DA: My name is Dwynne Arneson. I was born in Rochester, Minnesota back in 1937, and went to Rochester High School. From there I graduated and went on to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota where I got my degree in physics and math. Upon graduation, I competed for Officer’s Training School in the Air Force and then was selected to get a commission, went to Officer’s Training School, and was commissioned back in 1962. I went on to spend twenty-six years in the U.S. Air Force as a communication-electronics officer and retired in 1986. I had assignments all over the world, including Vietnam, Europe -- you name it, I’ve probably been there.

I held a top-secret SCI-TK clearance. That means Special Compartmented Tango Kilo information, which is above top secret, if you will. It takes a special investigation to get that sort of a clearance. Upon getting out of the Air Force, and retiring as a colonel in 1986, I applied for work at Boeing, and I came to work for Boeing as a computer systems analyst, and I’ve been working since 1987 in that capacity with Boeing. I retired in 1986 as Director of Logistics at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

I had various opportunities to see things that come through my perusal. One instance was back in 1962 when I was a lieutenant at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. I was the crypto officer for the entire Ramstein Air Base. I was a top-secret control officer. And in that capacity, I happened to see a classified message go through my com center, which said that "A UFO has crashed on the Island of Spitsbergen, Norway, and a team of scientists are coming to investigate it."

I do not recall where the message came from, where it was going to, because in that capacity we were oftentimes told, "What you see here, leave here." But I can recall seeing that.

The next thing that comes to mind is one that took place in 1967. I was in charge of the Communication Center, the Twentieth Air Division at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. I was again the top-secret control officer there. I dispatched all the nuclear launch authentications to the SAC missile crews, so -- I had a very good top-secret background.

One day, I happened to see a message that came through my communications center. There again, I cannot quote the date, where it came from, where it was going to, but I do recall reading it and seeing it. It said, basically, that "A UFO was seen near missile silos"… and it was hovering. It said that the crew going on duty and the crew coming off duty all saw the UFO just hovering in mid-air. It was a metallic circular object and from what I understand, the missiles were all shut down.

And then later on, years later while working here at Boeing, I heard from a man named, Bob Kaminisky, who had retired from Boeing and he said, "Yes, I was the engineer assigned by Boeing to come up and check out the missiles to make certain that they in fact had not gone down upon their own." And he said, "I gave them a complete bill of health." And I worked for Bob in Boeing and I was a good friend of his.

Even before he passed away, we had many, many conversations on this subject, and he was just a very incredible man.

What I mean by "missiles going down," is that they went dead. And something turned those missiles off, and so they could not be put in a mode for launching.

At another time, when I was Commander of a radar squadron up in Maine, at Caswell Air Force Station, Maine, we were right next door to Loring Air Force Base. It was where they launch the B-52s and the KC tankers and things like that. I had a lot of security friends over there at Loring who told me about UFOs hovering near the nuclear weapon storage area on Loring Air Force Base.

A little bit of background, not to belabor the point, but -- when I was assigned as Director of Logistics at Wright-Patterson, I left the wife and kids back in Oklahoma City. It was my daughter’s last year of high school, so I went out there on my own for about a year. And in the search for an apartment out there, I came across this lady, Chris Weedon by name, who had a little five-acre English manor outside of Dayton. She had three rooms for rent, three bedrooms. So I rented one, and I kind of became her son. I helped her cut the grass, I mowed the lawn, etc. She was up in her seventies.

Her husband was a Lieutenant Colonel Spencer Weedon. Now, he died about twelve years prior to that, and from everybody that I met, they said he was just a brilliant guy. He had a photographic mind, and he was one of the lead investigators of UFOs at Wright-Patterson. In fact I have a tape at home, produced back in the 1950s, of a debate between Spencer Weedon and that Major Donald Keyhoe. It was done in the Armstrong Circle Theater. So he was her husband.

