ZELIENOPLE — Air Force Tech. Sgt. Al Harris had no idea what he was looking at when he gazed at the black and white picture that showed an enormous, daunting mushroom cloud enveloping the sky over a coastal city.

But what Harris soon found out was that, in his capacity as a photography technician charged with developing pictures taken from the Enola Gay, he was one of the first people to ever see photographic proof that the world had entered the Atomic Age, a moment that changed the course of human history.

He was looking at an image of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Originally from New Brighton in Beaver County, Harris has lived at the Passavant Retirement Community in Zelienople for the past 10 years, where he keeps one of about only 20 original prints developed from the film taken off the Enola Gay.

Throughout the years, he has seen many copies of that iconic picture in history books, on television shows or movies, all while knowing his hands developed and could still hold the original.

Now, the 89-year-old Harris rarely tells his story to friends or family. But that doesn't mean the events aren't still fresh in his mind.

As Harris tells it, the date was Aug. 7, 1945, one day after the United States dropped the world's first atomic bomb. The blast immediately killed an estimated 140,000 people and many, many more over the ensuing years.

Only hours after the bomb dropped, the film taken from the Enola Gay was sent to Harris' base in Guam in the South Pacific. The film arrived with “armed military policemen with a strict ambience of secrecy,” Harris said, while the direness of the situation was made quickly evident.

“They wanted it done quickly,” he said. “Quickly would actually be a mild word for what they wanted.”

Only four prints were ordered from the original film, Harris said, one of which went to Gen. Douglas MacArthur and another that went to President Harry Truman. Soon after, the men were ordered to destroy the negatives and not talk about what they saw.

At the time, Harris and the five men working with him weren't even sure what they were looking at. They were holding a large picture displaying a gigantic mushroom cloud but knew nothing beyond that.

But it wasn't long before other pictures began filtering in for development, pictures that showed complete devastation. Debris and charred bodies littered the landscape with no semblance of normalcy or civilization.

It was then, Harris said, that the men realized what they had been looking at. And even though he didn't know it at the time, Harris had knowledge of the world's first atomic bomb being dropped even before many generals in the armed forces and before most, if not all, of the public.

“We were just six guys, but we were the first six people of anyone on Earth to even look at this picture,” he said.

What he saw that day and the emotions he felt are much the same as they are today whenever he pulls out the old photographs.

“It was beyond all of our comprehension,” he said. “It knocked us flat.”

Harris, who was born in New Brighton in 1921, remembers developing a fondness for photography early in life. It was in 1933 when he traveled to the World's Fair in Chicago, a place where he snapped as many pictures as possible with his father's camera.

He also recalled a time in his childhood when he and a friend painted a room in his house black, a room that would become his first dark room.

He graduated from high school in 1939 and in 1942 was drafted to serve in World War II. It was then that a recruiter asked him about his favorite hobby, and Harris answered with photography.

“It was a good thing I mentioned that first,” Harris said, “because my second favorite hobby was target practice.”

Harris' active service began on Aug. 7, 1942, when he joined the Air Force's Ninth Photo Technician Squadron.

He spent the next several years traveling around the country to military bases before being shipped to Guam in May 1945. While there, Harris was part of a unit of about 200 soldiers who developed film for bomb damage assessment and intelligence purposes.

Many of the photographs he developed were integral to the overall war effort because they helped his superiors determine enemy locations and movements.

But as the weeks progressed, Harris knew there was a much larger operation in the works. He said it wasn't long before B-29 aircraft were taking off at 30-minute intervals, all equipped with 18 bombs that weighed more than 500 pounds, bombs that would eventually be dropped on Tokyo.

Harris was in Guam for fewer than three months before the world's first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. Six days later, World War II officially ended.

While Harris still contends to this day that atomic warfare should be outlawed, he believes the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to avoid an invasion of Japan, which likely would have happened if not for the country's surrender.

Such an invasion easily could have cost more than a million American lives, Harris said, and added that it would have been “the most tragic, horrendous military encounter of the entire war.

“There is much controversy over the use of such devastating weapons,” he said. “It did save many American lives, as it did also save many Japanese lives. We sincerely pray that they will never be used in the future.”

Pictures of devastation and destruction aren't the only ones he keeps from those days as his memory is also filled with the good times. There are pictures of him and his buddies hanging out in their makeshift hut in Guam. Other pictures show the men smiling and relaxing while on a break.

But other pictures remain. The ones showing landscapes where desolate roads are the only discernable landmarks from what used to be a thriving industrial city. Another shows a Japanese woman cradling her young child, walking through a town with nothing but rubble and bare, leafless trees.

Another picture shows a Japanese man and his son pedaling away from a destroyed city on a bicycle.

It's photographs like these that have cemented his opinion, Harris said, that these horrendous weapons of mass destruction should never again see the light of day.

“I think it should never, ever be used again for any reason whatsoever,” he said. “It should be outlawed as a military weapon.”

After the war, Harris spent 42 years at H.H. Robertson, a manufacturing company in Ambridge.

He met his wife, Delores, there. They were married for 57 years before she died in 2001.