Bluegill Triple Prime: Did a nuclear test knock down a nonhuman craft in 1962?

By Douglas Dean Johnson

@ddeanjohnson on X and BlueSky

This article was initially published on May 21, 2025. Any substantial corrections or revisions that are made in this article after its initial publication will be noted in a chronological log at the end of the article. My gmail address is my full name, with periods between the names.

This article examines only a single matter: The theory that a U.S. nuclear test conducted over the south Pacific on October 26, 1962, called Bluegill Triple Prime, accidentally knocked down UFO, a nonhuman craft, some part of which then was recovered by the U.S. government.

In general, theories of a UFO-nuke connection interest me a good deal. There have been many reports of UFO events associated with nuclear weapons, going back to the Manhattan Project. I am not persuaded by those who attribute all of these reports to misinterpretations of prosaic devices or phenomena, or social contagion, or foreign adversaries, or hoaxes and fantasies. The reader wishing to explore this subject might begin with UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites (Second Edition, 2017), distilling the work of Robert Hastings, an independent researcher who spent about four decades (roughly 1972-2012) actively investigating UFO reports that reached him from persons involved in various capacities with nuclear weapons. Another worthwhile work is Unidentified: The National Intelligence Problem of UFOs (2017), in which Larry Hancock analyzed declassified military records of nuke-related events from the 1940s through 1960s. I do not agree with every assessment or conclusion reached by these two authors, but I respect their work (among others), and I believe that the subject matter is worthy of serious attention. [1]

Yet, to be of any positive value in the analysis of the phenomena or analyzing patterns, any specific account must first be able to withstand searching scrutiny on its own. As discussion of a "UFO-nuke connection" has grown over decades, hoaxers have become more prone to build their fables around nuclear weapons. I have personally previously investigated in depth two nuke-themed stories around which substantial bodies of ufological literature have been generated, in each case uncovering information demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that the tales were fabrications by serial prevaricators [2].

The genesis of this story, however, is different, and in some respects murkier.

SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS

After months of study and consultations with subject matter experts, my assessment is that the Bluegill Triple Prime UFO-knockdown story is primarily the product of confirmation bias run amok. I do not believe that any UFO event actually occurred during the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test.

In my view, the genesis of this UFO-knockdown theory is analogous to a police detective receiving a tip that if he examines a long-vacant room, he will find evidence of a murder. The detective goes to the long-vacant room and soon reaches the firm conviction that the stains on the floor mean somebody indeed must have been murdered there. The detective is mistaken; the stains are of prosaic origin (the tipster was also mistaken), but the die is cast. The detective is honest, intelligent, tireless, and imaginative. In fact, the detective is altogether too imaginative. When "connecting the dots" leaves large gaps, the detective employs his exceptional speculative powers to create new dots ex nihilo. He tirelessly and relentlessly interprets all evidence to support his predicate theory. After details of the detective's crime theory become public in the press, a fabulist calls the detective to supply many vivid eyewitness details of the imaginary murder. The detective is delighted to receive this apparent corroboration, even though the fabulist badly misdescribes the crime scene and provides details that deviate in some major respects from the detective's earlier reconstruction of the crime– the crime that never occurred.

The association of the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test with a UFO event does not have a very long pedigree. In March 2025, Robert Hastings, whom I mentioned above, told me he never heard of a UFO event associated with Bluegill Triple Prime until he heard the theory in 2024, attributed to Geoff Cruickshank, an Australian researcher. Cruickshank constructed the theory after encountering 2016 remarks by Tom DeLonge, as discussed below; but DeLonge's statements were both internally contradictory and entirely lacking in evidence or sourcing. Cruickshank based his theory mainly not on the words of DeLonge (which were the "tip" in my detective analogy), but on other forms of evidence discussed in detail in this article.

