Monday, March 18, 2024

UFOs, UAP: AARO's Official Report on the Historical Record of Government Investigation

UFOs, UAP - AARO's Report on the Historical Record of Government Investigation Graphic by www.theufochronicles.com





Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement
with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)


Volume I
February 2024

"AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."


     This report represents Volume I of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s (AARO) Historical Record Report (HR2) which reviews the record of the United States Government (USG)
By AARO
Feb. 2024
pertaining to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). In completing this report, AARO reviewed all official USG investigatory efforts since 1945, researched classified and unclassified archives, conducted approximately 30 interviews, and partnered with Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) officials responsible for controlled and special access program oversight, respectively. AARO will publish Volume II in accordance with the date established in Section 6802 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23); Volume II will provide analysis of information acquired by AARO after the date of the publication of Volume I.

Since 1945, the USG has funded and supported UAP investigations with the goal of determining whether UAP represented a flight safety risk, technological leaps by competitor nations, or evidence of off-world technology under intelligent control. These investigations were managed and implemented by a range of experts, scientists, academics, military, and intelligence officials under differing leaders—all of whom held their own perspectives that led them to particular conclusions on the origins of UAP. However, they all had in common the belief that UAP represented an unknown and, therefore, theoretically posed a potential threat of an indeterminate nature.

AARO’s mission is similar to that of these earlier organizations. AARO methodology applies both the scientific method and intelligence analysis tradecraft to identify and help mitigate risks UAP may pose to domain safety and to discover, characterize, and attribute potential competitor technological systems.

A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the USG—or a secretive organization within it—recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.

AARO recognizes that many people sincerely hold versions of these beliefs which are based on their perception of past experiences, the experiences of others whom they trust, or media and online outlets they believe to be sources of credible and verifiable information. The proliferation of television programs, books, movies, and the vast amount of internet and social media content centered on UAP-related topics most likely has influenced the public conversation on this topic, and reinforced these beliefs within some sections of the population.

The goal of this report is not to prove or disprove any particular belief set, but rather to use a rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past USG-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the USG and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material. AARO has approached this project with the widest possible aperture, thoroughly investigating these assertions and claims without any particular pre-conceived conclusion or hypothesis. AARO is committed to reaching conclusions based on empirical evidence.

Lastly, AARO thanks all participants in this review who include the interviewees who came forward with information.

Monday, March 11, 2024

We Need to Investigate UFOs Sans Conspiracy Theories

We Need to Investigate UFOs Sans Conspiracy Theories - www.theufochronicles.com



A former government official calls for investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena without succumbing to conspiracy theories about extraterrestrials
     Little else titillates and piques the national interest like unidentified flying objects and space aliens. After more than a century of films featuring intelligent creatures from other worlds, and over seven decades after the U.S. government began investigating them, UFOs remain a flashpoint for conspiracy
By Sean Kirkpatrick
www.scientificamerican.com
3-6-24
theorists and science deniers. By any name, UFOs or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) conjure the most vivid images and plots allowed by Hollywood and novels alike. Who doesn’t want to believe?

However, reality, as inconvenient as it can be, remains fundamental. In 2022 Congress found the courage to put into law the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), jointly managed by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Its mission is quite straightforward. Apply an unbiased scientific method and intelligence tradecraft to review existing information and data on historical UAP and investigate new data as these are provided to the office from military, federal, state and local entities as well as private citizens.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

UFOs Have Closely Monitored US Missile Tests Since the 1940s

UFOs Have Closely Monitored US Missile Tests Since the 1940s www.theufochronicles.com



While the 1964 Big Sur Incident was the most dramatic case documented thus far, encounters involving UFO surveillance and even interference have occurred on an ongoing basis.



     One only has to do a little research to discover that the Big Sur Incident was not unique. Actually, confirmed episodes of UFOs maneuvering near airborne U.S. missiles occurred on numerous occasions, both before and after the now well-publicized event, during which a UFO was filmed disabling a dummy nuclear warhead in flight, using beams of light.

After former USAF Lieutenant Bob Jacobs—head of the Vandenberg AFB-based telescopic-photography team that inadvertently filmed the amazing incident—went public with the story in 1982, he quickly received anonymous death threats over the telephone and,
Robert Hastings - www.theufochronicles.com
By Robert Hastings
www.theufochronicles.com
3-5-2024
independently, was harassed by a small group of “skeptics” with interesting but unpublicized government connections. An earlier article of mine discusses that situation.

