# The Saucer over the Baciu Forest [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 083 · 1968 Published: October 13, 2026 On a Sunday in August 1968 a technician named Emil Barnea photographed a silvery disc tumbling over the woods at the edge of Cluj, and the Communist state’s own news agency put the pictures in papers across the country. The engineer who championed them told Western readers they were among the best ever taken. But Barnea’s first account, given by telephone in 1968, differed in almost every circumstance from the dramatic picnic scene the West later read, and turned upside down, the second disc looks almost exactly like the first. ![Three grainy black-and-white halftone photographs side by side. Left: a small tilted disc with a dark lower rim near the right edge of a pale sky, above a dark tree line and a meadow. Centre: the disc high above the forest edge, a dark crescent along its upper rim, with a meadow full of flowers below. Right: almost all pale sky, with a tiny dark elongated shape near the top inside a darker blotch and a thin line of treetops along the bottom.]() Barnea’s three published photographs, left to right in the order he took them. Emil Barnea, 18 August 1968, as reproduced in Flying Saucer Review 15:6 (1969). Public domain in Romania (a photographic series first published there in 1968; protection under Decree 321/1956 lapsed before Law 8/1996) and therefore not restored in the US. Combined and cropped. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** August 18, 1968 - **LOCATION:** A clearing in the Baciu (Hoia-Baciu) forest, about 4.7 kilometers west-southwest of Cluj - **REPORT TYPE:** Close encounter - **RESOLUTION:** [Disputed explanation]() - **RECORD STATUS:** Never explained; a thrown plate and double exposure proposed ## The story ### The woods on the western hills In 1968 Cluj was the chief city of Transylvania, the Roman Napoca, and it was growing outward: on its western side, new apartment blocks were rising in the Grigorescu district right under a line of wooded hills. Those hills carry the Hoia and Baciu forests, about three square kilometers of woodland on the ridge above the valley of the Someșul Mic. For the people of Cluj, the Baciu woods were a place for Sunday outings and meals on the grass; Florin Gheorghiță, the engineer who would make the case famous, told his foreign readers that the forest, “by reason of its rich vegetation, has always given much pleasure to Nature-lovers.” Romania was already in a mood to look up that year. In late March meteorologists at the Semenic station in the Banat mountains, among others, had followed a bright object for three days, and the state press had reported an object seen by five weather stations in the Western Carpathians at heights of 7,000 to 30,000 meters. When the Cluj photographs appeared in September, one paper ended its report by noting that this was the second time that year such objects had been seen in Romania. Sources: [Pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() · [România comunistă, cuprinsă de „febra OZN-urilor”]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Un obiect zburător neidentificat în apropiere de Cluj]() · [Farfurii zburătoare la Cluj?]() ![Faded colour photograph looking down from a wooded hillside over a district of pale new apartment blocks and red-roofed houses, with a river on the left and the spires of the old city on the hazy horizon.]() Cluj’s Grigorescu district and its new apartment blocks, seen from the wooded hills where the city met the forest. The archive describes the picture as the 1960s; the Commons file is dated 1975. Union of Romanian Architects digital archive, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. [Image source]() [CC BY-SA 4.0 · Union of Romanian Architects digital archive]() ### A silver thing over the clearing The version the world came to know is the one Gheorghiță wrote in French for Flying Saucer Review, which Gordon Creighton translated in the November–December 1969 issue. On the morning of Sunday, August 18, it runs, the technician E.B. set out with his lady friend Z.M. and two other friends to spend a day “far from the noise of the town.” The sky was clear and very fine. At about noon they stopped in a clearing full of flowers, away from the busier paths, spread a rug, and decided to light a fire. E.B. went for firewood. He had gone “but ten paces or so into the forest” when his girlfriend called him back to see “something,” and looking up he saw “a great round metallic object which looked silvery in the sunlight,” flying over the forest “without making the slightest sound, and in a peculiar manner.” He watched for ten seconds, realized it was remarkable, and ran to the rug for his camera. The first frame was snatched in haste; the second came more calmly, because the object was moving slowly, and he saw it reverse direction and change in brightness. Then it suddenly accelerated, shot upwards and vanished, and he took two last frames in a hurry. “The time was 1.23 p.m. There was not the least breath of wind blowing, and the silence of Nature continued unbroken except for the songs of the birds in the forest.” (In his 1973 book Gheorghiță made it 1:20.) The four had watched in silence for about two minutes. Then they cooked their lunch, finished their outing, and let the impression fade. Sources: [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() · [Le dossier photo d’Inforespace: dimanche 18 août 1968, Cluj, Roumanie]() · [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() ### Ten days in the camera According to Gheorghiță, Barnea gave no more thought to the forest once he was home. He kept shooting until the roll was finished and developed it only ten days later, “fearing ridicule” and not knowing what to do with the pictures. The one man in Cluj he knew to be interested in such things was Gheorghiță himself, who had been in Bucharest for two months and came back only after August 26; in Hobana’s telling, his holidays were over. He