How an American filmed a UFO and was forced to keep silent about it

For decades, Jacobs obediently kept silent about this, while conducting intensive research on the UFO phenomenon. It wasn't until 1973 that he finally broke his silence about the incident by mentioning it on a small late-night radio show.

This story happened to a man named Robert (Bob) Jacobs, who called himself a doctor of philosophy and a professor at the Faculty of Journalism and Broadcasting (the name of the university where he taught was not announced). She is known only from his words, but some ufologists assure that Jacobs is a very reliable person and all this is not a hoax at all, but a real case. In 1964, Jacobs was in the military and served as the head of the photo-optical Instruments department in the 1369th Photographic Squadron at Vandenherg Air Force Base, California.

One day he was commissioned to take photos of the launch of a military Atlas missile from the Western Test site of the same base. It was emphasized that they wanted to get good pictures from a certain point at all stages of the rocket flight, for which Jacobs had to go 124 miles outside the base to a coastal place called Big Sur.

Jacobs and his assistants got to Big Sur and got access to the Boston University telescope belonging to the Eastern Test Site of the US Air Force - a fairly large device, "slightly smaller than a van" in size, to take good photos of the rocket at high altitude.

At first, it was difficult for him and his team to find a suitable place to install the resulting telescope, but on June 10, 1964, they were able to find the right point near Anderson Peak, at an altitude of 3400 feet, on the Forest Service trail.

The location was perfect because from here they could see a clear rocket launch line. On August 31, they brought the telescope here and installed the equipment, after which they spent a three-day test period waiting for the launch to make sure everything was calibrated and working flawlessly.

When the Atlas rocket was launched, Jacob's team managed to do everything they had planned and they also captured everything on video, clear and clear. Jacobs then collected the footage and brought it to the base, where it was planned to prepare for viewing the next day.

However, the very next morning something went wrong. When they installed the project in the observation room and called a group of military men here, among them Jacob noticed two men in simple gray suits who spoke little and constantly watched him.

It was a little disturbing and Jacobs had no idea who these mysterious people were, but he sat down and prepared to watch the movie, still feeling their eyes on the back of his head. Then the movie started, and Jacobs started talking about what was happening on the screen:

It was a great pleasure for me to see the recording from Big Sur after all the months of planning and weeks of work. I was quite surprised and very pleased with the quality, especially at the appropriate distance, as we could quite clearly distinguish the separated bow end, the radar experiment and the dummy warhead, which floated beautifully at high altitude.

When we came to the end of the recording, Major Mansmann said, "Now watch carefully, Lieutenant Jacobs." At that moment, the most wonderful vision of my life appeared on the screen. From left to right, another object got into the frame. He approached the warhead package and maneuvered around it. That is, this something was flying in a relative polar orbit around our warhead, which itself was heading towards the South Pacific Ocean at a speed of about 18 thousand miles per hour! When this new object circled around the equipment, it emitted four distinct bright flashes of light. These outbursts were very intense.

After that, the object left the frame in the same direction from where it appeared. The shape of the object resembled a classic "flying saucer". In the middle of the upper half of the object was a dome. From this dome, or directly below it, a ray of light seemed to emanate, which caused the described flashes. Next, the warhead failed and flew out of the suborbite hundreds of miles from the target.

This unidentified flying thing" obviously shot down an American dummy atomic warhead! The video ended, the lights came on, and Major Mansmann said: "Lieutenant Jacobs, were you or any of your people fooling around there in Big Sur?", "No, sir," I answered honestly. I was shaking with excitement. "Then tell me... what the hell was that?" he asked. I looked Major Mansmann straight in the eye. "It seems to me that we have a UFO here," I said. There was a suffocating silence among the people in gray civilian suits who continued to stare at me. And then Major Mansmann told them what I can only describe as "let me handle this myself."

Here's what he said:

After that, the major made it clear to Jacobs that he should never talk about what he saw in this room, and never talk about the footage from this video again, and the people in gray at that time sat and looked at him with an incomprehensible expression.

When Jacobs was about to leave, he was told that telling about anything of this in another place would be considered a security breach, and the major also added strangely: "If at some point in the future someone puts pressure on you about this and you can't help but respond to them, just tell them that these were laser tracking flashes, okay?"

That's all. He was sent about his business and for the next decade, Jacobs obediently kept silent about this, while simultaneously conducting intensive research on the UFO phenomenon. It wasn't until 1973 that he finally broke his silence about the incident by mentioning it on a small late-night radio show he was hosting in Eureka, California at the time.

Then he was immediately inundated with calls from people who told him about their own UFO sightings. Fortunately, at that time it was such a small program that it did not cause any media noise, except for calls from local listeners, and there were no sinister consequences, including no strange gray figures appearing at his door.

In 1983, Jacobs decided to write a full article about what happened in 1964 in order to publish it and get more coverage of the case:

I realized that there was no "security breach" in this story. This damn thing has never been under a security code or anything. In fact, they just told me that this "NEVER HAPPENED"! Therefore, I realized that I could freely tell the story to anyone, since it did not officially relate to the event. 

