A few days ago, I wrote an article in which I expressed surprise that none of my critics had publicly commented on my documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, which has been available at Vimeo On Demand since April.



A search of the Internet reveals the extent to which some debunkers have attacked me over the years, following the 2008 publication of my book UFOs and Nukes, in which I present dozens of incidents involving UFO activity at American nuclear weapons sites, as reported in declassified files and military witness testimony. Consequently, I was expecting more of the same once the film was released.

By Robert Hastings

The UFO Chronicles

9-16-16 By Robert HastingsThe UFO Chronicles9-16-16

Robert Kaminski

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Shortly after my article appeared online, one of those skeptics, Tim Hebert, wrote a critique which, not surprisingly, contains a number of factual errors, convenient omissions and other misrepresentations.For example, he writes, “There is little to no information offered to the viewer that numerous pages of documents are available that tell an entire different story, or when the highlighted document segments are shown in context to the full document itself, a different interpretation takes shape that has nothing to do with UFOs.”This is wishful thinking on Hebert’s part. There are hundreds of declassified U.S. government files concerning UFO incursions at ICBM sites, weapons storage facilities, bomb and missile test ranges, and other nukes-related sites. The film presents excerpts from 16 of those documents—made public by the U.S. Air Force, FBI and CIA in response to FOIA requests—15 of which explicitly and entirely concern UFO activity at nuclear weapons locations. Additionally, two Soviet Army documents, smuggled out of Russia, detail UFO incidents at that country’s ICBM sites or nukes storage facilities.The one American document that doesopenly mention UFO activity is a military teletype message, known as a TWX, sent from Malmstrom AFB, Montana in March 1967, concerning the mysterious full-flight shutdown of ten Minuteman ICBMs at Echo Flight. Because the message was only the initial report of an event, prior to any investigation of it, no mention of UFOs is made.However, two U.S. Air Force veterans—Col. Walter Figel and TSgt. Henry Barlow—have stated for the record that a UFO was reported near one of the missiles moments before all ten dropped-off alert status. Both men appear in the film—the former on audio tape—and make startling admissions.Figel confirms that a missile security guard had called him in the Echo Launch Control Capsule to report “a large, round object” hovering directly over one of the ICBMs. Further, during my lengthy interview with him—not shown in the film—Figel stated that he had sent out two Security Alert Teams to investigate, one of which confirmed the presence of the UFO. Figel also revealed that he and his missile commander, Captain Eric Carlson, were later debriefed back at Malmstrom by “everybody and his brother” and ordered not to talk about the incident.Figel’s first taped telephone interview with me, recorded in 2008, may be heard in its entirety. It should be noted that the colonel has never disputed the accuracy of the recording or asked me to remove it from my website. Two other telephone interviews with Figel, taped in 2009 and 2010 , are also available. (These three audio files are not available ondevices.)Tim Hebert and Eric Carlson’s son, James, have repeatedly denied or misrepresented Figel’s comments to me. Unfortunately for them, I have our conversations on tape. The reader may listen to them and judge for him/herself the nature and importance of Figel’s candid remarks.The other veteran who discusses the Echo Flight incident in the film, former Electro-Mechanical Technician Henry Barlow, was involved in bringing up some of the stricken missiles. On the way to the first ICBM silo, he and his team member were told by radio to keep their eyes open “because UFO activity had been reported in the area”. Barlow was later told that a disc-shaped UFO had been spotted hovering over the missile designated Echo-2 just before the full-flight shutdown occurred.In any case, Hebert’s characterization of the documents presented in the film—which he claims are misleading because they are either not pertinent or are taken out of context—is simply inaccurate. One may go to my website’s Documents page and leisurely read several of the declassified files that, of necessity, only briefly appear in the documentary.Also presented in the film are confirmatory revelations about the Echo Flight incident by the Boeing engineer who investigated it, Robert Kaminski, who has written (see below) that his team could find no known technical explanation for the missile shutdown and further mentions that a Boeing-Air Force liaison later informed him that Air Force personnel had categorized the incident as “a UFO event”.Further confirmation in the film comes from retired Lt. Col. Dwynne Arneson, who was the Officer-In-Charge of the 28th Air Division’s Communications Center at Malmstrom at the time of the incident. Speaking at my 2010 press conference in Washington D.C., Arneson told the media that he had once read another classified TWX, in March 1967, which unequivocally stated that “a UFO had shut down several missile silos in Montana”.In short, the one document in the film that does not mention UFOs per se, only an alarming full-flight missile shutdown event, nevertheless has multiple, credible witnesses confirming that the incident mentioned in it was indeed UFO-related. Not surprisingly, Hebert fails to mention any of this in his critique—while at the same time accusing me of being unfairly selective when presenting my evidence.Hebert has long referred to the claim that UFOs are interested in our nukes as “Hastings’ theory”. Actually, I’m only reporting on what has been said by high-level government officials and hundreds of military eyewitnesses. For example, in the film I present a CIA memorandum from December 2, 1952, in which the Assistant Director of the agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell, writes, “Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and travelling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.”Other declassified CIA, FBI and USAF documents confirm that UFOs had been sighted at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Savannah River—all nuclear weapons facilities—during the seven-month period preceding Chadwell’s statement. Indeed, as mentioned in the film, USAF Project Blue Book chief, Captain Edward Ruppelt, once referred to the “ominous correlation” between UFO sightings and atomic bomb production, testing and deployment sites.Hebert complains that the military witness interviews in the film are too short. Well, if the documentary were three hours long, instead of its current 48-minute length, all of the full-length interviews with the veterans would have been presented, instead of the brief snippets that appear in it. However, anyone buying the documentary at Vimeo also gains access to extended interviews with six of the former USAF missileers. (It cost the film’s producer, Jared Tarbell, several thousand dollars to fly those witnesses to Albuquerque, and put them up in hotels, during the extended interview process.)Hebert also writes, “[Hastings claims] ICBM launch officers are contacted by above ground security personnel and told of UFO sightings. The officers themselves see nothing (they're 60 to 100 feet underground) but the security personnel are treated to bizarre aerial performances that are not of this world. Where are the on camera testimonies from those security personnel?”Actually, I have dozens of USAF missile security policemen on audiotape, describing in great detail the dramatic aerial displays they had witnessed at one base or another. Those verbatim testimonies appear in my book and in several articles at my website. When deciding which veterans to re-interview on video, given the high cost involved, I concluded that the missile launch and targeting officers offered the most comprehensive summaries of the UFO events at their missile flights and, therefore, included those individuals in the film.I suppose I could go on here but there’s really no point. Those who strongly believe that I am full of shit probably won’t utilize even one of the many links provided in this rebuttal, while those who know that I document my public statements about nukes-related UFO activity, as best as possible, have already read or viewed many of the items I have posted over the years. Regardless, one may view my documentary film here