Nevertheless, another officer, retired Major Florenze Mansmann—who analyzed the Big Sur film frame-by-frame with a magnifier—has confirmed that it showed a “classic disc” UFO shooting four intensely luminous beams at the warhead, which then tumbled out of camera frame.

But the dramatic 1964 encounter was hardly the first case of UFO surveillance of our missile tests. For example, in March 1950, a True magazine article written by U.S. Naval Commander Robert B. McLaughlin, a rocket specialist at White Sands Proving Ground, in southern New Mexico, revealed that small, spherical UFOs—we would now call them orbs—had been sighted at the highly secret base during a V-2 rocket test conducted on June 10, 1949. Referring to the incident, he wrote,

This day we were firing a Navy upper atmosphere missile. Shortly after its take-off, two small circular objects, guessed to be approximately 20 inches in diameter, appeared from no place and joined the Navy missile on its upward flight.

At about the time the Navy missile was doing well over 2,000 feet per second, the object on the west side passed through the exhaust gases and joined its friend on the east. They then apparently decided the missile was not going fast enough for them. They accelerated, passed the Navy missile and sailed off upward and eastward.

News coverage of McLaughlin’s revelations was widespread at the time. According to veteran UFO researcher Richard Hall, McLaughlin was later punished by the Navy for writing the article—losing his job at White Sands and being shipped off to sea duty. UFOs snooping on military missile launches was obviously a highly-sensitive subject that was to be rigorously kept from public view.

In any case, unexplained UFO activity at White Sands in the 1940s and ‘50s was frequently observed by military and civilian personnel working at the test range, and nearby Holloman AFB, involving aerial objects that were radically different in appearance and vastly superior in performance, compared to our own aircraft and rockets. Reports periodically issued by the Air Force summarized various incidents over time.

By the early 1960s, UFO sightings during military missile tests began to occur at other locations. Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC Ret.), Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a well-respected UFO research organization, has written,

In [NICAP’s] files is a photocopy of an official tracking log from Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy), covering operations on January 10, 1961. A Polaris missile was fired that day. According to the log, the missile was on its way up when an ‘unidentifiable flying object’ came in over the range. The UFO was evidently so big and maneuvered so close to the Polaris that automatic tracking radar on the ground, set to follow the Polaris, locked onto the UFO by mistake. The UFO eventually flew out of the radar's ‘sight.’ It took trackers 14 minutes to find the Polaris again.

A declassified military teletype message, known as a TWX, summarizes the encounter, but the facts first became known to the public after they were leaked by someone with access to inside information. Importantly, the intriguing 1961 event occurred only three years before the incident reported by Bob Jacobs and Florenze Mansmann and the parallels between the two cases are obvious.

Predictably, UFO activity during US missile tests continued to occur following the Big Sur incident. In one case, a Minuteman ICBM carrying a dummy nuclear warhead was launched from Vandenberg AFB, California, one day in August 1973. On June 17, 1974, the Chicago Tribune carried the following news item:

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Experts at an Army missile base say they are puzzled about strange “ghost ships” picked up by powerful radar scanner in the Pacific during a tracking exercise last summer.

There has been little official comment on what the scientists found during the exercise, but Major Dallas Van Hoose, an Army spokesman, confirmed recently that “some unexplained aerial phenomena” were observed during the exercise last August. Scientists, many of whom are reluctant to be named in interviews because of general public skepticism over unidentified flying objects, say privately they have been unable to find any explanation for the “ghost ships”.

“We have never seen anything precisely like this before,” said one ballistic missile defense expert who works for an Army agency here and who is familiar with the advanced radar used to test missiles and warheads. Huntsville houses the Army’s ballistic missile defense systems command which tests in the Kwajalein Atoll region of the Marshall Island Trust Territory held by the U.S.

Last August the Air Force launched a Minuteman ICBM from Vandenberg Air Force base aimed for the Kwajalein missile range which is used by the Army, Air Force, and Navy. The radar experts in the Pacific found they were also tracking an unidentified flying object next to the ICBM’s nose cone. Radar picked up an inverted saucer-shape object to the right and above the descending nose cone and watched it cross the warhead’s trajectory to a point which was below and to-the-left of it before the phantom ship disappeared. The ghost ship was described as being 10-feet high and 40-feet long. Two separate radar systems saw it at the same time which may eliminate the probability that there was a malfunction in one of the radar systems. It was also reported that 3 other identical objects were seen in the vicinity—the same size, shape, and dimensions. One scientist said the data indicated that the phantom ship “flew under its own power” but could not explain what sort of “power” was involved.

