Fmr Lt. Robert M. Jacobs Who Captured UFO On Film Takes AARO To Task

Messing With an American Hero

"I will not, however stand-by and let them defame and slander an American hero, fighter pilot, test pilot, photo interpreter, then-Major Florenze J. Mansmann, later Stanford Research Fellow, Doctor Florenze J, Mansmann, PhD. ..."

Dr. Bob Jacobs has asked me to forward this statement to members of AARO, past and present. It is also being sent to other interested parties, including prominent journalists, and will be posted at The UFO Chronicles website–Robert Hastings My name is Robert M. “Bob” Jacobs, PhD. I am Full Professor Emeritus in Communication at Bradley University located in Peoria, Illinois.

By Robert Jacobs 8-1-2025

Among many other things before this, I was First Lieutenant Robert M Jacobs, Officer in Charge of the Photo-Optical Instrumentation Section of the 1369th Photographic Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base. My section of 135 NCOs and Airmen provided high-speed motion picture coverage of every single ICBM launched down the Western Test Range from about 30 cameras located on and around the launch pad, as well four-to-six high-speed, long focal length lensed cameras mounted on trackers from three different locations around the pad.

During my three-and-one-half-year tenure there I became extremely well adept at analyzing thousands of feet of film showing up close and personal views of missiles launching and flying off to wherever. I’ve attached a copy of one of my Officer Efficiency Reports (OERs) to demonstrate the confidence my superior officers had in my performance of duties. I was also awarded The Air Force Guided Missile Badge for “Making a significant contribution to America’s Missile and Space Program.” I wrote a report entitled, “Deliberate Deception: A Critical Analysis of the Curious Events at Vandenberg Air Force Base in September, 1964.” It was published in The MUTUAL UFO Journal, Number 249, January 1989.

-click on images to enlarge-

I wrote that piece to clarify and specify what had been reported first in 1982 in a badly butchered version of my statement in the National Enquirer rag. That article had stimulated a flurry of calls and letters from “researchers” around the country. I stand behind the UFO Journal piece.

In short, many know that I reported having been in-charge of a new tracking site that I made near Anderson Peak at Big Sur, California. Corporate engineers from aerospace companies, the builders of the missiles, wanted to know if we could provide tracking coverage showing missile in flight downrange from a side view. I found such a site and began showing coverage that delighted those engineers.

One day I got a call from Major Florenze J. Mansmann, chief photo analyst in the Office of the Chief Scientist at the First Strategic Aerospace Division Headquarters on base. I had worked with Major Mansmann a number of times on other projects. He informed me that a new device for tracking missiles was being flown out from Cape Canaveral to our Big Sur site. I was dispatched to meet what was the Boston University Telescope and its creator Doctor Walt Manning.

My team and I did so, helped install the impressive scope on site and a day or two later, we captured on film a UFO firing four beams of light and disabling one of our dummy nuclear reentry vehicles in near-space on a trajectory to Eniwetok Lagoon. “Deliberate Deception” provides details of that event.

Some years later now, I received a note from a friend showing me that Wikipedia has published a factoid that Big Sur was all a mistake and that I had simply misinterpreted what I saw, even after analyzing hundreds of other film images of missiles in flight, and that my account—after numerous retellings by me in writing, in podcasts, TV series, a motion picture, and personal testimonies including to AARO—has been dismissed by that august body as my having mistaken what I saw as chaff and a few decoys of ours. This conclusion, reached by the then-AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick, is based on an article from the “esteemed” publication, Skeptical Enquirer, authored by the late Kingston A. George.

He was a civilian analyst who did, in fact, participate in bringing the BU Telescope to Vandenberg. He was on the site when the tool arrived, and we had pictures taken together to prove it. I never saw him again after that day, but I did read a report he issued after the experiments with it were over. In response to my MUFON article, he was solicited by the guy who ran Skeptical Enquirer to rebut me. George did so by testifying that he knew of an ‘anomaly’ on one Atlas launch code named, “Buzzing Bee” and that it involved some “chaff” and the releases of “decoys” and that he saw this film “a couple of weeks after the launch” and I believe him. However, “Buzzing Bee” was NOT the event that I filmed.