saw the first prints after September 1. The camera, the witnesses told him, was a FED-2, a Soviet rangefinder, with a lens the sources call an “Interstar” 2.8; the film was ordinary 17 DIN stock, made by ORWO. In the sun it had been about 36°C. The object had come from the northeast on a straight course, reversed and seemed to dip toward the ground, and had stood, they estimated, about 600 meters up at 85° above the horizon. Barnea was forty-five, “known to his colleagues as a serious and honest man, though perhaps a little too self-centred”; he had been an officer in his youth and now worked as a technician for a construction firm, which was how Gheorghiță, then about forty and an engineer who had followed the saucer literature for more than ten years, had come to know him, on purely professional terms, almost two years before. Gheorghiță insisted Barnea was a skeptic, and that there were no UFO books in Cluj he could have studied. His companion, a thirty-four-year-old office worker whom Ion Hobana later named as Zamfira Matea, was said to have had no interest in the subject at all. Barnea’s written statement read: “The object had a metallic gleam, made no sound, and was constantly changing position and direction. It had no resemblance whatever to any of the bodies that I have seen so many times in flight, from balloons to jet aircraft.” Sources: [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() · [Un obiect zburător observat în apropierea orașului Cluj]() · [Florin Gheorghiță]() · [Le dossier photo d’Inforespace: dimanche 18 août 1968, Cluj, Roumanie]() ![Photograph of a Soviet rangefinder camera with a chrome top plate engraved ФЭД-2 in Cyrillic, chrome dials, a black textured body and a black lens, on a plain white background.]() A FED-2, the same model of Soviet 35 mm camera Barnea used, here fitted with an Industar-50 lens. This one is not his; it was photographed in 2021. Retired electrician, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0. [Image source]() [CC0 · Retired electrician]() ### Looking for the trick Gheorghiță said he set out to make sure it was not a hoax. He took the film and prints first to the best-known photo-reporter in Cluj, who studied them in his laboratory and had no doubts. A photographer from Agerpres, the national press agency, who happened to be in town, agreed, and offered a piece of psychology that Hobana and others would repeat: “if an amateur photographer, such as E.B. is, had wanted to make a hoax, he would have put the object at the centre of his picture.” In the first and third frames the disc sits almost at the edge. An official laboratory in Cluj analysed the film and “found no sign of trickery.” The second frame bothered him. Compared with the first, the shape of the object had gone “somewhat vague” while the trees and flowers stayed sharp, and a shadow on the upper rim “seems almost illogical when compared with the shadow thrown in the first photograph.” So he projected the whole film for a group of professors at the Cluj Institute of Fine Arts, and two lecturers who specialized in natural lighting built models of the disc and lit them from the side, as the sun would. Working separately, Gheorghiță wrote, they reached the same conclusion: the object in the second picture had become luminous, “but illuminated in itself, not from outside!” But what he called “the final proof,” the thing that made him send the pictures to the press agency, had been a book. Sources: [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() ### Three years and sixteen thousand kilometers The book that convinced Gheorghiță was Frank Edwards’s Flying Saucers—Serious Business, with its pictures of the object Rex Heflin, a traffic investigator for the Orange County Road Department in California, had photographed through the windshield and side window of his work van near Santa Ana on August 3, 1965: three Polaroids of a metallic-looking disc and a fourth of the ring of smoke it was said to have left behind. The Condon Committee’s photo specialist, William K. Hartmann, had studied them and concluded, “The case must remain inconclusive.” To Gheorghiță the resemblance was decisive: “the same type of construction; the same proportions; the same manner of metallic construction; the same technical features. Only the size seems to be clearly different.” Two men almost exactly three years and more than sixteen thousand kilometers apart, he argued, had photographed the same kind of machine with no possibility of contact, and “the proof is so absolute that I sent the photographs to the news agency to be published.” Barnea himself later told the weekly Flacăra that when he showed the prints to “a colleague, Eng. Gheorghiță, who is passionate about flying saucers,” the engineer had shown him a book with an almost identical object seen in California, and when the story broke, România liberă’s version of the Agerpres item and Flacăra’s column both put the Santa Ana comparison in print. Later, in FSR, Gheorghiță went further, quoting Hartmann’s rule that photographic proof would need several unconnected photographers and wondering whether, knowing of Cluj, he would change his findings. The magazine’s editor added a bracket: “\[Extremely unlikely—EDITOR.