The Big Sur Atlas Missile UFO Film

In 1964 the Air Force wanted a sharper view of its own missiles. From August to November, a Boston University telescope on a converted 5-inch gun mount sat near Anderson Peak, high above Big Sur. It filmed Atlas launches from Vandenberg AFB as their warheads flew toward the Nike-Zeus range at Kwajalein Atoll. The officer in charge of photo-optical instrumentation was 1st Lt. Robert Jacobs. The project engineer was a civilian analyst, Kingston George.

Just before sunup. The Atlas cleared the coastal fog. "There it is!" Jacobs shouted. The payload sat centered in the frame.

The rest came later, at a screening at Vandenberg. "Another object flew into the frame from left to right," Jacobs wrote. "It approached the warhead package and maneuvered around it." It was a classic flying saucer, with a dome on top. It circled the package, which was heading for the South Pacific at some 18 thousand miles an hour. Four bright flashes, one at each compass point of its orbit. Each bloomed into a halo on the camera tube. Then it left the way it came. The warhead, he said, "malfunctioned and tumbled out of suborbit hundreds of miles short of its target."

Major Florenz J. Mansmann of the 1st Strategic Aerospace Division saw it too. "The shape was a classic disc. The center seemed to be a raised bubble…the entire lower saucer shape was glowing and seemed to be rotating slowly."

Two or three civilians in grey suits were in the room, Jacobs says. Afterwards Mansmann told him: "Well, let's just say it never happened." If anyone pressed him, he was to call the flashes laser tracking. Mansmann later said CIA agents took the film. Jacobs first spoke out on KFMI-FM radio in Eureka in 1973. The National Enquirer ran his story in October 1982, and the MUFON UFO Journal followed in 1988 and 1989.

Kingston George remembered a different film. Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1993, he identified the launch as "Buzzing Bee", 22 September 1964. The reentry vehicle separated. Then two decoys fired off on small rocket charges, trailing packing material. Classified decoy technology, caught on camera. "Nothing 'circled' any of the images," he wrote. He doubted Jacobs ever held the clearance to see it.

Later analysis by Tim Printy in SUNlite added a second candidate, "Butterfly Net" on 15 September 1964, and stressed the limits of the image orthicon system. Bright points bloomed into halos. The recording kept only about 440 lines. A Bell Labs Nike-X report obtained by Joel Carpenter called Buzzing Bee the "most successful mission to date". Both launches reached the target area.

Robert Hastings sided with Jacobs and called George's claims factually wrong and "libelous". The date is still contested. So is the launch, and whether both men saw the same footage. The reel Jacobs describes has never been made public.

Hastings built the case into his book UFOs & Nukes and his National Press Club panels. On 19 October 2021, Jacobs told one of them that he "was part of a government cover-up for 17 years." In June 2025 a Wall Street Journal report on Pentagon UFO disinformation brought Big Sur back into the news. Christopher Mellon asked the paper for corrections. On Metabunk, the argument over one missing reel goes on.