Subject: The
"UFO" Filming, Big Sur, California
September 1964; UFO
or IFO?
Francis
Ridge:
Update: 22 August 2008
This now appears to have been a UFO disabling a dummy warhead on
an
Atlas missile. USAF Lt. Robert
Jacob's was Officer-in-charge of Photo-Optical Instrumentation for the
1369th
Photographic Squadron at Vandenberg AFB. He disclosed his crew's
filming of an Atlas
missile launch where a UFO allegedly caused the ICBM's warhead
malfunction. At the time of the filming apparently no one knew anything
about a UFO. But the next morning Jacobs was ordered
to report to the office of Maj. Florenz Mansmann, First STRAT AD, his
commanding officer where he was shown the film and was told to forget
it
ever happened. Kingston George, the project
engineer for the experiments, and who probably never saw the film,
"identified" the object as "nothing to do with UFOs" in an article by
the Skeptical Enquirer (Winter of 1993). Before Mansmann's death,
and 40 years after the actual event, the major confirmed a UFO incident
in writing. The opinion of
some serious researchers on our team, however, suggests that the
telescope imaging
system was not adequate enough to produce the results described by
Jacobs and Mannsman.
As coordinator for the Lunascan Project, which originally used a
vidicon tube camera and now uses CCD and digital cameras, I had
concluded that the Big Sur system and its Image Orthocon could have
performed as suggested by Jacobs, with the resolution and seeing
conditions that were present during those tests. With the res a
given, image projection could have easily pumped up the image even
more. Later, we used the expertise of John Waskiewicz to calculate the
capabilities, and his conclusion was that the images would have been
very small. The latest analysis, by Mark Rodeghier of CUFOS, using the
resolution of the 24" scope used at Big Sur, shows that the system was
capable of producing images as described by Mannsman & Jacobs as
described.
Robert
Jacobs on "Virtually
Strange" radio program with james Errol Knapp (.ra audio clip)