Egipto.Cairo · the film of seven dots (1956) and the destroyer "in the desert" (1960)

In July 1956 the US Air Force's Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson received an envelope sent from Cairo with photographic material on a supposed UFO: three negatives, two paper prints, a slide and a newspaper clipping. It came with no written report and no data on the sighting: neither the exact date, nor the time, nor the place from which the photographs were taken, nor the name of the person who took them. The Blue Book file records only that the source was a civilian and that the date was "July 1956".

On 17 July, Henry A. Miley, acting chief of ATIC's Air Sciences Division, sent the film to the photographic analysis section with a note explaining why it was given attention despite the lack of data: "although no written report or data was inclosed with the film to assist in the requested review, the correspondence is considered 'international' in nature, and must be given some consideration". The next day, 18 July, Wilber Price of the photographic section replied. In the centre of the 35-millimetre transparency were seven light images arranged roughly in a circle. Two were identified as birds in flight by the shape of their wings; the other five were "probably additional birds", in flight attitudes in which their wings could not be seen. Within the circle there were also three small dot-like faults, probably caused by scratches or abrasions of the emulsion. The Blue Book card closed the case as "Other: birds".

Blue Book's archive holds, under the same country, another file that did not happen in Egypt. In the early hours of 12 October 1960, at 01:30 local, three officers of a Sixth Fleet destroyer squadron saw an object crossing the sky at high speed from east to south-west, "accelerating and ascending", from five degrees above the horizon to forty, over about eight minutes. At first it was slightly brighter than a first-magnitude star and then steadily faded. The officers wrote that it was "definitely not a/c or shooting star", and suggested it might be a Soviet shot at Mars, since Thursday's newspaper had reported favourable conditions for one. The message, sent by the commander of Carrier Division 18 to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Sixth Fleet commands, gave the position as 23°59′ N, 30°23′ E, in the middle of the Egyptian desert west of the Nile. Blue Book noted that the position fell "in middle of Egypt", that the ship's heading was not given and that without those clarifications it could not place the object, and filed it as "insufficient data".

That second case is more interesting than the Cairo film, but its location is doubtful: a destroyer cannot be in the desert, so the position almost certainly contains a transcription error. A reading of 33°59′ N instead of 23°59′ N would put it in the eastern Mediterranean, west of Cyprus, where the Sixth Fleet operated. At that hour the Sun was some 54 degrees below the horizon, so no satellite in low orbit could be sunlit; the Soviet Mars launch the officers had in mind, Mars 1M number 1, had lifted off at midday on 10 October and failed during ascent, far away. It remains unexplained, but also without the data to look for an explanation.

It is the corpus's first case with Egypt as the place of record, and what it shows is how the American system handled material that reached it from abroad. A film with no context whatsoever received a technical analysis within twenty-four hours because it came from another country, and the conclusion was the right one: birds. Seven light blobs in a circle, five of them with no visible wings, is a typical image of birds flying in a group and catching the light; point defects in the emulsion are another classic source of false "objects" in photography. It is a closed case, and the card treats it as such.

The moment, moreover, was delicate. ATIC's note is dated 17 July 1956, nine days before Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and at the height of tension between Egypt and the Western powers. The card does not say who sent the film from Cairo or by what route —a citizen, an embassy, an attaché—, and the press clipping that came with it has not survived in the digital copy. What it does document is that in 1956 the Air Force had an established policy for reviewing foreign photographic material, and applied it even when it arrived without data.

The second file, the 1960 destroyer squadron's, is a good example of how a transcription error makes a report useless. Three Navy officers, an object that climbs and fades over eight minutes, with no obvious explanation at that hour of the night; but with an impossible position and no ship's heading, nobody could work out what lay in that direction. That is why the case splits its weight: the 1956 film is almost certainly mundane, and the 1960 sighting remains indeterminate.