The Vandenberg Missile Film

A disc- or saucer-shaped object flew into frame and fired beams of light at a dummy nuclear warhead, four beams in some tellings, and the warhead tumbled out of the shot. That is what Bob Jacobs says a telescope camera under his charge filmed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1964 during the launch of an Atlas missile. One version has the object wrapping around the warhead. Another says parts of the missile were destroyed. The retellings attach a speed of six to eight thousand miles an hour, in some versions to the object and in others to the warhead itself. Jacobs was a photographic-instrumentation officer. He says he was sworn to secrecy by his superior Major Mansmann and by two men in grey suits. One telling has the warhead falling short into the Pacific and the film confiscated by the CIA.

What is on the record

Three claimants come from five channels and sixteen videos. All of it is testimony and no documents sit in the file. The recurring core is Jacobs' own account and the corroboration attributed to Major Mansmann. Mansmann is said to have confirmed decades afterwards that Jacobs served at Vandenberg after the Air Force had denied it. Several tellings add reprisals: denied service records, a bombed mailbox and a film held in a private vault that one telling says Congress now seeks. One telling says Lue Elizondo has seen the film. In another Jacobs passes on rumours that objects were being shot out of the sky and that UFOs served as cover for other activity during the tests.

The resolved witness list is still not quite clean. Mansmann appears under two spellings of his first name, "Florence" and "Florenz". The tellings write the surname Mansman, while a public-record check spells it Mansmann, as this page does. The three claimants therefore come to two people, Jacobs and Mansmann. The Jacobs film claim is the spine of this entry.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3, the tier for multiple tellings of one connected event. It rests on testimony rather than any recovered film or government record. The central object here is the film, and the film is not in the archive's hands. What the camera recorded in 1964, if it was as described, is not resolved here.