Nukes & UFOs: Gov’t Cover-Up

Herald Tribune-- The clownish stewards of Soviet history used a heavy hand to rewrite its past, airbrushing disgraced icons — politicians, cosmonauts, generals, etc. — from state photos when the gravity of being human dragged them back to earth. In the U.S., managing history requires a bit more finesse.

Much about the evolution of nuclear weapons in America remains classified today, and during the Bush administration, previously released Cold War-era documents on our WMD arsenal were yanked back into the dark. After all, despite the best efforts of censors on the front end, some things slipped into the public domain that probably never should’ve been there in the first place. To wit:

In 1998, as she sorted through reams of government paper during her marathon legal ordeal to obtain widow’s benefits from the Veterans Administration, Pat Broudy found a reference to apparent UFO surveillance on a nuclear operation in the Pacific. The episode is detailed at length in Robert Hastings’ 2008 book “UFOs and Nukes.”


Broudy, whose ex-Marine husband Charles died in 1977 from exposure to radiation, discovered the surprise in Defense Nuclear Agency documents declassified in 1982. It was a blurb in a 4/7/54 ship’s log from the Operation Castle sequence, several hours after Shot Koon rocked Enewetak with a 110-kiloton blast. The report noted that “an unidentified luminous object passed over ship from bow to stern, yellowish-orange in color, traveling at a high rate of speed and a low altitude.”

As security breaches go, this one would appear to be a bag of small fries. OK, our impregnable fleet got buzzed by a UFO 50 years ago, so what — no harm, no foul. But then, as Hastings discovered in 2004 when he attempted to access the Operation Castle documents online from the Department of Energy, the bogey reference — cited on page 341 of the original report — wasn’t there. In fact, pages 301 to 350 were missing from the posted archives. Hastings’ theory: “It would have been too suspicious to delete just that one page.”

Maybe that’s what happened, or maybe not. Maybe it’s one of those random, arbitrary things, like when fish fall out of the sky. But if, as many researchers assert, UFOs are among America’s most highly classified secrets, then it would probably make sense to eliminate the reference from something this arcane. Unless you get caught doing it. Then you play into the hands of the accusers and you look really dumb.

Pat Broudy, who recently won her decades-long battle against the VA for widow’s benefits, still retains the DNA’s unedited Castle report at her home in Dana Point, Calif. She’s had her fill of government efforts to deny and alter the past.

“Nothing they do is surprising to me anymore,” she says.