Author Robert Hastings Has Added an Important Update to his Groundbreaking Volume on UAP Activity Involving Nuclear Weapons
| The Second Edition of my 500-page book, UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, was published in early 2017. Some months later, the now-famous article exposing the existence of a highly secret UAP investigations group at the Pentagon—the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATIP—was published by The New York Times. Written by journalists Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper, the exposé revealed that dramatic work had been secretly conducted by the Defense Intelligence Agency, from 2007 to 2012, to examine national security-related UFO activity, including disturbing incidents at nuclear missile facilities, when multiple |  The UFO Chronicles © All Rights Reserved 4-25-2026 |
That startling article in the mainstream media heralded numerous dramatic events over the following few years, culminating with former, high-level US government employees testifying before Congress about the existence of ultra-secret UFO crash-retrieval and reverse engineering programs, involving the alleged recovery of dead alien bodies.
Because all of these shocking developments occurred after the publication of my book’s Second Edition, I believe that providing my readers with an overview of them—effectively an update—is warranted and, therefore, have just added an Epilogue to the volume, which has also been inserted below.
Although this is a new version of the book, I need to stress that it is NOT a new edition. Ninety-nine percent of the text is identical to the previously-published Second Edition. Despite my editor’s strong contention that the newly-released tome should be promoted as a Third Edition, I was concerned that some persons who have already purchased UFOs and Nukes in the past would buy it again under the mistaken belief that the updated version contains mostly new material. It does not.
In any case, some of the important UAP-related developments in recent years stemmed from, at least in part, my five-decade-long research project. For example, according to journalist George Knapp, the late US Senator Harry Reid—who secretly sought funding to create AATIP’s predecessor, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP)—told Knapp that, upon reading my book, he was extremely concerned about many of the disclosures appearing in it—that is, numerous statements made to me by dozens of US military veterans whom I had interviewed over the years. According to Knapp, Reid told him that those revelations were one of the reasons he had pushed for a new, secret UFO investigative effort by the US government. I was stunned when I learned of this. It was certainly surprising and gratifying news to me!
Anyway, without further ado, here is my book’s new Epilogue.
This second edition of my book was published in 2017. The following updated material was added to it in April 2026:
In 2005, as I was working on the first edition of UFOs and Nukes, I reached out to a handful of physicists who had previously written about theoretical faster-than-light travel being utilized by technologically-advanced aliens and future humans. I planned to include a chapter on the topic in the book and was seeking guidance from an expert who would be willing to review my written material, to ensure its accuracy. The person who agreed to assist me was quantum physicist Dr. Harold “Hal” Puthoff, who later published the peer-reviewed paper, Advanced Space Propulsion Based On Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering.1
In November 2008, a few months after UFOs and Nukes was published, Puthoff bought a copy. At that time, I did not use Amazon to sell the book but instead distributed it from my own website. Consequently, I knew the identity (or pseudonym) of anyone who placed an order. When I saw Hal’s name, I was delighted.
However, a month later, Puthoff unexpectedly emailed me and asked whether I could deliver overnight four more copies to him. When I checked into the shipping cost, I discovered that it was a very pricy $115, whereupon I asked Hal what was so urgent that he was willing to pay that amount? He responded by saying that, two days hence, he had a meeting with “some movers and shakers in Washington,” and planned to give a copy of the book to each of them.
I immediately inquired about the identities of those individuals but Hal gently deflected my question. Although I was very curious about the apparently important persons who presumably had an official interest in UFOs, it seemed clear that further inquiries about them would also be rebuffed. So, I let the matter go.
Nine years later, on December 16, 2017, The New York Times published the seminal, now-famous article that revealed the existence of a secret UFO investigations unit at the Pentagon, designated the Advance Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), headed-up by a senior Department of Defense intelligence official and special agent named Luis “Lue” Elizondo.2 The group had apparently been created in 2007, but was disbanded in 2012, under pressure from high-ranking, religiously-oriented officials who believed that UFOs were demonic and, therefore, did not warrant investigation by the military. Elizondo later resigned from US government service to protest that unreasonable resistance and interference and, in 2017, began speaking publicly about AATIP’s important work.
When I read the Times article, I was pleased but not surprised to learn that the DoD had secretly engaged in another study of UFOs long after the highly-publicized closure of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, in January 1970, when the US government supposedly lost interest in the phenomenon. What did surprise me was that the article identified Dr. Harold Puthoff as AATIP’s scientific advisor!
