UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection UFOs & Nukes HOME (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM) ARTICLES (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/ARTICLES) BOOK (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/BOOK) DOCUMENTARY (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/DOCUMENTARY) LECTURE (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/LECTURE) DOCUMENTS (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/DOCUMENTS) INTERVIEWS (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/INTERVIEWS) ABOUT (HTTPS://WWW.UFOHASTINGS.COM/ABOUT) UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection Deep Denial or Disinformation? (https://www.ufohastings.com/articles/deep-denial- or-disinformation) posted May 05, 2009 Previously posted at UFO Chronicles (http://www.theufochronicles.com/2009/05/deep-denial-or- disinformation.html) The highly-classified Big Sur UFO Incidentaccording to the former/retired U.S. Air Force officers who publicly revealed it involved the inadvertent telescopic filming of a UFO that had suddenly appeared near a dummy nuclear warhead in flight. Both men say that the unknown object approached and circled the warhead and used beams of light to shoot it down. Former Lieutenant (now Dr.) Robert Jacobs and retired Major (later Dr.) Florenze J. Mansmann, Jr.both of whom were highly-decorated by the Air Force and eventually became distinguished academiciansare adamant that the nearly unbelievable incident occurred and say that the amazing film was quickly confiscated by the CIA. In an effort to debunk these dramatic revelations, Kingston A. George, a former civilian colleague of Dr. Jacobs, has written two articles for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, in which he makes demonstrable factual errors, easily-refutable claims, and unfounded, libelous personal attacks on Dr. Jacobs. George claims that Jacobs "concocted" the Big Sur UFO Incident, despite Mansmann's unequivocal written endorsement of the former lieutenant's account, in which he says that it is "all true as presented."1 Regardless, George claims that the UFO was actually a group of decoy warheads sailing along near the genuine article. He further claims that the resolution of the telescope's recording system was so poor that the missile, the separated dummy warhead, and the decoys all appeared as points of light, with no resolvable detail, thus accounting for Jacobs' misinterpretation of what was actually on the However, retired USAF Major Florenze Mansmann, the officer who actually analyzed the film at Vandenberg AFB in 1964, has written: "The [UFO's] shape was [a] classic disc. The center seemed to be a raised bubble ... the entire lower saucer shape was glowing and seemed to be rotating slowly. At the point of beam releaseif it was a beam, it, the object, turned like an object required to be in a position to fire from a platform ... but again this could be my Scientists and UFOs (https://www.ufohastings.com/articles/scientists- Deep Denial or Disinformation? (https://www.ufohastings.com/articles/deep- denial-or-disinformation) UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection assumption from being in aerial combat." Mansmann said that the craft was assumed to be "extraterrestrial," given its appearance and amazing performance.2 Moreover, the highly-experienced Air Force photo-analyst said that the footage clearly showed that the domed-disc UFO had come into camera-frame before shooting beams of light at the dummy warhead. In other words, it did not show the release of a cluster of decoy warheads emerging from the missile's payload package itself, which then flew along near the warhead, as George claims. Obviously, there is a wide gulf between Kingston George's more recent claims about the missile launch in question and the statements of Major Mansmann, whom the Air Force officially tasked with examining the film footage, frame-by-frame, immediately after the alleged UFO incident. Significantly, but not widely known, the individual who twice published George's attempted debunking of the Big Sur UFO Incident, Skeptical Inquirer magazine editor Kendrick Frazier, worked for over two decades as a Public Relations Specialist for Sandia National Laboratories, which has been involved in manufacturing many of the U.S. government's nuclear weapons since Curiously, one has to search diligently to discover this highly- relevant fact, given that the magazine has consistently referred to Frazier only as a "Science Writer" in its Publisher's Statement, which appears in every issue. Moreover, for some reason, Frazier chose not to mention his day job as a spin-doctor for the U.S. government's nukes program in his online biography, even though an earlier editorial position with Science News magazine was readily acknowledged by him.3 It was left to me to point out all of these rather interesting facts to ufology and the general public in my well-documented