What we photographed up at Vandenberg Air Force Base affected me for the rest of my life and made a huge impact on my understanding of the universe and of Governmental manipulation of our minds.

The background of this event is that we were testing ballistic missiles that were to deliver nuclear weapons on target. That’s what they were there for. We weren’t launching real nuclear weapons we were launching dummy warheads. They were the exact size, shape, dimension and weight of a nuclear warhead. I was the officer in charge of optical instrumentation at Vandenburg Air Force Base in the 1369th photo squadron and as such it was my duty to supervise the instrumentation photography of every missile that went down in that western test range. In those days we called them ICBM’s, inter-county ballistic missiles, because most of them blew up on launch. And our job was to determine why they blew up, to provide the engineers good engineering sequential photography so that they could see what was wrong with the burners that took off in flight. For my achievement in setting up the photographic station to track these tests I was awarded the Air Force Guided Missile insignia. I was the first photographer in the Air Force to get the Missile Badge and it was a highly coveted thing at the time.

The incident was definitely in 1964 because Major Mansmann confirmed that; he had written it down and knew the exact date of it.

They counted down the missile and we heard engine ignition lift-off so we knew the missile was underway. We were looking down south, southwest, and the missile popped up through the fog. It was just beautiful and I hollered, there it is. Our guys on our M45 tracking mount with a 180-inch lens on it filmed the missile. And the big BU telescope swung over and got it and we followed the thing. And sure enough we could see all three stages of powered flight boosters, they burned out and dropped away. And then of course, to our naked eye all we saw was a smoke trail going off into subspace as it headed off towards its target which was an island in the Pacific. Well, that was our first filming of a launch and we got it.

We sent the film back down to the base and- I don’t know exactly how long it was after the event, it might have been a day or two- I was called into Major Mansmann’s office at the First Strategic Aerospace Division Headquarters. I walked into his office and they had a screen and a 16mm projector set up. There was a couch and Major Mansmann said sit down. And there were two guys in gray suits, civilian clothes, which was fairly unusual. Major Mansmann said watch this and turned on the film projector. I watched the screen and there was the launch from the day or two before.

It was quite exciting. Because of the length of the telescope, as the Atlas missile entered the frame we could see the whole third stage. That was pretty exciting optics. We watched that stage burnout. We watched the second stage burnout. We watched the third stage burnout. And then on that telescope we could see the dummy warhead. It’s flying along and into the frame came something else. It flew into the frame like and it shot a beam of light at the warhead.

Now remember, all this stuff is flying at several thousand miles an hour. So this thing [UFO] fires a beam of light at the warhead, hits it and then it [the UFO] moves to the other side and fires another beam of light, then moves again and fires another beam of light, then goes down and fires another beam of light, and then flies out the way it came in. And the warhead tumbles out of space. The object, the points of light that we saw, the warhead and so forth, were traveling through subspace about 60 miles straight up. And they were going somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 to 14,000 miles an hour when this UFO caught up to them, flew in, flew around them, and flew back out.

Now, I saw that! I don’t give a Goddamn what anybody else says about it. I saw that on film! I was there!

Now when the lights came on, Major Mansmann turned around looked at me and said, were you guys screwing around up there? And I said, no sir. And he said, what was that? And I said, it looks to me like we got a UFO. Now the thing that we saw, this object that flew in, was circular, was shaped like two saucers cupped together with a ping-pong ball on top. The beam of light came out of the ping-pong ball. That’s what I saw on film.

Now Major Mansmann said to me after some discussion about it, you are never to speak of this again. As far as you are concerned, this never happened. And he said, I don’t need to emphasize the dire consequences of a security breach, do I? I said, no sir. And he said, fine. This never happened. As I started for the door, he said, wait a minute. He said, years from now if you are ever forced by someone to talk about this, you are to tell them it was laser strikes, laser tracking strikes.