Upon learning this, I emailed Hal and asked him if he recalled the “movers and shakers” episode in 2008. He said that he did and told me that Elizondo had been one of the recipients of my book. I was stunned! I asked who the other three recipients had been but he again declined to answer me. I then asked whether he would be willing to put me in touch with Elizondo, so that I could interview him, whereupon Hal consented to do so.
Lue and I subsequently met in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in early February 2018. He confirmed that he had indeed received a copy of my book while with AATIP and told me that his group had themselves investigated several nukes-related UFO incidents. Understandably, he would not discuss any still-classified material with me, however, he did tell me that my research was “right on target”.
Elizondo expanded on that comment in a 2021 podcast by saying, “There was a lot of information [about the nuclear weapons-related UFO incidents] that we didn’t have access to, and it turns out that Robert Hastings did. He did a fantastic job in his one book about the nuclear connection. And we were able to validate and substantiate exactly what he was saying, through intelligence reporting, so he was right. Not only was it good and accurate [data] but at the end of the day it was helpful. In some cases, there was a little bit of information that we didn’t have, that he did. And then in some other cases, we had classified information that he didn’t have…Actually, because of him, I was able to interview some people that I didn’t even know existed, and so it was very helpful.”3One important revelation made by Elizondo, in 2023, concerned the September 15, 1964 Big Sur Incident (discussed in Chapter 9) which involved the inadvertent motion picture filming of a UFO maneuvering near a dummy nuclear warhead in flight. Lue said that while he was with AATIP, he had sought and been given access to the Top Secret footage, then held by the CIA. Upon watching it on a DVD, he discovered that it showed exactly what former US Air Force Lt. (later Dr.) Bob Jacobs had long claimed: A domed-disc spacecraft had approached and circled an inactive nuclear warhead during a test flight, then disabled it, using weaponized beams of light.
Importantly, in addition to Lue Elizondo’s numerous public statements about ongoing nuclear weapons-related UFO activity, during various interviews, in November 2024, the well-known investigative journalist George Knapp revealed that he had given his longtime friend, prominent US Senator Harry Reid, a copy of UFOs and Nukes. After reading it, Reid told Knapp that he was extremely concerned about the many ominous disclosures by the US military veterans who I had interviewed.
According to Knapp, Reid said that those worrisome revelations—together with dramatic classified information provided to him by various persons in government—had compelled him to secretly seek funding for a new investigation of UFOs by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The highly-classified study, formally designated the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program (AAWSAP), was later surreptitiously nicknamed AATIP, so that it could be freely discussed in Reid’s unclassified correspondence with various Congressional leaders.
When I learned about Senator Reid’s confidential admission to Knapp, I was shocked. I had published this book to educate the American public, and people everywhere, about the UFO-Nukes Connection. Never for a moment did I expect it to have such a significant impact within high-level US government circles. This was very gratifying news!
Of note, the US government’s official shift from the term “UFO” (Unidentified Flying Object) to “UAP” (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) occurred around 2020–2021, marked by the Pentagon's establishment of a UAP Task Force and the Director of National Intelligence’s decision to issue an annual report on the topic. The term was further broadened to “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena in late 2022, following Congress’ passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, so as to include submerged and trans-medium phenomena.
In December 2023, a US Senate Armed Services Committee investigator, Kirk McConnell, contacted me and asked whether I would be willing to approach some of the US military veterans who I had interviewed over the years, to find out if any of them would agree to testify under oath before the recently-created US government UAP investigations group, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
The successor to the UAP Task Force—a U.S. Department of Defense initiative, established in 2020, to improve the analysis of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that could pose a national security threat—AARO was promoted to the public as an authoritative body that would objectively research key military UAP sightings and render its verdict on the nature of each incident.
However, it soon became clear that the group, under the direction of physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, was anything but objective and had apparently been created to dismiss or at least downplay the cases that it “investigated”. Given its distressing track record, I, and most other UAP researchers, quickly concluded that AARO was just another Project Blue Book, or Condon Committee, designed to whitewash legitimate UAP events so as to pacify public opinion and disrupt the momentum toward “Disclosure” that had recently been building in Congress.
However, in spite of this, I told McConnell that I would indeed approach the handful of US Air Force veterans with whom I was still in touch—individuals who had served in the 1960s or ‘70s—and encourage them to speak to AARO. I reasoned that, if the vets declined to comply, debunkers would allege that they had done so because there was nothing substantive to their assertions of having witnessed UAP activity at nuclear weapons sites, in an effort to discredit them.
Ultimately, eight veterans independently provided testimony to one AARO member or another in February and March of 2023. Most of those who did were satisfied with the reception they received, at least initially, saying that they were allowed to present their account uninterrupted and without any skeptical push-back. However, two of the veterans did have reservations, after asking whether their interview was being recorded, only to be told “no”. This immediately raised red flags for them, and me, suggesting that the information being provided was not being taken seriously enough to even record it for posterity.
