The Lake Tiorati Photographs

Lake Tiorati sits in the Harriman highlands of Orange County, New York. It covers 292 acres at 1,030 feet, with the Appalachian Trail following the ridge to the west. In winter the park roads close from 1 December. That did not stop three friends. "Twas the week before Christmas in 1966," columnist Cheryl Costa later wrote, "when twenty-three-year old Vincent and two pals decided to do a little winter fishing."

Sunday, December 18, 1966. One account puts the time at 4:30 in the afternoon. The men were at the lake when something arrived. Not a slow approach. A sudden appearance. Vincent described it plainly. "Suddenly a rare object of bronze color appeared, making no noise and its size was approximately 6 meters."

Circular. Metallic. Bronze. Silent. One of the men grabbed a box camera and managed to snap four pictures. The photographs are credited to Vincent, named in one source as Vincent Perna. A few minutes later the object was gone, flying away over Stockbridge Mountain.

Four black and white frames were taken. Only one seems to circulate today. It shows the object in the sky, and it has travelled through photo collections and best UFO picture galleries ever since. The print is catalogued by TopFoto and the Fortean Picture Library. The other three frames have never surfaced online.

Project Blue Book, the US Air Force's UFO programme, made what Costa called "a scant investigation and quickly labeled the sighting photos a hoax." Its reasoning has never been published online. NICAP looked closer. Its investigators studied the photos and interviewed all three men. They found no evidence of any hoax. The case went into their files as number 661218.

The Air Force kept a 1966 file titled "Bear Mountain State Park, New York". Bear Mountain borders Harriman State Park, and the Tiorati photos have long been listed under that name too. In November 1967, J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's scientific consultant, wrote to its chief, Hector Quintanilla, about the Bear Mountain photos. Air Force analysts had rejected them as fake about a year earlier. Hynek and Fred Beckman of the University of Chicago had examined the print. "I find no substantiation for the evaluation of hoax," Hynek wrote. He asked for the rating to be changed to unidentified.

Quintanilla kept it as a hoax. No source states outright that the Bear Mountain photos are the Lake Tiorati photos. But the year, the place and the timing all point the same way.

Costa revived the case in her Syracuse New Times column in December 2014, and The Black Vault reprinted it the following March. Her version placed the men "along the Hudson River" and put Indian Point three miles away. The lake actually lies several miles inland, deep in the highlands.

Questions remain. Was the lake open water or ice that December? Where are the other three frames? What did the Air Force analysts see that Hynek did not? The Blue Book file may hold the answers. For now, the photograph stands. So does the argument over it.