Big Sur expos, A Shot Across the Bow: Another Look at the Big Sur UFO Incident (http://www.cufos.org/hastings.pdf), first published in the International UFO Reporter in 2006. That article contains a number of excerpts from 1980s-era correspondence between Jacobs and Mansmann, as well as Mansmann's letters to various researchers, related to the Big Sur case. One will find in this article links to those In his latest article in the January/February 2009 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, titled "Buzzing Bee Missile Mythology Flies Again," Kingston George admits that he has belatedly reviewed some of Jacobs' and Mansmann's letters. Even a cursory examination of the correspondence will reveal why George does not quote from it and attempts to rush past the subject as quickly and superficially as possible, given that the letters thoroughly demolish his own bogus claims about the Big Sur UFO Incident. Last fall, I forwarded those same letters to debunker Tim Printy who has naively and uncritically accepted as fact George's demonstrably flawed 1993 article in Skeptical Inquirer and urged him to post them on his own website. Thus far, he has failed to do so. I wonder why? Undoubtedly for the same reason George fails to quote from them in his recent article in Skeptical Inquirer. UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection Instead, Printy added a section to his website's treatment of the warhead shoot-down incident titled, "Interactions with Robert Hastings concerning the Big Sur Case," in which he grossly distorts my responses to his questions and criticisms about the Top Secret encounter reported by Jacobs and Mansmann. For all of his preaching about analyzing the ongoing debate objectively, Printy is in reality a sycophant, willing to accept anything George utters, no matter how inaccurate or unfair. To illustrate Printy's idea of "objective" analysis, he characterizes Jacobs' and Mansmann's many explicit comments about the dramatic UFO incident this way: "Several times [in their letters] Mansmann and Jacobs expressed a strong belief that aliens were visiting the Earth." Actually, Mr. Printy, photo analyst Mansmann dispassionately describes what he personally observed through a magnifier when evaluating the amazing film frame-by-frame. He calmly reports that a domed-disc UFO rapidly entered the camera frame, circled the warhead, releasing four bright beams of light at it as it did so. Then the object retraced its flight path, disappearing from view, as the stricken warhead also tumbled out of camera In other words, despite your disingenuous attempt at spin, Mr. Printy, Mansmann's comments relate to the technical analysis of a motion picture film showing an unknown spacecraft engaged in a shockingly provocative action, and have absolutely nothing to do with his "belief" in aliens. True, given the UFO's appearance and vastly superior performancewhich far surpassed anything the U.S. or Russia has, then or nowMansmann's professional assessment was that the craft was "extraterrestrial" and Jacobs, having seen the film himself, agreed with that conclusion. Only then did Jacobs permit himself to speculate about the meaning of the event captured on film. These are hardly blind beliefs; they are instead informed evaluations. In any case, a careful reading of the former officers' letters will quickly reveal just how deceitful Printy's comments are on the matter. For his part, Kingston George first attempted to dismiss the reality of the UFO shoot-down in a 1993 Skeptical Inquirer article titled "The Big Sur UFO: An Identified Flying Object." However, as my rebuttal conclusively demonstrates, Georgewhether by incompetence or intentbadly misrepresented Jacobs' published statements about the Big Sur UFO Incident, thereby unfairly raising questions about the former officer's understanding of the launch's technical aspects and, by extension, his credibility and motives. Moreover, in his more recent article on the case, George has assiduously avoided acknowledging my item-by-item accounting of those misrepresentations. This intellectual dishonesty speaks volumes and George's participation in the Big Sur debate is frequently punctuated by such lamentable behavior. Kendrick Frazier, the person who published George's flawed rebuttal, is guilty of gross editorial incompetenceat the very least by failing to catch the many factual errors and distortions in the article before releasing it to an unsuspecting public. Was this simply UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection an oversight or something else? As I will explain shortly, based on the available facts, a more disturbing theory can be advanced to explain Frazier's professional ineptitude. In any case, Kingston George's latest attempt to debunk the Big Sur UFO Incident employs the same sleight-of-hand tricks, distortions, and outright falsehoods he trotted out in his first attempt to discredit the case. Either he is in deep denial