Mine, on 15 September 1964 was code named, “Butterfly Net” and my account of the UFO event in it has been verified by Major Mansmann and others who have actually seen the film image, including Lue Elizondo.

George’s testimony that he saw my film a couple of weeks later has been proven not to be true. And that is simply because, as Major Mansmann testified in writing, that film was snipped from the reel with a pair of scissors and taken back East that very day by the CIA. That film was never at Vandenberg after that day so, as Lt. Colonel Tim Phillips of AARO has falsely reported, they could not have recently gone back to Vandenberg, recovered the original 35mm and 45mm original film and verified George’s account. Well, there never was any 45mm film, and there was no 35mm or 16mm film left at Vandenberg for Tim or Sean to have looked at.

Period. They lied.

So, I am now relegated to the scrapheap of morons reporting on UFOs. Another victim of the ongoing, orchestrated campaign of propaganda and disinformation from our own government.

Tim and Sean may not have seen my film images. But other contemporaries have. It still exists, as Lue assured me.

My train is nearing the end of its long run sooner than I would have liked. At that moment of checking-out I would like to know that someone finally cleans out the barrel at AARO, DoD and the rest, and that full disclosure comes to the land. Asked by someone recently if I believed in UFOs. I said, “Certainly not. I believe in many things because I can’t know them based on lack of evidence. I do KNOW things though, and that transcends believing in them. I know, full-well that UFOs are real. They have been here a long time. I also know I filmed one committing what would have been an act of war by any terrestrial adversary.

And revealing that one event has cost me my honor, reputation, a couple of teaching jobs, an explosion in my mailbox, evil phone calls in the night and brooding anger at the pinheads who slander, defame, belittle, and deride anyone who makes them quiver in their cubbyholes by challenging their paradigm.

I will not, however stand-by and let them defame and slander an American hero, fighter pilot, test pilot, photo interpreter, then-Major Florenze J. Mansmann, later Stanford Research Fellow, Doctor Florenze J, Mansmann, PhD who examined my film frame-by-frame with a jewelers loupe and described in writing, in detail, the flying saucer-shaped UFO with a dome on top moving into position to fire beams of light four times, striking the reentry vehicle.

Damn you Sean Kirkpatrick, damn you Timmy Phillips you cowardly scum. I knew him well. You bozos did not. How dare you dismiss his verification of my account based on a mistake made by Kingston George. I can only hope that the preponderance of evidence catches up with you one day and proves “what fools you mortals be.”

See Also:

	Officer Who Filmed UFO Downing Missile Sets the Record Straight
	Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It
	Mansmann Letters

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Officer Who Filmed UFO Downing Missile Sets the Record Straight

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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 fiancé 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:

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.

See Also:

	Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It - PART 2
	UFOs are Stalking and Intercepting Dummy Nuclear Warheads During Test Flights
	Mansmann Letters

Fmr Lt. Robert M. Jacobs Who Captured UFO On Film Takes AARO To Task

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Big Sur UFO Disclosures: Revealing Private Letters Tell All

As many readers will know, I am the author of UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, which summarizes my extensive research on the topic. I recently stumbled upon a Reddit post relating to the September 1964 Big Sur UFO Incident, involving a US Air Force photographic team that inadvertently filmed a domed-disc UFO disrupting the test flight of a dummy nuclear warhead. According to former USAF Lieutenant (now Dr.) Bob Jacobs, after the UFO approached and circled the warhead—officially known as a Re-entry Vehicle or RV—it directed four bright beams of light at it, whereupon the warhead began tumbling, eventually falling into

By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 5-1-2025

the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles short of its target downrange.