So far none of the experts here believe the ghost ship was a natural phenomenon caused by freak weather conditions or echoes commonly seen on radar screens.

(Radar alone could not have determined that the unknown targets had an “inverted saucer-shape” so some optical images of the UFOs had to have been taken as well. The reporter writing the article apparently misunderstood some of what he was told by Army Major Van Hoose, and mistakenly attributed this particular discovery to the analysis of radar data.)

In any event, the earlier incident at Vandenberg AFB, described by both Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann, involving close-proximity UFO activity during an Atlas ICBM test launch, was apparently not only one to occur at the base.

Regarding the unnamed ballistic missile expert’s statement in the article above, about never having seen “anything precisely like this before”, given that the 1964 Big Sur incident was immediately classified Top Secret—with only a handful of individuals knowing the facts—it would have been unknown to other military and civilian personnel conducting missile tests a decade later.

Researcher Barry Greenwood later reprinted this newspaper story in his co-authored book, Clear Intent (later republished as The UFO Cover-Up). He wrote,

When FOIA inquiries were filed with the Army, they denied having any records concerning the sighting. We were referred to Vandenberg AFB, California. Vandenberg responded that “in accordance with Air Force manual 12-50 which implements the Federal Records Act, the launch operations records for August 1973 have been destroyed.” Note that it is not stated that the UFO tracking report was destroyed, only a very general statement is given that “launch operations records” were destroyed. That [records of] such a mysterious event as this would not be kept somewhere for possible future use is incomprehensible. Yet this excuse is offered time and time again to deny access to records…

In 2016, researcher Richard Hoffman located the Army spokesman cited in the article, retired Major Dallas Van Hoose. Upon learning that, I secured Van Hoose’s contact information and attempted to interview him. Despite repeated attempted phone calls, he decline to speak with me.

Regardless, here we have another reliable story, published by the Chicago Tribune, involving a UFO maneuvering near a dummy nuclear warhead (contained within the missile’s nosecone) in flight over the Pacific Ocean. Considering this case, as well as those at White Sands Proving Ground and Cape Canaveral, there can be little doubt that those who operate the UFOs have repeatedly monitored U.S. missile tests since the late 1940s. In fact, given the ongoing secrecy surrounding these events, the known cases are undoubtedly only a fraction of the total number that have occurred.

Consequently, despite the repeated and unfounded attacks upon them by various debunkers over the years, Bob Jacobs’ and Florenz Mansmann’s assertions about having watched on film a UFO maneuvering near, and disabling, a dummy nuclear warhead in 1964, are unquestionably credible.

Indeed, as I recently mentioned in another article, former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) director Lue Elizondo, has already confirmed to a handful of former US government personnel that he personally viewed a video copy of the Big Sur UFO encounter while at the Pentagon.

Thanks to researchers Barry Greenwood and Jan Aldrich for providing documentation relating to the White Sands, Cape Canaveral, and 1973 Vandenberg AFB cases. And special thanks to researcher Frank Warren of The UFO Chronicles website for posting my articles year after year.


UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites - www.theufochronicles.com
Robert Hastings’ book, is UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, available at Amazon.com.
His documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed is available at Vimeo.com.
UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed - www.theufochronicles.com

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Trinity UFO Crash Hoax – 'Witness' Credibility Implodes

Trinity UFO Crash Hoax – 'Witness' Credibility Implodes www.theufochronicles.com

"We have been attempting to verify the veteran's military service from the information that has been provided. We have conducted extensive searches of every records source and alternative records source at this Center; however, we have been unable to locate any information that would help us verify the veteran's military service."



TWO STORYTELLERS DECEIVE AN ICON OF UFOLOGY

     In their years of promoting the story of a 1945 alien-craft crash and recovery, Jacques Vallee, Ph.D., and Paola Leopizzi Harris constructed a towering skyscraper of speculation on a thin foundation made of chalk. The foundation has disintegrated, yet
By Douglas Dean Johnson
1-25-24
Vallee and Harris continue to engage in tortured exertions, seeking to avoid acknowledging the reality that their skyscraper has collapsed.