Said former Minuteman missile launch officer David Schindele, “One of the first things I asked AARO was whether they were recording the interview. Sean [Kirkpatrick] said, ‘No, we are transcribing it.’ I asked, ‘What does that mean?’ Sean said, ‘We are taking handwritten notes.’ And I could hear a few snickers in the background.” Clearly, something was amiss. Despite AARO’s claim to be a serious, objective, investigative group, their actions indicated otherwise.
On April 19, 2023, Dr. Kirkpatrick testified before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, hosted by Senator Kirstin Gillibrand, in a hearing meant to update Congress regarding the group’s progress in investigating military-related UAP incidents. At one point, Kirkpatrick unequivocally stated that “AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” 4
Upon hearing this, a number of the veterans who had testified before AARO became extremely angry. After all, the narratives they had provided variously described:
• UAPs that exhibited no visible means of propulsion, lift, or flight-control surfaces
• multiple disc-shaped craft performing right-angle turns in the sky at high velocity, before instantaneously stopping in mid-air.
• a glowing disc that hovered directly over a Minuteman missile Launch Control Facility, just as all ten of its ICBMs dropped offline.
• a diamond-shaped craft that generated a deafening humming sound while hovering low over an ICBM Launch Facility, just before the missile malfunctioned.
Even more amazing, one of the witnesses, Dr. Bob Jacobs, had described inadvertently filming a domed-disc craft pacing, circling, and then shooting down—using plasma-like beams of light—a dummy nuclear warhead that was flying thousands of miles-per-hour in outer space!
In short, the UAPs the veterans reported to AARO were so anomalous—clearly exhibiting capabilities vastly more advanced than any current technology would yield—that a non-human origin for them was the only reasonable explanation.
However, despite all of that amazing testimony, Kirkpatrick was, in his formal statement to Congress, completely, arrogantly rejecting the veterans’ sworn, eyewitness assessment of the various phenomena they had observed.
On September 9, 2025, the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform conducted a hearing titled Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection, presented by the committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Representative Anna Paulina Luna.5
Among the witnesses who testified was journalist George Knapp. At one point, in response to questioning by Representative Tim Burchett, Knapp mentioned the October 1982 incident in Soviet Ukraine (discussed in Chapter 22) when a UFO hovered over a nuclear missile base and, at one point, temporarily activated several of the weapons.
In response to questioning by Representative Eli Crane, Knapp further addressed the nuclear weapons connection with UFOs/UAP by mentioning both the 1964 Big Sur case, revealed by Dr. Bob Jacobs, and one of the ICBM-shutdown incidents at Malmstrom AFB in 1967, revealed by former missile launch officer Bob Salas (mentioned in Chapter 11).
Finally, in response to questioning by Representative Andy Biggs, Knapp said that the AARO group—rather than actually investigating UAP—seemingly “operated as a counter-intelligence operation, to get people to come in and tell their stories, and then discredit all of them.” He added, “I can’t imagine that any whistleblower or witness will ever go to AARO again because of what happened [to those individuals]”. At this, Representative Biggs suggested to Task Force Chairperson Luna that AARO itself should be investigated. She responded by saying that she would be willing to issue a subpoena to the group’s former director, Sean Kirkpatrick. As of the publication date of this book’s updated second edition, in January 2026, no such investigation has yet occurred.
Shortly after the hearing, former Minuteman missile launch officer Bob Salas—who was in the audience—met with one of the task force members, Representative Eric Burlison, and summarized his March 24, 1967 experience at Malmstrom AFB, noted above, when a UFO shut down all ten of his missiles. Salas forcefully but politely proposed that another Congressional UAP hearing be held, devoted solely to the self-evidently important nukes-related cases, with the witnesses being a few of the military veterans who had actually experienced the disturbing encounters—as well as myself, given my decades-long investigation of those kinds of incidents. Thus far, no such hearing has taken place.
In October 2025, a peer-reviewed scientific paper was published by Drs. Beatriz Villarroel and Stephen Bruehl which summarized their discovery of a link between the occurrence of dozens of atmospheric nuclear tests in the early-to-mid 1950s, and the sudden, unexplained appearance of mysterious, luminous objects in geosynchronous Earth orbit on the day following each test. These “transients” were inadvertently recorded on astronomical photographic glass plates during an ongoing daily sky survey conducted by the famous Palomar observatory in California.
