The Cote Photo: The Best UFO Photograph Ever Taken? | Adam Pillon

In 1971, a Costa Rican government mapping flight took a high-resolution photograph every 13 seconds. Frame 299 showed nothing unusual. Frame 300 captured what appears to be a metallic disc. By frame 301, it was gone. Nobody on board saw it, and the object wasn't discovered on film until two years later. More than half a century on, the original negative remains in a government archive, and modern analysis suggests that a physical object was in front of that camera. Filmmaker Adam Pillon joins the podcast to discuss the photograph, the investigation, and the new documentary he made with his wife Megan, The Cote Photo.

The Photograph and Its Capture

The image was taken during an official aerial cartography mission over Lake Cote. The camera was a specialized, 100-pound piece of equipment designed for mapping, using film that was 23 by 23 centimeters—roughly nine inches square. The disc-shaped object appears on the film at 0.42 centimeters across. Because the film was analog, there was no instant feedback; the anomaly was only discovered two years later when cartographers reviewed the images for a dam project. At first, they thought it was a drop of water.