\]” Sources: [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Case 52: Traffic Investigator Photographs (Santa Ana, Calif., August 1965)]() · [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() · [Un obiect zburător observat în apropierea orașului Cluj]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() ### In every paper On Wednesday, September 18, 1968, an Agerpres item by Ludovic Roman and Gh. Brătescu ran across the Romanian press. Scînteia, the Party daily, printed it on page seven with a photograph captioned “The object photographed at Cluj”: a group of excursionists had seen a flying object over a forest near the city that rapidly changed its position and direction; it was round, about ten meters across, and gave off a white light, and it had been photographed by “the young Emil Barnea” of the Cluj Directorate of Systematization and Architecture. (Barnea was forty-five; Flacăra later made a joke of it.) The Cluj observatory, the item added, had received similar reports from other eyewitnesses on various occasions. România liberă ran the same item with a signed note from Gheorghiță, “electronics engineer,” who wrote that after examining “the original negatives obtained by my colleague Emil Barnea” he was convinced they were genuine, “the first in our country of such clarity,” and that the object’s silent flight and curious changes of course confirmed once again that such things were “the product of a superior technology.” His note dated the sighting, wrongly, September 17 at 1:30 p.m. Scînteia tineretului, the youth paper, gave Barnea’s home address, by the railway station square, and said he had seen the object “together with a group of friends.” Television showed the whole series, and a crew came from Bucharest to interview the witnesses; according to Gheorghiță and Hobana, Barnea and Matea appeared on screen, and a reporter for Informația Bucureștiului put Barnea through tests of his powers of observation. In Flacăra, Bazil Dunăreanu confessed that until now he had been downright envious: in the country that gave the world Henri Coandă, the man who had given humanity the “real, not imaginary” principle of the flying saucer, people had seen saucers over Romanian soil but nobody had photographed one. Sources: [Un obiect zburător neidentificat în apropiere de Cluj]() · [Un obiect zburător observat în apropierea orașului Cluj]() · [Farfurii zburătoare la Cluj?]() · [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() · [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() ### “I thought it was a balloon” That same autumn Flacăra printed what it called an “indirect interview”: a very short telephone conversation with Barnea himself, the earliest account in his own words. It tells a different story. “On August 18, at around 3:15 p.m., I was walking in the Baciu forest,” he said. “At one point I spotted, in the slightly cloudy sky, a strange object moving at speed. It all lasted between two and three minutes. It had a metallic colour and made no noise. I thought it was a balloon. I took three photographs and went on my way. Only when I developed the film did I realise it was not a balloon.” Asked how he came to have his camera ready, he said he had been walking with “a girlfriend of mine, Matia,” taking pictures; “near us, in a clearing, there were also some tourists.” Asked how they had reacted, he said he did not know: thinking it was a balloon, he had nothing to say to them. And how had it vanished? “Vertically, suddenly, in less than a minute. I thought the balloon had burst.” A second 1968 statement, quoted in 2026 by Adevărul, is close to it: at about 3:50 p.m. he was at the edge of the forest, a group of tourists stood some distance away in a large clearing, he was with “a girlfriend, Zamfira Mathea,” and he had his camera ready to photograph her, not the “balloon.” He took three photographs and developed the film two weeks later. The object, he said there, had “no colour, but rather luminosity, neither silvery nor whitish.” Set beside the 1969 version, almost every circumstance moves: a walk for two instead of a picnic for four, strangers instead of friends, three frames instead of four, afternoon instead of 1:23, a slightly cloudy sky instead of a perfectly clear one, a balloon shrugged off instead of a marvel recognized in ten seconds. Both versions have Barnea at the Baciu woods on August 18 with a camera and the same woman; which circumstances are true, the record does not say. Sources: [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() · [România comunistă, cuprinsă de „febra OZN-urilor”]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Farfurii zburătoare la Cluj?]() ### Two balloons The first official verdict came from the director of the Cluj astronomical observatory, who is never named in the sources. Gheorghiță wrote that “without seeing the photographs” he suggested a meteorological balloon; Hobana and Weverbergh, who say he spoke as soon as he saw the pictures in the paper, have him calling them either a hoax or “a weather balloon photographed under special circumstances,” and the witness was made out to be “drunk,” “illiterate,” “fraudulent” and a “layman.” Gheorghiță answered in Tribuna, Viața Studențească and Magazin. Then, on the afternoon of September 19, the day after the pictures appeared, Cluj got a balloon of its own. A shining polyhedral object, its base at least fifty meters across by Gheorghiță’s figures, was seen from about 3:15 p.m. moving west against a strong wind, and then hung above the city centre for four hours while, by Gheorghiță’s account, tens of thousands watched, until a bank of cloud covered it at 7:15. Pilots of the flight in from Bucharest put it at 8,000 to 9,000 meters, and the meteorologist D. Peligrad wrote in Tribuna a week later that the wind at that height had reached 72 to 86 kilometers an hour. Through a telescope, Professor Gh. Chiș of Babeș-Bolyai University told the Agerpres correspondent that “the balloon shone by the reflection of sunlight” and that a bulge in its centre shone more than the rest. The press photographer Rudolf Wagner caught it with a telephoto lens. His picture was never published, but Gheorghiță said that enlarged it showed two luminous objects inside the plastic envelope, each with “an evident form of... ‘flying saucer.’” The television crew that had come to interview Barnea filmed it too; shown to experts in Bucharest, the footage settled nothing. Sources: [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() · [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() · [România comunistă, cuprinsă de „febra OZN-urilor”]() · [UFOs Behind the Iron Curtain, No. 18]() ### The saucer goes west After FSR, the photographs travelled. Phénomènes Spatiaux, the journal of the French group GEPA, ran the case