Each holds the caption “Flying Saucer, June 4, 1964” within NARA’s holdings, and are part of Record Group 255: Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

They are archived here for reference purposes.

These are known to be Paul Villa’s UFO photographs from 1964 and are part of a larger narrative where he claimed contact with extraterrestrial beings. He reported that these beings communicated with him telepathically since childhood and provided insights into their advanced technology and peaceful mission. He claimed to have been guided to a location near Peralta, New Mexico, where he photographed a flying saucer, allegedly interacting with his environment in ways that demonstrated their technological capabilities, such as levitating his truck.

How these photographs wound up in the Goddard Space Flight Center records collection is unknown.

Additional articles (credited to their respective authors) are below.

NOTE: The Black Vault has done no investigation on the below photos beyond what you see here. There is no position held and they are not pushed is either irrefutable proof of a “flying saucer” or a definitive hoax. They are here for archival and research purposes.

A .zip file is available [165MB] is available of all photos below, with the high resolution .tif versions. Each image is over 25MB per photo.

Photo Archive

Additional Information

UFO International – October 1965 – by Gabriel Green
Additional credit to UFOEvidence.org for archiving this article.

June 16, 1963-near Albuquerque, N.M. – Apolinar (Paul)A. Villa, Jr., 49 (born Sept. 24, 1916), a mechanic of 601 Niagara N.E.; Albuquerque, New Mexico, had a unique privilege having prearranged meetings with Space People for the specific purpose of taking pictures of their craft.

Apparently, contacts of one kind or another with space people are not new to Mr. Villa. He says that he has been taught telepathy by extraterrestrial intelligence since he was five years old. Although he did not complete the tenth grade of school, he seems to have a good knowledge on such subjects as mathematics, electricity, physics, and mechanics, and has an unusual “gift” for detecting defects in engines, generators, etc.

Villa says that prior to photographing his first series of saucers in 1963, he had seen about five Flying Saucers in the previous five years, and he had talked with a spaceman previously. He said that his first picture-taking contact was his second in-person meeting with extraterrestrial beings. The first was in 1953 while he was working for the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles. While on the job one day in Long Beach, he had a strong urge to go down to the beach, a feeling he did not understand. There he met a man about 7 feet tall. At first Villa was a afraid and wanted to run away. But the man called him by name, and told him many personal things about himself. “Villa realized that he was communicating with a very superior intelligence, and he then became aware that this being was a spaceman. “He knew everything I had in my mind and told me many things that had happened in my life,” Villa says. ” He then told me to look out beyond the reef. I saw a metallic looking disc-shaped object that seemed to be floating on the water. Then the spaceman asked me if I would I like to go aboard the craft and look around, and I went with him.” He said the saucer occupants were entirely humanoid in appearance, although better looking in general than Earth people, as they were definitely more refined in the face and the body. Also they had an advanced knowledge of science, as evidenced by their craft, and by their talk with him.” They told Villa that the whole galaxy to which our Earth belongs is a grain of sand on a huge beach, in relation to the unfathomable number of inhabited galaxies in the entire Universe. Because of their technological advancement, their spaceships can penetrate the Earth’s radar detection system, so that they are picked up on our radar screens only when they choose to call attention to their presence in our skies. It seems that their craft are constantly active over our surface, and that they plan more sightings and landings in order to increase public awareness of their existence. They said they were here on a friendly mission to help our people; that they have bases on our moon; that Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars is hollow and is artificially constructed; and that their is a Superior Intelligence that governs the Universe and everything in it.

For his first series of pictures, Mr. Villa says his space contacts told him, telepathically, to drive his pick-up truck on June 16, (1963), to the meeting place, alone. There he saw a landed Flying saucer which he estimated to be about 70 feet in diameter. There were nine people aboard the ship: four men and five women. They disembarked through a hermetically sealed door. These beings, he says, ranged in height from seven to nine feet and were well proportioned. Some were blond; some were red-headed; (like polished copper); and some had black hair. They told him they came from the galaxy of Coma Berenices, many light years distance. They were able to speak many languages, as well as to communicate telepathically. Villa was told the craft operated as a Mothership for its nine remotely-controlled monitoring disks which were 14 inches in diameter, and were controlled from instrument panels in the Mothership. They could pick-up pictures and sounds from any area from which they were directed, and then could then relay them to TV panels aboard the Mother Craft. They permitted Villa to take photo’s of their ship which posed and hovered close to the surface between 2 and 4P.M. while he took various shots of the craft framed by the trees in the foreground. He used a Japanese-made Rokuoh-Sha camera with an f4.6, 75mm lens loaded with 120 Kodak film. Two of the photo’s show the ship in a vertical position, on its side, to indicate that the Space People have created an artificial gravity within the craft, and thus are completely comfortable no matter what position the ship is in, relative to a planet’s surface.. Incidentally, in photo #7…???, the vents in the hull, thought by some to be port holes, are not windows, but are openings directly concerned with the propulsion of the ship. Villa says they told him that the vents are opened only within a planets atmosphere—never in outer space.
(UFO International Oct,1965 Gabriel Green)

II

Another contact… for his second set of pictures, Villa was telepathically guided, to another area near Bernalillo, New Mexico—about 15 miles north of Albuquerque. This was on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1965. The ship seen in photo’s #1,2 and 3, projected a ray which caused a small brush fire. The smoke from the fire is visible(more clearly in color)in the trees just below the craft, and just above and to the left of the tailgate of Villa’s truck.

