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Utah UFO?

06/14/04 - KMSB

By Scott Davis / NewsChannel 3

Taking pictures of the beautiful Utah countryside is part of Tommy Woodard's job with the Utah Film Commission. Recently, though, he captured something on film that's worthy of the silver screen. That something just might be a UFO.

At a distance, it's just a speck. But when you zoom in, things get interesting.

"When I was shooting the picture, I didn't see the object," Woodard said. "In relation to the ridge, it was tilted at an angle right above the tree line."

As the photo librarian for the Utah Film Commission, Woodard shoots any location filmmakers might want to see. He shot about 100 pictures the day he caught the startling images of what might be a UFO.

"In all my pictures, I've never seen anything like this," he said.

The picture that caused quite a commotion around the office came from Provo Canyon.

"I didn't get out of the car when I took the specific shot," Woodard recalled. "I just leaned up to the car window, took the shot and kept driving.

"I had around 20 people giving me their opinions. We've all come up with the same conclusion."

We asked Jim Dilettoso to analyze the photo, look for "fingerprints of a hoax," as he called them. Here in Phoenix, Dilettoso has spent years doing profession investigations of so-called UFO pictures. Some of the pictures he's looked at have turned out to be fakes.

"There are remote-control helicopters, really good ones ... blimps, could be that," he said. "It's a good place to go play with all those things."

Dilettoso said the ratio of the object's length to its width and its coloring match the profile of a classic UFO. The differing textures of the top and bottom edges probably mean that it's in flight. What's more, the digital picture shows no evidence of tampering.

"Bottom line: It's not a fake," Dilettoso said. "I can't find any evidence that it was digitally faked."

Still, he's not ready to say this is a flying saucer from another planet.

"Now just because it's a 20- to 30-foot object, a couple hundred feet away, doesn't mean it's an alien spacecraft," he said. "We then have a flying, hovering disc-shaped object that goes into the category of unknown aircraft because we don't have an aircraft on Earth that can hover like that."

"We had some people say that it might be a bird," Woodard said. "But how can that be a bird?"

Woodard said that no matter what it is, he's glad he was in the right place in the right time to capture it on film.

"This just looks incredibly like the pictures that you've seen on TV before," he said. "It's unidentified, it's flying, and it's an object."

Dilettoso also is just about to complete his analysis of videotape the Mexican air force recorded. That tape shows 11 mysterious balls of light, objects some are calling UFOs. 

Is it a U.F.O.?

05/31/04 - KATC

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Up in the sky -- a bird? -- or a flying saucer?

To the naked eye, Tommy Woodard's digital photo appears to be nothing more than a pretty picture of trees in Provo Canyon, Utah. But zoom in, he says, and the purple glow of a saucer hovering at an angle above the tree line starts to take shape.

The photo librarian with the Utah Film Commission says he's a "believer" in UFOs because as a 10-year-old he saw three blurry gray spheres rotating in the sky before suddenly disappearing.

A representative of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle thought the sphere looked like a bird. Woodard scoffs at that, as well as the theory that the image could be nothing more than a speck of dust on his film.

He says none of the 100 photos he shot Tuesday contained a similar mark. The war of the skeptics and the believers continues.
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