At the time, Jacobs headed-up the photographic team tasked with filming dozens of missile test launches at Vandenberg AFB, California, using a high-powered telescope/camera system. Located a hundred or so miles northwest of the base, on a coastal mountaintop near the village of Big Sur, the remote site permitted the launches to be filmed from a side-view.

In his Reddit post, “dingleberryjuice” cited my in-depth research on the case—as summarized in my book’s chapter, “Shot from the Sky”—which fully supports the credibility of Dr. Jacobs’ revelations about the still-classified incident.

The former lieutenant says that he screened the film shortly after it was shot, in the office of Major (later Dr.) Florenze Mansmann, the chief photographic analyst at Vandenberg in 1964, and that two mysterious men in civilian suits—who turned out to be CIA officers—were also in attendance.

Jacobs was astonished by what his team had unknowingly captured on film. Mansmann then dismissed him, saying, “This never happened,” and sternly warning him to never discuss what he had witnessed.

Mansmann is on the record as saying that the CIA officers confiscated the film immediately afterward, designating it Top Secret. According to the retired major, the stunning footage was then “rushed East on a special aircraft”, almost certainly to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), located in Washington D.C.

At this point, I will mention that, beginning in February 2024, former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) director Luis Elizondo has repeatedly stated that he had watched the film in question while with AATIP. Importantly, he confirms that it shows exactly what Dr. Jacobs has claimed ever since he wrote about the warhead-shootdown in a magazine article in 1985.

In spite of this definitive revelation, which dingleberryjuice knew about, he also chose to cite in his Reddit post debunking claims made by the late Kingston George—a member of the photographic team at Vandenberg—who says that he too viewed the film in 1964, alleging that it didn’t show a UFO pacing the dummy warhead but, rather, decoy warheads accompanying the real RV. Those were meant to test whether such decoys could help protect US nuclear warheads from being shot down by Soviet anti-missile missiles, should a war ever erupt.

George claims that Jacobs inadvertently mistook the decoys for a UFO.

In his Reddit post, dingleberryjuice asked anyone having documentation relating to the case to post it on the chain, to try to resolve this key question: Did the Big Sur filming incident actually involve a bona fide UFO, or merely misidentified decoy warheads?

Instead of doing that, I have chosen to present my contributions to the debate here, so as to educate a much larger audience than the handful of individuals on Reddit who read and responded to dingleberryjuice’s comments.

While all of the Air Force and CIA records relating to the Big Sur Incident remain highly classified, I nevertheless possess several private letters, mostly from the mid-1980s, written by Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Mansmann in response to inquiries by various researchers. Although not official US government documentation relating to the incident, they importantly provide key, unguarded testimony about the case from the two ex-Air Force officers who, unlike Kingston George, were directly involved in it.

As we will see, that testimony convincingly discredits George’s claim about having been able to watch the film in question “weeks later”—that is, weeks after the screening in Mansmann’s office, which he did not attend—simply because it had already left Vandenberg AFB in the custody of the CIA officers. Consequently, George had to have watched a different film and, therefore, his theory about decoy warheads being mistaken for a UFO by Jacobs and Mansmann has no merit. (Reader, after clicking on the above link, scroll to the last page of George's article, where he says, “Weeks later, my clearance level was increased to allow me to see the films again and analyze them.”)

(Indeed, while George insists that the launch occurred on September 22, 1964, and uses the scheduled decoy-related test on that date to make his case, Jacobs says that the film he saw in Mansmann’s office was actually shot on September 15th, when no decoys were deployed during the flight. Significantly, former high-level government intelligence analyst David Grusch has recently revealed that radar data from that launch, discovered while he was working with the UAP Taskforce, confirms the tracking of a single unknown object—presumably the UFO—flying near the dummy warhead. Given this, he explicitly endorses Dr. Jacobs’ assertion that the September 15th date for the launch is the correct one.)

