History of My Favourite Martian Photograph – Part 2

In yesterday’s article, I outlined briefly the history and my interest in a photograph of an alien that was being escorted by two secret agents, as well as some discoveries about it that I made in the UFO section of the Library and Archives Canada. In this article, I outline some of the things that I’ve found out since making that discovery.

Vintage photo of an ET with ‘MIB’ type secret agents. (Photo credit: Unknown)

Note: If you haven’t read Part 1, please do as Part 2 won’t make much sense without doing so.

My Questions and Research:

Whether or not this photograph (as shown in this article) is genuine or a hoax has never really concerned me. It’s a curiosity that has stimulated my imagination and challenged me to find out about its origins. Every story has a beginning and an author. Who are the people in this photo? Who came up with this idea and why? What purpose did/does this photo serve? And just what is that little being anyway? Those are the questions that interest me.

For weeks I searched in vain and then I decided to do the logical thing and ask around to find out if anyone could point me in the right direction. I emailed a few people and also asked in person a few people, what they knew about this curious vintage alien photograph. Basically, I came up with the same old snippets of the story. Some people recalled something about that the photo came out of Europe in the 1950’s and that it portrays an ET captured in Germany. Others recalled stories that say that it originated from Mexico or New Mexico from that same general time period. The ‘agents’ in these stories either belonged to the CIA, FBI, Gestapo, KGB and who knows what other spy or law enforcement agency. Still others (some even the same people) recalled that the photo had been proven a cut and paste job or hoax. But still, no-one could point me to any definite facts or sources.

While I was collecting responses from people, I was also searching the internet for clues. The re-occurring possibility of the photograph originating from Europe, possibly from the 1940’s and coming out in the 1950’s gave me a chilling thought…What if the picture actually depicts the Gestapo escorting a malnourished child, or even a diabolical Nazi experiment I wondered. Unfortunately, it didn’t help that I had recently seen a picture that purportedly depicted such an experiment. With those gruesome images in mind, I started searching German image archives for leads.

Although I didn’t find anything remotely matching what I was looking for in various national image archives, I did come across more examples of the alien photo on various UFO and Alien type websites. Unfortunately, they were all just the same old photo…Until finally, I came across this blog post: UFO Garakuta. There was my favourite ‘Martian photo’ rendered as a small figurine. The post says: “Small figure based on an infamous photo of an alien with KGB/SS/FBI agents. According to the Mexican researcher Luis Ruiz Noguez, the photo was in fact originally published in June 1950 by the USA based small paper Talk of the Times. The news item mentioned one McKennerich, from Phoenix, and explicitly claimed this was a Martian who came out of a saucer hit by rockets. Even [Donald E.] Keyhoe considered it a hoax.” (That would be the Keyhoe of ‘Flying Saucers Are Real’ fame).

I followed the links and found out some interesting information, despite my handicap of only knowing English. (I had to do some translation using Babelfish.) Even in the poor Bablefish translation the article is worth a read as it provides more versions of the legend of this photo and demonstrates that this is one story that just keeps on getting better with each re-telling. The cast of characters and the stories multiply and blend so that one is not sure just what really happened. The case of Ray Dimmick is also mentioned and looked at. This article by Noguez also provides an explanation of what the photo really depicts.

A Simple Explanation?

In the article previously mentioned, they quote a commentary by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, published in a magazine called Extraterrestres Contacts: “This photo is a fraud that was present during years. We have understood that one originated in Germany, and that the presumption pilot of the fallen OVNI (Unidentified Flying Object) was in reality a monkey of that if they had scraped for.”

I don’t really understand the last part of the translation but it’s clear from this quote that Hynek was of the opinion that the photo was a fraud and that the little alien was in fact a monkey — a Rhesus monkey. Of course, that story about Hynek could also be part of the legend; there’s no way for me to know at this point.

“A Rhesus monkey in a costume — But that’s so absurdly simple!” I exclaimed to myself. Here I was thinking of all sorts of complicated and delicate photo manipulation techniques and even of crazy experiments or possibly a malnourished child when in reality, a simple and obvious theory is that it could be an untouched photo of a dressed up monkey. I decided to search for pictures of Rhesus monkeys. A few of the photos I came across, definitely confirmed for me the probability but it was the photos from NASA of their space research primates that convinced me that what we’re looking at in this old photo is indeed a monkey made up to look like a spaceman.

Unanswered Questions

I am pretty satisfied that the alien is in fact a monkey and that the photo is some sort of ‘fraud’. I put the word fraud in quotes though, because it’s still not clear to me what the real fraud is. Nor is it clear to me, who perpetrated it or for what exact purpose.

If it was the work of a bunch of pranksters, who were they? Did they make the photograph in response to a certain flying saucer flap in order to add to the fun?

Or was this photograph the brainchild of some government agency? If so, which one? And even more importantly, why did said agency take such a photo and distribute it? What was their gain? Was this a piece in a larger disinformation campaign — for what purpose?

A few questions have been answered for me in my quest to learn more about the history of my favourite ‘Martian photo’ and yet many more questions remain. Perhaps some day I’ll stumble across the rest of the answers, just like I stumbled across the ‘little green man’ article, just sitting in some old archive, waiting for its part of the legend to be told.

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