Rhodes Phoenix Photographs (1947)

Background

The Rhodes photographs are among the earliest photographic images of unidentified flying objects published in the United States. They appeared during the 1947 flying-disc wave, weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting near Mount Rainier and in the same month as the Roswell incident. The photographer, William Albert Rhodes (1916–2007), was an amateur astronomer and inventor who later became known for an oxyhydrogen gas process. The photographs are sometimes called the "shoe-heel" photographs after the newspaper's description of the object.

The Photographs and the Newspaper

Rhodes reported that on 7 July 1947 he heard a loud whoosh while walking toward his workshop and first thought of a Lockheed P-80 jet. He saw a silent, disc-like object make three passes over his home and leave two vapor trails, and he took two photographs. Sources disagree on the details. Wikipedia describes the object as the shape of a shoe heel with a small hole in the center. The Debrief gives a different account: an elliptical, flat, grey object 20 to 30 feet across, descending in a spiral, photographed with a Kodak Brownie 120 box camera, once during the descent and once as it sped upward.

The Arizona Republic ran the photographs on its front page, under a headline calling the object a "Mystery Whatsis." Wikipedia gives the publication date as 9 July; The Debrief and Stronghold Nation say 8 July. The discrepancy is unresolved here.

Government Inquiry

The case drew official attention quickly. The FBI obtained copies from the newspaper's managing editor on 8 July. Two Air Materiel Command officers visited Rhodes in Phoenix. On 29 August 1947, a Counter Intelligence Corps agent (George Fugate Jr.) and an FBI agent interviewed Rhodes at Hamilton Field and took his prints and negatives, identifying themselves only as representatives of the U.S. government. The inquiry was later folded into Project Grudge, where it was catalogued as Incident 40 in the 1949 Air Force study Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the United States.

The Air Force's conclusion was that the object was most likely windblown debris. The study noted that four photographers disagreed about whether the scene could be filmed as described, and that the negative was "carelessly cut and faultily developed." The Nobel chemist Irving Langmuir offered a similar explanation, attributing the image to paper swept up by wind after a thunderstorm. In 1952, after Rhodes apparently raised the possibility of suing to recover his materials, an Air Force office said it did not have the negatives and judged the photographs "probably not authentic." The Debrief notes that a 1948 routing sheet places the negatives at Wright-Patterson, so their custody is itself disputed. The case is also recorded by J. Allen Hynek's classification system, where The Debrief reports it in category 3.b, meaning evidence suggests no explanation.

The Case For and Against

The photographs were widely reproduced. Ray Palmer ran them in Fate in 1948 as "proof positive" and used them in The Coming of the Saucers (1952). In 1958 Palmer claimed the army had seized newspaper copies. Arizona Republic columnist Don Dedera rejected that, pointing out that confiscating copies door to door would have required many army divisions. Gerald Heard discussed the images in 1950. Supportive modern writing, such as Stronghold Nation's, calls the photograph authentic and links its craft to the Roswell reports, but cites no named experts for that view.

The skeptical case rests on three points. First, the windblown-debris conclusion from the 1949 study. Second, a hoax theory: the Los Angeles Examiner reported an FBI probe into a letter claiming flying discs were Soviet craft on the same day the Phoenix photographs ran, and one historian argues Rhodes may have modelled his story on that and faked the images. Third, the questions about the negatives and their chain of custody, which make independent re-analysis difficult. No lens or camera-level analysis of the original prints appears in the sources consulted.

Current Status

The photographs are still discussed as an early example of the 1947 disc craze, and Arizona media continued to cover the case into the 21st century, according to Wikipedia. Rhodes continued to work as an inventor: he photographed another object through a telescope in 1950, was featured in Newsweek for a television light amplifier in 1952, and received a 1962 patent for electrolytic oxyhydrogen production. He died on 22 January 2007. The case is best treated as contested: the images are documented and the official inquiry is real, but what they depict has never been settled.