Jacobs’ and Mansmann’s Letters

Actually, before I present the former USAF officers’ responses to researchers in the 1980s, this first letter was written by Florenze Mansmann on November 15, 1995, and sent to a television producer, Curt Collier. In it, the retired major unequivocally confirms that Bob Jacobs’ public statements about the Big Sur UFO encounter are “all true as presented”.

The second letter was written by Mansmann to researcher Peter Bons on March 8, 1983, in which he states that the filmed craft that circled the dummy warhead, while directing four beams of light at it, was assumed by him to be “extraterrestrial”. Referring to details that he observed with a Loup magnifier, when examining the footage frame-by-frame, Mansmann describes the UFO as a “classic disc, the center seemed to be a raised bubble”. He further says, “At the point of beam release…the object turned like an object required to be in a position to fire from a platform”.

The third letter was written by Mansmann to researcher T. Scott Crain Jr. on May 6, 1987. In it, he elaborates on the circumstances surrounding the screening in his office and speculates that the amazing events captured on film were probably still being kept secret because of the US government’s so-called “Star Wars” research projects then underway, aimed at creating directed-energy beam weapons that could destroy Soviet nuclear warheads in flight.

The fourth letter was written by Dr. Bob Jacobs to Dr. Florenze Mansmann on January 14, 1985, in which he discusses the Big Sur Incident at length, offering his opinion about its meaning—it was “a shot across the bow … of our nuclear silliness ship”—and passionately arguing that the US government should not keep the incident secret forever.

The last letter that I’ll present here, written by Mansmann to researcher Lee Graham on March 10, 1983, confirms that “the original [35mm film] was rushed East on a special aircraft when we released it [to the CIA officers]”. Once again, this statement establishes beyond question that Kingston George could not possibly have viewed the same film at Vandenberg “weeks later” as he claimed, simply because it was long-gone from the base.

(BTW In the first letter, Mansmann states that the only copy of the film—the 16mm version that was screened on a projector in his office—was “confiscated by the two Government Agents and placed in a briefcase before they departed”. In other words, George also could not have viewed, weeks later, that copy of the film either.)

I also possess three more private letters on this topic, written to various individuals by Jacobs or Mansmann in the 1980s, that I will not include in this article. They are basically redundant in terms of what they reveal, relative to the ones that I have presented here.

In conclusion, while Kingston George attempted to discredit what he called “Bob Jacobs’ weird claims” about a UFO shooting down a dummy nuclear warhead in flight in September 1964, the extensive private correspondence of Jacobs and Florenze Mansmann convincingly confirms that the incident, however bizarre and difficult to believe, did in fact occur.

See Also:

	Deep Denial or Disinformation?
	Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It
	New “UFOs and Nukes” Film Trailer: The Amazing Big Sur Incident

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UFOs Have Closely Monitored US Missile Tests Since the 1940s

While the 1964 Big Sur Incident was the most dramatic case documented thus far, encounters involving UFO surveillance and even interference have occurred on an ongoing basis.

One only has to do a little research to discover that the Big Sur Incident was not unique. Actually, confirmed episodes of UFOs maneuvering near airborne U.S. missiles occurred on numerous occasions, both before and after the now well-publicized event, during which a UFO was filmed disabling a dummy nuclear warhead in flight, using beams of light. After former USAF Lieutenant Bob Jacobs—head of the Vandenberg AFB-based telescopic-photography team that inadvertently filmed the amazing incident—went public with the story in 1982, he quickly received anonymous death threats over the telephone and,

By Robert Hastings www.theufochronicles.com 3-5-2024

independently, was harassed by a small group of “skeptics” with interesting but unpublicized government connections. An earlier article of mine discusses that situation.

Nevertheless, another officer, retired Major Florenze Mansmann—who analyzed the Big Sur film frame-by-frame with a magnifier—has confirmed that it showed a “classic disc” UFO shooting four intensely luminous beams at the warhead, which then tumbled out of camera frame.

