 | By Robert Hastings
www.ufohastings.com
3-5-12 |
Declassified U.S. government
documents and testimony from U.S. military veterans reveal that UFOs have monitored and sometimes tampered with American nuclear weapons since the late 1940s. Seven of those veterans discussed their knowledge of such incidents at my CNN-streamed press conference on September 27, 2010:
Over the past 39 years I have located and interviewed more than 130 ex-Air Force, Army and Navy personnel who were involved in these cases. Several of the incidents reportedly involved a UFO directing one or more beams of light down onto ICBM launch sites or nuclear Weapons Storage Areas (WSAs). Depending on the specific case, some of the beams appeared laser-like, others seemed to be searchlights, while the 1977 incident described below allegedly involved a bright, white “starburst” that briefly enveloped a security commander at Loring Air Force Base’s WSA.
Declassified documents (see below) confirm that in the fall of 1975, a rash of UFO sightings and radar trackings occurred at various USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases that hosted nuclear missile or bomber squadrons. Some of the UFOs were described in these records as “disc” shaped craft; others were logged as mystery helicopters.
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At Loring AFB, Maine—home to the 42nd Bomb Wing’s B-52 bombers—one such “helicopter” (as it was called in several documents) was later described by B-52 ground crew chief Sgt. Steven Eichner in a sworn affidavit as appearing like “an elongated football, as long as four cars, and reddish-orange in color…The object looked like all the colors were blending together, as [if] you were looking at a desert scene. You see waves of heat rising off the desert floor. This is what I saw. There were these waves in front of the object and all the colors were blending together. The object was solid and we could not hear any noise coming from it.”
Some helicopter! As Eichner and the ground crew stared in disbelief, the object suddenly seemed to disappear and then quickly reappear at the north end of the runway, near the Weapons Storage Area, moving in an erratic, stop-and-start movement. If the declassified files are any indication, Eichner and his crew were never interviewed about their sighting, so the initial reports of an unidentified helicopter near the WSA were never updated.
Another UFO incident apparently occurred at the Loring WSA some two years later. Although no declassified document currently confirms the event, James M. Dunn, a former Senior Airman stationed at Loring in the late 1970s, told me this during a taped telephone conversation:
It probably happened in the early summer [of 1977]. I was K-9, with the 42nd Security Police Squadron. I was on the midnight shift and I was regularly assigned to the Weapons Storage Area, where they kept the nuclear weapons. I guess it was probably between one and three in the morning, a clear night, kind of warm. I was sitting in my gate shack, eating my ‘bag-nasty’—these little packed lunches that were pretty bad.
All of a sudden, I got a call from Entry Control, the unit at the entry of the WSA, saying, ‘Hey, K-9, or whatever code they used—I can’t remember, K-2, K-4, whatever—can you go check on the area commander? We’ve got a bright light shining down into the Weapons Storage Area, at the north end of the battery.’
So, I climbed up on the grassy mound covering one of the weapons storage bunkers and looked north, in the direction of the entry to the WSA. Sure enough, I saw what looked like a bright light shining down onto his vehicle. Even my dog kind of reacted—he cocked his head a little bit. I cannot recall actually seeing a ‘beam’ of light—like a flashlight beam would be visible in the fog—but the light seemed to be pointed down to the vehicle at about a 45-degree angle.
The truck itself did not appear to be illuminated, but the interior of the cab seemed to glow a greenish hue, although the light itself was intensely white, bright, and had almost a starburst pattern to it. And then, poof, the light was out. Maybe it was five or six seconds [after I saw it].
So I started walking, really fast, up to where his truck was. Sergeant G---- was just sitting there with a stunned, disbelieving look on his face, not reacting to me. So, after a few seconds, I said, ‘Hey, Sarge, what was that?!’
