The Atlas Site 9 Light

A fully lit round object hung silently over the Atlas silo and shone a light straight down onto it. In the archive's tellings it came back more than three times but fewer than ten over a month. The guards were frightened and reported it each time. The command post responded with indifference and a technician was ordered to report to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Jerome Nelson was a launch officer at the site. He says he learned only decades later, from the technician Bob Caplan, that the investigators had been called in. Neither he nor his commander had been told.

What is on the record

The archive has two claimants, Nelson and Caplan, whose surname its transcripts render as Kaplan. A third former member of the site's personnel, Gene Lamb, is part of the public record. Billy Cox of Florida Today interviewed the three men in 2001.

The accounts do not fully agree. Florida Today reported in 2001 that Nelson stayed at his post and did not see the object himself. In a later affidavit and in testimony in 2010 he says he saw it. Readers should weigh that change. The case also appears in Robert Hastings's UFOs and Nukes and separately in Eberhart's chronology for the Center for UFO Studies, which dates it to winter 1963 and counts at least three incidents.

The site's position is uncertain too. Our sources place it west of Roswell. Eberhart puts it north-east of Sunset in New Mexico, and the pin on this page is approximate. Caplan says a report went to the investigators. No file has been released and no explanation has been offered.

Why it sits where it does

It grades L3 on independent claimants. Three named former personnel spoke to a newspaper on the record and two of them are in the archive, though both tellings come from one channel. The investigators' report that Caplan describes has never surfaced. What hovered over Site 9 is not resolved here.