Two movies that were made during the Bluegill Triple Prime test and made public a quarter-century ago show an apparently smoking object tumbling away from the vicinity of the nuclear fireball; as discussed below, I concluded that object is very likely the 65-foot Thor rocket booster that carried the warhead aloft. I found still images published in classified reports of the 1960s (later declassified) that showed the booster near the fireball, illuminated by the nighttime detonation, with captions that explicitly identified it as the booster.

In a third movie, a triangle occupying part of the image frames was interpreted by some as a "sanitization" device added in the laboratory, but this is surely wrong: The triangle is actually and obviously part of the image that appeared on the original emulsion film. It is an object within the camera that took that film, according to three nuclear-image experts to whom I showed the footage; this article explores why it may appear as it does in the footage that we see.

Classified reports on the Bluegill Triple Prime test, later declassified, document a great amount of hardware going up and coming down during and after the detonation, including 28 sizeable "sounding rockets" with instruments of various configurations. I found nothing in the logs of the recovery-fleet ships to indicate that the naval personnel involved judged anything that they recovered was anomalous. Specific objects briefly and neutrally described in the logs were all likely products of the sounding-rocket instrument packages and other prosaic sources. Old declassified reports also provide non-mysterious explanations for aberrant radiation-exposure data.

Harald Malmgren (1935-2025), a significant U.S. trade-policy official in the 1970s, began telling fanciful stories about his past at least by 2018 and probably earlier; in 2024 he added UFO stories to his repertoire. Among other innovations, he inserted himself into Cruickshank's Bluegill Triple Prime UFO-knockdown story; some took this as corroboration of the Cruickshank UFO-knockdown story. It was not. For years Malmgren had been peddling a fantastic and self-glorifying account of his claimed high-level insider role at the Pentagon during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I believe that he attached himself to Cruickshank's theory merely because it was a UFO story that fit neatly into the timeline of his predicate story. In an article already published, I examined some of Malmgren's many demonstrable fabrications, replete with documents from the 1960s and 1970s, including documents signed and certified by Malmgren himself, that discredit his later claims about what he was doing in October 1962. Malmgren was even mixed up about very basic facts about the Bluegill Triple Prime test– for example, he repeatedly said that it included the actual interception of an incoming missile, which it did not.

However, the discrediting of fabulist Malmgren does not discredit Cruickshank's theory; it just means that the original theory must be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, neither enhanced nor diminished by the fabricated Malmgren overlay. Setting Malmgren aside now, I look at the evidence for the claimed event itself.

THE ORIGINS OF THE BLUEGILL TRIPLE PRIME UFO-KNOCKDOWN THEORY

Geoffrey Cruickshank has extensive and diverse expertise in technological hardware and software engineering and maintenance. He is currently an operations technologist in the oil-gas industry, operating complex process controls. In addition, he operates his own security consultant firm, work that includes creation and certification of security facilities (SCIFs) for intelligence and military components. In the past he has done work for an Australian intelligence service that he is not permitted to name, involving electronic intelligence collection and analysis. He describes himself as a past "intelligence analyst," rather than a past "intelligence officer." He told me, "For the record, the Australian Government does not believe UFOs / UAPs are worthy of scientific study, so I'm not claiming to have worked / been briefed on anything during my time employed in the Intelligence Community." [3]

In email correspondence, Cruickshank told me that he was inspired to look for evidence of a UFO knockdown by remarks made by Tom DeLonge during a 2016 interview by Jimmy Church. [A verbatim transcript of the exchange appears in End Note No. 4].

To my mind, DeLonge's claims on UFO-related matters have a poor track record, and the particular claims he made in the Church interview were both unsourced and internally contradictory. DeLonge and Church referred explicitly to the Starfish Prime nuclear test, which was conducted on July 9, 1962. They referred also to the astonishingly powerful and unexpected electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that test produced, which damaged some electrical equipment in Hawaii, about 900 statute miles away (line of sight). Yet DeLonge also mentioned the associated UFO knockdown as occurring during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was three months after Starfish Prime, and which did not involve any extraordinary EMP effects (but it did involve a design intended to produce intense X-ray effects). The U.S. conducted two atmospheric tests during the thirteen-day period generally considered as the Cuban Missile Crisis period (Oct. 16-28, 1962), named Checkmate (Oct. 20) and Bluegill Triple Prime (Oct. 26).

