Big Sur UFO film

Big Sur UFO film

Date	September 1964: 15 September per Jacobs and Mansmann; 22 September ("Buzzing Bee") per Kingston George
Location	Telescope site above Big Sur, Los Padres National Forest, California (later Anderson Peak)
Missile	Atlas ICBM launched from Vandenberg AFB with a dummy warhead
Camera	24-inch "B.U. Scope" telescope with image-orthicon television camera
Key people	Lt. Robert Jacobs (site commander); Maj. Florenz Mansmann (film analyst); Kingston A. George (project engineer)
Claim	A disc-shaped object circled the warhead and disabled it with beams of light
Explanation	Release of decoy warheads and chaff in a classified test (George)
Film	Never produced; George says it was destroyed
Topics	Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Ocean & underwater (topic)
People	Robert Jacobs, Florenz Mansmann, Kingston George
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 66
Year	1964 in UFO history
Timeline	1964 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

The Big Sur UFO film is footage taken in September 1964 by a U.S. Air Force camera team filming Atlas missile tests from a mountaintop near Big Sur, California.^[1] Robert Jacobs, the team's on-site commander, said from 1982 onward that the film showed a disc-shaped object circle a dummy warhead, hit it with beams of light and send it tumbling. He said the film was then taken away by men later identified to him as CIA officers.^[1][3] Major Florenz Mansmann, who analysed the film, backed his account. The project's engineer, Kingston George, said the film showed the release of decoy warheads and chaff in a highly classified test, which Jacobs was not cleared to understand.^[1][2] The film has never been produced, and the case remains disputed.^[1]

The deployment

From August to November 1964 the Air Force tested a special light-sensitive telescope high in the coastal mountains of the Los Padres National Forest above Big Sur. The aim was to collect low-light photography of missiles launched into the Western Test Range from Vandenberg Air Force Base, a little over 100 miles to the south.^[1][2] The site, at about 4,000 feet, gave a unique side view of launches and was clear of the fog that often hid Vandenberg's own telephoto cameras.^[2]

The instrument, called the "B.U. Scope", was a 24-inch mirror telescope built by Boston University in the 1950s on a modified 5-inch gun mount. It belonged to the Range Measurements Laboratory of the Eastern Test Range, and later supplied television coverage of Saturn launches.^[2] Its image-orthicon television tube was among the most light-sensitive of the time. Bright objects "bloomed" into blobs on the monitor and left persistence tails, and the picture was recorded by a film camera viewing a kinescope.^[2] The 1369th Photographic Squadron named Lieutenant Robert Jacobs on-site commander, running logistics at the Big Sur location. Kingston George was project engineer. The team covered nine of eleven Vandenberg launches during the three months.^[1][2] The project was so successful that a permanent site was later set up on Anderson Peak.^[2]

Jacobs's account

According to Jacobs, two days after a launch on 15 September 1964 he was summoned to the office of Major Florenz J. Mansmann, the ranking optical-instrumentation officer at Vandenberg. Two men in plain clothes were also present.^[3][4] On the film, he said, the rocket climbed and then a light swam into the frame, circled the warhead, and fired brilliant strobe-like flashes at it, four in all in later accounts. The warhead then tumbled and fell several hundred miles short of its target.^[3][4] Mansmann told him never to speak of it and that it "never happened". The two men left with the film.^[3] Jacobs said he only learned 19 years later, from Mansmann, that the men were CIA officers.^[4]

Jacobs, by then a communications professor, first went public in 1982 in the National Enquirer, under the headline "UFO Spied on Space Missile – and I Captured It on Film", after OMNI had turned the article down.^[1][4] He expanded the story in "Deliberate Deception: The Big Sur UFO Filming" in the MUFON UFO Journal of January 1989. There he concluded that the object was an "intelligently controlled flying device", probably extraterrestrial, giving a "demonstration" of something like the Strategic Defense Initiative.^[2] His personal log, he wrote, put the launch on 1, 2 or 15 September. He later said the log showed he was not at the site on 22 September.^[6] He said he received threatening phone calls after the 1982 article. The skeptic Philip Klass challenged him in a series of letters and wrote to his department chairman at the University of Maine.^[4][6] Jacobs took part in a press conference about the case in 2021.^[1]

Mansmann's support

Mansmann, who had worked on airborne radar, air defense and reconnaissance systems and later became a biomedical engineering researcher at Stanford, said in 1985 that the launch was on 15 September.^[3][6] In a letter of 6 May 1987 to the researcher T. Scott Crain, he confirmed Jacobs's account. He said he had screened the film four times:^[3]