Well, in 1964 we didn’t have any laser tracking strikes. We didn’t have any laser tracking at all. Lasers were in their infancy in 1964. They were little playthings in laboratories. So I said, yes sir, and walked out and that was the last I talked about it for 18 years.

I didn’t talk about it to anybody at Vandenburg Air Force Base, nobody in my squadron knew about it. Nobody saw the film but me. My Commanding Officer Major Lewis S. Clement, Jr. didn’t see it. My Operations Officer Captain Kenneth R. Callahan didn’t see it. His assistant Lieutenant Ronald O. Baylor didn’t see it. Their assistant, Chief Ward Officer Spooner didn’t see it. Nobody in my squadron saw it. And I didn’t talk about it to anybody under direct orders from Major Florence J. Mansmann, Jr. Consequently no one at Vandenburg that I know of knows anything about this.

That sounds real suspicious doesn’t it? Somebody should have seen it. Somebody should have talked about it. Well, they didn’t because in those days, I didn’t talk about top-secret things that I was told not to talk about. There are things that I know about that I did in the service that I won’t talk about to you now because they are top-secret and I could get my ass in trouble for talking about them.

After 18 years it occurred to me that I could talk about this one incident because nobody ever told me it was classified top-secret. If you parse what Major Mansmann said, he said, you are to say this never happened. Well, that’s not classifying it top-secret, is it? That’s why I felt free to talk about it. It’s not a secondhand story. This happened to me. And I was a part of a United States Air Force cover-up for 18 years.

After an article [came out about the incident], the shit hit the fan! I started being harassed at work. I started getting odd telephone calls that would come during the day. At night, at my house I would get telephone calls- all night long sometimes 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, midnight, 10:00, people would call and start screaming at me. You are going down mother fucker! You are going down mother fucker! And that’s all they would say. And they’d keep screaming that until I finally hung up the phone.

One night somebody blew up my mail box by putting a big load of skyrockets in it. The mailbox went up in flames. And that night at 1:00 in the morning the phone rang. I picked it up and somebody said, skyrockets in your box at night, oh what a beautiful sight, mother fucker!

And things like that have happened on and off since 1982. I told you that since this History Channel thing came up and since you’ve started asking questions and this thing is in the wind again, I’m starting to get telephone calls again. My wife and I get phone calls out here in nowhere {___} where we’ve retreated out to our farm. And it’s strange – They don’t say anything. You pick up the phone and say hello, hello, and there’s a hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, click. It’s disconcerting. But I’ve learned to not give a flip. I just don’t care anymore. What are they going to do kill me? What are they going to do discredit me? Are they going to do any more than Philip Klass has already done to me? Are they going to make me look foolish? That’s about all they can do.

I believe this nutty fringe around UFO’s is part of a concerted effort to keep serious study of it down. Anytime anybody tries to study this subject seriously, we are subject to ridicule. I’m a full professor at a relatively major university. And I’m certain that my colleagues at the university laugh at me and hoot and holler behind my back when they hear that I have an interest in studying unidentified flying objects- and that’s just one of the things that we have to live with.

The Air Force denied everything. Was I in the Air Force? The Air Force denied it. Was I ever at Vandenburg? Well of course I couldn’t be because if I wasn’t in the Air Force how could I have been at Vandenburg? Did I put a tracking site up along the California coast? No, there was no tracking site in California. Which is a crock! The tracking site is still there right where I put it. And they use it to show you every time the space shuttle lands in California- that’s where you first see it from. And they are still photographing missiles from Vandenburg from that tracking site.

At any rate, to corroborate my story, Lee Graham tracked down Florence J. Mansmann, Jr., the same Major who had ordered me to shut-up about it and he was now a Ph.D. at Stanford and a rancher in Fresno, California. And he wrote back to Lee saying everything Bob said in his story is absolutely true.

He corroborated my story and he continued to do that year after year, every time somebody brought it up, every time somebody would contact him he corroborated my story by saying, yes, that’s exactly what happened. It takes a lot of guts to do that. I became a fan of Sonny’s [Mansmann]; he is now deceased. He was my hero for a while.