in June 1970, and a Canadian magazine carried it that summer. Readers argued over the strange shadow. A. Calvert of Barnet wrote to FSR that the craft was self-luminous inside a plasma envelope and the dark patch was a “porthole,” “a hole in the plasma,” lying on the line of sight between the saucer’s operators and the Romanians watching them. In 1972 David Keilbarth of Oklahoma City, testing a computer program on Gheorghiță’s diagram, found his arithmetic wrong: at the 1,000 to 1,200 meters Gheorghiță had assumed in his sketch, the disc would have been 42 to 50 meters wide, not 32 to 38. “For a sceptic this is lethal ammunition,” he warned. The American writer Trevor James Constable, in 1976, counted the Cluj disc with the McMinnville saucer as proof of an etheric technology: an orgone field “stopped” by the camera, he wrote, would desensitize the emulsion, so that “an entirely anomalous shadow will appear on the materialized structure. This happened with the Cluj, Romania photographs.” The case entered the catalogs, in UFO Register’s 1977 list of photographs as entry 0341, “Four photographs taken,” and in reports reprinted from Belgium to Spain to the MUFON UFO Journal, where Barnea had become “Bornea” and his employer a factory. Sources: [Le dossier photo d’Inforespace: dimanche 18 août 1968, Cluj, Roumanie]() · [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() · [UFOs Behind the Iron Curtain, No. 18]() · [Mail Bag: ‘Shadow’ and ‘Portholes’]() · [Mail Bag: Computing distances of UFOs observed]() · [The Cosmic Pulse of Life]() · [Provisional Catalogue of UFO Photographs, entry 0341]() · [Clues from Cluj: UFOs over Romania]() ### The mirror test in Liège The most careful look came from Lumières dans la Nuit. Its editors received the pictures from Gheorghiță and sat on them, “by nature suspicious” of photographs. Playing devil’s advocate, they turned the second frame upside down and flipped it as if seen in a mirror, and the two resulting sketches looked so alike that they wondered whether the same drawing had been used twice, the clear, cloudless sky making a trick easy. They sent everything to the LAET laboratories in Brussels, and G. Delcorps signed his report at Liège on March 12, 1970. Working from two paper prints, a 50 mm lens and a 47° field, he measured the main tree at 11.2 meters and found the disc 22.3 meters wide if it was 600 meters away, or 806 meters away if it was 30 meters wide. Its elevations came out at about 31° and 19°, nothing like the 85° of the testimony: a 47° lens, he pointed out, could not take in both the horizon and the zenith. He also showed that any model between 12 and 46.5 centimeters across, placed between 3.2 and 12.5 meters from the camera, would produce the same picture. But he found the light and dark areas on the two discs essentially different, so the second was not the first reversed, and the dark zones could not be cast shadows unless the sun had been on the horizon. A fake would need two models, an expert hand, and “the perfect collusion of the three other witnesses.” He concluded that the prints “present the major elements of authenticity,” adding that the original negatives would let him finish the study. A second expert wrote in October 1970 that one image was “not the other seen in a mirror,” and that UFO shadows “do not necessarily have anything to do with the sun.” The magazine published in October 1971. Sources: [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() ### The frame no one printed The Romanian writer Ion Hobana carried the case to a wider audience in the book he wrote with Julien Weverbergh, published in French in 1972 and in English in 1974 as UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain. They said they had met the witnesses in 1968 and 1970 and “completed and/or corrected” Gheorghiță’s account, and it was they who named Barnea’s companion, Zamfira Matea. They also explained the missing photograph. Gheorghiță had said the fourth frame was “retained by E.B. for its special features,” and that the same trees in it proved “categorically” that the film was authentic. Hobana and Weverbergh said the other couple, whose identity “for strictly personal reasons must not be divulged,” appear in it “and did not want the embarrassment of its publication.” They said they had studied it closely: the object had become “so small, as if lost in a sort of dark cloud,” and the high “vapour” the witnesses noticed afterward showed in it, which they compared with Heflin’s fourth, smoke-ring photograph. Inforespace in 1974 described it the same way, with the friends recognizable on it and the UFO vanishing straight up. Hobana and Weverbergh were cautious about the rest. The shadow lines, they wrote, could scarcely be called “natural” given the sun’s position, but they declined to analyse the pictures, calling themselves “laymen,” and their summary of Delcorps both swapped his angles between the first and second frames and had him rule out trick photography altogether, which his report did not. Sources: [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Le dossier photo d’Inforespace: dimanche 18 août 1968, Cluj, Roumanie]() · [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() ### The cosmodrome of Cluj Within a few years the clearing had neighbours. In 1974 the Romanian press published the first admissions of Alexandru Sift, a biologist Gheorghiță gave as thirty-eight, and in May 1976 Gheorghiță introduced him to FSR’s readers. Sift photographed in the Baciu forest, “a few hundred metres distant from the Barnea glade,” and his interest went back to a summer day in 1953, when he was seventeen. He saw a luminous globe fall from the sky onto a large bush and vanish into its branches. When he pushed a stick in among the leaves, he could no longer see the stick, or part of his own hand; the hand tingled, the soles of his feet burned, and something cold seemed to press down on his whole body. He ran, and spent the evening vomiting. Later he returned again and again, and he