Unidentified flying objects have been making headlines lately, but one story that has been overshadowed by Chinese spy balloons is that of former U.S. Air Force personnel who have testified before the Pentagon about encounters with UFOs during the 1960s in which they reportedly turned off nuclear warheads and shot down test missiles.
The pair of Air Force veterans told the Daily Mail that they recently testified before the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) about their experiences. An email showed that the office reached out to Robert Salas, a former Air Force ICBM launch officer, to collect information about an encounter he had with an orange flying disc that turned off 10 warheads at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana back in 1967.
Just after one of Salas’s security police guards called him to report the incident, all 10 ICBMs dropped offline, one at a time. They essentially became unlaunchable and had to be repaired and retargeted. Although the military launched an investigation, an explanation for the shutdown of the missiles was never provided. Salas and his colleagues say that agents from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations interviewed them at the time and had them sign nondisclosure agreements.
Former officer Dr. Robert Jacobs informed the office that he shot a 35-millimeter film for the Air Force in 1964 that appears to show a flying saucer shooting a test missile right out of the sky.
In the 1960s, Jacobs was responsible for a telescopic camera team that was tasked with filming launches of test missiles at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. He said that footage of a September 1964 launch showed a disc flying up to a moving missile before shooting a series of beams at it and then speeding off. This caused the dummy warhead to fall out of the sky.
He said in an interview about the incident: “The object, the points of light that we saw, the warhead and so forth, were traveling through subspace about 60 miles straight up. And they were going somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 to 14,000 miles an hour when this UFO caught up to them, flew in, flew around them, and flew back out.”
He said that he was asked by his boss to keep quiet about the footage after viewing it with a pair of CIA officers in the days following the incident.
Pentagon investigating numerous UFO sightings
Their stories offer rare insight into the type of work that the government unit in charge of investigating unidentified phenomena in the air, space and sea typically keeps classified.
The director of AARO, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, is reportedly interviewing nine other witnesses who observed similar incidents. This is according to the author Robert Hastings, who has spoken to hundreds of veterans about numerous UFO incursions that have taken place at nuclear weapons sites since the time of the Cold War.
Salas, who is now 82, said that he is happy that the office is finally reaching out to him after years of frustrating denials on the part of the government. He said: “I’ve been wanting to tell a government agency my story for over 50 years. It was a great big relief.
“They were very magnanimous. They listened intently. I gave them a complete report on the Malmstrom incidents.
“I’m more confident now than I was going in that they’re trying to make a sincere effort,” he added.
He provided the Daily Mail with a thank-you letter he received from an AARO staffer for the information he provided.
The Chinese spy balloon that US fighter jets shot down last month also flew near the Malmstrom base where the UFOs were observed turning off the nuclear warheads, along with other nuclear silos, which prompted the bases to put emergency security measures in place.