In June 2021, Vallee and Harris self-published a co-authored book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, reciting a story of the crash and recovery of an alien craft. The event supposedly occurred a month after and not many miles away from the site of the first atomic-bomb test, the Trinity test of July 16, 1945. [1] An expanded Second Edition followed in August 2022. Vallee hired a publicist to promote the book and the story. By January 2023, the Trinity-crash story had been featured by media outlets as diverse as the New York Times, Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Network, and the Daily Mail in the UK, and on innumerable UFO-oriented websites and podcasts. [2]

The "Trinity" crash tale was originally based solely on the claims of two men who were both over age 60 when they first told the story in 2003 – Remigio (Reme) Baca (born October 26, 1938; died June 12, 2013) and Joseph Lopez (Jose) Padilla (born November 24, 1936, currently age 87). [3] Beginning in 2003, both men made public claims to have witnessed the crash, associated alien beings, and the subsequent recovery of the damaged alien craft by Army personnel, all of this ostensibly occurring during August 1945.

The far-reaching implications of the Trinity crash-recovery story, were it true, are the only reason why it is worth my time, or anyone's time, to further scrutinize the credibility of the witnesses, including the still-living Joseph Lopez Padilla. Padilla is now an 87-year-old man of whom few people would ever have heard, were it not for years of public promotion of his UFO crash tale by Vallee and co-author Harris, with Padilla's active cooperation. If the Padilla-Baca story is true, then the U.S. government has concealed custody of a crashed alien craft since August 1945, a span of more than 78 years – a very big deal indeed. [4]

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It - PART 2

Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It - Pt 2 www.theufochronicles.com

The very interesting backgrounds of the UFO “skeptics” who attempted to debunk the Big Sur UFO Incident after it was first publicized in the media by former US Air Force officer Dr. Bob Jacobs



     Part 1 of this article discussed former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) director Lue Elizondo’s recent admission that he had watched the Big Sur UFO film—actually, a video copy of it—while heading-up the once-secret Pentagon UFO project from 2008 to 2017. (Funding for the group officially ended in 2012, but Elizondo maintains that its work was still ongoing at the time of his resignation from government service.)

Briefly, in the early 1980s, two former US Air Force officers—Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann—confirmed that, on September 15, 1964, a domed-disc UFO had been inad-
Robert Hastings - www.theufochronicles.com
By Robert Hastings
The UFO Chronicles
2-18-2024
vertently captured on motion picture film as it paced and then shot down a dummy nuclear warhead—using mysterious, plasma-like beams—that had been carried aloft by an Atlas ICBM during a test flight over the Pacific Ocean. The missile launch took place at Vandenberg AFB, California, and the telescopic-camera team had been located a hundred miles northwest of the base, up the California coast at Big Sur, so that it could film such launches from a side view.

According to Major (later Dr.) Mansmann, he, Jacobs, and two CIA officers attended a highly-restricted screening of the film at Vandenberg two days after the dramatic incident occurred. At the CIA officers’ direction, the footage was immediately classified Top Secret. However, Lieutenant (later Dr.) Jacobs was apparently only told by Mansmann not to discuss the event with anyone and that “it never happened”. That verbal admonishment occurred just before Jacobs left the screening room and apparently prior to the Top Secret designation being assigned to the case—about which Jacobs says he was unaware.

In any event, in 1982, thinking that enough time had elapsed since the 1964 incident took place, Jacobs—by then a university professor—wrote an article about it which, after first being rejected by OMNI magazine, was published in the National Enquirer tabloid. Shortly thereafter, the former lieutenant began getting anonymous death threats over the telephone and, independently, was subjected to other forms of pressure by certain individuals who turned out to have rather suspicious, if not clearly incriminating backgrounds.

In 1989, Jacobs wrote a lengthier, more detailed article on the Big Sur UFO Incident, which was published by the MUFON UFO Journal. In it, he complained that following his revelations about the case he had been harassed by UFO debunker James Oberg, a leading member of the organization responsible for publishing Skeptical Inquirer magazine, then called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), now renamed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).

Another CSICOPer, Philip J. Klass, soon piled on, attacking Dr. Jacobs in a series of rebuking letters. Klass went so far as to contact Jacobs’ Communications Department chairman at the University of Maine, to allege that the professor was behaving in a manner inappropriate for an academician. According to Klass, anyone who contended that flying saucers existed and were shooting down U.S. dummy nuclear warheads in flight was unfit to teach the school’s students.

