Since 1973, I have interviewed 167 of those veterans regarding their experiences. Kirkpatrick asked whether I would be willing to contact the individuals with whom I am still in touch, to learn whether they would be willing to testify before AARO staffers. I readily agreed to do so and spent a few days reaching out to them.

A telephone conference was subsequently arranged for January 13th, between Kirkpatrick, two of AARO’s staffers, the Congressional investigator, and myself. I informed the other participants that I had contacted the veterans—mostly former/retired US Air Force personnel—and that eleven had agreed to testify before AARO. At that point, I was asked to prioritize the witnesses, in terms of their importance. Kirkpatrick explained that his group had already been contacted by many other veterans who wished to testify—regarding other types of UFO-related events—and that it would be awhile before AARO could interview all of the eleven I had recommended.

In response, I said that while all of the vets were important, I suggested that Kirkpatrick’s staff first contact former US Air Force ICBM launch officer Bob Salas, who had been on duty during an incident at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, on March 24/25, 1967, during which an orange, disc-shaped UFO had briefly hovered over the front gate at the Oscar Flight Launch Control Facility (LCF). The underground Launch Control Center beneath the LCF controlled ten Minuteman-1 missiles.

Seconds after one of Salas’ Security Police guards frantically called down to the launch capsule to report the UFO to him, all ten of the ICBMs dropped offline, one after the other. In other words, they were unlaunchable and it took several hours to repair and retarget them. (Another of my sources, Robert Jamison, had been a missile targeting officer at Malmstrom and had assisted in bringing the Oscar Flight ICBMs back to full functionality. Jamison said that he and his team received a special “UFO briefing” before leaving for the field, instructing them what to do should another UFO appear while they worked.)

Following the incident, Salas and his missile commander, the late Col. Frederick Meiwald, were debriefed by an Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent and required to sign national security non-disclosure statements that stipulated severe penalties and fines should they violate security.

Salas kept his silence until 1996, when he went public in an article, co-written with researcher Jim Klotz. Years later, on September 27, 2010, Salas and I co-sponsored the UFOs and Nukes press conference in Washington D.C., which was live-streamed by CNN. At that event, he and six other US Air Force veterans who I had interviewed described their involvement in nuclear weapons-related UFO incidents. Their disclosures received extensive, worldwide media coverage.

The second former USAF officer who I recommended to AARO as a high-priority interviewee was Dr. Bob Jacobs, who was involved in an amazing incident at Vandenberg AFB, California, in September 1964. Jacobs had been the officer-in-charge of a telescopic camera team tasked with filming missile test launches at the base. To achieve a side-view perspective of events, the telescope site was actually located roughly a hundred miles northwest of VAFB, up the California coast, on a hilltop at Big Sur.

During one such launch, on September 15th, the film crew inadvertently captured a UFO on film, as it approached and circled the missile’s separated dummy nuclear warhead, which was flying downrange over the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, the UFO—a domed-disc—directed four bright beams of light at the warhead. Seconds after being struck by them, it began tumbling and quickly fell out of sub-orbit hundreds of miles short of its target.

The film of the astonishing incident was soon viewed by Vandenberg’s photo-interpretation officer, Major Florenze J. Mansmann, Lieutenant Jacobs, and two CIA officers who confiscated it and classified the incident Top Secret. Jacobs finally revealed the event in a magazine article in 1982, after which he received numerous anonymous death threats over the telephone. (Skeptics, using demonstrably inaccurate information, have unsuccessfully attempted to debunk this case. The authoritative, documented summary of it appears in my book.)

Anyway, Jacobs testified about the incident to an AARO staffer on February 10, 2023; Salas testified about his 1967 experience at Malmstrom AFB on February 15th.

I have been lecturing about the UFO-Nukes Connection at American colleges and universities since 1981. More recently, Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s earlier UFO investigations group, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), has repeatedly, publicly referred to UFO/UAP activity at nuclear sites during television and newspaper interviews and podcasts. In one, he said that his Pentagon group had utilized UFOs and Nukes as a resource, and that I had done “a fantastic job” researching the subject.

Additionally, AATIP’s scientific consultant, Dr. Hal Puthoff, has also confirmed in interviews a longstanding and widespread pattern of UFO activity at nuclear sites, as has former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon.

Moreover, the late US Senator Harry Reid, who had secretly secured funding for AATIP, also publicly discussed the UFO-nukes link during interviews. According to journalist George Knapp, Reid had read my book and was stunned by the testimony of the veterans contained in it. (He no doubt had his own military sources as well). Reid, Elizondo, Mellon and Puthoff became Disclosure advocates in recent years, believing that the US government should be more candid with the American public on the topic of UFOs.

Hopefully, the rest of the veterans who I recommended to AARO will be interviewed soon and, more importantly, their testimony regarding the reality and obvious importance of UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites will be brought to the attention of Congress.