said he had seen luminous forms more than a hundred times in five years, some landing and turning into “triangular black boxes” that left triangular marks in the grass. His film also caught globes that no one present had seen, some hidden in dark haloes. By then, Gheorghiță told Lumières dans la Nuit, the forest was already being called “le cosmodrome de Cluj,” the Cluj cosmodrome. In letters quoted by FSR’s Gordon Creighton, he wrote that he had seen in recent photographs “the feet and the silhouettes of beings” invisible to the eye, and that after photographing the spot himself on May 19, 1974, he had come away with a swelling on his forehead bigger than the one on Sift’s. Creighton, for his part, tied Sift’s invisible globes to the infrared “life-forms” of Trevor James Constable. Sources: [Weird “Flying Globe” photographs in Romania · The Report from Cluj]() · [Untitled note on new photographs from Cluj]() ![Photograph of a stand of thin grey tree trunks bending in S-shaped curves and kinks above a forest floor carpeted with orange fallen leaves.]() Twisted trunks in the Hoia forest on November 4, 2012. The bent trees became a stop on the tours that followed the forest’s legend. Cristian Bortes, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. [Image source]() [CC BY 2.0 · Cristian Bortes]() ### The Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania In time the Hoia-Baciu forest became one of Europe’s famous haunted places (in 2013 The Guardian put it on a list of the continent’s most frightening), and Barnea’s photographs became its founding event. Adrian Pătruț, a chemist at Babeș-Bolyai University and president of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology, published Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu in 1995 with Gheorghiță’s analysis of the photographs, and the story grew new details. A year after Barnea, Adevărul reported in 2015, Sift photographed a similar object over the forest and next day found a circle of dried grass almost five meters wide, a mark that Pătruț said stayed “visible for many years, until about 2009.” In 2012 Pătruț told Evenimentul Zilei that the Barnea set held five images, of which only three were released, the last taken “immediately after the UFO dematerialized, leaving behind a large grey circular ring.” In 2004 Jurnalul Național wrote, without naming a source, that the Securitate had taken an interest and a few months later forced Barnea to hand over most of the negative. Pătruț said he never met Barnea, who left Cluj around 1970 and died of cancer in Iași on January 1, 1994. Later writers make him a military technician, and fix the clearing as Poiana Rotundă, the round meadow that tour guides now show as the place where the first UFO photographs were taken; the 1968 reports say only “a clearing.” Around it gathered the legends: a girl who vanished and walked out five years later remembering nothing, geomagnetic anomalies that drain batteries and unsettle visitors, the name “the Romanian Bermuda Triangle.” Romanian Wikipedia notes that these myths spread after 1968 and that none has been shown to have any basis, and in 2012 a reporter for Evenimentul Zilei wrote that most of the forest’s paranormal happenings date from after the photographs. Sources: [Misterele din Hoia-Baciu, una dintre cele mai înfricoșătoare păduri din lume]() · [Pădurea extraterestră de lângă Cluj înviorează turismul]() · [Lumini stranii pe cerul Clujului]() · [Pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() ![Photograph of a sunlit, gently sloping meadow of long grass, the foreground in shadow with a few small blue wildflowers, below a line of dense green trees and a strip of blue sky.]() Poiana Rotundă, the round meadow in the Hoia-Baciu forest, on August 19, 2019. Its link to Barnea’s photographs is a later identification; the 1968 sources name only a clearing. Lajsikonik, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. [Image source]() [CC BY-SA 4.0 · Lajsikonik]() ### A tin plate in the air The sharpest skeptical reading came from Marian Ţigănuş, a photography expert, as Evenimentul Zilei later called him, who posted his analysis online around 2007. Looking at the first frame, he wrote, he simply thought of a tin dinner plate he had at home. The distance came only from the witness; the angle the disc filled, about 1.83° by the analysts’ own figures, fits a 32-meter craft a kilometer away or, just as well, a 20-centimeter plate 6.25 meters from the lens, well inside the FED-2’s depth of field on a bright day. Then he did what the Lumières dans la Nuit editors had done. Turned top to bottom, the disc in the second frame matched the first almost exactly, in outline and in the play of light and shade, and the “impossible” lighting suddenly became ordinary sunlight. He thought that much coincidence implausible, and suggested a darkroom double exposure: the plate from one frame printed upside down into an empty landscape, with the shadows touched up, and the third frame another throw caught side-on. “We have the ‘culprit’ from the front, the back and in profile, as at the police,” he joked. In March 2008, at a barbecue, he had a friend throw a 15-centimeter white plate while he photographed it with a digital camera set close to Barnea’s film speed, and got sharp “UFOs” even at 1/60 of a second by catching it at the top of its arc. He did not claim to have proved it; the 20-centimeter plate, he wrote, was “perfectly valid,” the only clues against it “just the witness’s words.” Pătruț replied that the idea could not stand, since the witnesses and foreign analysts agreed the object had its own light. The negatives that Delcorps asked for in 1970 are not known to have been examined by anyone independent, and the case endures because of that gap: three saucer pictures that Gheorghiță, in Flying Saucer Review, ranked among the best ever taken, published by a Communist news agency, defended by a Belgian laboratory, and told by their photographer in two stories that do not agree. Sources: [Analiza poze OZN Emil Barnea 1968 din pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() · [Pădurea extraterestră de lângă Cluj înviorează turismul]() · [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() ![Three grainy enlargements of a disc against pale sky, side by side. Left: the disc from the first photograph, tilted, with a dark lower rim. Centre: the disc from the second photograph, with a dark band along its upper rim. Right: the same second-photograph disc turned upside down, its dark band now along the bottom like the first.]