WASHINGTON, DC—A UFO press conference at the National Press Club on Monday saw a group of serious men with serious stories to tell—about UFOs and nuclear weapons. Their gist was that UFOs, directed by a form of intelligence from another planet or another dimension, have appeared, tampered remotely with the nuclear weapons of the United States military, then disappeared—throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and up to more recent times.
The evidence they brought forth was mutually reinforcing: vocally, they delivered eyewitness and secondhand testimony, and on paper they presented half a dozen declassified documents that told the same story.
The witnesses were gathered together by Robert Hastings, a former laboratory analyst and the primary researcher of UFO activity around nuclear weapons, a man who speaks deadpan, and rarely readjusts his spectacles. They were a cross-section of 120-odd former military officials who have testified to similar experiences. Military people are less than one percent of the total number of people who claim to have witnessed UFO activity.
This was the first time that former military officials have given a joint statement on their UFO experiences; the purpose of the gathering was to further the push for publicity on the topic. Eventually, the theory goes, with enough public and media pressure, the US government will be forced to disclose the truth of its knowledge of and evidence of the existence of UFOs.
Weapons Shutdown
Two key incidents the speakers discussed were the shutdown (technically, “failure of strategic alert”) of nuclear missiles belonging to the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and to the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Similar incidents were said to have taken place at U.S. bases in Ohio, Wyoming, and as far afield as the United Kingdom.
The UFOs referred to were given descriptions that are by now widespread: disc-shaped, cylinder-shaped, or spherical crafts capable of hovering motionless or moving silently at extremely high speeds and making sharp angular movements, possessing many flashing and multicolored lights, and capable of sending forth strong, focused beams of white light.
The credentials of the men gathered appeared impeccable, their demeanors dour, ages advanced, and manners of speech understated.
Some made simple claims, like the stocky Dwynne C. Arneson, who was in the Air Force for 26 years and achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Arneson held the clearance of “Top Secret/Crypto/Special Compartmented Information/Talent Keyhole,” and for those who know about clearances, “you’ve got to be almost squeaky clean to get that.”
He recalled that he and other servicemen had read messages to the effect that UFOs had been hovering near missile sites, and that soon after the missiles were inexplicably shut down.
Charles I. Halt, who served for 28 years, retiring in 1991 as a Colonel, and who had inspection oversight over the entire Department of Defense, says he heard and saw much more than that.
On Dec. 27, 1980, in Suffolk, England, he says he led a team of security policeman into the woods to investigate mysterious light activity. In the forest he saw something that looked like “a large eye, red in color, moving through the trees.” Then it began “dripping something that looked like molten metal.” Then it flew out of the forest and into a field and exploded into half a dozen small white objects.
He says he and his colleagues saw a number of other objects at the same time. They looked elliptical, then became round; they were stationary, then started moving at high velocity in angular patterns, apparently “doing a grid search.” There were many more similar stories.
Working at Malmstrom in March 1967 was Robert C. Jamison, a 1st Lieutenant whose job it was to restart missiles that had shut down for whatever reason. On a certain day that year he was told that Air Police guards had reported the appearance of a UFO moments before missiles in a particular field malfunctioned. He was later debriefed on what to do after seeing a UFO, and spoke to many men who were “visibly shaken” by what they had seen.
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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.”
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