or he is knowingly participating in a disinformation schemeaided and abetted by long- time government public relations professional Kendrick Frazier designed to discredit Drs. Jacobs' and Mansmann's statements on the A Brief Review Let's go back in time and review the pertinent events as they've unfolded. In September 1964, Kingston George was a civilian engineer working for the Air Force on an experimental project designed to film Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) test launches at Vandenberg AFB. To achieve the proper photographic angle, the telescope/camera system was located a hundred or so miles up the California coast, on a hilltop near the town of Big Sur. Lt. Jacobs, who was assigned to the 1369th Photographic Squadron at Vandenberg and held the title Officer-in-Charge of Photo- instrumentation, was the telescope site commander. Major Mansmann had been assigned to Vandenberg AFB's Office of the Chief Scientist, 1st Strategic Aerospace Division. In his role as photo interpreter, he routinely analyzed the motion picture films of the missile tests, including the dramatic film in question. In 1982, Dr. Bob Jacobsby then out of the Air Force and a college professorwrote a short article about the Big Sur case. Rejected by OMNI magazine, it was eventually published by the tabloid National Enquirer. While at Vandenberg, Jacobs revealed, he had unexpectedly been ordered to attend a restricted meeting during which one of the missile launch films his team had shot at Big Sur was shown. Much to his amazement, a short segment of the footage captured the dramatic UFO shoot-down of the dummy nuclear Jacobs recently told me, "At the time of the filming, no one at the telescope site, including me, was aware of the UFO encounter as it occurred because the image orthicon picture tube being filmed by a 35mm film camera was covered by a black shroud. Moreover, because of the distances involved, we saw nothing unusual with the naked eye." According to Jacobs, as he and Major Mansmann, two other Air Force officers, and two men dressed in civilian clothes watched the film in stunned silence, the missile's dummy nuclear warhead, by then separated from the Atlas missile, was suddenly approached by a small bright object, which rapidly circled the warhead, shooting four distinct beams of light at it, at roughly 90-degree intervals as it UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection maneuvered. Seconds later, the warhead began to tumble and eventually fell into the Pacific Ocean, well short of its intended target downrange. Meanwhile, the unidentified object had raced out of camera frame. At the time of the incident, the missile, the dummy warhead, and the intruder were all traveling several thousand miles per hour. According to Jacobs, after the film ended Mansmann asked for his interpretation of the event, whereupon Jacobs blurted out, "It looks to me like we got a UFO!" Mansmann, after quickly glancing at the men in civilian clothes, sternly admonished Jacobs, telling him never to repeat those words. He then told Jacobs that the shoot-down had "never happened" and ordered him to leave his office. My full-length article on Big Sur provides much more detail about these events. About a year after Jacobs' article was published, UFO investigator Lee Graham located Mansmannwho by then held a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and was engaged in research at Stanford Universityand asked him to comment on Jacobs' revelations. In response, Mansmann wrote a series of letters to Graham and other interested researchers, in which he very reluctantly confirmed the validity and accuracy of Dr. Jacobs' published account. He disputed only one thing: Jacobs had written that the UFO incident had occurred in 1965; Mansmann said it was in 1964.4 I have had copies of those letters in my possession since 1987. Among other statements to Graham et al, Mansmann wrote that, following his analysis, the incident had been officially classified Top Secret and that the film had been immediately confiscated by the men in civilian clothes whom Mansmann identified as CIA agents.5 (Mansmann referred to "two" agents in every letter on the subject except this one, when he mistakenly referred to three.) In late 1984, Graham reacquainted Jacobs with Mansmann whereupon the former lieutenant thanked the retired major for endorsing the accuracy of his published account of the filming of the UFO. In one letter to Mansmann, Jacobs also marveled at the amount of detail provided by the former photo-analyst in his letters to Graham and others, given that Jacobs had not known the results of that analysis at the time. Jacobs speculated that those aboard the UFO had "fired a shot across the bow of our nuclear silliness ship," by which he meant that the shoot-down of the dummy warhead may have been a "warning" against the U.S. military's possession and testing of nuclear weapons.6 Jacobs' letter also makes clear that while he did not