In response, Jacobs circulated a strongly-worded retort, Low Klass: A Rejoinder. At one point, wrote Jacobs, Klass had told him in a letter that if he were uneasy about communicating with the debunker, Klass would provide as references Admiral Bobby R. Inman—the former Director of the National Security Agency, who also held Deputy Director positions at both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency—and Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Klass not only provided Jacobs with their names, but home addresses as well, and told him, “Both men have worked with me and gotten to know me in my efforts for Aviation Week [magazine].” Jacobs, viewing this offer as a veiled threat and suspecting that Klass was attempting to set him up for a security violation, consulted an attorney who told him not to respond directly to the debunker.

Klass, now deceased, was often accused of being a disinformation agent for the U.S. government—a charge he always vehemently denied. And yet, in a private letter to Jacobs, the long-time UFO debunker openly bragged about his high-powered intelligence community associates, presumably because he never thought that Jacobs would actually publish portions of the letter, which he nevertheless did.

For his part, Jim Oberg, the high-profile CSICOP/CSI debunker mentioned above, repeatedly attempted to discredit Jacobs’ and Mansmann’s amazing story. Interestingly, he also made self-incriminating comments to Jacobs in a letter obviously never meant for public view. Unfortunately for Oberg, Jacobs later published excerpts from that letter as well.

While an U.S. Air Force Captain, Oberg did classified work relating to nuclear weapons at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, located at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico. While there, in 1970-72, he had also been a Security Officer for his immediate group within the lab’s Battle Environments Branch, meaning that he was responsible for monitoring the security procedures used to safeguard the classified documents generated by it. In his letter to Dr. Jacobs, Oberg chastised him, saying, “Since you obviously feel free to discuss top secret UFO data, what would you be willing to say about other top secret aspects of the Atlas warhead which you alluded to briefly?”

This is rather curious given Oberg’s public face as a UFO debunker who claims that the mysterious craft do not even exist. One may find numerous articles he has written over the years in which he pooh-poohs UFO sightings and ridicules those who report them. And yet, in his private letter to Jacobs, Oberg angrily railed at the professor’s unauthorized release of “top secret” UFO information. Once a security officer, always a security officer, I guess.

And the “skeptical” attacks on Jacobs’ credibility continued as time went on. Skeptical Inquirer (SI) magazine featured an article in its Winter 1993 issue, titled “The Big Sur ‘UFO’: An Identified Flying Object”, written by Kingston A. George. In 1964, George had been the project engineer for the experimental telescopic-tracking and filming of missile launches at the Big Sur site. In that role he had worked directly with Bob Jacobs.

Given CSICOP’s well-established position of debunking all UFO sightings, it is not too difficult to guess the tone of George’s article. He begins by dismissing Jacobs’ “weird claims” and then offers an alternate, prosaic explanation for the events captured on the film in question.

George claimed that the supposed UFO that Jacobs had inadvertently filmed was actually an experimental package of decoys, housed in the missile’s nosecone, designed to be released in flight to confuse Soviet radar as they flew along near the actual nuclear warhead. This would make it more difficult for Russian anti-missile missiles to shoot down the incoming threat. According to George, it was these released decoys that Jacobs mistook for a UFO.

And how did George know this? He claims he viewed and analyzed the specific film “weeks later”, after Jacobs and Mansmann had already screened it. Therefore, George insists, he unquestionably knew what it showed—and it was definitely not a UFO. The only problem with this assertion is that Mansmann—who by his own account had sole custody of the film—has written that immediately after the screening in his office, the key frames of the projectable 16mm copy of the film, as well as the 35mm original, were signed out to the CIA officers present, who then left the base. Mansmann added that the film was “rushed East on a special aircraft when we released it.”

Consequently, George could not possibly have viewed the same film at Vandenberg AFB “weeks” after the missile launch, as he claimed in his 1993 article in Skeptical Inquirer, because it—both the original and the only copy ever made—had long since left the base.

The fundamental error made by George is that he chose the wrong launch date, mistakenly selecting another one, September 22, 1964. In his 1989 Mutual UFO Journal article, Jacobs had written that his personal missile test log—which he kept after leaving the Air Force—strongly suggested that the launch in question—and the UFO incident—occurred on September 15th.

