Evidence documenting one of the most significant events in UFO history remains classified Top Secret and unavailable to Congress and the public. It is a real shame. The data include high-quality movie film that alleges to show a flying saucer attacking and destroying an Atlas ICBM in flight.
The Vandenberg UFO incident was recorded from a United States Air Force missile tracking station set up in the mountains near Big Sur, California, about 125 miles north and west, up the Pacific coast from the missile’s launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, on or around September 22, 1964.
The central witnesses are former United States Air Force officers, 1st Lt. Robert Jacobs and Maj. Florence J. Mansmann, Jr. The following section is from the article Lt. Roberts wrote, published in the January 1989 MUFON UFO Journal (PDF):
It was a surprise and a delight for me to be seeing the kinescope recording from Big Sur after all the months of planning and weeks of work. I was quite amazed and very pleased with the quality, especially at the distance involved as we could make out quite plainly the separated nosecone, the radar experiment and the dummy warhead all sailing along beautifully about 60 miles straight up from planet Earth and some 300 to 500 nautical miles down range. As we neared the end of the camera run, Mansmann said, “Watch carefully now, Lieutenant Jacobs.”
At that point the most remarkable vision of my life came on the screen. Another object flew into the frame from left to right. It approached the warhead package and maneuvered around it. That is, this ... “thing” ... flew a relative polar orbit around our warhead package which was itself heading toward the South Pacific at some 18 thousand miles an hour!
As the new object circumnavigated our hardware, it emitted four distinct, bright flashes of light at approximately the 4 cardinal compass points of its orbit. These flashes were so intense that each “strike” caused the 1.0. tube to “bloom” or form a halo around the spot. Following this remarkable aerial display, the object departed the frame in the same direction from which it had come. The shape of the object was that of a classic “flying saucer.” In the middle of the top half of the object was a dome. From that dome, or just beneath it, seemed to issue a beam of light which caused the flashes described.
Subsequently the warhead malfunctioned and tumbled out of suborbit hundreds of miles short of its target. This ... unidentified flying ... “thing” ... had apparently “shot down” an American dummy atomic warhead!
The lights came on and Major Mansmann said, “Lieutenant Jacobs, were you or any of your people fooling around up there at Big Sur?”
“No sir,” I answered honestly. I was shaking with excitement.
“Then tell me ... what the Hell was that?”
I looked Major Mansmann straight in the eye. “It looks to me like we got a UFO,” I said.
There was a stifling silence among the men in grey, civilian suits who continued to stare at me. Major Mansmann gave them what I can only describe as a “let me handle this” look.
Click here for his MUFON Journal report in PDF format on the incident.
The United States Air Force needed to optically monitor and photographically document the test flights and missions of its emerging missile force, especially the nascent fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles. These included America’s first ICBM, Atlas, and its successors Minuteman and Titan.
Working with a team from Boston University, Air Force scientists and engineers developed a telescope that could track and film a rocket in flight, at high speeds and from more than 100 miles away. The instrument is seen in the image below. It later would track, record and share from Cape Kennedy the historic missions of the Gemini-Titan and the Apollo-Saturn rockets that helped mankind walk on the moon.
A marvel of optical, electrical and mechanical engineering, the telescopic camera system required a team of more than 100 Air Force and civilian specialists to set-up and operate. Positioned in the mountains above the hazy Pacific air, the camera created a close-up, detailed and clear record of an ICBM in flight. The images looked, members of the crew said, as if one were standing next to an Atlas on the launch pad.
Lieutenant Jacobs is standing on the far right in the back row in the photo above. Major Hansmann is in the second row, second from the end on the right. Lt. Jacobs discussed the work and UFO experience in 2021 with Micah Hanks of The Debrief:
The Incident at Vandenberg Air Force Base
Dr. Robert Jacobs, a former USAF lieutenant and missile test photographic officer, also joined the conference remotely from his home in southwest Missouri.
“I was part of a U.S. Air Force coverup for seventeen years,” Jacobs said. An officer in charge of photo-optical instruments at Vandenberg Air Force Base in the 1960s, Jacobs oversaw a 100-man unit that supplied instrumental photography for launches within the Western Range.
“Our duty was to provide coverage for every launch,” Jacobs explained, recounting that many of the missile tests at that time resulted in failures. “Many of the missiles blew up on the pad,” Jacobs explained, noting that engineers wanted to be able to review footage of the tests to aid in troubleshooting problems with the missiles.
Jacobs had been tasked with going to Big Sur to evaluate whether a (20-inch) telescope could be mounted on a mountaintop to help acquire additional side-view observations of missile launches from Vandenberg. On September 14, 1967, an Atlas D missile was launched from Vandenberg, at which time Jacobs had been at the Big Sur facility to aid in operating the telescope, which was equipped for kinetoscope recording with an Image Orthicon tube connected to a 35 mm Mitchell motion picture camera.
