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Friday, June 20, 2025

Officer Who Filmed UFO Downing Missile Sets the Record Straight

UFO Took Out Warhead - Eyewitness Fmr Lt. Bob Jacobs Speaks Out - www.theufochronicles.com

A DETAILED TRUTH



     The venerable Wall Street Journal recently published an article telling readers that the entirety of the UFO/UAP issue in America from 1945 through today is nothing more than an official DoD program of utter disinformation perpetrated to deflect the public from what is really going on behind closed doors, SCIF sessions, trillions of dollars being spent on God knows what and the ruse has been perpetrated by a mysterious Air Force colonel passing out photos and films of non-existent unknown flying objects. Supposedly initiated to dispel the mystique of Area 51 and Groom
Bob Jacobs - www.theufochronicles.com
By Bob Jacobs
The UFO Chronicles
6-20-2025
Lake, Nevada the program now casts doubt on all UFO, alien abductions by these craft on the people, all of the people, who have reported sightings in the air, land and sea.

I am one of those people.

Many podcasters and one brilliant researcher wrote about their and our collective outrage at this disgraceful reportage. I needed to personalize it. Six million Jews murderd by Hitler is a terrible writ. One Jewish girl named Ann Frank personalizes it.

Here is a first-hand report of what I experienced. And also the result of my having reported it to Sean Kirkpatrick, then head of AARO- the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in DC:

In 1964 I was an Air Force officer in charge of the Photo-optical Instrumentation section of the 1369th Photographic Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base. (now Vandenberg Space Force Base).

I was OIC of this 135-man unit charged with providing both normal and high- speed motion picture coverage of every launch from the base down the Western Test Range. We had cameras on the launch pad getting detailed information from engine ignition through liftoff. There were 20 to 30 cameras at a time. I was involved personally in hundreds of such events.

In addition to on the pad coverage we also provided tracking from three opposed sites triangulating each missile with 6 to 8 cameras using long focal length lenses to follow the missile up and away on its flight heading for targets at either Kwajalein Island or Eniwetok Lagoon in the deep south Pacific.

Filming of missile launch at Kwajalein Island - www.theufochronicles.com

I received outstanding OERs (Officer Efficiency Reports) all during my three and one-half years at VAFB as well as commendations from my squadron and group HQ, from contractors like Boeing, as well as the Air Force Guided Missile Badge for “making a significant contribution to America’s Missile and Space Program.” In short, I knew what the Hell I was doing.

One day in the Fall of 1964 I was called into the office of Major Florenze J. Mansmann in the Chief Scientists section of the 1st Strategic Aerospace Division HQ. He and I had worked together before determining ways to improve coverage. He asked me if I knew anything about the coastal area north of the base known as Big Sur. I told him that I did, having driven my MG-TD up Highway 1 in my college days to listen to Beat Poets like Alan Ginsberg and Henry Miller at a resort called Nepenthe.

The Major then asked me to take a film camera and a radio unit up there, staying out of uniform and make contact with a Forest Service Ranger who would escort me up to a spot close to Anderson Peak. There I was to wait for a call telling me that a launch was in progress to see if I could see the missile through all three stages of powered flight from the side. Since we were not in uniform I took my Dad up with me. We had a camera and the radio and within a couple of hours on site I got the call. An Atlas missile was about to launch. I sighted it, rolled my Bell and Howell and got the bird seen from the side.

Engineers hoped to tell more about a flight if they could get a side view rather than as seen from the base, a shot up the tailpipe. They could and my tracking site at Big Sur was established.

Bob Jacobs with Da at Big Sur - Circa 1964 - www.theufochronicles.com

A few weeks after this successful experiment and fun with Dad, I had to get serious. In caravan I escorted one our M-45 tracking mounts fully equipped up Highway 1 and then up the winding Forest Service road to a large flat cutout area on the edge of a steep declining mountain side with a sweeping, unimpeded view to the Southeast looking back from Big Sur located miles northwest of the base. The map of California indicates how Point Arguello, where VAFB lay, is several miles farther east. Hence our side view. Well-established after three days on site we were notified of an upcoming launch. With our 180 -inch telephoto lenses on our tracker we provided previously unavailable reactions from contractor engineers. They were thrilled.

The stage was set for a totally unexpected, unprepared for event that would change my understanding of reality and make my life in many respects a continuing morass of danger and calamity and a fractured dream.