But the dramatic 1964 encounter was hardly the first case of UFO surveillance of our missile tests. For example, in March 1950, a True magazine article written by U.S. Naval Commander Robert B. McLaughlin, a rocket specialist at White Sands Proving Ground, in southern New Mexico, revealed that small, spherical UFOs—we would now call them orbs—had been sighted at the highly secret base during a V-2 rocket test conducted on June 10, 1949. Referring to the incident, he wrote,

This day we were firing a Navy upper atmosphere missile. Shortly after its take-off, two small circular objects, guessed to be approximately 20 inches in diameter, appeared from no place and joined the Navy missile on its upward flight.

At about the time the Navy missile was doing well over 2,000 feet per second, the object on the west side passed through the exhaust gases and joined its friend on the east. They then apparently decided the missile was not going fast enough for them. They accelerated, passed the Navy missile and sailed off upward and eastward.

News coverage of McLaughlin’s revelations was widespread at the time. According to veteran UFO researcher Richard Hall, McLaughlin was later punished by the Navy for writing the article—losing his job at White Sands and being shipped off to sea duty. UFOs snooping on military missile launches was obviously a highly-sensitive subject that was to be rigorously kept from public view.

In any case, unexplained UFO activity at White Sands in the 1940s and ‘50s was frequently observed by military and civilian personnel working at the test range, and nearby Holloman AFB, involving aerial objects that were radically different in appearance and vastly superior in performance, compared to our own aircraft and rockets. Reports periodically issued by the Air Force summarized various incidents over time.

By the early 1960s, UFO sightings during military missile tests began to occur at other locations. Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC Ret.), Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a well-respected UFO research organization, has written,

In [NICAP’s] files is a photocopy of an official tracking log from Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy), covering operations on January 10, 1961. A Polaris missile was fired that day. According to the log, the missile was on its way up when an ‘unidentifiable flying object’ came in over the range. The UFO was evidently so big and maneuvered so close to the Polaris that automatic tracking radar on the ground, set to follow the Polaris, locked onto the UFO by mistake. The UFO eventually flew out of the radar's ‘sight.’ It took trackers 14 minutes to find the Polaris again.

A declassified military teletype message, known as a TWX, summarizes the encounter, but the facts first became known to the public after they were leaked by someone with access to inside information. Importantly, the intriguing 1961 event occurred only three years before the incident reported by Bob Jacobs and Florenze Mansmann and the parallels between the two cases are obvious.

Predictably, UFO activity during US missile tests continued to occur following the Big Sur incident. In one case, a Minuteman ICBM carrying a dummy nuclear warhead was launched from Vandenberg AFB, California, one day in August 1973. On June 17, 1974, the Chicago Tribune carried the following news item:

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Experts at an Army missile base say they are puzzled about strange “ghost ships” picked up by powerful radar scanner in the Pacific during a tracking exercise last summer.

There has been little official comment on what the scientists found during the exercise, but Major Dallas Van Hoose, an Army spokesman, confirmed recently that “some unexplained aerial phenomena” were observed during the exercise last August. Scientists, many of whom are reluctant to be named in interviews because of general public skepticism over unidentified flying objects, say privately they have been unable to find any explanation for the “ghost ships”.

“We have never seen anything precisely like this before,” said one ballistic missile defense expert who works for an Army agency here and who is familiar with the advanced radar used to test missiles and warheads. Huntsville houses the Army’s ballistic missile defense systems command which tests in the Kwajalein Atoll region of the Marshall Island Trust Territory held by the U.S.