The one person I happened to meet and took quite a shine to, and he to me, was a Dr. Adolph Raum. Now, he at that time was eighty-three years old. I think he has since died. One night after supper and after a few martinis, I jokingly asked Adolph, "What do you know about the little gray men that are supposedly on ice here at Wright-Patterson?" And I distinctly recall his face turning ashen white, his voice got very stern, and he said, "Arne," he says, "all I can tell you is that they were not weather balloons, and we will not talk about it again. Do you understand?" And there was no uncertainty in my mind that we wouldn’t talk about this further. He was from Switzerland originally. He was on the first A-Bomb test in the U.S. and he knew Dr. Oppenheimer personally. Even though I had a top-secret clearance, there were areas that we just couldn’t get near, and we just could not find anything about some of these areas at Wright-Patterson that may have held some bodies or -- who knows what they held? And a lot of my technicians that worked for me as a communication electronics officer; would tell stories about objects going across their radar screens at fantastic speeds. Nothing we had could go that fast.

SG: What years would this have been?

DA: Well, this was back in the mid-seventies when I had that radar squadron commander’s job at Caswell Air Force Station, Maine. That’s when these technicians would tell me about events like that.

As a commander of a radar squadron, you have people who are operational types as well as the people who are the technician types, who actually maintain the radars. In fact, in that capacity, we would take and have battle exercises. We were the only radar squadron in the U.S. under operational control of the Canadian NORAD Division. Now, you’d see the B-52s coming down from Canada, the fighter interceptors being directed against them, or whatnot. So these men knew how fast things were flying. They knew the speed of bombers. They knew the speed of the current fighter force that we had. The radar technicians I had, the maintenance men working for me -- they were in the position to say, "Yes, that scope was in A-1 condition -- or the radar is in A-1 condition." So things could check out. The experience of the operational types, the experience of the maintenance guys -- they confirmed that the system was operating perfectly. And they said, "That thing is going two or three thousand miles an hour." I heard it from different sources that related similar events at different radar stations throughout the U.S., not just at Caswell Air Force Station. We had radar stations back in those days all over the U.S. and stories like that are not uncommon at all.

If you think about it, all this vast universe we have, if we’re the only intelligent life here, God has sure got bad judgment…

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 1369^th 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.

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…

The information I’ve just given you about my take on what happened there is based on not only my own speculation but having read other things and talked to other people over the intervening years. Perhaps our paranoia is unfounded and if we encounter beings with superior technologies maybe we should embrace them and be nice to them because they might be showing us how to survive.

RD: … While I was at the AEC in 1952, I had my first incident with UFOs which was in mid July when they flew over Washington, D. C. I saw my first nine UFOs…

I was a staff officer for the military liaison committee between the chairman of the AEC and the Secretary of Defense. I became acquainted with not only the Army, Navy, and Air Force, but civilian agencies, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other contacts which I developed. During that period of time one of my functions was to accompany a security team which visited all of the nuclear facilities to check on the security of weapons. And we were getting reports of visits by UFOs over the storage facilities and even some of the manufacturing facilities. And that went on continuously…

And so, then after that siege which went through the entire ‘50s, I was assigned to the Unified Command under Admiral Felt during the ‘60s. I was the officer in charge of the Alternate command post involved with nuclear weapons operation planning. During that period of time, I maintained contacts with NORAD, with the SAC operations, and was involved with operational plans for the use of nuclear weapons. And during this period of time, I also learned of a number of incidents which happened involving UFOs. And then further on I finally retired from the Air Force and joined the Boeing Company where I was assigned to the Minute Man program where I was responsible for the accounting of all the nuclear fleet, the Minute Man One, Two, and Three. And during that period of time, I also learned about incidents involving nuclear weapons. And among these incidents were those where a couple of nuclear weapons that were sent into space were destroyed by the extraterrestrials…

SG: Were over-flights of nuclear facilities taken seriously?

