John Mills and the Vandenberg warhead films

John Mills and the Vandenberg warhead films

Witness	John W. Mills III, retired USAF technical sergeant; Minuteman targeting team chief at Vandenberg, 1981–1985
Told to	Robert Hastings, 2006 and August 2011
Minuteman claim	c. 1984, Launch Facility 26: a film showed a white speck circling three reentry vehicles; only one reached the target
Peacekeeper claim	Late 1984 or early 1985: contractors said a light beam appeared and only two of five warheads came down (film not seen)
Mills's own view	"Nobody… thought UFO" at the time; has "no real idea what happened"
Evidence	No film or records released
Date	1984/1985
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Military encounters (topic)
People	John Mills, Robert Hastings, Robert Jacobs, Kingston George
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 98
Year	1984 in UFO history
Timeline	1984 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

John W. Mills III, a retired U.S. Air Force technical sergeant, told the UFO researcher Robert Hastings about a film he saw in the mid-1980s. It came from a Minuteman III test launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and showed a small white object moving around the missile's dummy warheads in flight. Two of the three warheads, he said, were never found.^[1][7] He also passed on contractors' second-hand account of a Peacekeeper test in which a beam of light appeared and three warheads went missing.^[1] Mills stressed that no one present thought of UFOs at the time. Hastings presents the accounts as successors to the disputed 1964 "Big Sur" film.^[1][2]

Mills

From 1981 to 1985 Mills was a Minuteman targeting team chief at Vandenberg, in the 394th Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Test Maintenance Squadron.^[1] His work, as he described it:^[1]

• His team. He was assigned to the Combat Targeting Team within the Electro-Mechanical Team group. He worked mainly with the contractors Rockwell's Autonetics Division and Space Data Corp, and sometimes Lockheed.
• The job. His team ran "Heading Sensitivity Tests" on missile guidance systems before launch, predicting whether each reentry vehicle (RV) would land on target. These tests were part of "Glory Trip" launches, in which operational missiles are shipped to Vandenberg and fired toward the lagoon at Kwajalein.
• Ellsworth, 1978. Earlier, in 1978, at a launch facility near Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, a terrified guard called him and his team commander up from the silo. They saw a rhombus-shaped object hovering low overhead. Hastings covers that case in his book UFOs and Nukes.

Mills first mentioned a "missing MIRV" incident to Hastings in 2006 without details. He described it in August 2011, after Hastings sent him a report of a failed hypersonic-vehicle test from Vandenberg blamed on an "anomaly".^[1]

The Minuteman film

Mills recalled a launch "I think in 1984", possibly the test designated 101 GB or 104 GB, from Launch Facility 26.^[1] His account:^[1]

• "Three went up, one came down." Contractors asked his team why it had not warned them the targeting would be off. The team replied that its data had looked good.
• The footage. About two days later, a contracting team showed Mills and his partner a "very classified" 30- to 40-second black-and-white segment from the Vandenberg tracking camera, on a 24-inch screen. In it, a speck about a millimetre across whipped around the RV platform, which was the size of a quarter, before reentry vehicle release.
• The cloud. The platform passed behind a cloud. When it came out, the engineers said only one RV remained, and later only one release burst was seen.
• The search. The recovered platform held no RVs, and the P-3 Orion aircraft filming the Kwajalein splashdown never saw the other two come in. "They never did find them."

Mills described the reaction in the room: "Nobody—I swear, nobody—thought UFO." The engineers considered leaking nitrogen tetroxide or monomethylhydrazine, ignition effects, and lint on the lens.^[1] Only years later, after hearing of the Big Sur case, did he reconsider. He told Hastings he considers a UFO possible but has "no real idea what happened".^[1]

Hastings, a former professional photographer, argued that lint on a lens focused at infinity would appear as a large blur, not a speck. Mills replied, "I guess we can rule out dust now." Hastings also speculated that the speck might be a basketball-sized sphere, but called this "speculation".^[1]

The Peacekeeper story

Months later, in late 1984 or early 1985 by his reckoning, two contractor friends told Mills about a Peacekeeper (MX) test.^[1]

• The test. Five RVs were launched but only two came down.
• The beam. A beam of light "coming from space" appeared on the film. Engineers first assumed a Soviet particle-beam weapon, until NORAD found no Soviet satellite on the trajectory.
• Not seen. Mills could not see this film because his clearance had been dropped when he left targeting. He heard only rumours that "they" thought it was a UFO.

Hastings added that Soviet particle-beam weapons of the time were thought too inaccurate to knock warheads off course.^[1]

Related accounts

Hastings sets Mills's story among other Vandenberg cases:^[1]

• Glory Trip 39GM. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Philip Moore, a task force commander, said one of three RVs in the launch of 28 March 1979 was "lost" well before impact. The debriefing gave only a "we don't know" answer. Moore admits he has no evidence of a UFO.
• Walker AFB, 1964. As an Atlas launch officer with the 579th Strategic Missile Squadron near Roswell, New Mexico, Moore said his technicians saw a light hovering over and darting between missile sites.^[1][6]
• The "ghost ships". A 1974 New York Times report said Army radar at Kwajalein had tracked unexplained objects beside a Minuteman nose cone in August 1973. Vandenberg later told researchers that the launch records for that month had been destroyed.

The Big Sur precedent

The best-known Vandenberg story is Robert Jacobs's account of a 1964 film from a telescope on a mountaintop near Big Sur.^[1][2]

• Jacobs's claim. Since 1982 he has said the film showed an object circling an Atlas warhead and hitting it with beams of light. Major Florenze Mansmann reportedly backed him in a 1987 letter.
• George's rebuttal. Kingston George, the project's engineer, wrote in Skeptical Inquirer in 1993 that the film showed the release of decoy warheads and chaff, a classified test of devices designed to defeat Soviet missile defences. Jacobs, who lacked the clearance to be told, mistook it for alien interference.^[2][3] George described watching objects separate from the sustainer tank and RV, at timings consistent with decoy release.^[3]

A video circulated online as footage of a "UFO shooting down an ICBM" at Vandenberg has been identified as a re-enactment.^[4] A History News Network article on UFOs at nuclear weapons sites is also listed among the sources, but its page returned no article text.^[5]

Assessment

Mills's account is a recollection, given about 27 years later, of a classified film he saw once. No film, test record or contractor statement has been released to support it.^[1] The Peacekeeper story is second-hand.^[1] Mills himself drew no conclusion. The Big Sur case that framed his later reconsideration has a documented conventional explanation in decoy deployment.^[1][2][3]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• John Mills — Air Force technician who described films of UFOs near test warheads.
• Robert Hastings — Researcher who has collected accounts of UFOs at nuclear weapons sites, author of UFOs and Nukes.
• Vandenberg Space Force Base — The California missile and space launch base.
• Robert Jacobs — Air Force officer who said he filmed a UFO intercepting a test warhead at Big Sur in 1964.
• UFOs and Nukes — Robert Hastings's book on UFOs at nuclear sites.
• 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

• Groom Range land withdrawal (1984) (7 August 1984) — The Air Force admits it restricted public access to land near Area 51 without legal authority.
• Advanced Theoretical Physics group (20 May 1985) — A secure facility hosts a conference on whether UAP evidence supports a research program.

See every 1984 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.