() The disc from photo 1 (left) and photo 2 (centre), and photo 2 turned upside down (right), which brings it close to photo 1 in outline and shading, the resemblance noticed by Lumières dans la Nuit’s editors and later by Marian Ţigănuş. Emil Barnea, 18 August 1968, as reproduced in Flying Saucer Review 15:6 (1969). Public domain in Romania (a photographic series first published there in 1968; protection under Decree 321/1956 lapsed before Law 8/1996) and therefore not restored in the US. Enlarged detail; halftone screen visible. [Image source]() ## The evidence ### Three halftones and two prints What survives in public is three photographs, and only as reproductions: the screened halftones in the 1968 Romanian papers and in Flying Saucer Review, Lumières dans la Nuit, Hobana and Weverbergh’s book and the periodicals that copied them. The negatives went from Barnea to Gheorghiță, to the Cluj photographers, an official laboratory and Agerpres in 1968, and no later analyst outside Romania is known to have seen them. Delcorps worked in 1970 from two paper prints, numbered 100 and 101, and asked for the originals; Ţigănuş worked from what he called copies of copies, two versions of the second frame differing in grain and specks. The checks Gheorghiță describes, by a photo-reporter, an Agerpres photographer, a laboratory and the Fine Arts lecturers, are reported only by him and those who repeated him, without names or written findings. The publication itself is solid: the Agerpres item, Gheorghiță’s signed note and Barnea’s telephone interview can all be read in scans of Scînteia, România liberă, Scînteia tineretului and Flacăra from September 1968. Sources: [Un obiect zburător neidentificat în apropiere de Cluj]() · [Un obiect zburător observat în apropierea orașului Cluj]() · [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() · [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() · [Analiza poze OZN Emil Barnea 1968 din pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() ### Numbers that do not agree The measurements disagree with each other. The first press reports gave a round object about 10 meters across with a white light; the witnesses, as Gheorghiță relayed them, gave more than 30 meters at about 600 meters’ height and 85° above the horizon. Gheorghiță’s own diagram assumed a distance of 1,000 to 1,200 meters and got 32 to 38 meters, which Keilbarth showed should have been 42 to 50. Delcorps, measuring the prints, found elevations of about 31° and 19° and a diameter of 22.3 meters at 600 meters, and pointed out that a 47° lens could not have photographed something at 85° with the treetops in frame. Hobana and Weverbergh reported his angles reversed. Even the place moved: FSR printed the clearing as “47 km.” from Cluj, a slip for the 4.7 kilometers west-southwest given in Gheorghiță’s 1973 book, Hobana and Inforespace, and his 1976 article put it four and a half kilometers from the centre. The time runs from 1:20 and 1:23 p.m. in the investigators’ accounts to 3:15 and 3:50 in Barnea’s 1968 statements, with 1:30 on “September 17” in Gheorghiță’s first note; and the photographs appeared on September 18, not in “all the Bucharest newspapers of September 19,” as FSR has it. None of the size estimates can be better than the distance, and the distance rests on what the witnesses believed they saw. Sources: [Un obiect zburător neidentificat în apropiere de Cluj]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Mail Bag: Computing distances of UFOs observed]() · [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() · [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() · [Le dossier photo d’Inforespace: dimanche 18 août 1968, Cluj, Roumanie]() · [Weird “Flying Globe” photographs in Romania · The Report from Cluj]() · [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() · [România comunistă, cuprinsă de „febra OZN-urilor”]() · [Un obiect zburător observat în apropierea orașului Cluj]() ### Two accounts of one afternoon The 1968 sources and the 1969 one describe different afternoons: in Flacăra and the statement Adevărul quotes, a walk for two, a supposed balloon, three pictures and strangers nearby; in Gheorghiță’s FSR article, and in everything built on it, a picnic of four, ten seconds of recognition, four frames and two minutes of silent watching together. Scînteia tineretului’s “together with a group of friends” falls between them. Hobana and Weverbergh say they met the witnesses in 1968 and 1970 and corrected the account, and they keep the four. The changes matter, because the case for authenticity leans on the later version: Delcorps counted “the perfect collusion of the three other witnesses” as an obstacle to a hoax, and the unpublished fourth frame is explained by the presence of a couple who do not appear in Barnea’s first telling. No statement from Zamfira Matea, or from any other person in the clearing, has been found. Sources: [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() · [România comunistă, cuprinsă de „febra OZN-urilor”]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Farfurii zburătoare la Cluj?]