Last August the Air Force launched a Minuteman ICBM from Vandenberg Air Force base aimed for the Kwajalein missile range which is used by the Army, Air Force, and Navy. The radar experts in the Pacific found they were also tracking an unidentified flying object next to the ICBM’s nose cone. Radar picked up an inverted saucer-shape object to the right and above the descending nose cone and watched it cross the warhead’s trajectory to a point which was below and to-the-left of it before the phantom ship disappeared. The ghost ship was described as being 10-feet high and 40-feet long. Two separate radar systems saw it at the same time which may eliminate the probability that there was a malfunction in one of the radar systems. It was also reported that 3 other identical objects were seen in the vicinity—the same size, shape, and dimensions. One scientist said the data indicated that the phantom ship “flew under its own power” but could not explain what sort of “power” was involved.

So far none of the experts here believe the ghost ship was a natural phenomenon caused by freak weather conditions or echoes commonly seen on radar screens.

(Radar alone could not have determined that the unknown targets had an “inverted saucer-shape” so some optical images of the UFOs had to have been taken as well. The reporter writing the article apparently misunderstood some of what he was told by Army Major Van Hoose, and mistakenly attributed this particular discovery to the analysis of radar data.)

In any event, the earlier incident at Vandenberg AFB, described by both Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann, involving close-proximity UFO activity during an Atlas ICBM test launch, was apparently not only one to occur at the base.

Regarding the unnamed ballistic missile expert’s statement in the article above, about never having seen “anything precisely like this before”, given that the 1964 Big Sur incident was immediately classified Top Secret—with only a handful of individuals knowing the facts—it would have been unknown to other military and civilian personnel conducting missile tests a decade later.

Researcher Barry Greenwood later reprinted this newspaper story in his co-authored book, Clear Intent (later republished as The UFO Cover-Up). He wrote,

When FOIA inquiries were filed with the Army, they denied having any records concerning the sighting. We were referred to Vandenberg AFB, California. Vandenberg responded that “in accordance with Air Force manual 12-50 which implements the Federal Records Act, the launch operations records for August 1973 have been destroyed.” Note that it is not stated that the UFO tracking report was destroyed, only a very general statement is given that “launch operations records” were destroyed. That [records of] such a mysterious event as this would not be kept somewhere for possible future use is incomprehensible. Yet this excuse is offered time and time again to deny access to records…

In 2016, researcher Richard Hoffman located the Army spokesman cited in the article, retired Major Dallas Van Hoose. Upon learning that, I secured Van Hoose’s contact information and attempted to interview him. Despite repeated attempted phone calls, he decline to speak with me.

Regardless, here we have another reliable story, published by the Chicago Tribune, involving a UFO maneuvering near a dummy nuclear warhead (contained within the missile’s nosecone) in flight over the Pacific Ocean. Considering this case, as well as those at White Sands Proving Ground and Cape Canaveral, there can be little doubt that those who operate the UFOs have repeatedly monitored U.S. missile tests since the late 1940s. In fact, given the ongoing secrecy surrounding these events, the known cases are undoubtedly only a fraction of the total number that have occurred.

Consequently, despite the repeated and unfounded attacks upon them by various debunkers over the years, Bob Jacobs’ and Florenz Mansmann’s assertions about having watched on film a UFO maneuvering near, and disabling, a dummy nuclear warhead in 1964, are unquestionably credible.

Indeed, as I recently mentioned in another article, former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) director Lue Elizondo, has already confirmed to a handful of former US government personnel that he personally viewed a video copy of the Big Sur UFO encounter while at the Pentagon.

Thanks to researchers Barry Greenwood and Jan Aldrich for providing documentation relating to the White Sands, Cape Canaveral, and 1973 Vandenberg AFB cases. And special thanks to researcher Frank Warren of The UFO Chronicles website for posting my articles year after year.

Robert Hastings’ book, is UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, available at Amazon.com.

His documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed is available at Vimeo.com.

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See Also:

Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It (Pt 1)

Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It (Pt 2)

	Deep Denial or Disinformation?
	The UFOs and Nukes Book and The Secret Pentagon UFO Project
	AARO Interviews 'UFOs and Nukes' Witnesses
	UFOs are Stalking and Intercepting Dummy Nuclear Warheads During Test Flights

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