The paper’s hypothesis proposes that the detonation of the weapons by the US military and Atomic Energy Commission—at the Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds—resulted in the temporary presence of the unknown objects, which were judged to be intelligently-operated craft.
In an email sent to the author by Dr. Bruehl a few weeks before the paper’s publication, he wrote,
The proofs [accompanying] our article are attached and they are slightly different from the unpublished version I had sent you previously. You will note that we added analyses to address something you had asked about regarding exact timing of associations between nuclear tests and transients (a journal reviewer asked the same question). We now specify that this association is due almost entirely to transients that appear one day AFTER a nuclear test. Taken together with results of another paper of ours that was just accepted by a mainstream astronomy journal which shows that the number of transients drops dramatically in the Earth's shadow, we can speculate that our findings suggest that:1) transients represent thousands of highly reflective and likely artificial objects in orbit,To me, these studies seem to provide the first publicly-accessible, objective, scientific evidence that supports the possible presence of non-human technology orbiting our planet in the 1950s.
2) that were observed prior to launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 so are likely of non-human origin,
3) that show apparently intelligent behavior (curiosity) in response to our nuclear tests, and
4) were near enough to Earth prior to the nuclear tests to be able to appear in Earth orbit within 24 hours (pure speculation but maybe the far side of the moon?).
Very dramatic findings! The reader will recall that several of my US military veteran sources, who participated in one or more of the atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in the 1950s, reported observing UFOs in the vicinity during the various periods of the detonations.
In late 2016, I released a 48-minute documentary, titled UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, which was designed to be a filmed version of this book. In it, several of the US Air Force veterans whose testimony I had audiotaped over the years provided lengthy on-camera interviews regarding their UFO-related experiences at nuclear weapons sites. The film was made possible only because of the generous support of two benefactors, Jared and Laurie Tarbell, who funded it. To ensure a large-scale viewership on the Internet, I distributed the film via a few major websites, including Gaia.com.6
In November 2025, a groundbreaking film was released, titled The Age of Disclosure, in which 34 former and current US government defense and intelligence officials—some serving at a high-level—former military officers, and scientists working on Top Secret projects, candidly discuss UAPs and non-human entities.7
In the documentary, various nuclear weapons-related UAP incidents are referenced by, among others, former AATIP director Lue Elizondo, former UAP Task Force director Jay Stratton, and former US Senator (now Secretary of State) Marco Rubio. Also interviewed are former Minuteman missile launch officer Bob Salas, former Air Force photographic team leader Bob Jacobs, and former USAF Security Policeman Mario Woods.
These recent developments have left me feeling optimistic. Although the “disclosure” process has advanced in fits and starts, it has been moving in a generally positive manner. True, there hasn't been the unequivocal announcement from the White House or the US military that so many—including me—are eager for. But the movement in the US Congress — and the media — is unprecedented. It's clear that this subject is being taken far more seriously than ever before. Though it remains for some a topic for ridicule, many more people have been thoughtfully speaking out, whether about their own experiences or their general concern that the subject be taken seriously.
And no small number of those people are in governmental positions or professional fields that have heretofore been broadly silent. Over the past two decades or so we've seen a growing number of resolute contributions from elected officials, journalists, academics, and members — both former and current — of the military services.
What form “disclosure” takes is a matter of conjecture. Even if the Pentagon were to come clean about the existence of extraterrestrial evidence, it's unlikely that they'd reveal much about any technological artefacts in their possession. Further, given the prevailing secrecy surrounding all things nuclear, we probably shouldn't count on many revelations regarding the kind of information I have presented in this book. But one thing is fairly clear: This phenomenon will no longer continue to be swept under the rug.
1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2184
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/poltics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid-html
3. https://www.theufochronicles.com/2021/10/pentagon-utilzed-ufos-and-nukes-data.html
4. https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/23-31_04-19-2023.pdf
5. https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/restoring-public-trust-through-uap-transparency-and-whistleblower-protection/
6. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/UFOs-and-Nukes-The-Secret-Link-Revealed/0MSR7FJN6O101X6SKBMD27WIZL
7. https://www.amazon.com/Age-Disclosure-Dan-Farah/dp/B0FMF29BBJ
No comments :
Post a Comment
Dear Reader/Contributor,
Your input is greatly appreciated, and coveted; however, blatant mis-use of this site's bandwidth will not be tolerated (e.g., SPAM, non-related links, etc).
Additionally, healthy debate is invited; however, ad hominem and or vitriolic attacks will not be published, nor will "anonymous" criticisms. Please keep your arguments/comments to the issues and subject matter of this article and present them with civility and proper decorum. -FW