know the film had been officially classified Top Secret when he publicly revealed its existence in 1982, he nevertheless thought that the American people should know the facts, and did not regret revealing the dramatic UFO encounter in his article. Mansmann, on the other hand, expressed concern about the national security-related information "falling into the wrong hands" (i.e. the Soviets).7 According to Lee Graham, he also fretted that the "agency involved" in the film's confiscation would somehow exact its revenge on him, given that he had voluntarily confirmed Jacobs' account of the still-highly-classified incident. Thankfully, those fears proved unfounded, probably because the CIA realized that the "cat UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection was out of the bag," as Jacobs once put it, and that any harassment of the decorated veteran might backfire if Mansmann went to the media and revealed what he knew, thereby publicly reinforcing Jacobs' In any case, the two ex-Air Force officers' letters make clear that some 20 years after-the-fact, they were still dumbfounded by, and marveling over, the amazing incident they had witnessed on film in 1964. That correspondence was never intended for publication and I am the first to make it available. In 1989, Jacobs wrote a lengthier, more detailed article on the Big Sur UFO Incident, which was published by the MUFON UFO Journal.8 In it, he complained that following his first two articles on Big Sur (the second one had been published by OMNI in 1985) he had been harassed by UFO debunker James Oberg, a leading member of the organization responsible for publishing Skeptical Inquirer, then called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), now renamed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). Another CSICOPer, Philip J. Klass, soon piled on, attacking Dr. Jacobs in a series of rebuking letters. Klass went so far as to contact Jacobs' department chairman at the University of Maine, to allege that the communications professor was behaving in an inappropriate manner for an academician. In response, Jacobs circulated a strongly-worded retort, "Low Klass: A Rejoinder". At one point, wrote Jacobs, Klass had told him in a letter that if he was uneasy about communicating with the debunker, Klass would provide as references Admiral Bobby R. Inmanthe former Director of the National Security Agency, who also held Deputy Director positions at both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agencyand Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Klass not only provided Jacobs with their names, but home addresses as well, and told him, "Both men have worked with me and gotten to know me in my efforts for Aviation Week."9 Jacobs, viewing this offer as a veiled threat and suspecting that Klass was attempting to set him up for a security violation, consulted an attorney, who told him not to respond directly to the debunker. Klass, now deceased, was often accused of being a disinformation agent for the U.S. governmenta charge he always vehemently denied. And yet, in a private letter to Jacobs, the long-time CSICOP/CSI UFO debunker openly bragged about his high-powered intelligence community friends, presumably because he never thought that Jacobs would actually publish portions of the letter. Moreover, James Oberg, another high-profile CSICOP/CSI debunker who has repeatedly attempted to discredit Jacobs' and Mansmann's amazing story, also made self-incriminating comments to Jacobs in a letter obviously never meant for public view. Unfortunately for Oberg, Jacobs later published excerpts from that letter as well. Oops! UFOs & Nukes The UFO / Nuclear Weapons Connection Oberg, a former USAF officer himself, once did classified work relating to nuclear weapons at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. While there, in 1970-72, he had also been a "Security Officer" for his immediate group within the lab's Battle Environments Branch, meaning that he was responsible for monitoring the security procedures used to safeguard the classified documents generated by it.10 In his letter to Dr. Jacobs, Oberg chastised him, saying, "Since you obviously feel free to discuss top secret UFO data, what would you be willing to say about other top secret aspects of the Atlas warhead which you alluded to briefly...?"11 Once a security officer, always a security officer, I guess. So, to recap, among CSICOP/CSI's top UFO "skeptics" we have a long-time PR Specialist (Frazier) who worked for the U.S. government's nuclear weapons program for over two decades; a journalist (Klass) who worked for decades for an intelligence community-friendly publication, Aviation Week, who privately cited as character references two of the top figures in the NSA and CIA; and a former Air Force officer (Oberg) whose job it was to protect nuclear weapons-related secrets. And, supposedly, all three of these individuals object to Jacobs and Mansmann's revelations about the