UFOs & Nukes

Malmstrom, 1967: ten ICBMs went dark as the object hovered. The Air Force logged it.

Let me ask you something. If you were a visitor from somewhere else, watching humanity from above, what is the one thing on this planet you might be most interested in? For decades, a group of former military officers has offered an unsettling answer: our nuclear weapons. So here's where it gets strange. This isn't one story. It's a pattern. Since the 1940s, dating back to the dawn of the atomic age, personnel at American and Soviet nuclear facilities have reported unidentified objects appearing over the exact places where we store, test, and launch our most dangerous weapons. Glowing craft hovering over missile silos. Discs pacing bombers. Lights over weapons storage areas, like the ones described in the Rendlesham Forest case at those nuclear-capable British airbases. The man who spent his life gathering these accounts is a researcher named Robert Hastings. Now, here we have to be precise, because this is where it's easy to overreach. Hastings is not a government agency and he is not claiming to have recovered a craft. What he did, over decades, was track down and interview former and retired U.S. Air Force personnel, missileers, security police, radar operators, and record their testimony on the record. Many of these were men with high security clearances and spotless service records, and a number of them went public together at a 2010 press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Their claim, in their own words, was that UFOs had repeatedly shown interest in nuclear missile sites, and that on some occasions weapons systems malfunctioned during these events. But here's the part most people don't know. We have to be honest with you about what all of this is and isn't. These are witness accounts. They are numerous, they are often consistent with each other, and many come from credible, sober people who had nothing obvious to gain and careers to lose. That makes them worth documenting and taking seriously. But witness testimony, no matter how sincere, is not the same as official confirmation. The U.S. government has never officially confirmed that any UFO caused a nuclear weapons malfunction. There is no released Pentagon document that says, in plain language, 'an alien craft disabled our missiles.' So we sit in the honest middle: a large body of firsthand human testimony on one side, and an absence of official causal confirmation on the other. We are not going to tell you the aliens did it. And we are not going to sneer at a decorated veteran who says he saw something over his silo and will swear to it under oath. Both of those would be a disservice to you. The most famous single episode inside this pattern is the one you'll find in the neighboring Missile Shutdowns file, the 1967 events at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where former officer Robert Salas says an entire flight of nuclear missiles dropped offline while a glowing object hovered above. On our map, UFOs and Nukes sits at the crossroads, linking the forest at Rendlesham to the missile fields of Montana, the thread tying strange lights to the deadliest machines we ever built.