“We couldn’t see what the telescope was seeing,” Jacobs explained, noting that the camera equipment prevented them from watching through the telescope in real-time.
“We watched this missile until it went out of sight,” Jacobs said. After successfully recording the launch, the footage was recovered, and Jacobs returned with his team to Vandenburg.
Two days later, Jacobs was called to the office of Major Florenze J. Mansmann, then the Chief Science Officer at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where Mansmann asked him to describe what he observed during the launch.
“There were two guys,” Jacobs recalled. “Two men in gray flannel suits,” who joined Jacobs and Mansmann in the room where a film projector had been set up. After Jacobs described what he and his team had observed, he was asked to sit down and watch the footage of the launch.
“The most amazing thing happened,” Jacobs said, as he recalled watching the missile going through its planned stages. “[The missile] was flying along, going about 8000 miles an hour now.”
“Suddenly, from in the frame we saw an object come in from the same way we were going,” Jacobs explained. “This object flew in, it came up to our warhead, it went around the top of the warhead, fired a beam of light down onto the top of the warhead. It went around to the front of the warhead—remember, we’re all traveling at about 8000 miles an hour here—fired another beam of light, went down below the warhead, fired another beam of light. Went around the way it had come in, fired another beam of light, [and] then it flew out of the frame the same way it had come in.”
“At that point, the warhead tumbled out of space, “Jacobs said.
When asked what the object was, Jacobs told his superior officer that it looked like they had captured a UFO on film. Jacobs was told never to talk about the incident.
“It was shaped like a flying saucer,” Jacobs added. “How could such a thing happen? That thing was up there. I saw it, it was on film.”
“What had happened to me (was) my world changed,” Jacobs remembers. “My worldview changed, but I was under orders to shut up, so I shut up… part of the U.S. Air Force coverup, in fact.”
Jacobs, who went on to host a late-night radio program several years later, eventually talked about his experience on the air. Jacobs said that for years afterward he was subjected to harassment in the form of threatening phone calls, and eventually his termination from a position he held at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh after his supervisor received a letter of complaint from Philip J. Klass, a former senior editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology and noted UFO skeptic.
A Hero’s Example
Dr. Robert Jacobs is a hero, both for resisting the attempts of bullies from within government, academia and the press to pressure him, as well as for his reporting of what he experienced while on active duty as a commissioned officer in the US Air Force. Dr. Jacobs saw something that demonstrated to him that we are not alone in this universe and considered the news worthy of reporting to the government’s boss, “We the People.”
When ordered by their superiors, 1st Lt. Robert Jacobs and Major Florenze J. Mansmann, Jr. did their duty and kept silent about what they saw on film and discussed. Years later, when the men, both of whom earned PhD degrees, realized that the story was being covered up for un-American reasons, they told the truth as they saw and remember.
Of course, the possibility exists the two were themselves manipulated by others, a psyop (psychological operation) or spy op (take three letters and a number). The Atlas Launch Log from Vandenberg Air Force / Space Force Base reads:
Date: 1964 SEP 22 / Launch Time: Unknown / Vehicle: Atlas /
Pad-Silo: D 4300 A-3 / Comments: SAC launch Buzzing Bee.
Hmmm. “Buzzing Bee.” Sort of sums up what was reported on the film - a bee flew around our bird and stung it. Who gave the launch that code name, when and why?
Perhaps someone in the US Government, or an unknown human agency, and/or some non-human intelligence from off-world or not, wanted to see what two USAF officers would do when faced with evidence of extraterrestrial technology affecting, if not destroying, a key part of the national defense?
Going from the publicly available record of the phenomena’s interactions with people and organizations, such nefarious operations by secret agencies or unknown operators is a real possibility. However, the professional qualifications and personal integrity of Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Mansmann, who knew what moving films and special effects were capable of depicting in 1964, make manipulation a very minor possibility.
One more thing to remember: the rationale for most all UAP whistleblowers coming forward is not the profit motive: It is to tell the truth. Now it’s up to us to continue the work and share what we discover about the UFO phenomenon. It’s the least we can do to honor Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Mansmann — and continue the search for truth and service for the good of the nation.
The image at the top of the post: A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the third Mobile User Objective System satellite for the United States Navy launched from Space Launch Complex-41 at 8:04 p.m. EST on Jan. 20, 2015. Credit: United Launch Alliance. The image tracks the latest version of the Atlas booster as it lifts off from Cape Kennedy to blaze an arc through the night sky and on to outer space.