Mariana UFO Incident

At 11:25 am on August 15, 1950, Nick Mariana, the general manager of the Great Falls Electrics minor-league baseball team, and his nineteen-year old secretary, Virginia Raunig, were inspecting the empty Legion Stadium baseball field before a game.The Electrics were a farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

A bright flash caught Mariana's eye and, according to his reports, he saw two bright silvery objects, rotating while flying over Great Falls at a speed he estimated to be two hundred to four hundred miles per hour. He believed that they were roughly fifty feet wide and one hundred and fifty feet apart. Mariana ran to his car to retrieve his 16 mm movie camera and filmed the UFOs for sixteen seconds. The camera could film the objects in color, but could not record sound. Raunig also witnessed the objects.

The day after Mariana's sighting, the Great Falls Tribune, the city's daily newspaper, described his sighting and the film in an article, which was picked up by other media outlets. For several weeks after the sighting, Mariana showed his film to local community groups, including the Central Roundtable Athletic Club.