MYSTERY WIRE — A group of retired military men told reporters Tuesday about disturbing incidents involving America’s nuclear missile bases and UFOs.

In some of the incidents, the witnesses say, the unknown craft somehow sabotaged and disabled nuclear missiles.

In the gathering Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. was intended to get the attention of Congress. Witness after witness told reporters about chilling incidents at multiple nuclear missile bases where unknown objects or craft intruded into restricted air space, hovered over ICBM silos, and somehow disabled the weapons.

If the nation had gone to war during any of these incidents, according to those testifying, the weapons would have been inoperable.

“In September of 1966, I was a Minuteman ICBM Launch Control Officer and Deputy Commander of a large crew stationed at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota,” Retired Air Force Captain Dave Shindele said. “I was involved in a UFO incident at that time, where a flying object tampered with, and took down a total of 10 nuclear tipped ICBM missiles by rendering them unlaunchable.”

In each of the incidents described by the witnesses, Air Force personnel were ordered to keep quiet and forget they ever happened.

One of the men speaking Tuesday’s event was Robert Jacobs, a former Air Force officer in charge of a photo optical instrumentation group squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. He told the story of helping in the setup of a large telescope on top of a hill at Big Sur.

Jacobs said the telescope and film camera were used to record the launch of a nuclear test missile. He said the test went well and everyone on site was pleased.

But two days later he was called in to an office where a Major and two other men in grey suits were standing. Jacobs said they showed him film from the telescope he assisted in setting up. The film showed the missile launching into the atmosphere. Jacobs said the film then showed the nose of the missile opening, dispersing aluminum foil chaff, and shooting the dummy warhead through and above the chaff.

Jacobs said at this point the warhead was flying close to 8,000 mph. This is when he said he saw on the film what looked like a traditional flying saucer come up to the warhead shooting a beam of light at it from different angles. The craft then moved out of frame and the warhead tumbled out of frame.

Jacobs then recounted what happened next. “The lights came on. Major Manson looked at me. The two guys in white suits looked at me. Major Manson said, ‘Were you guys screwing around up there?’ And I said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘Then what was that?’ I said, ‘It looks to me like we got a UFO.’ Major Manson said, ‘You are never to say that again. As far as you’re concerned, this didn’t happen,’ he said. ‘You understand?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He escorted me to his door to his office and he said, ‘Now, I don’t need to remind you of the seriousness of a security breach. Do I?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’ He said all right and you’re dismissed. But as I left, he leaned over to speak into my ears to say something that the guys from in the suits couldn’t see. He said, ‘Lieutenant, if you are ever tortured in the future, somebody has you up against the wall and they’re frying your privates with fire,’ he said. ‘You can tell him this, just to get out of it. Just tell him it was laser tracking.’ We didn’t have laser tracking in 1964.”

The men in grey suits then cut the section of film showing the craft from the rest of the reel, kept it, and left the office. Jacobs never saw that film again.

PREVIOUS REPORTS OF UFOs AND NUKES

Mystery Wire has previously reported on longtime investigator and author Robert Hastings who has said there is already plenty of evidence to prove the point.

On September 27, 2010, Hasting’s held his first “UFOs and Nukes” news conference in Washington D.C. at the same venue as the latest one. In this news conference, seven veterans discussed still-classified incidents involving UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles during the Cold War era.

By 2016, Hasting had interviewed more than 150 witnesses who reported UFO intrusions over nuclear sites, including intercontinental ballistic missile bases where nuclear missiles were somehow disabled during the encounters.

Hastings said government documents confirmed the witnesses were not exaggerating. “There have also been hundreds of documents released through the Freedom of Information Act that back up to some degree what these individuals are saying,” Hastings said. “UFO incursions at nuclear sites in general, are just a matter of course, the military knows full well they’re going to continue to go on and have quite clearly decided the public should be kept in the dark about all this.”

In 1955, 14 A-bombs were detonated as part of Operation Teapot at the Nevada test site, witnessed by thousands of military personnel in trenches, and by thousands of test site employees. But there were other observers as well. “It was what we called flying saucers. They were pretty prevalent at the test site back then,” said a former test site photographer.

At least a dozen former test site employees have told similar stories about unknown aircraft showing up hours or days after an atomic blast.

In addition to the eyewitness accounts, thousands of pages of formerly-classified documents have been released to buttress these stories. A Freedom of Information Act request filed in 1992 produced a thick stack of documents from the Department of Energy (DOE), indicating UFO incidents over every major atomic weapons facility dating to the late 1940s, over Los Alamos national lab, where the bombs were designed, over Hanford, where the plutonium was processed. But DOE has no records of any official sightings over what later became the Nevada Test Site. Hastings however, has found plenty.

The government ended atomic weapons tests years ago, but Nevada incidents continue. Former security officers at Area 2 at Nellis Air Force Base, for years a storage facility for up to 200 nuclear warheads, have reported multiple intrusions by unknown aircraft from the late 1990s through 2004.

When Hastings is asked who is behind these incidents and why, he gives this answer, “Who knows what their motivation is?”

Similar incidents have been reported in the UK, India, Pakistan and other nuclear powers.