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Twenty years ago this October, military contractors working for Boeing reported ‘a gigantic floating red square’ UFO — over 100 yards long — hovering in the morning air over a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The eerie 2003 event first exploded into public view this July, in sworn testimony before Congress, but now an ex-US Air Force security officer has come forward to detail his official, rapid-response investigation into the UFO on the day it occurred.
‘This is not a joke,’ ex-USAF senior patrolman, Jeff Nuccetelli, told the Merged podcast Tuesday. ‘These are contractors with top secret clearances.’
Nuccetelli also revealed a second reported encounter with the ‘red square,’ in which two of his fellow USAF police patrol officers ‘got buzzed by the UFO.’
‘When I showed up, it’s just mayhem,’ as Nuccetelli recalled it. ‘Everybody’s excited. They’re scared. Everyone’s freaked out.’
A dancer by trade, Hawn was just a 20-year-old in Anaheim, California, when she first began wondering about the great unknown. “That was a time when, you know, there was a lot of UFO sightings,” says Hawn during the episode. “I remember this so clearly: I went outside my door, and I sat on the little ledge, and I looked up at the dark sky. And I saw all these stars. And all I could think of was, How far does this go? How little are we? Are we the only planet in the whole wide universe that has life on it?”
It was then, she says, that she knew she was destined to make contact with aliens. “I said, ‘I know you’re out there, I know we’re not alone, and I would like to meet you one day.’”
Smash cut to four months later, when the future First Wives Club star was working another dance job in West Covina, California—a city that’s “very close to the desert,” as she’s careful to note. Exhausted from dance rehearsals, Hawn asked a friend if she could take a nap in his car, a decision that still baffles her to this day. “I don’t know why I said that,” she says. “I don’t know why I didn’t just lie down on the bleachers.” After getting into the car to sleep, “I got this high-pitched sound in my ear,” she says. “It was this high, high frequency.”
That’s when she looked out the window. “I saw these two or three triangular-shaped heads,” Hawn recalls. “They were silver in color, slash for a mouth, tiny little nose, no ears. They were pointing at me, pointing at me in the car as if they were discussing me, like I was a subject. And they were droning…” Throughout her encounter with the two to three silver-headed creatures, she was unable to move her body, Hawn says. “I was paralyzed. And I thought, Oh, my God. I want to get up. I didn’t know if it was real or not real.”
Eventually, Hawn was able to “burst out” of the episode, she says. “It was like bursting out of a forcefield,” she recounts. “Of course I go back to all the kids and stuff, and I went, ‘Oh, my God. I think I made contact with outer space.’”
In every war there are often lesser known experiences floating about beyond the typical tales of fighting and heroism. Here in the background of all of the conflict and death often lurk outlandish accounts of something strange going on, something perhaps even more frightening than the enemy. Strange things in the sky have long been said to loiter around places of war, going all the way back to ancient times, but this is far from just in the realm of superstition and the ignorant of the past misunderstanding common celestial phenomena, and here we will look at some of the stranger cases of these things congregating to war all the way up into modern times.
Starting from World War I we have the spectacular time the Red Baron supposedly shot down a flying saucer. The so- called Red Baron was the German ace pilot Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, who was both renowned and feared for his unrivaled flying skills, often considered to be “the ace of aces” and racking up at least 80 air combat victories over his wartime carreer. In the book UFOs of the First World War, by Nigel Watson, there is a curious account that seems to show that human pilots were not the only ones the Red Baron hunted down and engaged. The story goes that as he was flying over the Belgian trenches in the spring of 1917 with fellow pilot Peter Waitzrick, the Baron spotted an unidentified object that was described as “an upside down silver saucer with orange lights” hovering in clear blue skies. After a moment of awe, fear and wonder, the Red Baron opened fire upon it, and Waitzrick, who reportedly saw the whole incident, described what happened next as follows:
We were terrified because we’d never seen anything like it before. The Baron immediately opened fire and the thing went down like a rock, shearing off tree limbs as it crashed into the woods.
But wait, it gets even weirder still. As they passed over the wreckage, two humanoid figures were supposedly seen to climb out of the otherworldly wrecked craft and scurry off into the trees, after which they were not seen again. Waitzrick would keep the whole bizarre story to himself until 80 years later, in 1999, when he would tell the world about it. There are certainly some suspicious aspects of the whole tale, not the least of which is that Waitzrick chose to come out with his amazing experience after 8 decades of silence to The Weekly World News, which many readers will recognize as perhaps not the most trustworthy of news publications. Also, the planes they were piloting were claimed to be Fokker triplanes, which is odd since these planes would not be used in the war until some months after the alleged event, in August of 1917. Perhaps Waitzrick just didn’t know anyone who would take his story seriously and didn’t know any better so it just happened to be that the Weekly World News picked it up, and perhaps with the planes his memory after nearly a century was not what it once was, but one thing he seems to be quite sure of is that the infamous Red Baron shot down a UFO, saying:
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Baron shot down some kind of spacecraft from another planet and those little guys who ran off into the woods were space aliens of some kind.
With the earliest reported sighting in 1928 and the most recent this past September, California has over 16,000 reported UFO sightings, according to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). UFOs are also commonly referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), their technical name.
Most of the reports detail a string of lights in the sky or several balls of light, many of which were reportedly orange. A large chunk of the sightings were reported by individuals who were out camping or on Navy ships docked in nearby harbors — places with clear views of the sky. That’s why many initially thought the lights they saw were shooting stars.
But many also reported seeing UFOs in broad daylight as they walked to work, drove their kids to school or simply went about their days. Several sightings fall between the hours of 10am and noon. A lot were also reported on airplane radars and from pilots looking out as they flew across the sky.
