The Red Bud Photograph

Dean Morgan was a part-time photographer and, according to the account the archive holds, a birdwatcher, out on the wooded hills near Red Bud in Randolph County, Illinois, on the afternoon of 23 April 1950. He said he photographed an object thirty to forty feet across hovering below the treetops, and that it then accelerated away. He did not make the picture public until about 1959, when it appeared in a saucer magazine.

What is on the record

Four claimants are resolved: Morgan, a couple repairing a roof, a man and wife on a roof, and a newsboy. That list needs handling with care. Two of the four entries appear to be the same couple counted twice under different descriptions, and every one of the corroborating witnesses reaches the archive through Morgan's own account of who else saw the object along its path. The published record of the case treats him as its sole witness. The archive's count of four overstates what can be shown, and a reader should take this file as one man and a photograph. The archive's second telling also renders his surname Margan, which is a transcription slip.

The photograph itself is the case, and it is widely reproduced. It has never been analysed from a negative, and the published consensus leans towards a hoax without ever establishing one. The archive holds neither the picture nor any examination of it, and a nine-year gap between exposure and publication is a fact about provenance that the record cannot explain.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on the archive's count of claimants, and that count is not sound. It sits here as a documented photograph case with a single witness, kept because the archive records what the sources say and this is what they say. What Dean Morgan photographed is not resolved here.