The first photograph, of any kind, which barely resembles anything like a photograph, may have been taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. This gives some perspective when you hear that the first UFO photo may have been one taken in 1870 or 1871, on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire.
What is often claimed to be the earliest picture of a UFO, this picture was taken from the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, in 1870.
It looks like a log sitting on the ridge of a snowy mountain, right? Not so fast… the original stereo image seems to show that this object was way up in the clouds. This made me look again closely at the top image. Is that … an embossed swastika?
Is that even possible in 1870? Yes, it seems so. The word swastika has been in use in English since the 1870s, replacing gammadion according to wikipedia.
By the time the swastika was adopted by Hitler and the National Socialists, it was already in use by anti-Semitic politicians and völkish movements in Austria and Germany. Circa 1870, followers of Austrian anti-Semite politician George Ritter von Schönerer (whose ideas influenced Hitler) were using the symbol.
It looks to me a bit chewed up, even burnt at one end, so my working theory started with this being a cigar, added for contrast for the photo. The “clouds” are actually just a tasty looking ice formation on the surface of the mountain.
This was originally a “stereo” photograph. Certainly it was difficult to manipulate photos at that time, and remember, there were no flying objects then; at least, not from this world. Thanks to a reader, we now have the original “stereo” photo.
I was able to look at the stereo image to see it in full stereo, (get close, cross your eyes, move out slowly, you don’t need a device) and … what in the heck? You can not tell me that clouds looked like that in 1870. Could the shutter speed have been so slow as to capture tracks of moving clouds? It sure doesn’t look that way.
Doing more research, I found that others had already identifying the photographers of the stereoscopic image as Amos Clough and Howard Kimball.
The image had been taken in the winter of 1870-71 during a meteorological expedition, which he would learn later included a study of frost architecture.
Mullahy googled the expedition and discovered that the New York Public Library had a copy of the original high-resolution, uncropped photo (see above) in its digital library, along with a number of photos from the same set. After examining them closely, he decided his initial reaction was right:
“The object in the photo is not in the cloud, but on the surface of the mountain itself. In the original photo, there is a clear distinction between the surface of the mountain and the sky above the mountain range. The brown object is lying on, or suspended in, the snow on the mountaintop.” He says it could be a wooden ruler used to measure the snow or to show scale, but definitely is not a UFO.
“I don’t claim to have cracked the case myself,” Mullahy says. “Others found little pieces of the puzzle too.” But, because he takes his UFOs seriously, “I’m happy to get rid of a case that clearly was not credible so we can provide a clear picture of what the actual history is.”
Here are the guys, the top two are Amos and Howard. If either smoked cigars, I think we solved this one.
Members of the winter expedition of 1870-1871 on top of Mount Washington, possibly December 1870, (left to right): Sgt. Theodore Smith, Amos Clough (above Smith), Howard Kimball, Solomon Nelson and Joshua Huntington.
Was the first cigar-shaped UFO an actual cigar?
I found this even closer look:
It’s not a swastika at this resolution, more of a star.
But the squareness…. Could it be a wooden railroad support? In this photo, it looks like it was dragged up to where it is by a man, who had a sit down on it briefly, then left some snow on it when he got up and left the scene.
A railroad tie at the top of a mountain? That’s crazy right? Not in this case. There was a mountain climbing rail way to the summit of Mount Washington at that time. I believe it is still functional.
The Mount Washington Cog Railway, also known as the Cog, is the world’s first mountain-climbing cog railway (rack-and-pinion railway). … In August 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant visited New England to escape the heat of summer in Washington, D.C. During his tour he rode the cog railway to the top of Mount Washington.
In this video, you can see many of the squarish wooden beams used to construct the railway. Finding an old discarded broken one would probably have been fairly easy.
At this point I was thinking this must be it… but a closer look at the 3D image and I started to be convinced that I was seeing a bush or small tree covered in snow and ice. That makes the 3D drop from where they object is make more sense, but it also takes us back to the object being more likely the size of a cigar. In 3D, this could be a tree, a pine, which has been bent down with the former top facing directly at us covered in snow and ice. That would explain some of the unusual patterns in the ice.
Mount Washington, called Agiocochook by some Native American tribes, is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States at 6,288.2 ft (1,916.6 m) and the most prominent mountain east of the Mississippi River. The mountain is notorious for its erratic weather. … The Mount Washington Cog Railway ascends the western slope of the mountain, and the Mount Washington Auto Road climbs to the summit from the east. The mountain is visited by hikers, and the Appalachian Trail crosses the summit.
What was going on with cigars in the 1870’s?
In 1869, Spanish cigar manufacturer Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his Principe de Gales (Prince of Wales) operations from the important cigar manufacturing center of Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida to escape the turmoil of the Ten Years’ War. Other manufacturers followed, and Key West became another important cigar manufacturing center.
Here’s what one type of cigar looked like in the 1870s.
Could be. One end looks more square than the other, so perhaps there was some kind of cigar holder that squared it off. They did use cigar holders back then, although the one I found had a round hole.
That’s it for now. The impression on the near side of the object could be fingers in the ice and the trail coming from the tip of the object in the ice could be melting caused by the heat of the just extinguished cigar, or he may have extinguished it on or dragged it a bit on the ice before the photograph was taken. You can see a trail.
An 1870s cigar on a snowy tree is my theory to add to the other guesses for this first ever UFO photograph.