Cruickshank suspected that DeLonge had received insider information on the UFO knockdown from the retired U.S. Air Force major generals with whom DeLonge had contact, William Neil McCasland and Michael Carey. ((McCasland's name came up in emails between DeLonge and White House staffer John Podesta, released by Wikileaks later in 2016, and Carey later said something nice but vague about a DeLonge novel, Sekret Machines (2016).) Cruickshank set to work looking for evidence of a 1962 UFO knockdown. When he came across declassified films from the Bluegill Triple Prime test, showing an object tumbling away beneath the nuclear fireball, he believed he had found that evidence. From there he went on to find references in ships' logs that he interpreted as evidence that the Navy had recovered "anomalous" material.

Cruickshank initially laid out the major elements of his theory in a series of three posts on Reddit, which he told me he posted in late 2022. In 2024 he laid out a more polished version in a paper memorandum titled Supporting Evidence for Bluegill Triple Prime UAP Shootdown Theory, hereafter referred to in this article simply as Supporting Evidence. The entire paper as released in August 2024 is embedded below in PDF.

I confess that Cruickshank's paper generally struck me as a collection of unsubstantiated assumptions, linked by rather breathtaking leaps of speculation. The paper is replete with such phrases as "it seems entirely possible," "it is hypothesised" "it is posited here," "the most likely place," etc. In some cases, actions or positions are imputed to various people based not on any direct information about what they did, but on Cruickshank's speculations about what they must have done or said, based on the unshakable premise that his basic theory of a UFO knockdown was true. Sometimes the use of quote marks without attribution, and use of the passive voice, made it impossible to know who had done or said what.

In August 2024, Cruickshank was interviewed about his theory by Ross Coulthart on his Reality Check program on NewsNation, a multi-platform network owned by Nexstar Media Group, linked here. Cruickshank subsequently authored an article titled "The Hidden Truth Behind a 1960s Nuclear Test: A Non-Human Craft Fell Down To Earth," published on December 21, 2024, on Liberation Times, a website owned by Christopher Sharp in the UK. (I have embedded below a PDF of that article as it appeared on March 5, 2025; there has been at least one subsequent substantive edit to the web version.)

In the Liberation Times article, Cruickshank drew heavily on then-recent posts on X by Harald Malmgren, which I have already dismissed as explained above. Of course, in late 2024 Cruickshank had no way of knowing many of the things about Malmgren's history that I documented in May, 2025.

In reviewing the Bluegill-knockdown theory without reliance on the clearly bogus Malmgren claims, I first wondered whether there were any old documents or reports, or any references at all in UFO-related books or other literature, that associated the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test with a UFO event, prior to 2016. By email, I asked Robert Hastings whether he had ever encountered any account of a UFO incident during the Bluegill Triple Prime, prior to hearing about Cruickshank's narrative in 2024. Hastings replied by email on March 7, 2025, "I was unaware of claims that an alleged UFO crash had occurred during the Bluegill Triple Prime test until I saw Cruickshank being interviewed by Ross Coulthart last year. If any previous public mention of the supposed crash by anyone else ever occurred, I am unaware of it."

Based on the Supporting Evidence paper, the Coulthart interview, and the Liberation Times article, Cruickshank's UFO-knockdown theory, at least as of the end of 2024, appeared to rest on two main pillars (not counting the late-coming Malmgren claims): (1) his interpretations of declassified movies made during the nuclear test; and (2) his interpretation of certain entries in the logs of ships that were part of the recovery fleet for the test. I should note that Cruickshank also has engaged in extensive expositions regarding the physical mechanisms by which he believes the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear device might have disabled a nonhuman craft. I think that such ultra-attenuated extrapolations are of no value unless the reality of an actual UFO event itself could first be established, so I do not engage them in this article.