I wrote my article and then went to magazines, trying to find the one where it would be published. Eventually, The National Enquirer published it. And, as retired Major Florence J. would say now. Mansmann, "Jacobs opened Pandora's box." A variety of researchers, amateurs, cranks, supporters and detractors started contacting me.

James Oberg, a frequent "mouthpiece" of some NASA projects and a self-proclaimed "UFO Whistleblower", wrote to me to refute my story and provocatively ask: "Since you obviously don't hesitate to discuss top secret UFO data, what would you like to say about the other top secret aspects of the Atlas warhead that you briefly mentioned?". In response, I told Mr. Berg where to shove his inappropriate cynicism.

Here's what he said:

Despite this, the military completely denied that any footage from Jacobs' video ever existed in reality, and none of them were ever published. Indeed, according to Jacobs, the US Air Force has done everything in its power to discredit him and distance itself from him.

Jacobs also doubts that the Air Force itself will ever release the footage, and insisted that the requests of the American Freedom of Information Act will be fruitless since the footage he shot was probably simply destroyed shortly after that day in the viewing room:

The Air Force alternately stated that I had never been a military officer at all, that I had never served at Vandenberg Base, that I had never been the head of the optical instruments department in the 1369th Photographic Squadron, and that there had never been a missile tracking site in Big Sur.

It was also stated that the Atlas-F rocket, or, for that matter, any other rocket, was not launched on the date or dates I reported. I don't believe that anyone will be able to get my film on a FOIA request. I was asked to make such a request personally, but I refused to do it. Eric Mishara, Lee Graham, T. Scott Crane Jr. and others have done this and hit a wall of futility. I don't believe that anyone will be able to get the film, because the fact of its existence has now been completely erased from the records.

Investigators who encounter negative responses from the Air Force or representatives who are currently in Vandenberg are not necessarily intentionally deceived. Almost 25 years have passed, and currently no one at the base remembers this event personally, let alone any official records about it. Think about the very limited number of people who saw the movie in the first place, and you'll realize how easy it was to make it disappear.

Here's what he said:

This case and the veracity of Jacobs' story have since been repeatedly analyzed and discussed by ufologists and other researchers, whose work has been constantly complicated by the fact that there is absolutely no concrete evidence to support what he says. Although he has a high academic pedigree and certainly seems to be a reliable witness, it was difficult to even verify his involvement in anything related to Vandenherg Air Force Base, as they deny that he ever worked for them. Skeptics also pointed out that the story was first published in The National Enquirer, a well-known shoddy tabloid, but Jacobs defended himself on this:

"Some of my academic colleagues ridiculed me for writing an article about this cover-up in 1982, and it appeared in The National Enquirer. I had no intention of becoming a tabloid writer either then or now. The Enquirer turned out to be the only publication I could find that was interested in publishing the article at all. Both academic and mainstream journals and periodicals rejected it for almost a year, during which time I submitted and resubmitted it. Editor after editor told me that UFO stories should not be "published"." Then I thought this story was important. That's why I let the tabloid publish this. I still think it's important. That's why I responded to the invitation to write this for this magazine."

Here's what he said:

Indeed, he has always fiercely defended the veracity of his story, and since then it has been published in MUFON UFO Journal (the main ufo journal of the USA), issue No. 249. In this report, he repeats what happened, and even suggests that the military may have known about the UFO in advance, perhaps even specifically appointing him to shoot in Big Sur with an ulterior motive so that he would film this UFO. In his conclusion for MUFON, he stated the following:

"Academics first collect data and then draw conclusions based on what they discover. From what I have gathered first-hand, the primary evidence received from Mansmann, from an excellent researcher named Lee M. Graham, from reflection, discussion and discussion of the material, as well as from the position of the Air Force on this and other related issues, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. On that September day in 1964, we photographed a solid three-dimensional flying device with intelligent control.
2. The object emitted a beam of energy, possibly a plasma beam, onto the dummy warhead and caused it to malfunction.
3. This object was not something that our science and technology in 1964 were capable of. Therefore, the most likely explanation for the device is its extraterrestrial origin.
4. The flashes of light that we recorded on tape did not come from laser tracking devices. There were no such devices then, except for small laboratory models.
5. Most likely, the BU Tele telescope was brought to California specifically to photograph this event, which was planned in advance. That is, we were set up to record an event that someone in our government knew about in advance.
6. What we photographed that day was the first ground demonstration of what later became known as the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) or the Star Wars Project. For some reason, the demonstration was arranged for our benefit by aliens.

It is unknown whether we can believe Jacobs or not, and it is impossible to look at his footage on our own because it was either destroyed or so classified that it will never see the light of day, which condemns it to uncertainty for assumptions and disputes.

We have a lot of questions and few answers left. What exactly was Jacobs filming? Who were these people in gray suits and why did the military think in advance that the footage was special? What did these shots show?

We will probably never know the answers, and if his story is true, then this is just another example of how the government is doing everything possible to hide evidence that they don't want people to see. The only one who seems to really know for sure is Jacobs himself, and it looks like it will stay that way for a long time.

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About author:

Serg Toporkov Ufologist, Ph.D., blogger, I go on my own expeditions for UFOs. I use scientific methods to investigate the UAP phenomenon. Write to me

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Related tags:

UFO  1964  interview  UFO sighting  UFO phenomenon  Men in black