What’s more acceptable — an inability to secure our nuclear bombs, or the prospect that those who pick the locks can also enter our bedrooms whenever they want?/CREDIT: businessinsider

Once you concede, officially, that you’re dealing with phenomena that shatter longstanding laws of physics, where does it end? The extent of it? Hardware? Pilot/occupants? Would we know the end if we saw it? If an elusive radar target can plummet 80,000 feet in a fraction of a second, then reappear 60 miles away in a flash at a predetermined and coded military rendezvous point, does this mean they can read our minds, too? How deep does it get?

“It’s a slippery slope,” says researcher Robert Hastings from his home in southern Colorado. “If someone in authority finally admits that UFOs are real, then a lot of other questions are going to be asked – especially if you’ve been denying the truth for 70 years. I don’t know how you put the lid back on Pandora’s box.”

The lid popped off under the Trump regime when the U.S. Navy authenticated a series of hot-pursuit videos and issued new instructions to its sailors for reporting UFOs. Yet, military intelligence hasn’t formally addressed head-on what small but growing numbers of transparency advocates have been talking up for years – the wide-open vulnerabilities of America’s arsenal of mass destruction. Chief among them is Robert Hastings, author of UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites and producer of a companion documentary, “UFOS and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed.”

Hastings had few takers in the mainstream media when the book went to press in 2008. He incurred a tepid response two years later, when he persuaded seven retired Air Force officers to join him in Washington to share first-person accounts of UFOs ripping holes in no-fly zones over Strategic Air Command bases. They represented just a fraction of the 160 or so service personnel who went on the record during Hastings’ four-plus decades of research into multiple allegations of UFO tampering with our doomsday weapons. Former USAF captain Robert Salas put a face on the charges by recalling how a UFO hovered over a launch control facility at Malmstrom AFB in 1967 and disabled a flight of 10 fully loaded Minuteman missiles.

CNN livestreamed the testimony from the National Press Club, but the media wasn’t big on followups back then. Truth was, the Malmstrom incident had been in the public sphere since 1973, when defense contractor and Sylvania manager Raymond Fowler – whose duties drew him into the damage-assessment confusion – leaked the story to the Christian Science Monitor.  

Fowler, Salas and Hastings had more in common than a passing interest in UFOs. They were also witness to the freak show in the cellar, a door that nooobody attempting to manage and destigmatize the UFO conversation wants to open. All claim to have been abducted and subjected to varying degrees of examination trauma by UFO occupants whose motives are pitch black. Hastings was the last of the trio to come clean about it in 2019. That’s when he released Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed, a memoir which suggests his involuntary contacts began as early as age 2. Maybe that’s what set him on the path, subconsciously, to conduct seminal research on the nuclear connections.

If, as Hastings suspects, the UFO/nukes entanglement proves too hot for inclusion in the Pentagon’s imminent release of its UAP status report, a formal inquiry into the WMD angle is nevertheless inevitable. He applauds the efforts of former Department of Defense insiders like Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon, whose skills and persistence have compelled lawmakers to take a good hard bipartisan look at the evidence for confrontations with the ridiculously advanced hardware recorded on military video. And the momentum they’ve created is beginning to look irreversible – with the potential for international cooperation to boot.

“We know from documents that (investigative reporter) George Knapp smuggled out of Russia in 1994 Russian government’s interest in UFOs shown in documents – Mystery Wire that there have been incidents in the Soviet Union where they’ve had UFOs messing with their nuclear weapons, too,” Hastings adds. “So it’s real, and whoever’s flying these craft are not playing favorites.”

But how do you even begin to game out the consequences of acknowledging the abduction puzzle? If that’s real, there are no relevant analogies. The prevailing cliché about the UFO coverup is that it was enacted to prevent widespread panic amid a public mind riddled with Hollywood images of ET death rays and roaring urban infernos. But is it possible that something far more sublime, and far more intimate, could be far more terrifying?

“This subject for many people is still in the realm of fantasy, it’s a spooky movie on TV,” Hastings says. “But the concept that these entities can come through closed windows and ceilings and walls and somehow manipulate space time, where they can pass through physical objects – I was actually levitated off a bed, and my last memory was watching the rapidly approaching ceiling before I blacked out.”

Hastings has trouble imagining any development that would provoke a serious, policy-level discussion of abductions, given its implicit admission that a $900 billion military budget is incapable of preventing taxpayers from getting the lab-rat treatment at the hands of amoral non-human techno-wizards.

“If it was officially confirmed by some government agency that abductions are taking place, I think a lot of people would consider that a threat. It’s a violation of our individual freedoms,” he says. “You’re being taken against your will by entities that apparently have the ability to erase much of your memory about the event. So I think that would be perceived as a threat by many, many people, not just here in America but around the world.”

Which isn’t to say, accommodation is impossible. Hastings concedes that many so-called abductees report their lives being ruined by the experience, traditionally ascribed to bad dreams and sleep paralysis. “But lately,” he insists, “I don’t feel resentment. I don’t even feel fear anymore. I find it fascinating.”

Whether or not newly engaged Capitol Hill lawmakers would be so sanguine if a full accounting of the phenomenon required peeling back that layer of onionskin remains to be seen. Highly unlikely, though. But Hastings insists that trying to get a grip on what’s spoofing America’s nuclear bases while excluding the more uncomfortable clues is like being a little bit pregnant.

“At some point, humanity is going to know this is real, and they’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later.” Hastings doesn’t laugh often, but he manages a chuckle. “And that’s not my problem.”