() · [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() · [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() ### Model, mirror or machine Nothing in the images rules out a small object close to the camera. Delcorps calculated that a model 12 to 46.5 centimeters across at 3.2 to 12.5 meters would give the same pictures, and Ţigănuş showed that a thrown plate can be photographed sharply with comparable settings. The dispute is over the second frame. The LDLN editors and Ţigănuş both found that turning it upside down makes it closely resemble the first; Delcorps, superimposing enlargements, found that the shaded areas differed in essentials, and LDLN’s second expert agreed that the second disc was not the first reversed. Each side then reads the odd shading its own way: for Gheorghiță, the Fine Arts lecturers, Delcorps, Calvert and Constable, light the sun could not have made; for Ţigănuş, the sign of a darkroom composite. Set side by side, the enlargements show the resemblance; they cannot settle a question that Delcorps himself said needed the original negatives. Sources: [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() · [Analiza poze OZN Emil Barnea 1968 din pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() · [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() · [Mail Bag: ‘Shadow’ and ‘Portholes’]() · [The Cosmic Pulse of Life]() · [Pădurea extraterestră de lângă Cluj înviorează turismul]() ### Later layers Much of what is now told about the case appears only decades later and without sources. The five-photograph set with its grey ring comes from Pătruț in 2012; the confiscated negative from an unsourced line in Jurnalul Național in 2004; Barnea’s departure from Cluj around 1970 and death in Iași on January 1, 1994, from Pătruț alone, who never met him. The identification of the clearing as Poiana Rotundă, Barnea’s rank as a military technician, and the forest’s legends of vanishing girls and magnetic anomalies are later still, and Romanian Wikipedia dates their spread to after 1968. Sift’s 1953 globe is his own story, told by Gheorghiță in FSR in 1976 after Sift’s first public admissions in the Romanian press in 1974. Parts of the 1968 record are thin too: the observatory director is never named, and the Informația Bucureștiului tests and Gheorghiță’s three 1968 rebuttals are known only from his and Hobana’s later citations. Sources: [Pădurea extraterestră de lângă Cluj înviorează turismul]() · [Lumini stranii pe cerul Clujului]() · [Pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() · [Misterele din Hoia-Baciu, una dintre cele mai înfricoșătoare păduri din lume]() · [Weird “Flying Globe” photographs in Romania · The Report from Cluj]() · [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() ## Timeline - **SUMMER 1953:** By his later account, the seventeen-year-old Alexandru Sift sees a luminous globe fall into a bush in the Baciu forest, and his stick and part of his hand become invisible. - **3 AUG 1965:** Rex Heflin photographs a disc from his truck near Santa Ana, California; the Condon study later calls the case inconclusive. - **29 MAR 1968:** Meteorologists at the Semenic station begin three days of watching a bright object over the Banat mountains. - **18 AUG 1968 · 1:23 PM OR 3:15 PM:** Emil Barnea photographs a disc over the Baciu forest west of Cluj, with Zamfira Matea beside him: on a picnic of four in Gheorghiță’s account, on a walk in his own. - **LATE AUG–EARLY SEP 1968:** Barnea finishes the roll and develops it, ten days or two weeks later by different accounts. - **AFTER 1 SEP 1968:** Back in Cluj, Florin Gheorghiță sees the prints and takes them to photographers, a laboratory and lecturers at the Institute of Fine Arts. - **18 SEP 1968:** Agerpres releases the story; Scînteia, România liberă and Scînteia tineretului print it, and television shows the photographs. - **19 SEP 1968 · 3:15–7:15 PM:** A shining polyhedral “balloon” hangs over central Cluj for hours in a strong wind; Rudolf Wagner photographs it and a television crew films it. - **SEPTEMBER 1968:** The observatory director calls the photographs a hoax or a weather balloon; Flacăra prints Barnea’s telephone interview: “I thought it was a balloon.” - **NOV–DEC 1969:** Flying Saucer Review publishes Gheorghiță’s “Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania,” with the picnic of four and the withheld fourth photograph. - **12 MAR 1970:** G. Delcorps signs his LAET report in Liège: the 85° angle is impossible, a small model would work, but the prints show “the major elements of authenticity.” - **JUNE 1970:** Phénomènes Spatiaux publishes the case in France; a Canadian magazine follows that summer. - **1970:** Hobana and Weverbergh meet the witnesses for the second time. Barnea leaves Cluj around now, according to Adrian Pătruț. - **OCT 1971:** Lumières dans la Nuit publishes its mirror test, Delcorps’s report and a second expert’s verdict. - **1972:** Hobana and Weverbergh’s book appears in French; in FSR, David Keilbarth finds Gheorghiță’s size calculation wrong: “lethal ammunition.” - **1973:** Gheorghiță’s O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă tells the Cluj story at length, with the September 19 balloon. - **1974:** UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain appears in English; Inforespace runs the case in Belgium; the Romanian press tells Sift’s story. - **MAY 1976:** FSR publishes Gheorghiță on Sift’s invisible globes from “a few hundred metres” from the Barnea glade; the same year, Trevor James Constable reads the Cluj shadow as orgone. - **MARCH 1977:** The MUFON UFO Journal translates Michel Bougard’s “Clues from Cluj”; that year UFO Register’s photograph catalog lists the case as entry 0341. - **1 JAN 1994:** Emil Barnea dies of cancer in Iași, according to Pătruț. - **1995:** Adrian Pătruț’s Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu makes the photographs the founding event of the forest’s legend. - **5 JUL 2004:** Jurnalul Național says, without a source, that the Securitate forced Barnea, a few months after the sighting, to hand over most of the negative. - **ABOUT 2007–2008:** Marian Ţigănuş proposes a thrown 20-centimeter plate and a darkroom double exposure, and tests a thrown plate at a barbecue on March 9, 2008. - **15 JUL 2012:** Pătruț tells Evenimentul Zilei that the Barnea set held five images, the last showing a grey ring where the UFO dematerialized. ## Sources & interviews - [Un obiect zburător neidentificat în apropiere de Cluj]() — Agerpres (Ludovic Roman and Gh. Brătescu) · Scînteia no. 7829 · Wednesday, September 18, 1968 · page 7, with the photograph captioned “Obiectul fotografiat la Cluj” · scan via Biblioteca Județeană Deva - [Un obiect zburător observat în apropierea orașului Cluj]() — Agerpres item and a signed note by the electronics engineer Florin Gheorghiță · România liberă no. 7437 · September 18, 1968 · page 5 · scan via Biblioteca Județeană Deva - [Farfurii zburătoare la Cluj?]