In an effort to establish the actual launch date I consulted the definitive aerospace history archive, Encyclopedia Astronautica (EA), and reviewed records relating to all Atlas launches at Vandenberg AFB during September 1964. There were two such launches which were noted as:

1964 Sep 15 - 15:27 GMT - ABRES LORV-3 re-entry vehicle test flight Vandenberg Launch Pad: 576A1 – Launch Vehicle: Atlas D 245D

1964 Sep 22 - 13:08 GMT - NTMP KX-19 Target mission Vandenberg Launch Pad: 576A3 - Launch Vehicle: Atlas D 247D

The cumbersome acronyms for the September 15th launch translate to “Advanced Ballistic Re-entry System” and “Low Observable Re-entry Vehicle”. In plain English, this is precisely the type of test described by Bob Jacobs all along. The Air Force had hoped that the warhead, within the RV, would be difficult to distinguish from the cloud of metallic chaff—aluminum foil strips—accompanying it through space. If this test was successful, the experimental system might defeat an enemy’s radar, by effectively rendering invisible the incoming nuclear warhead.

According to Encyclopedia Astronautica, the September 22nd launch—the one picked by George—was designated a “NTMP KX-19 Target” mission, which means Nike Target Missile Program, flight number KX-19. Unlike the earlier test on September 15th, which was designed to evaluate the experimental Re-entry Vehicle itself, the purpose of the target test was to determine whether the U.S. Army group on Kwajalein Atoll would be able to track the RV on radar. It was hoped—if such tests were successful—that incoming Soviet warheads might be targeted with Nike anti-missile missiles.

When I informed Jacobs about the published data, he responded, “Well, Robert, I think you’ve found the launch. The timing is exactly right [according to my personal records]. The date, September 15th, is one of the three [possible dates that] I mentioned. I never believed the launch took place on September 22nd, which is what George keeps saying. The stated mission of that launch had nothing to do with the experiment we were doing the day of the incident. We were testing a re-entry vehicle, just as [the published summary] says.”

I gently challenged Jacobs on this point, to gauge his level of certainty. His response was emphatic, “No, we were testing the RV itself. It was not a target test.” He then elaborated, “There were several interesting aspects of the anti-missile-missile tests. This particular one involved a dummy warhead and a bunch of radar-deflecting aluminum chaff. The dummy warhead was targeted to splashdown at Eniwetok Lagoon...As far as I know Kwajalein [played no part in this test] aside from radar tracking. There was no planned Nike launch [involved with it].”

(Significantly, as I mentioned in Part 1 of this article, while a member of the UAP Taskforce, from 2019 to 2021, government whistleblower David Grusch tasked a colleague with finding corroborating evidence for the Big Sur UFO event. That individual had discovered, in a Department of Defense archive, a radar data summary of the launch on that date selected by Jacobs—September 15th—that revealed the apparent tracking of an anomalous object flying near the dummy warhead.)

So, it’s quite clear that Kingston George chose the wrong launch—and the filmed record of it—as the basis for his skeptical attack on Bob Jacobs. But was this an honest error or, on the other hand, part of an intentional effort to cast doubt on Jacobs’ public summary of the Big Sur Incident? After extensive evaluation, I have concluded it was the latter. Indeed, George’s Skeptical Inquirer article is so riddled with other suspicious factual errors that I cannot help but think he was purposefully engaging in disinformation intended to discredit Jacobs. And Dr. Jacobs agrees with this assessment.

Moreover, importantly, Kingston George devotes not a single word to Dr. Florenze Mansmann’s unreserved endorsement of Jacobs’ published account of the Big Sur UFO Incident. Perhaps George was unaware that, by the time he wrote his debunking article in SI, Mansmann had already admitted to several people that Jacobs’ account was completely factual.

Regardless, a full exposé of George’s demonstrable misstatements, misquotes of Jacobs’ published commentary, and off-base assertions appears in my 2007 article, “A Shot Across the Bow: Another Look at the Big Sur Incident”, published by the Center for UFO Studies.

My suggestion that George may have deliberately, unfairly tried to spin the facts to cast doubt on Jacobs’ credibility is not just idle speculation. Indeed, George’s choice of publisher for his article is, I think, telling. Although not widely known, the person orchestrating George’s attempted debunking of the Big Sur UFO Incident, leading CSICOP/CSI member and Skeptical Inquirer magazine editor Kendrick Frazier, worked for over two decades as a Public Relations Specialist for Sandia National Laboratories, which has been instrumental in manufacturing many of the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons since the 1940s.

Curiously, one has to search diligently to discover this highly-relevant fact, given that the magazine has consistently referred to Frazier only as a “Science Writer” in its Publisher’s Statement, which appears in every issue. Moreover, Frazier chose not to mention his day job as a PR guy for the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program in his online biography, even though an earlier editorial position he held with Science News magazine was readily acknowledged by him. So, for some reason, Frazier seemed to be exceedingly shy about openly admitting his long-term government Public Relations job to his magazine’s readers as well as the general public.