(Note: I have the photo’s..Dex)

In one photo they singed a tree top—by use of a ray directed from the ship. These things were done to demonstrate some of their capabilities. The ship landed and Villa judged it to be 300 feet in diameter. It had telescopic, tripod landing gear, which are protruding from the bottom of the craft in photo’s ???(Note: I don’t have…Dex). The three crewman had light brown hair and tan skin. They appeared to be about 5’8″ or 5’9″ tall. Villa talked with them for nearly two hours about personal as well as general matters. They told him that our Astronauts, Edward White and James McDivitt, on their now-famous GT-4 flight, were really seeing a spaceship when they reported sighting the Pegasus-like object. They also said our Government won’t release the Mariner-4 photo’s because they show pumping stations for the canal systems on Mars. They added, that by 1966, 17 nations will have the Atomic Bomb. Villa says they conversed both in Spanish(his native language)and in English. On their advice, the Contactee says, he stopped smoking so as to enhance his ability to receive telepathic communications.

The post “Flying Saucer” Photos Found In National Archives Collection for Goddard Space Flight Center first appeared on The Black Vault.

The first images from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun.

Solar Orbiter is an international collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA, to study our closest star, the Sun. Launched on Feb. 9, 2020 (EST), the spacecraft completed its first close pass of the Sun in mid-June.

“These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained,” said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.”

“We didn’t expect such great results so early,” said Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist. “These images show that Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start.”

Getting to this point was no simple feat. The novel coronavirus forced mission control at the European Space Operations Center, or ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany to close down completely for more than a week. During commissioning, the period when each instrument is extensively tested, ESOC staff were reduced to a skeleton crew. All but essential personnel worked from home.

“The pandemic required us to perform critical operations remotely – the first time we have ever done that,” said Russell Howard, principal investigator for one of Solar Orbiter’s imagers.

But the team adapted, even readying for an unexpected encounter with comet ATLAS’s ion and dust tails on June 1 and 6, respectively. The spacecraft completed commissioning just in time for its first close solar pass on June

15. As it flew within 48 million miles of the Sun, all 10 instruments flicked on, and Solar Orbiter snapped the closest pictures of the Sun to date. (Other spacecraft have been closer, but none have carried Sun-facing imagers.)

Solar Orbiter carries six imaging instruments, each of which studies a different aspect of the Sun. Normally, the first images from a spacecraft confirm the instruments are working; scientists don’t expect new discoveries from them. But the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, or EUI, on Solar Orbiter returned data hinting at solar features never observed in such detail.

Principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, points out what he calls “campfires” dotting the Sun in EUI’s images.

“The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” Berghmans said. “When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.”

It’s not yet clear what these campfires are or how they correspond to solar brightenings observed by other spacecraft. But it’s possible they are mini-explosions known as nanoflares – tiny but ubiquitous sparks theorized to help heat the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, to its temperature 300 times hotter than the solar surface.

To know for sure, scientists need a more precise measurement of the campfires’ temperature. Fortunately, the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment, or SPICE instrument, also on Solar Orbiter, does just that.

“So we’re eagerly awaiting our next data set,” said Frédéric Auchère, principal investigator for SPICE operations at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France. “The hope is to detect nanoflares for sure and to quantify their role in coronal heating.”

Other images from the spacecraft showcase additional promise for later in the mission, when Solar Orbiter is closer to the Sun.

The Solar and Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI, led by Russell Howard of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., revealed the so-called zodiacal light, light from the Sun reflecting off of interplanetary dust – a light so faint that the bright face of the Sun normally obscures it. To see it, SoloHI had to reduce the Sun’s light to one trillionth of its original brightness.

“The images produced such a perfect zodiacal light pattern, so clean,” Howard said. “That gives us a lot of confidence that we will be able to see solar wind structures when we get closer to the Sun.”

Images from the Polar and Helioseismic Imager, or PHI, showed it is also primed for later observations. PHI maps the Sun’s magnetic field, with a special focus on its poles. It will have its heyday later in the mission as Solar Orbiter gradually tilts its orbit to 24 degrees above the plane of the planets, giving it an unprecedented view of the Sun’s poles.

“The magnetic structures we see at the visible surface show that PHI is receiving top-quality data,” said Sami Solanki, PHI’s principal investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. “We’re prepared for great science as more of the Sun’s poles comes into view.”

Today’s release highlights Solar Orbiter’s imagers, but the mission’s four in situ instruments also revealed initial results. In situ instruments measure the space environment immediately surrounding the spacecraft. The Solar Wind Analyser, or SWA instrument, shared the first dedicated measurements of heavy ions (carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, and others) in the solar wind from the inner heliosphere.

The new data, including movies and images with detailed descriptions, can be viewed in ESA’s gallery.

Solar Orbiter is an international cooperative mission between the European Space Agency and NASA. The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Germany operates Solar Orbiter. Solar Orbiter was built by Airbus Defence and Space, and contains 10 instruments: nine provided by ESA member states and ESA. NASA provided one instrument, SoloHI, hardware and sensors for three other instruments, and the Atlas V 411 launch vehicle. The European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Spain conducts the science operations.

The above article is archived from NASA.

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