() — Ion Rus · Scînteia tineretului no. 6012 · September 18, 1968 · page 1 · scan via Biblioteca Județeană Deva - [La Cluj: farfurie zburătoare? · Interviu indirect cu Emil Barnea]() — Bazil Dunăreanu · Flacăra no. 39 · late September 1968 · page 5 · Barnea’s telephone interview, his earliest recorded account · scan via Biblioteca Județeană Deva - [România comunistă, cuprinsă de „febra OZN-urilor”]() — Daniel Guță · Adevărul · September 16, 2026 · quoting the 1968 Agerpres item, a 1968 statement by Barnea, Steaua Roșie and Tribuna of September 20, 1968 - [O.Z.N. – o problemă modernă]() — Florin Gheorghiță · Editura Junimea, Iași · 1973 · chapter V, “S-a întîmplat la Cluj,” pp. 81–85, and figs. 9–12 · via the Internet Archive - [Flying Saucer over Cluj, Romania]() — Florin Gheorghiță, translated by Gordon Creighton · Flying Saucer Review 15(6) · November/December 1969 · pp. 12–16 · via the Internet Archive - [Mail Bag: ‘Shadow’ and ‘Portholes’]() — A. Calvert, Barnet · Flying Saucer Review · early 1970 · a reader’s plasma theory of the second photograph · via the Internet Archive - [Mail Bag: Computing distances of UFOs observed]() — David Keilbarth, Oklahoma City · Flying Saucer Review 18(4) · July/August 1972 · letter of April 30, 1972 · via the Internet Archive - [Weird “Flying Globe” photographs in Romania · The Report from Cluj]() — Florin Gheorghiță, translated by Gordon Creighton, and Creighton’s commentary · Flying Saucer Review 22(1) · May 1976 · pp. 3–9 · on the biologist Alexandru Sift · via the Internet Archive - [Analyse minutieuse de photos prises à Cluj (Roumanie)]() — Lumières dans la Nuit 114 · October 1971 · pp. 21–25 · Gheorghiță’s account, the editors’ mirror test, G. Delcorps’s LAET report signed at Liège on March 12, 1970, and a second expert’s note of October 28, 1970 · via the Internet Archive - [Untitled note on new photographs from Cluj]() — Florin Gheorghiță · Lumières dans la Nuit 155 · 1976 · p. 4 · Sift’s photographs and “le cosmodrome de Cluj” · via the Internet Archive - [UFO’s from Behind the Iron Curtain]() — Ion Hobana and Julien Weverbergh · Souvenir Press, London · 1974 (French edition 1972) · chapter 6, “Emil Barnea from Cluj (Rumania) offers some important clues,” pp. 93–107 · via the Internet Archive - [Le dossier photo d’Inforespace: dimanche 18 août 1968, Cluj, Roumanie]() — Michel Bougard · Inforespace 13 · 1974 · pp. 22–26 · via the Internet Archive - [Clues from Cluj: UFOs over Romania]() — Michel Bougard, translated by Beatrice Zimmer from Stendek 21 (September 1975) · MUFON UFO Journal 112 · March 1977 · via the Internet Archive - [UFOs Behind the Iron Curtain, No. 18]() — Joseph M. Brill, translating Gheorghiță from the Cluj amateur astronomers’ bulletin of December 1970 · Skylook 64 · March 1973 · via the Internet Archive - [Provisional Catalogue of UFO Photographs, entry 0341]() — UFO Register 8 · 1977 · “Emil Barnea. Four photographs taken.” · via the Internet Archive - [The Cosmic Pulse of Life]() — Trevor James Constable · 1976 · on “anomalous shadow” and the Cluj photographs · via the Internet Archive - [Case 52: Traffic Investigator Photographs (Santa Ana, Calif., August 1965)]() — William K. Hartmann · Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (the Condon Report) · 1968 · on Rex Heflin’s Polaroid photographs of August 3, 1965 · NCAS online text - [Analiza poze OZN Emil Barnea 1968 din pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() — Marian Ţigănuş · Ozenistice (freewebs) · c. 2007, with his tin-plate experiment of March 9, 2008 · archived by the Wayback Machine, July 17, 2012 - [Pădurea extraterestră de lângă Cluj înviorează turismul]() — Evenimentul Zilei · July 15, 2012 · interviews with Adrian Pătruţ and Marian Ţigănuş - [Lumini stranii pe cerul Clujului]() — Vasile Surcel · Jurnalul Național · July 5, 2004 · drawing on Adrian Pătruț’s Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu (1995) - [Misterele din Hoia-Baciu, una dintre cele mai înfricoșătoare păduri din lume]() — Florina Pop · Adevărul (Cluj-Napoca) · February 6, 2015 · on Sift, Pătruț and the Poiana Rotundă tours - [Pădurea Hoia-Baciu]() — Wikipedia (Romanian) · revision 16726068 · geography, the 1968 photographs and the later legends - [Florin Gheorghiță]() — Wikipedia (Romanian) · revision 17441673 · biography and bibliography Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Saturn over Trindade]() — Another sequence of saucer frames from one photographer, given to a government and the newspapers, whose negatives were never independently examined. - [The Disc on Frame 300]() — A disc over Costa Rica that analysts found shaded the wrong way for the sun, the same puzzle as Barnea’s second frame. - [The Lubbock Lights]() — Photographs that laboratories could neither break nor explain, taken by an amateur whose account was all anyone had to go on. - [The Jellyfish over Petrozavodsk]() — Nine years later, another Eastern Bloc sighting that the state news agency, TASS, put on the wire. - [The Lights of Hessdalen]() — A remote valley that, like the Baciu forest after Sift, became a place where strange lights kept returning and cameras kept watching. - [Kenneth Arnold]() — Gheorghiță saw in the third Cluj frame the same notch in the rim that, he noted, had been described in the shining discs of Arnold’s 1947 sighting. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Kelso Airship]()