Boston University Telescope - www.theufochronicles.com

Next time I met with major Mansmann he had a surprise. At Cape Canaveral they had employed an experimental large astronomical telescope run by Dr. Walter Manning at Boston University. This device employed a folded Gregorian scope that, the signal from which, fed directly into a large scale Image Orthicon tube. The face of that tube was filmed by a 35mm Mitchell motion picture camera. The combining of these instruments allowed for maximum manipulation of the image for definition and focus. It was a very large device that had to be hauled around by a big rig truck. And it was arriving in two days to be transported up the Forest Service road to my tracking site. I departed for the site that day with a crew of one NCO and two airmen.

We camped in the pickup truck with a camper and an Army tent. In the morning the crew and I awoke, had lots of coffee and Cheerios for breakfast and waited. By noon, an entourage of Brass from VAFB arrived lead b Major Mansmann, a Mister Poulson from the Cape and Walter Manning. Behind them came the BU telescope and excitement as we placed it in the best spot to view down the coast.

L to R - CWO Guy Spooner, Lt Bob Jacobs Mr. Paulson Major Mansmann  - www.theufochronicles.com
L to R - CWO Guy Spooner, Lt Bob Jacobs Mr. Paulson Major Mansmann

That afternoon the VAFB visitors went back home, Mr. Paulson and his crew operating the BU telescope retired downhill to rooms at the Nepenthe, Staff Sergeant Dodd, Airman First class Williams and I worked on our gear to be ready for the promised launch tomorrow morning. And with all assembled back on site by 0600 hours we, with our M-45, the crew from the Cape and high hopes were set to make history.

There was a vast coastal fog bank hugging the coastline as far as we could see. It was early morning light. Over our radio we heard the countdown and trained eyes and instruments at the coordinates we knew would be Vandenberg. And the countdown reached 30 seconds and 20 seconds and the 10, 9,8, 7, I shouted out “Roll Cameras” and they rolled to 6, 5, 4,3,2,1 and we heard “engines start” and “liftoff”.

And after 3 seconds the big Atlas popped out of the white coated seacoast and up and away on AZ and on Elevation to targets, one hoped. As our M-45 cameras ran out we lost sight of the bird to distance. The BU Telescope unit however kept rolling, finally shutting down. Mr. Paulson gave a thumbs up and we all cheered the fact that we had given the Convair/General Dynamics engineers and all other stake holders in our missile and space program the cherished side view all the way. We had no idea the quality of the BU footage because the screen is not visible during the operation as it must be covered by a dark hood to prevent light hitting the Image Orthicon tube. With hearty handshakes all around I collected all of the film from both units and drove back to base to have it processed. Mission accomplished I supposed.

The second day I received a call from Major Mansmann asking me to come to his office right away. I thought it might have to with the success at Big Sur. I rapped on his office door and was invited in. There in the middle of the room was a 16mm film projector on a table. Next to it was a chair. Against the far wall was a Da-Lite projection screen. In one corner two men in business suits stared at me. Major Mansmann without introducing us asked me to sit down. He dimmed the lights. I hoped that this would be the BU film. I was not wrong.

“Lieutenant Jacobs watch the screen,” he said. Then he flicked on the projector. There was the image of the bottom of the Atlas missile seen from 130 miles away, filling the screen. My heart soared, this was, indeed the view as seen by the Folded Gregorian telescope lifting skyward. Major Mansmann said, “Watch closely to the end.”

Nose Cone Splaying Chaf - www.theufochronicles.com

As the bird continued on, it rose rapidly looking spectacular against the sky made black by contrast on the IO. The Atas D was a stage and a half weapon. It had a main pressurized body for fuel and liquid oxygen, when it burned out and fell away, three smaller engines propelled the nose cone holding the warhead downrange. I watched Stage One burnout and drop off, the final stage ignition puff. By this time with our eyes from Big Sur we were losing the object. But here on the screen the nose cone was a quite small white object. It opened and a small batch of aluminum foil splayed out in a fan to deflect the enemy radar tracking. The dummy nuclear warhead, in every dimension, weight and appearance identical to the real thing deployed into a slightly higher trajectory in front of the chaff. I smiled at Major Mansmann. He said, “Watch carefully.” So I did.