I wasn’t in the room at the time but what happened to the film is an interesting story in itself as Major Mansmann related to me and other people. Some time after I had gone, the guys in civilian clothes- I thought it was the CIA but he said no, it wasn’t the CIA, it was somebody else- took the film and they spooled off the part that had the UFO on it and they took a pair of scissors and cut it off. They put that on a separate reel. They put it in their briefcase. They handed Major Mansmann back the rest of the film and said here, I don’t need to remind you Major of the severity of a security breach; we’ll consider this incident closed. And they walked off with the film. Major Mansmann never saw it again.

And as far as I’m concerned nobody else ever saw it again certainly not at Vandenburg. I’m certain that it left Vandenburg and went somewhere else. Major Mansmann, who’s a very good reader of film, said it must have been extraterrestrial. They assumed that the beam of light that struck the dummy warhead was some sort of plasma beam because it looked like a plasma beam.

Major Mansmann was a man of great honor and great scientific standing in the community. For him to corroborate it is good enough for me. Even if I didn’t believe myself, I would believe Major Mansmann.

So there were two of us who were Air Force Officers at the time and we saw something and we both corroborated with each other that we saw it. And what I have to ask skeptics or people who disbelieve what I’m saying is why would I make this up? Why would Major (and Doctor) Mansmann make it up? What have we to gain? I’ve got nothing but pain and suffering out of it, out of talking about it. I’ve been harassed at my home. This was used against me, partially in losing a job once in teaching. I’ve had a hell of a time after I’ve told this story but I continue to tell the story because I think it is important for people to understand that this sort of shit goes on in the Government. That the Government covers up information that we are entitled to know about as citizens of this country. That’s why I tell my story. That’s why I’m telling it to you.

Now, I’ll continue to tell it as long as I’m alive. And I’ll always tell it the same way because it only happened one way. I never vary the story because I can’t; it’s the truth. And I’ve been the subject of humiliating letters and phone calls from skeptics like James O’Berg at NASA and Phillip J. Klass, who’s a paid informant of the United States Government who persisted in belittling me. And that’s fine if they want to belittle me but don’t belittle Sonny Mansmann!

The Air Force’s position right now is there was no such incident and there was no film of it.

The thing that’s important to me about this whole operation is very simply this: the biggest event in the history of humankind is the discovery that we are not alone, that there are other living entities- intelligent entities- in this universe and that we aren’t here alone. That’s a huge, enormous discovery. It’s the discovery of the lifetime of humankind, isn’t it, to find out that we’re not here alone? That’s why I think it is important to talk about these things. I think that’s exciting. And I think that it’s important for us as humans to come to terms, to grow-up and recognize that we may not be the paragon of animals after all. That there may be something out there that’s bigger and more exciting than we are. And that just maybe, just maybe they are telling us something.

Because what I saw that day was something shooting down a dummy nuclear warhead. What message would I interpret from that? Don’t mess with nuclear warheads. That’s probably the message I would interpret from that. Maybe somebody doesn’t want us annihilating Moscow; maybe we should stop doing that.

[I have interviewed many military officers who have reached the same conclusion after extraterrestrial vehicles have appeared at nuclear facilities: Maybe others have evolved to the point of interstellar travel and know how dangerous these weapons are and understand their use would end our civilization. And they certainly do not want us going into space with such weapons. SG]

Ronald Reagan one night went on television and did a most astonishing thing: He stood up in front of America and said we are going to build a defensive shield, we are going to call it SDI, the strategic defense initiative, and its mission is going to be to protect us, to protect all of us. Ronald Reagan said we are going to share this with everybody. We are going to share it with the Russians- our enemies, the guys that only a few years ago we were pretending to annihilate. Now suddenly we are going to protect them with a shield. From who are we going to protect them?

Perhaps that was the first shot across the bow, the first warning shot from somebody saying, knock this off kids it’s time to grow-up. You don’t want to annihilate this planet, do you? Could be…