One particularly intriguing entry from 1953 detailed the experience a camp worker had with the kids she had been supervising at a summer camp near a lake. As the group chatted, a strange flying object came and landed near them to observe them.
The woman who reported it wrote: “It was silver, and looked like two saucers glued together with windows where they joined. It was so close, we could see figures at the windows that surrounded the middle seam. This was 1953, and none of us had ever seen anything move like this craft did.”
UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan presented them at a congressional hearing after they were found in Peru and tests confirmed they were not manufactured by humans.
Stephenville is often referred to by locals as the “milk capital of the world.” But after the events of January 2008, the Texas town of Stephenville became known for something otherworldly.
In “Messengers”, the first episode of VICE Studios and Netflix’s new series Encounters, residents of Stephenville and the surrounding area recount seeing something strange in the sky. One witness called it an orb, another referred to it as a flying Dorito—yes, as in the three-sided tortilla chip.
But even with such wild descriptions, the so-called Stephenville Lights is considered one of the most credible UFO sightings in modern times.
It began when Steve Allen and a couple friends were enjoying a few beers by a campfire one night and something caught their eye.
“All of a sudden I see some real bright, high intensity light off to the east, headed our way at a high velocity of speed. The lights was so bright it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was almost blinding to look at them,” said Allen. “Then what amazed me is there was no wind noise, no engine noise. There was silence. When it came past us, I developed the most peaceful, easy feeling I think I’ve ever had in my life. It was almost like a religious experience, like I was at one with whatever it was. Something I’ve never had before or since then. It was unreal.”
Then just as quickly as it arrived, it disappeared. A few seconds later, Allen claimed that two F-16 jets “came in hot pursuit.”
“And in my head I’m wondering, is it War of the Worlds? What was going on?” Allen said.
A few miles west, local police constable Lee Roy Gaitan was on his way to rent a movie for his wife’s birthday when “something caught my attention,” he said.
“I saw what appeared, I call it a bubble, or an orb, it was a reddish orange, fiery looking color, really big,” said Gaitan. “It was these bright lights, flashing, like a pulsating thing, like that. They had spread out. There was 11 or 12 lights that I was able to count. All of a sudden, these things just shoot off at a blazing speed.”
Shortly after, he too saw fighter jets, he said. “They were flying in the same direction, the same path, as these lights.“
The sightings in Stephenville quickly became the talk of the town, and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a U.S.-based non-profit dedicated to the research of UFOs around the world, came to investigate the sighting. The group invited people who had seen something to come and tell them their stories, expecting a handful of people. Instead, dozens of other witnesses appeared, claiming to have also seen odd things in the sky around Stephenville. Soon, TV crews from Japan to Brazil were descending on the town.
In the summer of 2023, a US Congressional hearing on national security was convened to discuss evidence relating to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). A parade of highly-credible men from the intelligence and military communities delivered jaw-dropping testimony regarding evidence of aliens.
Unquestionably, the most stunning takeaway was the nearly wholesale disinterest of the public at large. What should have commanded gigantic, bold-faced, block letter headlines and bug-eyed doomsday proclamations from frantic news readers barely registered a blip in the global consciousness.
Within the music industry however, one man found soaring vindication. For others, it confirmed long-held beliefs that aliens are indeed real – and pop by Earth for visits regularly.
The recordings captured from US Air Force planes last a mere 1.17 minutes — just long enough to spark mass international reaction. In the first video, against a backdrop of cloud contours, a bright white oval figure streaks across the sky.
“Oh, my gosh!” exclaims one of the pilots.
“They are going against the wind!” chimes in the second, “and the wind is 120 knots to the west!”
“Look at that thing, dude!” insists the first one.
Suddenly, the object starts to rotate. The pilot can’t contain his amazement.
“Look at that thing! It’s rotating!” Cut.
In the second video, the camera is pointed downward, with the sea as the backdrop. The radar pinpoints an object moving at such astonishing speed that it eludes tracking. The first two attempts are unsuccessful. On the third try, the radar locks onto it.
“Whoa! We got it!” exclaims the pilot.
The military personnel are all excitement: “Woo-hoo!” one cheers.
“Oh, my gosh, dude!” exclaims the first.
“Wow! Look at it fly!” Cut.
In the third video, a small object picked up by the radar remains static for a few moments before vanishing abruptly. Cut.
These images were never meant to go public. In fact, they gathered dust in the Pentagon’s archives for several years until Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, and later for Security and Information Operations, leaked them to the press. Since 2017, Mellon has been working to discover the truth about unidentified aerial phenomena, or what are commonly known as UFOs, or what the US government now calls UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomenon.
In September 1970 Captain William Schaffner, a young USAF pilot serving with the RAF, took off in a Lightning fighter aircraft from RAF Binbrook in North Lincolnshire to intercept an unknown radar contact. He was never seen again. One month later his aircraft was recovered from the North Sea, but although the cockpit was closed and the ejector seat was in place, there was no sign of Captain Schaffner.
The RAF enquiry into the disappearance of Captain Schaffner was conducted in secret, leading some people to suppose that this was part of an attempt to cover up the fact that the radar contact he had been sent to intercept was a UFO and that this had somehow spirited him out of the cockpit. This speculation was given further impetus when in 1992 newspapers published articles which included a transcript of radio calls from Schaffner which seemed to confirm that he had approached a UFO before his disappearance.
Almost fifty years later, it’s much easier to separate fact from conjecture and downright hoax. Something certainly happened to Captain William Schaffner out in the darkness over the North Sea in 1970, but is it possible to deduce precisely what? Let’s have a try.
Hellbound and Down 
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