he actually saw. My entire story on this Tennessee sighting appeared in the July issue of the MUFON Journal under the tilte "A Tennessee Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind."

  I talked to two very knowledgable veteran UFO researchers (Joe Fex of Colorado and Andrew Hennessey of Scotland) and asked them if they had ever seen a UFO shape like the one depicted by Rick Smith. Neither one of them had ever seen any kind of UFO or airplane that came anywhere close to looking like what Rick had drawn. [One of our Memphis MUFON members said it bore some rough resemblance to the experimental Falcon jet that first appeared in our skies in 1958.]  Jay Billings a Tennessee MUFON member and a Physicist at Oak Ridge Laboratories [which by the way is just twenty miles north of where this 1999 "Klingon" craft was seen] took a look at Rick's drawing and said it certainly didn't look aerodynamic to him. He then added that it looked quite phallic to him. I believe a lot of people who saw my article in the MUFON Journal must have thought that the Kingston, TN "Klingon" ship described by the witness was more fantasy than fact.

  But now I have some powerful confirmation that what our witness said he saw he actually did see. About a week ago a MUFON Field Investigator in Pittsburgh who had seen my July MUFON Journal article got cold chills when he was privileged to see an actual photograph taken in 1943 in New Mexico of practically a carbon copy of what Rick had depicted. This Field Investigator had been at a local MUFON meeting when someone mentioned a recent sighting in Pennsylvania of a strange looking UFO which the witness had said looked like a Klingon ship from Star Trek. Then a man at the meeting spoke up and told the group that his father had taken a photograph of a "Klingon" ship in New Mexico in 1943. After his father's death in 2003, he kept this in a safe deposit box at his bank and had never shown it in public. He agreed to show it to the group the next day. When the above-mentioned Field Investigator saw this photograph, he  immediately saw the uncanny resemblance to the drawing in my MUFON article.

  He wasted no time contacting me to tell me the whole story. He said he would ask the man who had the photo if he would send a copy to me for analysis. The man agreed to do this ; I suppose because I am the Tennessee State MUFON Director and presumably in a position to get some top photo-analyst from the MUFON organization to examine it. The man also agreed to talk to me on the phone. I called him a few days later and had quite a lengthy conversation with him. He told me his father who had been in the Marine corps at the time he  took the picture had kept this a dark secret from everyone his whole life ; that is, until twenty minutes before he died. At that point, with just he and his son in the hospital room, he suddenly roused from half-unconsciousness to total lucidity and told his son to go look in the back of an old family Bible (itself well-hidden away) where he would find a photograph of a UFO that he (the father) had taken while driving through New Mexico on leave in 1943. This photo was taken with a 110-X Brownie camera.

  How he came to take this photograph is quite an interesting story in itself and actually makes an errie connection with the 1999 Tennessee "Klingon" ship sighting. In my next installment I will give the full account of this.  

[Postscript : I am going to be receiving the original negative and will give a complete update on what is concluded from the photo-analyis. In the meantime I have been given permission to publish this photo to the world. If anyone knows of a UFO sighting like this one, I would be extremely greatful to hear about it. I suspect that this is the only photograph ever taken of this extremely unusual UFO.]

To be continued.