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Researcher and lecturer Robert Hastings leads discussion, with the retired Air Force officers on either side. (Lisa Fan/The Epoch Times)
This account is backed up by a document declassified on Jan. 16, 1996, dating from March 1967, a photocopy of which was given to the press. It says, in part: “The fact that no apparent reason for the loss of ten missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters.” A large, round UFO was reported hovering near one of the missiles at the time of the incident, witnesses stated.
Failures of that kind are rare and inexplicable: “I’m not aware of two missiles going down at any one time, let alone ten,” Jamison said.
Top Secret
Each speaker had similar stories, without apparent conventional explanation. The documents they obtained are several decades old, because the Carter administration made a strong push for open governance during those years. After the 1980s, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on the UFO theme were met with a wall of red tape. The contents of the documents often corroborate the eye-witness accounts.
In many cases the officers reported similar responses from superiors. These ranged from laughter, rebuke, active ignorance, nonchalance, buck-passing, and sometimes, visits from unidentified men in uniform who told them not to say anything to anyone. One such man said “it didn’t happen, it’s top secret,” which almost prompted one speaker to stand up and ask “Which is it? Is it top secret, or did it not happen?”
Skeptics are also dismissive, without specifically negating the evidence. “To me it looks like the same old stuff we’ve been hearing for 50 years: spooky lights in the night sky, cigar shapes… there’s not much more to say about it,” said Dr. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of the Skeptic magazine, in a telephone interview with The Epoch Times. “There’s still this 1950s science fiction thing that this is a warning to Moscow and the U.S. that nuclear missiles are dangerous. They’re a little late in the game there.”
Such views are echoed by his colleague, Pat Linse, co-founder of the Skeptic Society, who suspects that memory may be playing tricks on these retired officers. She suggests that they are perhaps attempting to fit vague recollections now decades old into prefab narratives of the UFO subculture.
When asked how the missile shutdowns might be explained, Shermer temporized, questioning whether that is what really happened. That the objects were unidentified only shows that they were unidentified, nothing more, he said.
A spokesperson for the Air Force referred The Epoch Times to their FAQ on the subject online. The three points it makes are that no UFOs have been a threat to national security, there’s no evidence that such sightings show technology beyond what humans have already discovered, and that there is no evidence that the sightings were “extraterrestrial vehicles.“
The speakers themselves appear unperturbed that some, including members of the media, don’t take their experiences seriously. Hastings has given over 500 lectures at schools and colleges around the U.S., and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive and receptive.
His general thesis, and that of the other men—and which they say is what they themselves were told by higher-ranked officers—is that sudden disclosure of the real existence of UFOs by the U.S. government would cause mass panic. Further, whoever or whatever is behind the UFOs also has no interest in engaging in a dialogue with, or making their existence fully known to, earthlings, they say.
Instead, Hastings argues, it is a matter of such significance to humanity that the people of the world should be allowed to decide for themselves how they will respond, once they find out the truth.
“I made a decision decades ago that no matter who laughed at me or who threw things at me, I would speak what I knew to be the facts,” he said. “At the grassroots level, people are becoming more and more aware of this.”
