Members of another team did report the UFO, however, and they were ordered to sign a national security agreement, vowing never to discuss the event again.
Later on it was learned that the power failures that night had been widespread. As many as thirteen missiles had gone off alert status.
Again, this is just a small sampling of UFO incursion incidents at America’s ICBM bases.
Reports tapered off with the 1970s, but not completely. In fact, a UFO incursion at a U.S. missile base was reported as recently as 2005.
Still, there are fewer ICBMs these days, due to various disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia. Perhaps that’s why there are fewer UFO sightings at nuclear missile bases.
But that still leaves the question: Why were UFOs so interested in these places? What were they doing? Surveillance? Sabotage? Or were they sending some kind of message?
The foo fighters seemed curious about the ways we’ve come to kill each other; maybe this was just another form of that inquisitiveness. Or maybe this was someone’s way of telling us what we should already know: that these kinds of weapons could quickly destroy all of human civilization.
Or maybe it was something else altogether.
The biggest mystery of all, though, is why the U.S. military, and mostly the U.S. Air Force, chose to treat these incidents so cavalierly and/or deceptively.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the late great scientist who first worked for the air force in debunking UFO cases only to become a believer in them himself, published an article in 1972 about one of the UFO incursion incidents.
He reported that after the episode was “investigated,” the air force’s official explanation was that all the witnesses — from airmen to the base in question’s high-ranking officers — were seeing “stars.”
Hynek then asked facetiously: Was the U.S. Air Force putting in charge of the nuclear arsenal people who were so stupid that they didn’t know a “star” when they saw one? These same people who someday might be called on to launch this country’s nuclear weapons?
As with the cascade of UFO incidents in the 1950s and during the Korean conflict, the air force’s actions — or inactions — when it came to the UFO ICBM incursions of the 1960s and ’70s, like the incursions themselves, simply defy explanation.
17
Vietnam
In many ways, America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was an exercise in military mismanagement.
Fought as part of the larger Indochina War, which ran from 1950 to 1975, from America’s point of view, the heaviest combat occurred between 1965 and 1969 when the United States had more than 500,000 troops in the country and many thousands more in ships offshore and in nearby countries supporting the effort.
Essentially a civil war that the United States entered to help the somewhat democratic South Vietnam against the totalitarian communist North, it was a disastrous conflict with no set battle lines, no clear-cut U.S. strategy, few conventional battles and no tangible way to measure success except by body counts.
The war saw more bombs dropped on relatively tiny North Vietnam than on the entirety of Europe during World War II. Hundreds of jet fighters and bombers took to the skies daily, unleashing everything from terrifying “daisy cutter” bombs, to napalm and cluster bombs, to advanced weaponry like the first “smart” bombs, to massive carpet-bombing raids performed by B-52s loaded with conventional weapons instead of nukes.
It also involved this huge, half-million-man U.S. ground force whose members were required to do duty in the war zone for just one year and then go home. For many of these troops, fully aware that what they were doing was universally unpopular, catastrophically destructive, with no chance for a clear-cut victory, the idea wasn’t so much fight to win but more to just stay alive for those twelve months and then hopefully get out. Sadly, 58,000 of them didn’t make it.
There was much heroism in Vietnam, and many brave American soldiers and marines died in what they considered service to their country. But by the admission of many, and by the historical record, there was much drug use and abuse during the Vietnam War as well. American troops went into combat stoned on marijuana or worse. Hallucinogenics were not uncommon in the fighting units or in the rear areas; heroin was readily available, too. At the height of the American involvement, one section of the South’s capital city, Saigon, was considered such a dangerous drug haven for AWOL U.S. soldiers, even the military authorities refused to go there.
It is no surprise then that many of the reports of UFOs from this luckless war — happening at the same time as the frightening UFO ICBM incursions episode — are as chaotic as the war itself. Many sound more like science fiction than scientific mystery. And oddly, most come from ground forces and not from those flying through the air.
With thanks to UFO Casebook, Brian Vike’s HBBC UFO Research, the Australian UFO Research Network’s Jon Wyatt and others, what follows are a few of the most unusual — and infamous — UFO episodes of the Vietnam War.
Maybe one of the strangest UFO incidents of any war took place in 1966 at the height of the Vietnam conflict. It happened at a place called Nha Trang, and if the reported accounts are correct, the sighting might have been witnessed by hundreds, or maybe thousands, of U.S. soldiers.
The incident was initially investigated by the original NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena; this story comes from its archived files.
At the time of the reported episode, June 1966, Nha Trang was a massive joint U.S.-South Vietnamese military base and one of the most heavily defended installations in the country. Located along South Vietnam’s central coastline, the base was actually situated in a valley, with highlands to the west and the South China Sea to the east.
The story of what happened went like this: According to the witness who originally reported the incident to NICAP, the base was abuzz with activity this particular night. A construction crew using more than a half dozen bulldozers was cutting roads around a hill about a half mile west of the base. Two Skyraider fighter-bombers were warming up on the base runway about a mile to the east, getting ready to take off. Meanwhile, a large group of U.S. soldiers were in an open area somewhere in between, all set to watch an outdoor movie. The recent addition of a small electrical generator had made such open-air entertainment possible.
According to the witness, the movie started around 8 P.M. and ran for a while without any problems. But around 9:45, the sky around the base suddenly turned extremely bright. At first the cause seemed to be a flare lit off over a hill to the north of the base. The troops at Nha Trang were used to seeing flares being fired around the base’s defense perimeters, so initially no one in the crowd of moviegoers gave it much thought.
But then the light did not go away — and it was soon obvious this was not a flare illuminating the huge military installation. It was a luminous object hovering high above the base. Some fighter pilots in the crowd estimated the object was at least five miles up. But no one knew what it was.
Suddenly the object began dropping straight down, heading right for the base. But before a full-scale panic could break out, it stopped in midair. Now it was just 500 feet above the crowd, and at this point the witness said not just the base, but the entire valley around it was lit up like daytime. That’s how bright the object was.