Claimed filming of an unidentified object interfering with an Atlas missile test launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in September 1964. Lieutenant Robert Jacobs, who ran the tracking telescope at the Big Sur site, said in 1982 that the developed film showed a disc-shaped object approaching the dummy warhead in the upper atmosphere, circling it while emitting beams of light, and departing, after which the warhead tumbled out of trajectory.
The state of the evidence
Jacobs went on the record almost two decades after the event; Major Florenz Mansmann, his superior, corroborated part of the account, including a screening at which the film was described as classified and not to be discussed. The film has never surfaced. Kingston A. George, who worked on the same programme, published a detailed rebuttal arguing that what Jacobs saw was an optical artefact of the tracking system and the staging sequence, and Philip Klass argued the same. Nothing in the case has been resolved either way.
Why it is in the argument
It is one of the pillars of the Nuclear Interference literature that Robert Hastings assembled and that Closer Encounters uses to make its sovereignty argument: no state can concede that something interferes with its strategic arsenal and remain a state in the same sense. The claim carries that weight only if the film existed as described, and it rests on testimony.
Connections
Nuclear Interference · Robert Hastings · Philip Klass · Closer Encounters · Malmstrom AFB 1967 · Minot AFB 1968