Joseph Perry's Moon Slide (1960)

At about one in the morning on 21 February 1960, Joseph Perry pointed his home-made telescope at the Moon from Grand Blanc, Michigan and took about twenty pictures. One slide showed "what appears to be a flying object somewhere between the end of his telescope and the surface of the moon." Blown up, the object was "flat on the bottom" and "oval shaped" and seemed to have "a fluorescent glow around the entire object". It was apparently moving, he said, "as it has a vapor trail running behind it." In over a thousand Moon pictures he had never seen anything like it.

What is on the record

The story runs through Section 9 of the FBI's headquarters UFO file, 62-HQ-83894, released by the Department of War in May 2026. A Detroit office memo of 9 March 1960 records Perry's account. He said he had been a professional photographer for thirty years. He was sure the shape was not a camera fault, a blur on the telescope or anything from how he developed the film. He kept the two properly exposed slides and gave both to the FBI.

The Bureau stressed it was not investigating and handed the slides to the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations at Selfridge Air Force Base. Unable to learn where his slide had gone, Perry wrote to President Eisenhower on 21 March asking for his transparency back. He quoted Major Donald Keyhoe's warning that "we consider it unlikely that you will ever see your picture again."

A Detroit memo of 20 May passes on what Dave Downey of the Aerial Phenomenon Investigation Society told the Detroit Times. By his account, the Air Force returned the slide on 3 May with a letter "explaining that what appears to be a flying object in this slide is actually a part of the negative which was not properly developed." Downey did not believe it. The Air Force letter itself is not in the released section. A 1966 letter in the same file dates the photographs to 13 February, not 21 February.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The one witness is Perry. No independent testimony sits beside the file in the archive, and the tier measures sourcing rather than truth. The explanation on record is the Air Force's, and it reaches the file second-hand. What is on Perry's slide is not resolved here.