And that's all of the negative analysis of the photograph. Clinton, whoever he is, claims the story told by Rhodes to be in conflict with that shown on the photographs. He assumes that the object is rotating based on something he sees on the prints, but I confess I don't know what it is. Besides, Rhodes talked of the craft circling east of his house, moving north to south when he first saw it. This seems to me to be an explanation for the conclusion drawn by Clinton that might suggest the object is rotating.
More important are the suggestions about the limitations of the camera used and the sharpness of the photographs obtained. Of course, if Rhodes, for whatever reason, overestimated the distance and the speed, then those problems might be resolved.
Finally, I confess that I don't understand the emphasis placed on the letter that Rhodes sent to Amazing Stories. There was nothing in the letter that was not true. Rhodes must have forgotten that he had been told that he probably wouldn't receive his negatives and photographs back. Still, that is no reason to dismiss the case as a hoax.
By 1952, when Rhodes was trying to get the pictures back, Air Force investigators, including the then Captain Dewey Fournet suggested in a telephone conversation with the then Lieutenant Ed Ruppelt, that "There is no information available as to whether or not Rhodes ever sent his negatives to the Air Force or whether he just sent prints. We do have some rather poor quality prints of the object. As you know, we have concluded that these photos were probably not authentic. If seems as if Mr. Rhodes attempted to get on the 'picture selling bandwagon' and if he can prove he sent the negatives to ATIC or to the Air Force and they were never returned, it may lead to a touchy situation."
So now, after all this, Rhodes' photographs are going to be rejected because he wanted to sell them. Five years after the fact, without a single clue that such was the case, we are now told to reject the photographs because Rhodes "may" want to sell them. There is no evidence anywhere that Rhodes ever sold the photographs nor is there any information in the Project Blue Book files to confirm he made a dime from the pictures.
There are a couple of additional complications to this case. The first comes from Kenneth Arnold. Because of his first sighting, he was involved in some of the "official" investigations that were undertaken by military officers in the first days of the modern UFO phenomenon. He was heavily involved in the Maury Island case, working with the Army Air Forces officers, Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown.
Arnold wrote, in his book, The Coming of the Saucers, about one of the meetings that took place in his hotel room during that investigation. At one point Davidson told Arnold they had found out some interesting things. Arnold wrote, "He motioned me over to my bed, took a piece of paper from his pocket and drew a picture. It was a disc, almost identical to that one peculiar flying saucer that had been worrying me since my original observation — the one that looked different from the rest and that I had never mentioned to anyone.
"As he showed me the drawing, he said, 'This is a drawing of one of several photographs we consider authentic. We just received it at Hamilton Field.'"
Hamilton Field? The Project Blue Book file on the Rhodes case is filled with references to Hamilton Field. Fourth Air Force Headquarters was at Hamilton Field, investigators came from Hamilton Field to interview Rhodes, and inquiries about the distribution of his photographs were sent to Hamilton Field. In other words, the intelligence officers at Hamilton Field are clearly established as having access to the Rhodes photographs and so it is not only possible, but probable that Davidson would have drawn for Arnold the craft that Rhodes photographed over Phoenix.
Arnold, in his account, continued, "I turned to Lt. Brown for verification. He nodded his head and stated, 'That's right. It came from Phoenix, Arizona the other day. We have prints of it at Hamilton Field but the original negatives were flown to Washington, D.C.'"
The only problem with Arnold's description of the scene is that it is, quite frankly, hearsay. The two officers were killed not long after in an aircraft accident. They are not able to corroborate the Arnold story.
And, if we're going to be objective, it has to be pointed out that Arnold's book was published in 1952. The Rhodes photographs had been published within hours of the event. There is the possibility that Arnold heard about the photographs through another source or that Ray Palmer, Arnold's publisher, "massaged" the story to make it more exciting.
There is some reason to suspect Palmer. In a story published in the Arizona Republic on November 18, 1958, Don Dedera reported a recent issue of Ray Palmer's magazine, Flying Saucers, had published most of the front page of the Arizona newspaper about the Rhodes sighting and photographs. Palmer's caption under the pictures said, "A portion of the front page of The Arizona Republic for July 9, 1947, showing two views of a flying saucer photographed by William A. Rhodes… Phoenix, Ariz.
"All copies of this paper were seized by the army, in a house-to-house canvass, and all plates of the newspaper, plus the photo negatives and prints.
"The only known copy of the paper, plus duplicate negatives, prints from the original negatives, and statements of witnesses outside secret army files at the time were secured by Flying Saucers editor prior to the arrival of the army on the scene."
Of course, this tale is ridiculous. Copies of the newspaper are easily available to anyone who wants to research the records at the Phoenix Library. While it is certainly true that the military officers and government officials were interested in the Rhodes photographs, as evidenced by the number of interviews they conducted, there is no evidence that anyone confiscated anything at any time.
That is not to mention the logistical impossibility of confiscating every single copy of the newspaper, especially after it has been distributed. No, Palmer was inventing that tale for the excitement it would generate.
But that doesn't mean that those events described by Arnold didn't take place. The meeting probably transpired as Arnold described it, but to be objective, we must be aware of the other possibilities. We must not reject them, but we should not give them more importance than they deserve.
There is one disturbing thing about the case that is not evident in the Blue Book file. In the mid-1960s, Dr. James E. McDonald corresponded with Rhodes about his case. McDonald wrote to Richard Hall, of NICAP (and later of the Fund for UFO Research), on February 18, 1967 that "I did a lot of checking on Rhodes' degrees, because there seemed something odd about an honorary PhD based on the kind of work I could imagine him doing. Columbia said no record of any such degree. Geo. Washington said no record of a BA ever given to Rhodes in the period I specified. So I made a trip up there in December and spent an hour or so with him. Devoted most of my querying to the matter of the degree and his associations with inventory (sic), Lee DeForrest… He [Rhodes] showed me a photo-miniature in plastic of the alleged Columbia degree, and he said he had the original somewhere in his files but did not show it to me… As I kept going over the thing he finally volunteered the remark that he, himself, had checked with Columbia about a year after DeForrest presented him with the certificate, found no record of it, confronted DeForrest with the information, and was non-plussed by D F putting his arm over his shoulder and saying something to the effect, that, 'Well, my boy that's the way those things happen sometimes,' and saying no more about it… But the fact that he lists himself in the Phoenix phonebook as Dr. Wm Rhodes in the face of that history constitues (sic) a cloud that would be impossible to overlook. Everything else checks out solidly in his story."