OPERATION DOMINIC / OPERATION FISHBOWL

Context: In 1962, faced with active testing of nuclear devices by the Soviet Union – 57 detonations in 1961 alone– President John F. Kennedy ended a U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing that had begun in October, 1958. This unleashed the Atomic Energy Commission, national nuclear laboratories, and military components to rush to test theories and hardware they'd been accumulating for years. The United States conducted a series of 36 nuclear detonations during 1962, under the rubric Operation Dominic. The Soviets conducted 78 detonations in 1962, nearly all above ground.

A subset of Operation Dominic, known as Operation Fishbowl, involved the use of Thor rockets to lift warheads to very high altitudes (from 30 to 248 miles), where they were detonated. In general, the Fishbowl tests were intended to learn more about the effects of high-altitude nuclear detonations on radio communications and radar, but also to explore possible weapons effects that scientists believed might later be harnessed to destroy incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). The Soviet Union had only a small number of ICBMs in 1962, but was rapidly expanding its ICBM inventory. Then as now, the U.S. had no effective means of disabling large numbers of incoming ICBMs.

Five of the Fishbowl detonations were conducted near Johnston Island, a small U.S.-controlled island in the south Pacific. One of the Operation Fishbowl series, Bluegill Triple Prime, was conducted on the morning of October 26, 1962, Washington D.C. time– which, as it happened, was the day before the critical climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 13-day episode that is regarded by some historians as the closest we ever came to a full-blown nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In Bluegill Triple Prime, a Thor rocket transported a W-50 nuclear warhead to a height of 30 miles (48 km). Most declassified documents merely say that the yield was "in the kiloton range," and some commentators have speculated that it was 400 kilotons, but the declassified technical paper Optical Phenomenology (see below) on page 214 explicitly affirmed a "total yield of 200 kilotons." This was about 13 times the yield of the device that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

The W-50 nuclear warhead used in this particular test was specially designed to put out very intense X-rays, partly because it was believed that such a device might be useful in disabling warheads on incoming enemy ICBMs. There was no actual incoming target missile involved in this test (contrary to Malmgren's 2024-25 fictional version), but one of the purposes was to use instruments aloft to gather basic data about the effects of this weapon type when detonated at the chosen altitude.

The official time of the test detonation is recorded as 9:59 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on October 26, 1962, or 5:59 AM Eastern Daylight Time. At the test site, it was one minute before midnight on October 25, 1962.

After the Fishbowl series, teams of scientists and engineers produced many technical papers, originally classified but largely declassified during the 1980s, albeit with some redactions. An overview report titled Operation Dominic 1962, apparently released in 1983, contained some useful summary data on the Bluegill Triple Prime test; those pages are embedded immediately below, followed by a PDF of the entire report.

The technical report that I found contained the greatest amount of data useful to this inquiry was ADA995489, Optical Phenomenology of High-Altitude Nuclear Detonations (Oct. 9, 1964; extracted version Sept. 1, 1985, embedded below), which includes considerable information on the movies made during the test, some of which I will cite or reproduce below. [5]

The Bluegill Triple Prime test was conducted under the gaze of 66 cameras (movies and still), about one-third of these recording in color. Footage from three of these cameras will be discussed in this article. Some small fraction of the films were digitized, edited for purposes of classification or other reasons, and apparently made public in 1998.