So, to recap, among the top CSICOP/CSI UFO “skeptics” who have publicly blasted Bob Jacobs’ and Florenz Mansmann’s revelations about the Big Sur case we have:

● A journalist (Klass) who worked for decades for an intelligence community-friendly publication, Aviation Week, and who privately cited as personal references two of the top figures in the NSA and CIA

● A former Air Force officer (Oberg) whose job included protecting nuclear weapons-related secrets

● A long-time Public Relations Specialist (Frazier) who worked for the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program for more than 20 years.

Supposedly, all three of these individuals object to Jacobs and Mansmann’s unauthorized disclosures about the still-Top Secret incident only because they are “skeptical” that it actually happened.

Yeah, right!

Part 3 of this article will be posted soon. It examines other incidents of UFOs closely monitoring US missile launches, as confirmed by declassified documents, military witness testimony, and various, credible media accounts. In short, the Big Sur event was not unique.

UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites - www.theufochronicles.com
Robert Hastings’ book, is UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, available at Amazon.com.
His documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed is available at Vimeo.com.
UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed - www.theufochronicles.com

Monday, February 19, 2024

Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It

Government UFO Whistleblower Sees Big Sur UFO Film - www.theufochronicles.com

Confirms the Existence of a Recording of a UFO Interfering with a Dummy Nuclear Warhead in Flight in September 1964



BACKGROUND:

     According to two former US Air Force officers—Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann—a USAF photographic team based at Vandenberg AFB, California, tasked with filming missile test launches, inadvertently captured the image of a domed, disc-shaped UFO as it circled and then disabled—with four flashes of an intense beam of light—a dummy nuclear warhead flying downrange over the Pacific Ocean. Jacobs had been in charge of the telescopic photography site located at Big Sur, California, and Mansmann was Vandenberg’s chief photographic imagery analyst.

Robert Hastings - www.theufochronicles.com
By Robert Hastings
The UFO Chronicles
2-9-2024
The date of the dramatic incident was September 15, 1964. Two days later, a highly-restricted screening of the spectacular footage took place at the base—attended by Jacobs, Mansmann, and two CIA officers who immediately classified the event Top Secret. The film was then confiscated by the pair and flown “back East” for analysis and storage, according to Major Mansmann. The destination was undoubtedly the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) which, it is now known, had already engaged in UFO photo analysis for years.

By the early 1980s, Jacobs felt that enough time had passed following the stunning UFO encounter to allow him to discuss it publicly. He has explained that, at the time of the 1964 film screening at Vandenberg, Major Mansmann had only ordered him “not to talk about” the unexpected filming of the UFO with anyone, pointedly saying that it had “never happened”. No mention was made of its Top Secret classification, for reasons that remain unclear to the former Lieutenant. Furthermore, because the two officers lost touch with each other after leaving the Air Force, 19 years passed before Mansmann was able confirm to Jacobs that the two mysterious men in civilian clothes at the screening were in fact CIA personnel.

In any case, in 1982, Jacobs wrote an article about the extraordinary event which, unfortunately, was published in the sensationalistic National Enquirer tabloid, after OMNI magazine had rejected it. Shortly after the story appeared, Dr. Jacobs—by then a university professor specializing in Communications—began getting death threats from unidentified persons who repeatedly harassed him over the telephone. He also received intimidating letters from certain well-known UFO “skeptics” who attempted to get Jacobs to retract the story. The suspicious, unpublicized connections those individuals had with the US Government will be discussed in Part 2 of this article.

I first interviewed Jacobs in 1986, in conjunction with my long-term research into UFO-related activity at nuclear weapons sites, as summarized in my book, UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. In 2021, Luis “Lue” Elizondo, the former director of a previously-secret UFO project at the Pentagon—the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)—confirmed in a podcast that his group had utilized the book as a resource when conducting its own research into UFO incursions at nuclear weapon sites. Said Elizondo, “There was a lot of information we didn’t have access to that, it turned out, Robert Hastings did...We were able to validate and substantiate exactly what he was saying.”