• once in quality-control review for the general and his staff
• once with the chief scientist and his assistant
• once for the commanding general and one staff member
• once with the chief scientist, his assistant, "three government men" and Jacobs

He said he had only passed on his own order not to discuss it, and that he released the film to the chief scientist over his signature.^[3] In another 1980s letter he described his frame-by-frame study with a loupe. He said it showed a "classic disc" with a raised central bubble, glowing and slowly rotating, which turned as if to fire from a platform. The assumption at the time, he wrote, was that it was extraterrestrial.^[4][6]

Crain's FOIA requests in 1987 drew Vandenberg's reply that "the records you requested do not exist". The researcher Robert Todd was told that no Atlas F missiles had been launched from Vandenberg on 15 September 1964.^[3] A Vandenberg spokesman had earlier told OMNI, in January 1985, that there was no documentation of a UFO incident and that the dummy warhead hit its target.^[3]

The decoy explanation

Kingston George, a physicist and engineer who spent 30 years in Air Force civil service and later became Vandenberg's chief engineer for safety, answered Jacobs in Skeptical Inquirer in the winter of 1993. He did so again in January–February 2009 in "Buzzing Bee Missile Mythology Flies Again".^[2][6] He wrote that before sunrise on 22 September 1964 the team filmed an Atlas nicknamed "Buzzing Bee". The booster section dropped away, the sustainer shut down, and then a puff of exhaust appeared as the reentry vehicle separated. Two smaller puffs followed, and two groups of three objects drew away from the tank and the warhead until tracking was stopped after about eight minutes.^[2] The Atlas was supposed to release decoys. On this flight some of the decoys' packing material trailed along with them and gave them away, visually and to some radars.^[2]

When the film was shown at Vandenberg, George wrote, the reaction was startling. A copy was flown to Strategic Air Command headquarters, and the classification was raised from Secret to Top Secret. The fear was that the Soviets could tell decoys from warheads with a few mountaintop telescopes.^[2] Everyone who had seen it, including Jacobs and George, was questioned by civilian intelligence experts and told not to discuss it. George was later cleared to analyse the films, but he did not think Jacobs ever was.^[2] George rebutted Jacobs's conclusions point by point:^[2]

• The warhead would have been two or three scan lines long, seen only as a glint of reflected sunlight, so no shape could be resolved.
• Nothing circled the warhead.
• An energy beam would be invisible in space.
• The Atlas, like all ICBMs, was suborbital and did not miss its target.

He added that the Top Secret film, marked for declassification after 12 years, was destroyed long before then.^[2]

Hastings disputed George's date, noting that George never documented why he chose 22 September. He also argued that Mansmann's description of a disc entering the frame did not fit decoys emerging from the payload.^[6]

Later claims

The researcher Robert Hastings, who first interviewed Jacobs in 1986, popularized the case from 2007 and calls it the most dramatic case of apparent UFO interference with a nuclear weapon system.^[1][4] He placed it alongside other reports of objects near test warheads, including Army radar reports from 1973.^[5] In 2023 he wrote that an anonymous Senate investigator had told him three things:^[4]

• Luis Elizondo, former head of AATIP, had seen a DVD of the film and described it to AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick on 2 February 2023.
• Kirkpatrick found the safe drawer Elizondo pointed to empty.
• Kirkpatrick said there was an explanation, a test of an anti-ballistic missile that day.

Hastings also reported, from an unnamed source, that a declassified radar record of the 15 September launch showed an unknown object near the warhead, which its analyst considered might be debris. He allowed that this could have been the chaff.^[4] None of these claims has been documented publicly.^[4]

In 2025 The Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of Air Force personnel had been falsely told of a secret program to harvest alien technology, as a long-running practice compared to a hazing ritual. It also traced another missile-shutdown UFO story to a classified electromagnetic-pulse test.^[1]

People and topics

• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Vandenberg Space Force Base — The California missile and space launch base.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Robert Jacobs — Air Force officer who said he filmed a UFO intercepting a test warhead at Big Sur in 1964.
• Florenz Mansmann — Air Force major who confirmed parts of Robert Jacobs's Big Sur story.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Kingston George — Engineer who argued the Big Sur film showed ordinary missile hardware.

On the Timeline

• Holloman landing and hangar claim (1964) (30 April 1964) — A claimed UFO under guard at Holloman AFB; the same day a pilot reports an egg-shaped object.
• Fort Riley incident (1964) (10 December 1964) — A Fort Riley guard says soldiers were marched toward a large object lit by a helicopter.

See every 1964 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Big Sur UFO”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.