Many of the photographic images were made from two KC-135 jet aircraft, each packed with cameras and other instruments. A KC-135 designated as KETTLE 1 in some records and as "Aircraft 53120" in other records, was about 41 miles (horizontal distance in statute miles) nearly due north of the detonation. A KC-135 designated as KETTLE 2 in some records and as "aircraft 60376" in other records was about 41.5 miles (horizontal distance in statute miles) east of the detonation point; this aircraft is of particular interest in my analysis. Both aircraft were flying at 37,500 feet. The detonation occurred at an altitude of about 157,480 feet (about 30 miles), so by direct line of sight each plane was about 47 miles from the warhead when it detonated. [6][7]

CONSULTATION OF SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS

During the course of my inquiry, while studying the pertinent photographic images and declassified papers, I also consulted directly with several persons possessing expertise on the nuclear tests and the resulting films. All provided observations and interpretations that I found very useful. Although I approached each independently, their observations were consistent on most key points. Of course, none of these people are in any way answerable for any of my opinions or conclusions. I will cite below observations by three knowledgeable individuals:

• Peter Kuran: Author of the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb (2006), director of an acclaimed 1995 documentary Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, and winner of an Academy Award in 2002 for developing a new method for restoring old color films. Kuran was also among the experts were part of the Film Scanning and Reanalysis Project, a joint effort between the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to preserve, digitize, and reanalyze many of the nuclear-test films of 1945-1963. This project was well described in "Preserving the Past to Protect the Future," which appeared in Science & Technology Review, Oct.-Nov. 2017. I highly recommend that the reader take a look at this article, and also in a short documentary produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that I have embedded in End Note 8].

• Alex Wellerstein: Professor of technology at Stevens University. A nationally recognized expert on the history of nuclear weapons and related government programs. Creator of the NUKEMAP website that allows dial-in displays of nuclear-weapons effects. Operates the NUKES account on X, devoted in large part to historical nuclear weapons images and incidents. Writes a nuclear-themed blog, DOOMSDAY MACHINES. Author of the authoritative Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

• Dr. Bryon L. Ristvet: retired from long service as Assistant for Nuclear Matters at what is now known as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Ristvet headed the team that coordinated the declassification of the nuclear-test movies under discussion here.

Again, please note: While each of these persons offered observations that I found valuable, none of them are in any way responsible for my assessments or conclusions on any point.

THE THREE MOVIES

There are three declassified movie clips now in the public domain that are pertinent to the Bluegill Triple Prime UFO-knockdown discussion. Geoff Cruickshank referred to films based on the designations of the airplanes with which he associated those films. I have reached different tentative conclusions about where each film originated. I have adopted my own labels for each film, using a nomenclature that can accommodate different theories about the origin of each movie, to facilitate further discussion. I hope that publication of this article will engender further discussion and inquiries that ultimately may result in greater clarify about the history of these movies and what they show.

FALLING OBJECT MOVIE BETA (FOM-B)

The movie that I have labeled "Falling Object Movie Beta" (FOM-B) has a viewing time of only 32 seconds. In this film, an indistinct dark object can be seen initially at an elevation a little lower than the fireball, headed earthward. The indistinct object is visible on screen for about 11 seconds, and appears to trail a wisp of smoke for part of that span. Very briefly, the object's elongated or cylindrical shape can be discerned.

I believe that FOM-B is most likely Film Number 95226, which was taken from a KC-135 plane designated as KETTLE 2 and also as "aircraft 60376." That plane was at a line-of-sight distance of about 41 statute miles from the detonation. If I have identified the correct film, then it was taken with a Photo-Sonics 4C camera with a 50mm lens, using Ektachrome ER (EDER) film, at an original frame rate of 2500 frames per second, a frame-rate allowing for super-slow-motion playback. That super-slow-motion frame rate would have been greatly adjusted during the process that produced a film for public release; my guess is that the viewing version slows down real time by a factor of about 10. The images may have also been cropped and enlarged on an optical printer. In the paper Optical Phenomenology, the terse notes on Film Number 95226 state, "Long, persistent record of central core. Shows early fireball dissipation. Small image."

My identification of this movie as Film Number 95226 is made with only a modicum of confidence. I would welcome challenges, so long as they take into account that this movie shows the falling object from essentially the same perspective as FOM-A (see below), and therefore both of the originating cameras must be found on the same camera platform.