RD: Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. In fact, they were taken so seriously that the observers would often not report them because it involved so much bureaucracy and protocol, and et cetera. They deliberately would not report them. On most of those cases where the UFOs became identified at least on a radar or with reports, why, they would try to scramble aircraft to intercept them. It was a very aggressive, you might say, response from our own government. Well, there was one incident when we exploded a nuclear weapon over the Pacific and this was in about ‘61 I believe. The consternation that it caused [from the ETs] was because it shut out communications over the Pacific basin for a number of hours in which no radio transmission was available at any time. And this was very significant. And of course this was one that the extraterrestrials were really concerned about because it affected our ionosphere. In fact, the ET spacecraft were unable to operate because of the pollution in the magnetic field which they depended upon. It was my understanding that in either the very end of the ‘70s or the early ‘80s that we attempted to put a nuclear weapon on the Moon and explode it for scientific measurements and other things which was not acceptable to the extraterrestrials.

SG: And what happened?

RD: The ETs destroyed the weapon as it went toward the Moon. The idea of any explosion of a nuclear weapon in space by any Earth government was not acceptable to the extraterrestrials and that has been demonstrated over and over.

SG: How was that demonstrated?

RD: By the destruction of any nuclear weapon sent into space. …

And then later on our visits to Los Alamos and Livermore we found that people were interested in the extraterrestrial technology, very much so.

RD: Oh yes. Oh yes. In fact, that was the time when Area 51 became notorious…

This target was above 65,000 feet and the strength of the signal was as strong as the surface contact on the water of an aircraft carrier so this contact was huge. It got my attention and the attention of others that were on watch. There were four enlisted on watch and two officers at the time that this occurred. We challenged it and checked the codes out. It was not commercial. And then it began to move fairly slowly at first, and then very quickly. It was doing better than 1,000 knots. The first time I picked it up on radar it was hovering, it was stationary. Then it was doing about 1,000 knots. Then when we tried to make contact it was over 500 miles away…

In this particular case it was showing up on height finding equipment and it was showing up on radar equipment. The CO came in and he wanted to know what the heck was going on here. And they looked at it and asked what the hell was that, you know? And it got the attention of the Captain at that time, Captain Clark- my commander was Commander Gibson. There was only one person on watch in ECM and in the matter of 15 minutes the ship was being turned and two Phantom-2’s were being prepared for launch.

Now I got on a set of headphones and I’m on a SPA 8 repeater now. And I’m listening to communications between the pilots and the CO flight ops. And when you go to general quarters you do the same thing and I was used to doing this because one of my jobs during general quarters was to sit right next to the commander of our division and to listen to the aircraft. My job was to log in all the tally-ho’s and everything [a tally-ho is when contact is made with the target by the fighter pilot]. My job was as a recognition expert, also-to be able to identify different types of navy ships, foreign ships, commercial ships, maritime ships, and aircraft. Not only electronically but visually and be familiar with electronic fingerprints.

In any event, the Phantom-2’s went to after-burners. And they were about 100 miles or so away from this contact and turned on the conical scan radar to lock on and it winked out. Just disappeared. I could see the two Phantom-2’s on my scope and this thing winked out. They flew around for about 10 minutes and then they headed back to the ship.

After they landed, about 35 minutes later, this thing winks back on again and it’s about 12 to 15 miles from the ship, hovering at about 30,000 feet…

Of course I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything because I was told by my CO that, Jordan, you know, what you have in your log, this never happened. And I wasn’t the only one there on watch that night. So anybody who was there at that time knows what I’m talking about and knows that it’s the truth. But less than a dozen people knew what went on that night. And that ship had 5,000 men on it…

In this case, the radar contact was not leaving any kind of a heat signature. It was not leaving any kind of a trail. It was not moving at an usual speed. This thing was moving 10, 15 miles in 30 seconds, 20 miles, then 30 miles, then 40 miles, then 100 miles. And in three and one-half minutes this thing moved almost 500 miles. And then it was moving from one altitude to another in a way that would cause any normal pilot to black out. This was a real contact. This signal from this contact at that distance and that altitude was sending back a signal as strong as the Roosevelt itself and the Roosevelt was over 1,000 feet long.