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS:

In February 2023, a US Senate investigator—who has asked to remain anonymous—told me that Elizondo had privately confirmed having been given access to the Big Sur UFO film while with AATIP, and that it showed exactly what Dr. Jacobs has maintained over the years: A UFO actually interfered with an Atlas missile in flight, as it carried a dummy nuclear warhead aloft. The official Air Force video of the encounter captures the moment the unknown object appears to engage the warhead with a luminous beam—which turned on and off four times—as it travelled downrange at several thousand miles-per-hour over the Pacific Ocean.

The Senate investigator, knowing of my research, had previously arranged a teleconference between Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick—then the head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)—and myself, to coordinate the scheduling of interviews by AARO staffers of several of my sources, all former/retired USAF personnel who had worked with or guarded nuclear missiles. Those interviews began in January 2023, as noted in an earlier article of mine.

Regarding Elizondo’s admission about having watched the Big Sur UFO video—it was on a DVD—the Senate investigator, while accompanying Elizondo to and from AARO, said Elizondo’s interview was conducted by Dr. Kirkpatrick himself, on February 2, 2023. During that briefing, the former AATIP director confirmed the existence of the video, the details regarding what it showed, and the location of a copy of it in AATIP’s workspaces.

The Senate investigator subsequently wrote to me on April 27, 2023, saying,

Robert – Sean has told me that [when he searched] for the Big Sur video in the safe drawer where Lue told him to look, [it] was “empty”. He also claimed to me that there is an explanation for this event – namely, a test of an ABM missile (like Nike?) that day. I told Lue about this and he practically screamed “bullshit”. Thought you should know that we are nowhere on this issue with AARO. Finding a copy of that video is really important.

It is also important to note that the Pentagon has previously admitted it destroyed all of Elizondo’s files and emails after he resigned his position in protest, the fall of 2017. This highly unusual move by the Pentagon is in direct violation of a legal Preservation Order that was mandated based on Elizondo’s other duties at the time. The order requires all of Elizondo’s electronic and hard copy files to be preserved indefinitely, including email and correspondence.

Significantly, additional confirmation exists regarding Elizondo’s admission about having seen the video of the original film while with AATIP. On November 10, 2023, a highly-reliable source—who I am not at liberty to identify—told me that UAP whistleblower David Grusch has privately confirmed that Elizondo also told him about having screened the Big Sur film, and that it did indeed capture an amazing, UFO-related, dummy warhead-interference event.

While assigned to the UAP Taskforce, from 2019-21, Grusch apparently went so far as to have a colleague search one Department of Defense archive, the Defense Technical Information Center, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in an effort to find out whether any corroborating evidence—other than the film itself—existed.

According to my very credible source, a now-declassified, but as yet unreleased radar data record of the September 15, 1964 missile launch was discovered, which confirmed the tracking of an unidentified aerial object near the dummy warhead at the time of the incident.

Analysis contained in the radar summary apparently considered the possibility that the “object” was actually debris of some kind. Jacobs has stated that when the warhead separated from the missile booster, it had been surrounded by a field of metallic chaff—in conjunction with the test being conducted—that was still visible in the camera frame at the time of the UFO’s appearance. The Air Force wanted to know whether embedding airborne warheads in chaff, during an actual war, would prevent the Soviets from identifying the warheads’ exact positions on their own radars.

So, perhaps the mysterious target tracked on radar near the warhead was merely the chaff. On the other hand, it may have indeed been the actual UFO, whose presence the author of the radar data report would probably not have known about, given the incident’s Top Secret status.

Regardless, in one 1980s-era letter written by Dr. Florenze Mansmann—who was by then a part-time biomedical engineering researcher at Stanford University—he confirmed that his frame-by-frame analysis of the film with a Loupe magnifier, conducted shortly after the missile warhead test, revealed the UFO to be “[a] classic disc, the center seemed to be a raised bubble...the entire lower saucer shape was glowing and seemed to be rotating slowly. At the point of beam release...the object turned like an object required to be in a position to fire from a platform...but again this could be my own assumption from being in aerial combat.” Mansmann’s contemporary evaluation of the UFO’s origin was explicit: “...the assumption was, at that time, extraterrestrial.”

The Big Sur UFO Incident is arguably the most dramatic case on record of apparent UFO interference with one of our nuclear weapon systems. As such, its importance cannot be overstated. While the actual motivation underlying what Jacobs has referred to as ”the shooting down” of the dummy warhead remains unknown—he has speculated that it was designed to convey someone’s displeasure over our possession of nuclear weapons—the act itself was nevertheless unmistakably provocative and, from a technological perspective, absolutely astounding.

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