FALLING OBJECT MOVIE ALPHA (FOM-A)

The film that I call "Falling Object Movie Alpha" (FOM-A), has a running time of one minute, 44 seconds – over three times the viewing length of FOM-B. The film begins just before the dropping object becomes visible. The falling object is visible for only about one second, trailing smoke and elongated in shape; this is the same event that consumes 10-11 seconds of screen time in FOM-B, thereby providing an important clue on the relative frame-rates that may help us to identify the originating cameras.

I believe that FOM-A is derived from Film Number 95218, also taken from the KC-135 designated as KETTLE 2 / "aircraft 60376." That film was shot with a Flight Research-Cine camera through a 35mm lens, on XR film. It was shot at 20 frames per second; I believe that the speed of the event that we see on the screen when watching FOM-A approximates real time. I believe that other analysts who have interpreted this film as a slow-motion film were mistaken. In Optical Phenomenology report, the terse "Results" notes on Film Number 95218 say, "Excellent record 380 feet. Burnhole on first frame." (I think the first frame is not included in this public release version.)

Towards the end of the FOM-A footage we see the fireball drift out of sight at the top of the screen, and then come back into a centered view. Geoff Cruickshank imagined that the camera operator had swung his camera downward in an attempt to recapture the falling object, but that interpretation is entirely fanciful, in my view. As Cruickshank himself noted, an operator who did this on purpose would have "lost vital data" of the fireball's growth "which was the entire reason for filming it."

I think that if the camera operator even noticed the falling Thor booster, it would have been of no interest to him. I think that this apparent movement of the camera was really a movement of aircraft 60376. I believe that I found that very maneuver by that plane described in one of the declassified reports, and associated in that report with the correct airplane: "The large intense fireball appeared to leave the field of view after about 60 seconds at which time the aircraft went first into a right roll...and then into a left roll, which brought the fireball back into the field of view again." ((AD354288, Dominic Fish Bowl Series Project Officers Report--Project 8A1, High-Altitude Nuclear Detonation Optical-Infared Effects (U), page 35.)) While this passage was referring specifically to the image recorded by a different device on the same aircraft (60376), I believe that it accounts for the sequence of movements that we see near the end of FOM-A.

Promoters of the UFO-knockdown theory also talk a good deal about a third movie taken the Bluegill Triple Prime test, which they believe displays evidence of having been "sanitized" (redacted) to cover up the falling UFO. I have labeled the third film the "white triangle movie" (WTM). I believe that the WTM originated as Film Number 95318, taken with a Triad camera located on Johnston Island, with a 25mm lens, on XR film, at 16 frames per second. In Optical Phenomenology, the terse notes on 95318 state, "Good record but burst is low in frame. Shows many shock waves." These notes provide clues to the cropping and enlargement that I believe was done to produce the footage that we now see in the WTM, as discussed in detail further down.

THE FALLING OBJECT = THE THOR BOOSTER

In the Bluegill Triple Prime test, the nuclear device was carried aloft by a Thor rocket that was launched from Johnston Island. It arced up to an altitude (apogee) of about 660 miles (900 km). Before reaching apogee, the main engine shut off, and after completion of adjustments by small vernier rockets, three large instrument-packed "pods" (each 6.7 feet long) were released. The Thor rocket coasted up to apogee, then headed downward and released the "re-entry vehicle" which contained the warhead. Meanwhile the pods, on their own ballistic arcs, had each oriented themselves vertically and were arrayed between 3281 and 6890 feet from the detonation point, quite close to their ideal planned positions– a very impressive feat of precision, I think. After the detonation, the pods continued to descend, their falls broken by a parachute system, to be recovered by waiting ships. [9]

The Thor was a single-stage rocket; the spent Thor booster was 65 feet long and 8 feet wide.

