THE NUCLEAR CONNECTION

By Richard H. Hall

             In my book Uninvited Guests (Aurora Press, 1988) I devoted a chapter to analysis of what we could decipher about the purposes of the UFO pilots from the accumulated evidence. Therein I discussed a seeming interest in human energy sources, especially petroleum, and briefly touching on nuclear energy. Table 6, "UFO Displays and World History," mentions seeming associations of UFO sightings with atomic bomb tests and with our space programs. Later I conducted a "strategic correlation" study showing an apparent association of close-range sightings with nuclear generating plants, which was published in a popular newsstand UFO magazine.

            It was not until I began reviewing reams of literature while doing research for The UFO Evidence, Volume II, in the mid-1990s that a more obvious pattern began to emerge: a strong correlation of sightings with nuclear weapons.  Once the pattern became clear, one of its implications struck me: could the aliens (or "beings from elsewhere") actually have intervened in earthly affairs to help end the dangerous Cold War nuclear confrontation? Debunkers, of course, will consider this an entirely crackpot notion; nothing but wishful thinking and a desire for "saviors from space." But they never bother to study the data and so are oblivious to the many emerging patterns.

            Section II ("Military Witnesses") of The UFO Evidence, Volume II (Scarecrow Press, 2001) reports much of the data that led me to this suspicion. It includes the 1967 ICBM base cases in Montana and North Dakota and the 1975 SAC base overflights reported by Ray Fowler and Fawcett & Greenwood, and also the 1978 McGuire AFB "alien encounter" case and the 1980 Bentwaters AFB case. I had extensive face-to-face interviews with the primary witnesses in the latter two cases, and both involved UFOs in the close vicinity of nuclear weapons storage sites.

            With 20-20 hindsight, other cases such as the 1957 Army jeep patrol case in New Mexico and a number of incidents reported by Ed Ruppelt also had a "nuclear connection."

            Interestingly, my mentor and friend, Donald E. Keyhoe, who was way ahead of everybody in his perceptions about the significance of UFOs first raised this suspicion in The Flying Saucers Are Real (Fawcett, 1950):  "[UFO visits which had occurred sporadically in the past] suddenly increased in 1947, following the series of A-bomb explosions begun in 1945" (p.  174).

            Clearly the study of patterns in UFO sightings holds a lot of promise for increasing our knowledge about the nature and meaning of UFO visitations. Larger scale and more sophisticated statistical analyses would be highly desirable.