A Lieutenant Commander whom I didn’t know very well came over and he asked, you know, what was up Jordan? What have you got in your log? And he says, you don’t need to put that in there. Now to me that was highly irregular, highly irregular to say that particularly on a ship’s logs. I did have the contact logged in there. And I started writing in UFO…

Years later during the [Space Shuttle] STS 48 mission, while they were in orbit, I was listening on the HAM radio. I have an OMNI antennae and the astronauts were saying, ‘we have the UFO under observation’. And then I heard them say we have the alien spacecraft under observation. I was one of the HAM operators who did hear that. So I called Dr. Kasher about that, he is a friend of mine who had a son going to school where I teach, and I told him they are talking about alien spacecraft. They actually use that term over the airways. And it just stunned me. It just stunned me…

Later I saw Inter-Agency cars right across the street and guys in suits taking pictures of me. They also took pictures of me and my wife in Kansas City when we were at Worlds of Fun. I told other people about this because I got very skittish about what was going on here. I took down the license number of the vehicle and it was registered at an Air Force Base.

I also had an Air Force Intelligence Officer visit me at my house…

The planet is becoming intellectually celibate in my opinion. People are walking around in a daze. They have no idea, no idea what is going on. Many corporations have been getting wealthy [from UFO related research and materials]. Yes they’ve been providing humanity as a whole with technological change that benefits us all but they really aren’t sharing the meat and the source of where it all came from and ultimately they are not sharing the truth about UFO’s…

JK: …All eight teletypes were just typing complete garbage. Totally incoherent. I had seen one or two mistakes in the messages but never anything this extensive. So I immediately called the facilities control on the intercom to inform them that my broadcast was out and they informed me that they were busy because all communications had just gone out, ship-wide. This had never occurred before.

We had an intercom and a pneumatic tube system that went between the communications room to the signal bridge, which is located at the very top of the island structure of the carrier. And we heard a very excited voice come on yelling that "God was here. It was the end of the world." And we looked at each other and thought that that was strange. What was going on there? Another few seconds went by and another voice came on, more controlled. This person said that there was something over the ship. Well, I looked at a friend of mine, a shipmate, and he looked at me and we decided to go have a look…

So we exited the Communications Center and went to the catwalk on the port side of the ship on the edge of the flight deck and we observed a large glowing sphere over the ship. It was hard to decide what size this thing was because there was no perspective. It was late in the evening. The sun had gone down, it was twilight, but it looked huge…

After that, I talked to a few shipmate friends that I had on the ship. One in particular worked in the radar department and he was on watch during the incident. He told me that all the radar screens were glowing- and then nothing. They couldn’t detect anything on radar. We stayed up most of the night talking about it.

We heard that the compasses were not working on the bridge and that the radar navigational system had gone offline…

A few days later the Commanding Officer and the Executive Officer came on the closed circuit television system that we had on board. It was the only way that they could address the crew of 5,000. He [the Commanding Officer] looked at the camera - and I will never forget this - and he said, "I would like to remind the crew that certain events that take place on board a major naval combative vessel are considered classified and should not be discussed with anyone without a need to know." And that was all he said…

The UFO was only over the ship for maybe five minutes or less however the ramifications of the disruptions lasted for at least an hour. That is why we stayed at battle stations for two hours. I guess they were waiting to see if it came back. And they were still trying to restart systems and get things back to fully operational. It took them probably at least an hour.

There were no aircraft in the air. They were all on board when the incident started. They kept two F-4 Phantoms, which were called a Ready CAP, Combat Air Patrol. From what I heard, they would not operate. They were trying to start those jets and from what I heard, they wouldn’t start. They were out of commission…

We had an organization on this ship called IOIC, Integrated Operations Intelligence Communications, something to that effect. I heard that they were out there taking pictures of this thing during the event.

I am convinced that somebody in the government knows a lot more than we know. I have my own theories as to why it is being hidden. I think that there are many reasons that the information is being kept from the public.

SG: What would those be?

JK: They probably feel that the general public couldn’t handle the knowledge of extraterrestrials visiting. I think that they have information that would seriously undermine the economy of the country. I think there are devices that could produce energy at very low cost and with no pollution but corporate greed would prohibit that.