Crucial to Cruickshank's entire thesis is his belief that there was no large conventional object in the vicinity of the nuclear detonation that could account for the large tumbling object seen in FOM-A and FOM-B. In his August 2024 interview with Ross Coulthart, Cruickshank asserted that the falling object seen in the movies must be a UFO, because "the scientists put that denotation at a point in space and time where there was no other debris or aircraft or anything in that local area." Likewise, in his Supporting Evidence, Cruickshank wrote, "The warhead was delivered to the detonation point via a Mark IV Re-Entry vehicle on a high apogee trajectory, so the Thor missile delivery vehicle remnants were also not within the detonation area and [this] is documented in the 1961 test plan."

It is true that a 1961 "test plan" for the entire series of atmospheric nuclear tests contained a passing comment suggesting that the Thor rocket could be adjusted to place the spent booster far from denotation site. But many changes later were made to plans for specific tests, and we obviously should rely primarily on the abundant records that are specific to the Bluegill Triple Prime test.

I found explicit textual references and images showing that during the Bluegill Triple Prime test, the 65-foot intact Thor booster was still in the vicinity of the warhead when it detonated, and was identified as such in photographs published not long afterwards. In the Optical Phenomenology paper, embedded above, the table of contents describes Figure 5.31 as a photo showing "Thor booster below fireball at 2.5 seconds, taken from Aircraft 60376."

Moreover, in the main text, on page 198, we read regarding the same Figure 5.31, "The Thor booster is also evident as a small white dot some distance below the burst."

Importantly, the Optical Phenomenology paper attributes the described image 5.31 to "Aircraft 60376," which is the same plane (KETTLE 2) that took Film Numbers 95218 and 95226, which I postulate to be the falling object movies, respectively designated as FOM-A and FOM-B.

When Optical Phenomenology was declassified in 1985, most of the pages containing images of the detonation were redacted (i.e., they remained classified), including page 253, which contained the actual image designated as Figure 5.31. Figure 5.31 was not singled out for redaction – most of the pages devoted to reproducing photographic images from the test were redacted in their entirety. This was probably the default practice at the time; in the same paper, the redacters did the same thing with images from nuclear tests other than Bluegill Triple Prime, tests for which no one has ever constructed any UFO story.

All of this establishes to my satisfaction that the falling Thor booster was visible to the cameras on that plane (aircraft 60376, KETTLE 2), and supports the conclusion that we are seeing that same object hurling away from the fireball in the movies under discussion. I see no reason to discount the contemporary records and still images that explicitly document that the 65-foot Thor booster was in the vicinity of the nuclear device when it detonated, and that it was photographed falling, in favor of a theory that the tumbling object was a nonhuman craft. The scientists who recorded the event saw nothing extraordinary about the object; they knew what it was, and they had seen this sort of thing before. (For example, a description of a photo taken during the July 9, 1962 Starfish Prime test said, "The small bright object at eight 0' clock from the burst point is the Thor booster which evidently had been heated to a faint incandescence by the X-rays...")

Perhaps some reader will object. "Well, maybe the scientists just assumed the dot on their image 5.31 was the booster, but maybe actually the booster was somewhere far away, as Cruickshank assumes based on the 1961 plan." This makes no sense to me; the engineers and rocket scientists of 1962 had full access to all manner of data (radar, telemetry, photographic) from numerous instruments. I would regard their contemporary descriptions and images as a far more reliable guide to the location of the Thor booster than any assumptions adopted decades later in support of a narrative.

The same reader or another, if heavily invested in the UFO-knockdown narrative, might object, "But if the scientists who wrote the paper knew there was a UFO knocked down, they might have labeled the images of the falling UFO as 'the Thor booster' as a cover story." Look: If something very unexpected appeared during a nuclear test, and there was a great desire to keep it secret, the photographs of that thing simply would not be published at all. To suggest that such images would be released to the public, but with deceptive labeling or imposition of crude "sanitization" devices, represents the sort of convoluted illogic that one finds when confirmation bias is operating at full throttle.

The scientists and engineers of 1962 simply had little interest in the falling booster. They knew what it was and where it was. Its presence in one or more images was neither surprising nor significant to any of the dozens of parameters they were measuring or trying to measure; and so they mentioned the booster's visible presence only in passing.