He said, ‘Dunn, did you see that?!’ I said ‘Yeah, what was it?’ He said, ‘Did you see anything?’ We started looking around the sky. Nothing. There was no noise, dead silent. Even when the light was there, there was no noise at all. Totally quiet. Maybe four or five minutes later, two F-106 interceptors, from the tactical part of the base, came screaming over us, right over the Weapons Storage Area. The base had gotten some kind of bogey on their radar. Then we heard later that the thing was too fast, they couldn’t get it, and it just disappeared.
I asked Dunn, “Who told you that?” He replied, “Actually, I went over to the tactical guys, at the pilot bay, and they went, ‘Negative contact on the bogey. Whatever it was, [it was] not anything we made.’ Afterward, it was funny, ordinarily if anything comes close to the Weapons Storage Area, there’s an alert, you know, because its nuclear weapons, but none of that happened.”
Dunn continued, “I talked to the sarge later and he told me he had the feeling that [the light] wasn’t a threat. It’s kind of hard to explain but—he knew it was something intelligent—but not threatening. I had that feeling too, I don’t know why. Even when I was standing next to his truck, just after the light disappeared, I knew that there was no threat to the weapons. I don’t know why. It’s funny. I can’t explain it to you, but I knew and Sarge knew that there was no attack going on.”
I asked Dunn, “Are you saying that you both just had a hunch that there was no threat or—” Dunn interrupted me and said, “Uh, it’s a weird one, uh, I was trained to react as a K-9 security [guard], you know, you radio it in if you think it’s important, but, uh, it’s a hard one to explain, I can’t really tell you why we, uh—we almost got the feeling of non-threat—and I can’t explain that to you. It was a feeling of this is something beyond a threat, uh…”
Dunn was clearly flustered and, it seemed to me, hesitant to put his thoughts into words, so I asked, “What do you think that something was?” Dunn let out a long sigh and blurted out, “Okay, we thought it was alien. The sarge and I talked about it and we decided it was, uh, alien.” Then, laughing, he said, “It’s goofy, I know, but...”
I asked Dunn if he or the sergeant had seen a craft of any kind, or a black space in the sky where the stars had been hidden by an unlit aerial object. He said, “No, just the light. Uh, the sarge told me that he had the feeling that the light had some kind of intelligence, you know, beyond human. He felt—I don’t know if the word ‘communicated’ is right—but he felt that something was imparting, uh, that’s probably where he got the sense [that it was] non-threatening. He said that it was like something was saying, ‘You’re not in any harm,’ or something like that.”
I asked Dunn if he had had the same sense. He said, “Uh, no, not like
that. I had a feeling there was no threat involved, but not the sense that someone or something was telling me that. [Sarge] told me that he had the feeling, from the light, that he was being dissected almost, or studied. We talked about it later and that’s what he said. I think that’s when we both decided that it wasn’t any [kind of aircraft] we make. We were saying, you know, ‘Well, there’s got to be aliens out there.’ We had this one talk about it later on but, after that, he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”
I asked Dunn if he and the sergeant had been debriefed. He said, “No! That was weird too! It was like everyone wanted to forget the incident. We were willing to talk about it, but no one asked us anything. The higher-ups—no one came to us and said, ‘Don’t say anything’—but they just didn’t mention anything about it, you know, like just forget it. The sarge said the light was visible for maybe 15 seconds, and that it had illuminated the inside of his truck.”
I asked Dunn if he or the sergeant had, at any time during the incident, seen the light fall directly on one of the weapons bunkers. He said, “I didn’t see that, and [sarge] didn’t say anything about it either.” This particular question related to a reported incident at a U.S. Air Force Weapons Storage Area located at the RAF Bentwaters base in England, in December 1980, which I discussed in
an earlier article.
In conclusion, among the reports of UFOs at nuclear weapons storage sites that I have received from military veterans over the years, this one was unique. To be sure, numerous accounts of alleged telepathic communication related to UFO encounters do indeed appear in the literature but, as far as I am aware, never in this context.