On that movie screen I watched another object slide into the frame. It approached the warhead from the same direction; in short it chased and caught up. The entire image on screen was moving away down range at several thousand miles an hour. The object, a larger spot on film than the warhead, moved closer and shot a beam of light striking the device. The object rotated above the package and shot another beam of light down, hitting it again. The object than dropped down in the path and struck it in the front with a third beam, rotated beneath it and fired a fourth beam then zipped out of the frame at a fantastic rate of speed back the same way it had come in. The dummy warhead than slowed and malfunctioned. It appeared to me to be falling out of the frame when the film ended.

The object as made out in fine detail later as Major Mansmann studied it frame by frame with a jewelers loupe, was a classic Flying Saucer, two dinner plates turned convex side out and stuck together with a round dome on top. The illustration is an enlarged artist’s conception.

Big Sur UFO Incident - Artist's Conception - www.theufochronicles.com

The two CIA agents glared at me as the lights came back on. Major Mansmann stood up between them and me. He said, “Lieutenant were you guys screwing around up there?” (Meaning at Big Sur.)

“No sir,” I replied.

He said. Pointing at the screen, “Then what was that?”

Wanting badly to talk about it I said confidently, “It looks like we got a UFO!”

The agents stepped around so I could see them.

Major Mansman said very firmly, “You are never to say that again.”

I was startled.

“As far as you’re concerned, this never happened. Do you understand.”

I couldn’t reply. I did not understand.

“You can go now. Not a word to anyone.” And he escorted me to and out of the door to his office. It would be twenty years before I ever spoke with him again.

I did not talk about the revelation I had just witnessed–not to anyone.

Never a ‘believer” in flying saucers before this moment, my whole intellectual being was shaken by the fact of all facts, we are NOT ALONE in the vast universe.

One night ten years later I was hosting a late night radio talk show in Eureka, California. Topics among lost, late night souls reaching out in the dark for something, anything to soothe anxiety and god-awful loneliness, turn to ghosts and goblins and Jewish banking conspiracies and yeah, UFOs. About two a.m. a guy named Rick Van Pelt phoned in with a story that happened to him as an Air Force security force sergeant.

He and a partner were summoned to Thule AFB, Greenland to guard a flight of B-52 nuclear bombers on a frosty snowy night. While at a remote end of the base he and his partner spotted an apparent native Greenlander appearing over a snow bank a few feet away. Rick sent his partner to check the guy out. When his partner got near, it turned out that the “guy” was a couple of feet taller than the airman. He wore a skin tight iridescent ski suit and had long blonde hair. They spoke for a bit, then the partner started back to join Rick, dragging his rifle on the ground. He stared blankly. Rick stopped him. “Hey, what did he say?”

“He said we were supposed to stop using nukes.”

Just then Rick looked over to see a brilliant, glowing “flying saucer” lift up and shoot silently away.

Without even thinking about it, I went ahead and told mine. The same one you just read about.

Nothing happened. No bolts of lightning. No armed guards at the station door. My car didn’t blow up when I started it. The curse was lifted.

I thought.

It came back in a blind fury that goes on to this very day when I am still in pain for telling the truth: I and many, many more of my brothers-in-alien land. The date was November 1, 1982. I was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. I had a small alfalfa farm in the country. My pay at UWO was only for nine months. So every summer I had to make some money. I usually did it producing TV commercials. Nothing was in the offing so I turned to freelance writing. It had been 18 years now since Big Sur so I wrote a small article about it to try out. Omni Magazine, Life Magazine, Argosy Magazine all turned it down. So I sent it to sleaze publications and The National Enquirer bought it. I paid the mortgage, kept the farm and went back to teaching film production.

Shortly after the story hit the streets, as they say, the decades long nightmare began. I started to get telephone calls that ended in a click. My address got out and letters from a large number of UFO ‘nuts’ began mounting up in my rural mailbox. Some of these things were from various people around the country claiming to have been on a space ship to Venus, to have flying saucers in their back yard or being from some planet or another. Mixed in with these came a few from apparently rational humans seeking the truth. One of these was a gifted researched named Lee M. Graham. The Air Force denied to him that there had ever been any of the following: anyone named Robert M. Jacobs in the Air Force, assigned to the Photo-Optical section of the 1359th Photographic Squadron, nor had there even been an Atlas D missile launched on that date, nor that they had any record of a BU Telescope, nor of anything at Big Sur… ever.

Lee dug into them with FOIA requests, letters and phone calls and did verify that they had lied on each and every count. I was reinstated into humanity.

