Unacknowledged: An Expose of the World's Greatest Secret

And there were two guys in gray suits―civilian clothes, which was fairly unusual.

Major Mansmann turned on the film projector. I watched the screen and there was the launch. It was quite exciting. Because of the length of the telescope, we could see the whole Atlas missile as it entered the frame.

We watched the first stage burnout. We watched the second stage burnout. We watched the third stage burnout. We could see the dummy warhead flying along―and into the frame came something else. It flew into the frame and it shot a beam of light at the warhead.

Now remember, all this stuff is flying at several thousand miles an hour. So this thing… this UFO fires a beam of light at the warhead, hits it and then it moves to the other side and fires another beam of light, then it moves again and fires another beam of light, then it goes down and fires another beam of light, and then it flies out the way it came in.

And the warhead tumbles out of space.

The warhead was traveling through subspace about sixty miles straight up in the neighborhood of eleven to fourteen thousand miles an hour when this UFO caught up to it, flew in, flew around it, and flew back out.

Now, I saw that! I don’t give a Goddamn what anybody else says about it. I saw that on film! I was there!

When the lights came on, Major Mansmann looked at me and said, “Were you guys screwing around up there?” And I said, “No sir.” And he said, “What was that?” And I said, “It looks to me like we got a UFO.”

Now the thing that we saw, this object that flew in―it was circular and shaped like two saucers cupped together with a ping-pong ball on top. The beam of light came out of the ping-pong ball.

That’s what I saw on film.

After some discussion, Major Mansmann told me I was never to speak of this again. As far as I was concerned, this never happened. And he said, “I don’t need to emphasize the dire consequences of a security breach, do I?” I said, “No sir.” And he said, “Fine. This never happened.” As I started for the door, he said, “Wait a minute.” He said, “Years from now, if you are ever forced by someone to talk about this, you are to tell them it was laser strikes, laser tracking strikes.”

Well, in 1964 we didn’t have any laser tracking strikes. We didn’t have any laser tracking at all. Lasers were in their infancy in 1964. They were little playthings in laboratories. So I said, “Yes sir,” and walked out and that was the last I talked about it for eighteen years.

Much later I learned that, after I left Major Mansmann’s office, the guys in civilian clothes (they weren’t CIA) spooled off the part of the film that had the UFO on it, took a pair of scissors and cut it. They put that on a separate reel and placed it in their briefcase. They handed Major Mansmann back the rest of the film and left.

For eighteen years I was a part of a United States Air Force cover-up. There are still things that I did in the service that I won’t talk about because they are top-secret and I could get my ass in trouble for talking about them. But after eighteen years, it occurred to me that I could talk about this one incident, because nobody ever told me it was classified top-secret. Major Mansmann had said, “You are to say this never happened.” Well, that’s not classifying it top-secret, is it? That’s why I felt free to talk about it. It’s not a secondhand story. This happened to me.

After an article came out about the incident the shit hit the fan. I started getting harassed at work. I started getting odd telephone calls that would come during the day. At night, at my house, I would get telephone calls all night long. People would call and start screaming at me. “You are going down mother fucker!”

One night somebody blew up my mail box by putting a big load of skyrockets in it. The mailbox went up in flames. And that night at one o’clock in the morning the phone rang. I picked it up and somebody said, “Skyrockets in your box at night, oh what a beautiful sight, mother fucker!”

Things like that have happened on and off since 1982. Since this History Channel thing came up I’m starting to get telephone calls again. It’s disconcerting. I’ve been the subject of humiliating letters and phone calls from skeptics like James O’Berg at NASA and Phillip J. Klass, who’s a paid informant of the United States Government who persisted in belittling me.

I’ve learned to not give a flip. I just don’t care anymore. What are they going to do… kill me? Are they going to do discredit me? Are they going to do any more than Philip Klass has already done to make me look foolish? That’s about all they can do.

The Air Force’s position is there was no such incident and there was no film of it. In fact, they’ve denied everything, from my being in Vandenburg, to me even being in the Air Force. Did I put a tracking site up along the California coast? No, there was no tracking site in California… which is a crock! The tracking site is still right where I put it. And they used it every time the space shuttle landed in California―that’s where you first see it from. And they are still photographing missiles from Vandenburg from that tracking site.

I believe this nutty fringe around UFOs is part of a concerted effort to keep serious study of it down. Anytime anybody tries to study this subject seriously, we are ridiculed. I’m a full professor at a relatively major university. And I’m certain that my colleagues hoot and holler behind my back when they hear that I have an interest in studying unidentified flying objects.

To corroborate my story, Lee Graham tracked down Florence J. Mansmann, Jr., the same Major who had ordered me to shut-up about it. He was a Ph.D. at Stanford and a rancher in Fresno, California. And he wrote back to Lee saying everything Bob said in his story is absolutely true.

The thing that’s most important to me about this whole operation is very simply this: the biggest event in the history of humankind is the discovery that we are not alone, that there are other living entities― intelligent entities―in this universe and that we aren’t here alone. That’s a huge, enormous discovery. It’s the discovery of the lifetime of humankind, isn’t it, to find out that we’re not here alone? That’s why I think it is important to talk about these things. I think that’s exciting. And I think that it’s important for us as humans to come to grow up and recognize that we may not be the paragon of animals after all… that there may be something out there that’s bigger and more exciting than we are. And that maybe, just maybe they are telling us something. Because what I saw that day was a UFO shooting down a dummy nuclear warhead.

What message would I interpret from that?

Don’t mess with nuclear warheads.