Phoenix, Arizona: William Rhodes photographs heel-shaped object over his house
On July 7, 1947, at 4:00 p.m., scientist and inventor William A. Rhodes took two photographs of an object circling at about 1,000 feet over his home in Phoenix, Arizona; the prints and negatives were later collected by an Army Air Corps intelligence officer and not returned.
Background
At 4:00 p.m., William A. Rhodes, an independent scientist and inventor, was walking to his backyard workshop at 4333 N. 14th Street in Phoenix, Arizona, when he heard a 'whoosh' and saw an object banking in tight circles to the south at an altitude of about 1,000 feet. He took two photographs as it passed above his house: in the first it looked somewhat cigar-shaped, in the second, while banking, more heel-shaped with a small hole in the center. The Arizona Republic published the photos on July 9. A few weeks later an Army Air Corps intelligence officer from Hamilton Army Airfield in Novato, California, visited Rhodes and took the prints and negatives, which Rhodes could not get back; Kenneth Arnold later obtained them on a visit to Hamilton, and they ended up with James E. McDonald. According to the entry, Rhodes held an informal top-secret clearance because of a ship degaussing device he had invented. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.