Several military leakers claim that a “disc-shaped UFO” destroyed a US nuclear missile during a routine test over the Pacific.
After circling the unarmed dummy warhead at several thousand kilometers per hour, the ship is said to have fired four laser beams at the missile.
It is not known at what altitude the altercation is said to have occurred.
Retired US Air Force officers Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann are among two who claim the event took place, and say they have seen footage of the event, which was captured on September 15, 1964.
However, the video has since gone missing.
Extraordinary allegations about the encounter have been swirling for years, but are now being investigated by author Robert Hastings, whose books include UFOs And Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed.
Lt Jacobs and Maj Mansmann were part of the team charged with filming the test from a military telescopic photography site in Big Sur, California, and while doing so, inadvertently captured the altercation.
They allege that after a ‘highly-restricted’ screening of the footage, two plain-clothed CIA officers confiscated the tape.
Lt Jacobs said that at the time Maj Mansmann had told him ‘not to talk about it’, and said ‘it had never happened’.
Separately, Mr Hastings confirmed that Luis Elizondo, former director of the advanced aerospace threat identification program (AATIP), also said he had seen the footage.
This was confirmed by an anonymous US Senate investigator, not Mr Elizondo himself, who has previously accused the Pentagon of trying to discredit him for speaking out over the issue of UFOs.
Writing on his website, The UFO Chronicles, Mr Hastings described the craft as a ‘domed, disc-shaped UFO’.
‘[The video] showed exactly what Dr Jacobs has maintained over the years – a UFO actually interfered with an Atlas missile in flight, as it carried a dummy nuclear warhead aloft,’ wrote Mr Hastings.
‘The official Air Force video of the encounter captures the moment the unknown object appears to engage the warhead with a luminous beam – which turned on and off four times – as it travelled downrange at several thousand miles-per-hour over the Pacific Ocean.’
By 1983 Maj Mannsnann had decided to speak out about the encounter, describing the UFO as a ‘classic disc, the center seemed to be a raised bubble… the entire lower saucer shape was glowing and seemed to be rotating slowly.’
A year earlier, Lt Jacobs – then a university professor specialising in communications – had written an article about the incident in the ‘sensationalistic’ National Enquirer. After publication he began receiving ‘death threats’ over the phone, and ‘intimidating letters from certain well-known UFO “skeptics” who attempted to get Jacobs to retract the story’.
Further evidence for the encounter has been offered in declassified but as-yet-unreleased radar data taken on the day, which shows an unidentified object near the missile at the time of the incident.
However, Lt Jacobs has suggested this could have been some of the ‘metallic chaff’ surrounding the warhead, debris deliberated scattered to confuse enemy radar from detecting the exact location of a missile.
‘So, perhaps the mysterious target tracked on radar near the warhead was merely the chaff,’ wrote Hastings .
‘On the other hand, it may have indeed been the actual UFO, whose presence the author of the radar data report would probably not have known about, given the incident’s Top Secret status.’
Now, almost 60 years on and with UFOs making headlines daily, the story has resurfaced – but the tape has not.
At present, it seems like it was destroyed alongside the rest of Mr Elizondo’s files and emails when he resigned as AATIP director in 2017.
‘This highly unusual move by the Pentagon is in direct violation of a legal Preservation Order that was mandated based on Elizondo’s other duties at the time,’ wrote Hastings. ‘The order requires all of Elizondo’s electronic and hard copy files to be preserved indefinitely, including email and correspondence.’
Mr Elizondo said he stood down in protest at the Pentagon over ‘excessive secrecy’ surrounding the programme.
Speaking to CNN at the time, he said: ‘My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.’
