Robert Hastings spent decades tracking the mysterious overlap between unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the nation's nuclear arsenal.
As Wyoming prepares to pioneer next-generation nuclear technology, Hastings expects UAP activity to follow and sees their presence as a potential safeguard against catastrophic failure.
“In my opinion, these are non-human entities flying the UAPs,” Hastings, a renowned UFO researcher, author, lecturer and filmmaker who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday. “One might propose that what they’re up to, these entities, is trying to save us from ourselves.”
Hastings’ fascination with UAP and nuclear weapons began when he was a teenager. In 1967, his father was stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana.
That was the same year 10 Minuteman nuclear missiles went offline at once, an event that former launch officers later told Hastings coincided with security personnel reporting a large object hovering over a missile site.
Hastings would come to find out that Malmstrom was far from an isolated event.
Through hundreds of interviews with military veterans and government insiders, he said he uncovered a decades-long pattern of mysterious craft hovering above nuclear-weapons facilities, monitoring launch systems and occasionally intervening.
“We know beyond a reasonable doubt, based on the testimony of my sources and other people’s sources, that they can tamper with weapons,” Hastings said. “They can temporarily disable them through isolated cases.”
Though his research focused on nuclear weapons, Hastings said the crossover between UAP and nuclear development doesn’t end with bombs.
“There are many cases on record where these objects have hovered above or maneuvered around civilian nuclear-power plants,” Hastings said.
Now, with the Bill Gates-backed Natrium reactor inching closer to its projected 2030 completion in Kemmerer, Hastings said that if the historical pattern holds, whatever has watched nuclear sites for decades will take notice of Wyoming’s, too.
‘There Will Be More’
The last case Hastings formally investigated was a 2010 incident at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, where controllers temporarily lost communication with a squadron of 50 nuclear-armed Minuteman III missiles while an unidentified craft was reportedly sighted in the area.
Though he has since retired, Hastings suspects the phenomenon has not.
"My gut tells me that between 2010 and now there's certainly been more incidents at F.E. Warren,” Hastings said. “And there will be more in the future.”
Military leadership attributed the 2010 communications outage to a failed receiver card in a subterranean communications cable that triggered a domino effect across the missile field.
But Harry Gillway, who served as sheriff in Kimball County, Nebraska, where a portion of F.E. Warren’s missile silos are located, told Cowboy State Daily he never received an explanation about what happened after the missiles went dark.
“Soon after that time, we had drones that were showing up in my county,” Gillway said. “Numerous people saw them, including the deputies and myself. But looking at these drones, you couldn’t identify what they actually were.”
Gillway said the sightings were rampant but identifying the crafts in any way proved impossible.
“The only thing that I could identify was that they didn’t travel in a behavior like an aircraft,” Gillway said. “They would come to a sudden stop, change directions at a 45-degree angle. No aircraft can do that. But what were they? I don’t know.”
Then, as mysteriously as the unknown crafts had arrived, they were gone.
“It carried on for about maybe six months,” Gillway said. “Then, all of a sudden, the phenomenon was over and we weren’t getting any more reports.”
‘Cowboy Chernobyl’
In the cases Hastings has researched, he said UAP have shown they can disable nuclear weapons, from missiles going offline at Malmstrom to a massive object reportedly trailing bombers on nuclear alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world might have been closest to nuclear war.
In other documented cases he’s read about, Hastings said the phenomenon has behaved similarly at energy-development sites.
He highlighted the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, where nuclear monitoring teams and eyewitnesses reportedly saw a brass-colored sphere hovering directly over the burning, exploded reactor core and directing two crimson light beams onto the wreckage for several minutes.
Hastings said radiation monitoring teams took readings right before the craft appeared, then tested the area again after it left.
“For whatever reason, and it was inexplicable to them, the radiation level had dropped by 74%,” Hastings said. “It seems that some higher intelligence flying this advanced technology was aware of this explosion and of the disastrous consequences of radioactivity leaking into the atmosphere.”