Then the terror campaign began on the phone. I had an answering machine back then and it began to record dozens of threatening phone calls, each ending with the epithet that I received live in person to wit; “You talk too much. You’re going down motherfucker!” My fiancĂ© at the time, now my wife also got these calls. And one night in 1986 we had come home from a movie. There was a call waiting on the answering machine. The same gruff voice said, “Fireworks in your mailbox at night, oh, what a beautiful sight. You’re going down motherfucker!” and my rural mailbox exploded.

I bought a gun. I learned how to shoot it. I practice and I don’t miss.

Then in September, 1986 I met Robert Hastings. We are close friends today. His counsel has meant a great deal to my ability to deal with the issue. Here’s what the issue has cost me personally after appearing on several television, motion picture, print and podcasts to keep telling my account, which has never varied an iota. I left Wisconsin under the constant threats to my life and the safety of my wife. I lost my next professorship at the University of Maine under a character assassination by Phillip J. Klass, I lost my next professorship at Cleveland State University under a mysterious character assassination accusing me with no proof of sexism and homophobia and after a relatively pleasant and productive 20 years as Full Professor at Bradley University from which I retired 2017, the final character assassination of all.

In a phone call one day, Robert said that he had been contacted at AARO, led by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, when it began its investigation into UFO- now called UAP phenomena, to see if any of his interviewees would testify. He said, with a caveat that he would. He passed this invitation on to me, to Mario Woods, and Terry Lovelace that I know of. I told him that I would be happy to do so.

A few days later I was called by a man saying he was from AARO and he would like to hear my story. I asked if he was recording me and he said that he was not. So I spoke with him for nearly an hour. Afterward I sent the following note to Robert and the others in my group:

Email Form Jacobs to Hastings et al Re AARO 11-2-2023 - www.theufochronicles.com

On April 29, 2023 Sean Kirkpatrick after being praised lavishly by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, chairing the Senate Armed Services Committee testified. After extensive investigation and testimony from military and former military witnesses and ‘whistle blowers’ he reported that AARO had found “no evidence of extraterrestrial” objects, machines, space ships or little green men in the United States of America. Nothing to see here.

If you’ve hung with me to this point, I’ve tried to spell out a no doubt extraterrestrial or NHI incursion that I filmed at Big Sur. My account has been substantiated by Major Mansmann, then Dr. Mansmann who when contacted by a number of researchers and TV producers stated in writing that my account was TRUE as written. The images I captured have been seen by others in government, including by Luis Elizondo. He saw the film when he was with ATTIP in Washington, DC. He told Dave Grusch when he had left his post, exactly where to find it. When Dave got to the ATTIP office everything of Lue’s in it had been cleared out. It is certain that Sean Kirkpatrick knew all about that film if not having seen it himself. In spite of the fact that that Big Sur UFO committed an act of war, this guy is a shill for the cabal suppressing NHI presence among us; everything that every honest, American patriot has told us about since 1945.

I have been compelled for reasons I don’t fully understand to prepare this document, this testimony, this tribute to my fellow witnesses, experiencers, rational thinkers. Others of us have suffered from PTSD to depression, defamation, unmitigated anger, self-doubt, threats, loss of jobs, community standing and worse- to be sold out by shills and fakirs, like AARO and the damned Wall Street Journal. F%CK YOU!

FAREWELL THE TRANQUIL MIND.

1 comment :

  1. Anonymous12:46 PM

    The government gaslighting continues. A few years ago, the CIA tried to blame all UFO sightings on flights of the U2 spy plane or the SR-71. Unfortunately for them, the modern UFO era began in the mid-1940s (Foo fighters during WWII). Of course, sightings really picked up in the late 1940s after Kenneth Arnold's sighting in 1947. The U2 did not fly until 1955. The SR-71 did not fly until 1964. Both aircraft would have to have flown schedules similar to several worldwide international airline schedules in order to account for all the UFO sightings during the era they did fly.

    There is even a report that Kelly Johnson got the idea for the SR-71 from a UFO sighting he and some friends had off the coast of California.

    There was a UFO documentary I saw sometime ago that showed the film of the Atlas missile warhead being shot down by a UFO as in the incident cited in the article. It illustrated four laser-like blasts at the warhead resulting in it toppling. At the time, I thought it was an actual film of the incident. I cannot recall the name of the documentary. It was sometime ago. Curiously, I have never seen that depiction of the incident in the many subsequent UFO documentaries in spite of many years passing.

    I prefer the term UFO over UAP. UFO flows easily over the lips, UAP not so much.

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