That would be the part that would bother me the most about the cover-up. I think of all the pollution that there is and all that could have been saved…

JW: …As we got out of the car my flight instructor was looking back to the northeast in the direction of the runway and said, what is that? And I looked up in the direction he was looking in the sky over the runway. What we saw were three very bright but independent lights. I mean, three separate lights; we assumed they were independent. And they were in a perfect equilateral triangle with the point south and the other two points of the triangle directly behind it to the north. The curious thing about this formation of lights that caused us to watch it for an extended period of time -- 10 or 15 minutes we watched it -- was that first, it was silent. Second, it was moving slowly but in a perfectly constant altitude, perfectly constant velocity, and perfectly constant direction from north to south. We pieced together later it was actually coming from the direction where my flight instructor had reported seeing the flash of light earlier…

The next morning I reported for duty. This would now have been the morning of April 18^th. The first duty I had each day was to report to a wing stand-up briefing in the wing command post. This was a Strategic Air Command base equipped with, as I recall, three squadrons of B-52’s, two squadrons of 135’s, and a squadron of F-106 interceptors. When I arrived at the command post the next morning about 6:30 in the morning, it was unusually active and unusually well staffed. In fact, it was a beehive of activity. And there were people who had obviously been there most of the night from their general appearance and apparent level of frustration. So I very quickly learned that what had been occurring during the night began at about the time my flight instructor and I saw these lights. And it seems that these lights did position themselves over the alert force of the B-52’s, over the alert pad of a number of B-52’s configured for their wartime mission should they be required to perform it. Therefore this was a very sensitive area, naturally….

And as sorties returned, I was told by those who had been there overnight they were asked to close with and try to identify these lights. And this included B-52’s, KC 135’s and some of the F-106 interceptors that had been out during their particular training missions. And the pattern was the same: each time an aircraft would approach, the lights would part in ways that defied any aerodynamic knowledge that anybody there had or could explain. There was rapid acceleration, rapid changes in direction including vertical. They were doing things that something that is flying by the rules of aerodynamics that we understand would not have been at able to do. Then always to return to their point of interest which was the aircraft in the alert area. And then at some point late in the night, early in the morning their curiosity was satisfied and they took off very expeditiously in a straight line and were gone.

I would be guessing how many hours this whole event took from beginning to end but it was probably in the range of six and perhaps more hours in duration.

So I filed it away. And I just mused about it and I discussed it with a few people over the years but not too many. Until a day in the early 1990’s -- I forget the exact year and date but it was about ‘93 or ‘94 -- that I had occasion to attend a lecture by Dr. Steven Greer in Hampton, Virginia. And saw a photograph of what I now understand is a very familiar sighting among those who have been privileged to actually see a UFO. And when I saw the photograph, I literally jumped out of my seat, grabbed my wife by the hand and I said, that’s it. That is exactly what I had seen nearly 25 years ago, at that point. But to see that picture just brought back the image so strikingly clear that there was no doubt in my mind that that was exactly what we had seen over the runway in April of 1969. And it was only then that I had any notion that it was in fact a single machine not three independent machines.

I will deduce with some degree of knowledge that they must have been because of the repeated attempts of returning aircraft to close with them, from distances and altitudes where they couldn’t have acquired them visually because of the low ceiling that night. So I would deduce from that fact that they were being tracked on radar, both ground control radar and airborne radar on the aircraft that were returning to base. It would be a very reasonable deduction to say that they were easily being tracked on radar…

I do remember very clearly that no aggressive action was taken by the Air Force by anybody at the wing in response to the lights because they in fact showed no aggressive or threatening behavior whatsoever. They were simply in airspace that was restricted air space. But they were not doing anything that would prompt any sort of a security response…

SG: Was it bigger than a conventional plane?

JW: Oh absolutely. That’s why I was so surprised when I saw the photograph to learn that those lights which were so far apart could conceivably be part of a single machine. And why I naturally assumed, and for all those years believed, I had seen three separate machines operating independently- although their formation was so perfect that in retrospect, clearly there is no reason to assume they were three, except that for them to be part of one unit it would have to have been so enormously large compared to anything. And at that time, B-52’s were considered pretty big airplanes. And this of course dwarfed anything that would have been part of a B-52.

It covered most of the wingspan of the B-52 -- it was large…