Critics of the Natrium project, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, warn that a similar disaster could unfold in Kemmerer once it opens in 2030. In a statement last December criticizing the federal review as rushed, the UCS nicknamed the project “Cowboy Chernobyl.”
While TerraPower says the reactor’s design has safety features built in, locals have also voiced concerns about living next to a first-of-its-kind reactor.
If the worst ever happened at Kemmerer, Hastings said history suggests UAP might step in, whether out of altruism or concern for the planet itself.
"What they're apparently doing, in my estimate, is wagging a finger at humanity, specifically the nuclear powers,” Hastings said. “And telling us in no uncertain terms, that we're playing with fire.”
Richard Beckwith, former city attorney of Rock Springs and a current UAP investigator, told Cowboy State Daily that while he hasn’t heard of an influx of sightings around Kemmerer yet, it might not be a matter of if they start, but when.
“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were some kind of activity,” Beckwith said. “As a matter of fact, I would be really surprised if there wasn’t some activity out there given the nature of the facility.”
‘Show Me The Beef’
For Tucker Fagan, former wing commander at F.E. Warren, not all activity in the sky over military bases amounts to alien activity. In fact, Fagan told Cowboy State Daily that people who jump to extraterrestrial conclusions often don’t understand the reality of operating a base.
Before coming to Cheyenne, Fagan was vice commander at Malmstrom, where he said a workforce made up mostly of people under 21 patrolled remote sites, logging 900,000 miles every month.
“They come back to the missile site, then they've got to go out again,” Fagan said. “They walk the fence on a missile site at 3 o'clock in the morning, and they're out there like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ And you don't think someone may get spooked?”
Fagan wasn’t at Malmstrom in 1967 when the reported UAP sighting preceded a mysterious missile shutdown, but he said he chalks up the incident to lore -- not fact.
Similar incidents, Fagan said, also happened during his time at F.E. Warren. Occasionally, personnel would get spooked by a bright light in the night sky and file a report. But the incidents always ended there, Fagan said, because no tangible proof ever materialized.
Still, he said he doesn’t think anyone is lying, and he isn't ruling out any possibilities, either.
“Are there other beings on other planets? Statistically, you'd have to say probably,” Fagan said. “But as far as things here, I say ‘Show me the beef.’”
He pointed to the vast array of sophisticated radar and satellite networks monitored around the clock by the U.S. and other global powers. With all that technology watching the skies, Fagan said surely the beef would have materialized as something concrete.
While Hastings and Beckwith both believe there is an element of cover-up surrounding the phenomenon, Fagan said that theory doesn't align with what he saw during three years writing speech material for top Air Force leadership at the Pentagon.
Even if the government had all the alien answers and wanted to keep them hidden, Fagan doesn't think they could.
“People can't keep their mouths shut,” Fagan said. “It would already be out by now.”
‘All The Answers’
Whether they see cosmic intervention, like Hastings, or the pragmatic skepticism of Fagan, those tracking Wyoming’s skies agree on one thing about the future: Show them the beef.
Hastings said he has heard from reliable sources that key figures in the Trump White House are actively interested in the subject and Trump might lead the way on full UAP disclosure before his term ends.
It’s an exciting notion, but Hastings isn’t holding his breath.
“I'll believe it when I see it,” Hastings said. “But the people who've told me that are some of these former high-level Department of Defense or CIA insiders, and they've generally been pretty reliable in the past.”
One well-known figure from that world is Lue Elizondo, a former Pentagon intelligence official who says he led the government’s UFO investigation program before resigning in 2017. Both Hastings and Beckwith count him as a friend.
Shortly after Elizondo left the government and moved to Wyoming, Beckwith said, Elizondo told him personally that the clock was ticking toward a definitive timeline for UAP disclosure.
“What he told me is that we would get all the answers in 2027,” Beckwith said.
But just as Hastings takes rumors of a presidential reveal with a grain of salt, Beckwith treats that impending disclosure timeline with the same caution.
Both men agree that only time will tell, and Kemmerer’s new reactor is one site Beckwith will be watching closely in the meantime.
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
