Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
by Martin Kufus
The Pentagon is adamant that no flying saucer crashed in July 1947 near Roswell, N.M., and that no aliens nor advanced technology were recovered and secreted away. It’s an odd coincidence, nonetheless, that the world’s most famous UFO-related incident occurred near the world’s only nuclear weapons.
By summer 1947 – almost two years after World War II – a nuclear triangle existed in central New Mexico.
To the north, the Los Alamos National Laboratory built the world’s only atomic bombs. To the south, the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Site was still radioactive from a July 1945 A-bomb test. To the east, Roswell Army Air Field was home to the world’s only nuclear-capable bombers. The alleged UFO crash site and debris field fell within this triangle.
READ MORE: Beyond the Crash: Roswell, the Nuclear Triangle, and UFO Questions That Remain Unanswered
Roswell aside, some nongovernmental UFO investigators and writers – “ufologists” – believe that an extraterrestrial intelligence is particularly interested in Earth’s nuclear weapons. Hollywood fictionalized that idea decades ago. In 1951’s black-and-white The Day the Earth Stood Still, a flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and a spaceman with a scary robot bodyguard sternly warns that an Earth with atomic weapons someday will become an unacceptable threat to other worlds.
In reality, the U.S. military, primarily the Air Force, has looked into a possible link between anomalous sightings and nuclear sites. There presumably have been too many reports through the years by highly trained and cleared military personnel – with nothing to gain by speaking up – to ignore.
In March 2024, the Pentagon released Volume 1 of an extensive report on U.S. Government involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. The project was the work of the civilian-led All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The report cites events and incidents, along with government, military, and academic investigations from 1945–2023.
The group investigated a cluster of UAP sightings that occurred near U.S. nuclear facilities, wherein nuclear missiles were destroyed or malfunctioned.
READ MORE: Mussolini’s UFO file: The 1933 Magenta Crash Declassified
Investigators interviewed five former USAF members who served in and around various U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile silos between 1966 and 1977. The silos were at Air Force bases in Montana, South Dakota, California, and North Dakota.
“Some of these individuals claim UAP sightings near the silos, while others claim UAP disruptions to ICBM operations,” the document notes. Specifically, they said the ICBM launch control facilities went offline or experienced total power failure.
One interviewee and a USAF videographer claimed to have seen and recorded a UAP destroying an ICBM loaded with a ‘dummy’ warhead, mid-flight, the report notes.
The disruptions to ICBM operations might refer to two highly publicized incidents in 1967 at the nuclear-missile field at Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls, Montana.
Separately, the incidents are explored in depth by author Robert L. Hastings in his book, UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites.
In these 1967 incidents, Hastings writes, military personnel reported seeing large round or saucer-shaped UFOs hovering over underground ICBM silos during highly unusual malfunctions.
The UFO’s apparently disrupted all 10 Minuteman I missiles in one sector on March 16 of that year, and repeated the process around March 24, when they shut down at least six to eight missiles simultaneously, Hastings writes.
Air Force sources attributed the 1967 Malmstrom shutdowns to an unannounced, secret test of site vulnerability to electromagnetic pulse (EMP), the Wall Street Journal reported in June 2025. The report prompted considerable online debate.
The alleged destruction of an ICBM loaded with a ‘dummy’ warhead, as mentioned in the AARO report, likely refers to the “Big Sur UFO Incident” in September 1964 off the coast of California.
In that incident, an Atlas-D ICBM lifted off from Vandenberg AFB with “an experimental enemy radar-defeating system and dummy nuclear warhead,” Hastings writes in his book.
“Shortly after nosecone separation, as the warhead raced toward a targeted splashdown at Eniwetok Lagoon in the Pacific Ocean, it was approached by a disc-shaped UFO,” he writes. The object chased and circled the dummy warhead, emitting four bright flashes of light, causing the warhead to tumble and fall hundreds of miles shy of its target, the book adds.
Atlas missiles on alert at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 1960
During that mission, the Air Force had positioned a sophisticated telescopic camera system at Big Sur, to record the test. Afterwards, two USAF officers who scrutinized the classified motion-picture film afterward reportedly described a shoot-down by a UFO using a directed-energy weapon.
Hastings describes other UFO sightings, such as those at nuclear-weapon tests at the Nevada Test Site and, in the Pacific, of increasingly powerful thermonuclear weapons. In researching the book, he states, he interviewed more than 150 former military personnel, mostly from the Air Force but also Navy and Army.
The American public, for its part, is skeptical of learning the truth from the U.S. government. The Pew Research Center notes that in 1958, about 75 percent of Americans believed the government did the right thing “almost always” or “most of the time” regarding truth-telling about UFO’s. Since 2007, that number has never climbed above 30 percent.
Meanwhile, UAP content in popular culture is more pervasive now than ever, the AARO reports.
The Pentagon has not yet released the second volume of the UAP report. The release date has not been announced.
Writer Martin Kufus was a staff editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1995–97. He is a contracted technical editor at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. That work is unrelated to this story. He is the author of a memoir, Plow the Dirt but Watch the Sky.
