United States.Rex Heflin · Santa Ana

On 3 August 1965, around midday (11:30 according to the Air Force narrative report; other accounts give 12:30), Rex Heflin, a traffic investigator for the Orange County Road Department (California), was driving his official van slowly along Myford Road in Santa Ana, about 500 metres from the freeway and inside the flight pattern of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, checking roadside growth. He tried to call headquarters by radio and, by his account, the radio went dead after about three words; the Air Force investigator noted that, under detailed questioning, Heflin placed the failure before the sighting and not during it. His superintendent, one or two kilometres away, heard the transmission begin and a sudden, sharp cutoff unlike normal interference, and the Santa Ana FCC facility reported no interference that day. Heflin then saw an object he at first took for an aircraft: it crossed from left to right in front of the van and hovered for a moment. With the department's Polaroid Model 101, loaded with high-speed Type 107 film, he took one photo through the windshield and two more through the right window as the object moved off to the northeast; in the second he saw a beam of light rotating from the center of the underside. He described it as dull gray, about 30 feet across, about 150 feet up, wobbling like a gyroscope, until it accelerated and left a blue-black vapor ring. He drove about a mile down the road toward that ring, got out and photographed it: that is the fourth picture.

That afternoon he showed only the first three photos at the office. A friend tried to sell them to Life magazine, which returned them; copies circulated around Santa Ana and the Santa Ana Register published the first one on 20 September. That day Heflin lent the originals to a Marine intelligence investigator from El Toro, without checking credentials or asking for a receipt, and received calls from a self-styled NORAD colonel who asked him to refrain from further comment and from a Boeing engineer who suggested the same. On 22 September the Marines returned the originals with a receipt, and that same evening, according to Heflin, two men claiming to be from NORAD showed him identification cards similar to the Marines' and took the three photos, which were never returned. The Air Force report, based on its interview the next day, records a single visitor, and a NICAP report signed by Heflin on 25 September speaks of 'a man with a briefcase'; NORAD denied that anyone of theirs had visited him. James McDonald later learned that all military ID cards of the time carried a photograph, and the ones Heflin described did not. The fourth photo, which Heflin called his 'ace in the hole', was not mentioned to the Marines or the Air Force; Heflin said in 1967 that NICAP had advised him to withhold information from the Air Force. That fourth original was lent to a NICAP investigator and misplaced.

The Air Force studied copies of the originals and on 17 October 1965 stated that the object was as sharp as the road's center stripe and measured one to three feet, 15 to 20 feet above the ground; the internal report of its Foreign Technology Division added that a 9-inch vaporizing tray tossed in the air gave a 'surprising similarity'. On 27 October Maj. Hector Quintanilla of Blue Book told the Santa Ana Register it had been classified as a photographic hoax; NICAP's analyst Ralph Rankow supported authenticity and NICAP called the verdict an insult, and on 9 December Col. William E. Poe wrote to a congressman that the Air Force had not classified the photograph as a hoax. According to the reanalysis published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, an early study by Robert Nathan of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ruled out a model hung from a thread. William Hartmann, for the Condon Committee, visited the site, interviewed Heflin and the Marines, and effectively simulated the first three photos by hanging a model from a thread tied to a rod on a truck roof. He concluded the case had no probative value: the strongest arguments against it were the clouds in photo four, because Loren Crow's weather study had the sky inland of the freeway totally cloud-free at that hour, and the inconsistent early records about the NORAD visitors, and the photos contain no data that fix distance or size independently of the testimony. He added that the case remained of exceptional interest because it was so well documented.

Heflin matters for the rare combination of two features that seldom coincide in a photographic case: a quality image subjected to serious technical analysis, and a component of anomalous institutional behavior: the handover of the originals to men claiming to be from NORAD who never returned them, followed by the official denial of any involvement. That second element, connecting to the opaque-handling pattern (8m) and, together with the radio cutoff shortly before the sighting, to electromagnetic interference (8k), is what raises it above a simple disc photo: the case documents not only what Heflin saw, but what the official apparatus did with the evidence.

NICAP's analysts found no sign of trickery, but the file itself accumulates contradictions at the source: the NORAD visitor was one the next day and two later, the fourth photo was hidden from the official investigators, and its clouds do not match the clear sky the weather records give. Polaroids have no negative, so the loss of the three original prints, as in Calvine, precludes a definitive forensic verdict and is, ironically, what prevents closing the case in any direction. No analysis has demonstrated the trick, although William Hartmann, for the Condon Committee, effectively reproduced the first three photographs by suspending a model from a thread. Heflin is the photographic case that illustrates how the disappearance of the originals turns a good image into a permanently open question.