The US military is in possession of video of a UFO apparently disabling a nuclear warhead during a routine test, according to several former officials.
They claim that the video in question captured a saucer-shaped craft surrounding the simulated, disarmed warhead shortly after it separated from the Atlas missile’s booster, and then fired four beams of light at the warhead, disabling it.
Retired U.S. Air Force officers Lt. Bob Jacobs and Maj. Florenze Mansmann claim to have seen the recording of the 1964 encounter before the tape disappeared.
The former officials were part of a team tasked with capturing video of missile test launches in California with telescopic photography and videography equipment.
Two days later, after screening the video, they say two plainclothes CIA agents confiscated the footage and swore them to secrecy.
The incredible account is part of a pattern that some UFO experts have identified, where UFOs appear to interfere with nuclear weapons.
Retired Air Force Major Florenze Mansmann claimed he saw a flying saucer deactivate a dummy nuclear warhead during a missile test. He was ordered not to say a word of what he had seen.
The alleged incident occurred almost six decades ago, on September 15, 1964, but recently became public because author Robert Hastings investigated it.
Luis Elizondo acknowledged the existence of the video and claimed he had seen it, according to a Feb. 10 post by Hastings on The UFO Chronicles website.
Elizondo says he was the former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) for studying UFOs, and that he has been involved in several high-profile leaks of military images purportedly showing UFOs.
Graphic recreation of what happened in the 1964 video when a UFO supposedly intercepted the Atlas rocket over the Pacific Ocean
An anonymous source revealed to Hastings that Elizondo confirmed details of the event in internal interviews.
In the 1960s, Jacobs was in charge of a military telescopic photography site in Big Sur, California, which captured video as the missile traveled several thousand miles per hour on its planned flight path over the Pacific Ocean.
At the time, Mansmann was the chief photographic imagery analyst at Vandenberg Air Force Base, now called Vandenberg Space Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, California.
The Cold War was advancing rapidly, including many covert operations programs testing sophisticated and secret military hardware. Some UFO skeptics have claimed that UFO reports provided cover for these programs.
Lt. Bob Jacobs, middle and bottom, photographed with his crew. Jacobs reported the sighting of him in the press in 1982, but was ridiculed and threatened for his claims.
The ship inadvertently captured on film was dome-shaped and disc-shaped, according to Jacobs and Mansmann.
It was a “classic disk, the center seemed to be a raised bubble… the entire shape of the bottom saucer glowed and seemed to rotate slowly,” according to one letter Mansmann wrote about the incident in 1983.
“At the time of the beam launch… the object rotated as an object required to be in position to fire from a platform… but again, this could be my own assumption being in aerial combat.”
Forty years later, a US Senate investigator told Hastings that Elizondo had confirmed this description in an on-the-record interview last year.
“During that briefing, the former AATIP director confirmed the existence of the video, details about what it showed, and the location of a copy of it in AATIP workspaces,” Hastings wrote in the new post.
Although Mansmann told Jacobs not to talk about what they had seen, Jacobs began talking about the event in 1982, thinking that enough time had passed since the event that he could speak freely about what he saw.
But his claims were dismissed by skeptics and he was even the subject of harassment and anonymous death threats.
Hastings’ new report appears to match Elizondo’s recollection of the video.
Luis Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), told a Senate investigator that he had seen the 1964 video.
When investigators went to look for the DVD recording of the video, where Elizondo had told them it was, it was not there, Hastings reported.
And although the recording is missing and the story that Elizondo saw the recording comes secondhand from an investigator, Hastings reported that he has additional evidence to back it up:
‘On November 10, 2023, a very reliable source, who I am not at liberty to identify, told me that UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) whistleblower David Grusch had privately confirmed that Elizondo also told him him about having screened the movie Big Sur, and that it actually captured a surprising UFO-related simulated warhead jamming event.’
It appears the video was lost when the Pentagon destroyed Elizondo’s files and emails, Hastings wrote. This reportedly occurred in 2017 after he resigned as director of AATIP, which he claims was in protest of the Pentagon’s cover-up of UFO matters.
“This highly unusual action by the Pentagon constitutes a direct violation of a lawful Preservation Order that was issued based on Elizondo’s other duties at the time,” Hastings wrote. “The order requires that all electronic and paper files of Elizondo be retained indefinitely, including emails and correspondence.”
Beyond the video, there is some limited evidence to support the story.
A declassified but unpublished set of radar data from the September 15, 1964, event apparently confirmed that an unidentified aerial object was observed near the simulated warhead during the missile test, a source told Hastings.
Analysis of radar data at the time suggested that the unidentified object could have been debris. It is also possible that these were “chaff”, metal objects intended to confuse radar to prevent enemies from identifying the exact location of a warhead.
“So perhaps the mysterious target tracked by radar near the warhead was nothing more than straw,” Hastings wrote. “On the other hand, it is possible that this was the actual UFO, the presence of which the author of the radar data report would likely not have known about, given the top secret status of the incident.”