Robert Hastings has spent nearly five decades investigating one of the most unnerving and underreported patterns in modern military history: unidentified flying objects repeatedly interfering with nuclear weapons.
Shortly after he began interviewing retired Air Force personnel in the early 1980s, Hastings says his phone started ringing after each call – but no one would speak. Just heavy breathing.
‘Somebody was trying to intimidate me,’ he claimed to the Daily Mail.
‘But I took it as confirmation I was on the right track. They wouldn’t be monitoring me if I was some nut listening to liars.’
Although initially shaken and concerned these mysterious calls would result in violent attacks or charges for divulging classified information, Hastings said he ‘ultimately decided that this was important.’
‘I felt strongly that the public needed to know the facts, and so I just stuck with it.’
Hastings is best known for helping bring to light the now-infamous 1967 incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, where multiple nuclear missiles were mysteriously disabled while security personnel above ground reported a glowing object hovering over the silos.
Hastings’ father worked at the base’s radar facility, and as a teenager, Hastings took a janitorial job cleaning the air traffic control tower.
One night, Hastings recalled, a radar supervisor waved him over to his screen and pointed out five unexplained blips.
‘He kind of motioned me over to take a look at what he was looking at. For whatever reason, he did that almost nonchalantly,’ he said. ‘What he pointed out were these five unknown blips, which formally are called targets. And he probably used the word “unknown,” which is the formal designation for a non-identified aerial object.’
That brief moment would go on to shape the rest of his life.
Years later, he began interviewing military veterans who had witnessed similar strange phenomena – many of whom had direct experience with nuclear weapons.
‘I began informally, at first very sporadically, seeking out Air Force veterans,’ he said.
‘By 1981 I had probably in the neighborhood of 20 or 25 sources of veterans. And they were all telling me the same thing… these kinds of nuclear weapons related UFO incidents.’
Among them was Captain David Schuur, a missile launch officer who described a chilling event at Minot Air Force Base in the 1960s.
‘He said his missiles were actually temporarily activated for a period of time and were preparing to launch for all intents and purposes,’ Hastings said.
‘And he had to flip what’s called an inhibit switch… to disrupt this what seemed to be an impending launch.’
Hastings also described an event at Ellsworth Air Force Base where another witness allegedly encountered a UFO while working in a missile silo.
Hastings said the witness was a targeting technician, adding that he was underground at the time. Suddenly, he relayed, the guard started banging on the ladder, saying, ‘Get up here. Get up here.’ When they emerged, Hastings said, they heard ‘an omnipresent hum.’
Moments later, according to Hastings, a massive rhombus-shaped object appeared overhead – and the missile went offline.
At times, the activity was even more alarming abroad. ‘Unbelievably, one of the people I interviewed was a retired Soviet Army Colonel,’ Hastings said. ‘According to this document that George smuggled out and had translated… there was an intermediate range missile base in Soviet Ukraine… and for some 15 seconds, the missiles went into countdown mode. They were apparently preparing to launch.’
Despite the pattern, Hastings doesn’t believe the so-called entities – what he refers to as NHI, or non-human intelligence – are attempting to start a war.
‘What I emphasize to my audiences and in my book, to my readers, I don’t think that the NHI who were involved in these incidents, either here or in the Soviet Union, were actually attempting to start World War III,’ he said.
‘I think rather, what they were attempting to do is to scare the hell out of the nuclear forces, the nuclear powers, to basically say, “You better think twice. You’re playing with fire.”‘
He added, ‘I think they’re trying to keep humans from destroying ourselves, but also they don’t want their activities terminated or negatively impacted by massive radiation surrounding the earth and so on years after the war.’
Even in the 21st century, the reported sightings haven’t stopped. Hastings described an incident at FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming in 2010, shortly after he and Robert Salas held a press conference in Washington revealing decades of UAP activity at missile sites.
‘According to the Atlantic story, overnight on October 23… the base could not communicate with five of the launch capsules,’ He said.
Hastings explained that if war had been declared at that moment, the missiles ‘could not have been launched.’
But according to Hastings, Air Force technicians who were deployed to investigate the problem saw something stunning: ‘Multiple teams saw a huge, cigar shaped object in the air flying over the missile field.
‘They were called together in a squadron wide meeting and told not to discuss what they quote “may or may not have seen,” end quote.’
The Air Force later blamed a faulty processor and claimed the problem lasted only 59 minutes. But Hastings claimed his sources told a different story.
‘It was apparently intermittent for 26 hours… I’m sure that the Air Force would not want to acknowledge that they had lost control or the ability to launch that many missiles for more than a day.’
In his opinion, these incidents form a consistent and disturbing pattern.
‘What my sources are confirming to me is that this has gone on repeatedly, year after year, decade after decade… The available testimony, the available evidence, even though it’s anecdotal, confirms that the UFO nuclear weapons link is long standing, widespread and ongoing,’ claimed Hastings, who has lectured at more than 500 colleges and universities over the course of his career.
Many of his most valuable leads came from veterans who approached him after his presentations. He meticulously verified each with official military discharge documents.
His work reportedly reached the highest levels of government. According to Hastings, unbeknownst to him, physics researcher Hal Puthoff ‘actually gave four copies of my book to Lou Elizondo and three other persons’ in Washington, DC.
Even former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reportedly read Hastings’ work, which helped convince him to back the secret Pentagon program known as AAWSAP and its successor, AATIP.
Today, Hastings is 75 and retired due to congestive heart failure. He’s no longer conducting new interviews, but he says his research continues to ripple through official circles – and among journalists and whistleblowers newly emboldened to speak out.
‘I’ve done my part,’ he said. ‘Now it’s up to the next generation to keep asking questions. The more people know about these incidents, the harder it becomes to deny they happened.’
Asked whether he thinks official disclosure is coming, Hastings is cautiously optimistic.
‘I think it’s just a question of time before the US government, probably in conjunction with other world governments, they’re going to have to simultaneously admit… that these are NHI,’ he said.
‘But even when that happens… I don’t think that any government is going to immediately acknowledge that they’ve been messing with our nuclear weapons. It’s just too disconcerting.’