Regarding the three instrument pods that I mentioned in the first paragraph of this section: In December 2024, after reading Cruickshank's Liberation Times article for the first time, I starting studying the old literature about the Bluegill Triple Prime test. I was surprised when I immediately encountered information about the three instrument pods, because Cruickshank had not even mentioned the pods in the Liberation Times article. It immediately occurred to me that the falling object seen in the movies might be one of those instrument pods.

I later found that Cruickshank did touch lightly on the pods in Supporting Evidence and in his August 2024 Coulthart interview. As I delved deeper into the subject, I soon concluded that none of the 6.7-foot-long pods explained what was seen in the movies. But the Thor booster, ten times longer than a pod and explicitly identified in the old declassified papers, was another matter.

Although the instrument pods were not the culprit in the movies, they were a major component of the test. I enjoyed learning about their development, which involved various setbacks and creative engineering, all done on a compressed time schedule. Since I find all of that interesting and some readers may as well, I present considerable information about the pods and their recovery in Appendix A to this article.

THE WHITE-TRIANGLE MOVIE: THE "SANITIZATION" THEORY

A substantial exhibit in Geoff Cruickshank's array of evidence is what I call the "white-triangle movie" (WTM). This movie shows what appears to be a close up of the fireball, through which several shock-wave pulses are seen. About 15% of bottom of the frame is taken up by a triangular shape, which obscures part of the fireball in an area immediately below the left side of the fireball. The triangle is visible in the same location for the entire length of the movie, which runs about 36 seconds in the public version.

Crucial to his theory, Cruickshank asserted that the white triangle in the WTM was a "sanitization" device added by government actors to cover up the falling UFO that he believes is visible in the FOMs. I believe that this explanation for the white triangle is narrative-driven, implausible on its face, and lacks any substantial documentary or credible testimonial evidence in its support. Several passages of Supporting Evidence seemed to offer authorities for such a claim, but under scrutiny, each such data point evaporated or at least could not be substantiated.

In his 2024 writings Cruickshank associated the WTM with the KETTLE 2 plane (i.e., aircraft 60376), but he did not provide much if any documentation for that association. I concluded that the WTM was derived from film shot by a camera on Johnston Island. I have tentatively identified the WTM as being derived from Film Number 95318. If so, it was taken with a Triad camera with a 25mm lens, on XR film, at 16 frames per second. In Optical Phenomenology, the terse notes on 95318 state, "Good record but burst is low in frame. Shows many shock waves." At first glance that may seem a poor fit, since the WTM shows a fireball centered in the frame, but I believe that the original 95318 images were cropped through use of a device called an "optical printer," as discussed below.

My identification of the WTM with Film Number 95318 may be further supported by the statements in Optical Phenomenology that in photographs taken from the aircraft the fireball initially appeared elliptical, but that "from Johnston Island the fireball appeared as a circular disk...No trace of an elliptical shape is apparent." To my eye, the fireball as seen in Film Number 95318 is circular.

In a series of email exchanges, nuclear-film expert Peter Kuran conveyed to me that he did not believe that the WTM had originally been shot in slow motion (at a very high frame-per-second rate), as had been asserted by Cruickshank. Kuran said that he believed the WTM was shot on XR film and probably at 16 frames per second. Looking over the tables of the cameras used during the Bluegill Triple Prime test, he said he felt that the most likely candidates for the WTM were film numbers 95120 and 95318, both of which were shot on XR file at 16 fps using a camera designated as "TRAID." I will explain further on why I settled on 95318.

THE WHITE TRIANGLE IS OBVIOUSLY PART OF THE ORIGINAL IMAGE; AND RELEASE OF A CRUDELY MASKED FILM WOULD MAKE NO SENSE

I consulted the three experts independently, and all agreed that the white triangle is not a redaction device. There is ample evidence in the images themselves that their assessment is correct.

Alex Wellerstein observed, "I do not think it is redaction. It is clearly part of the original film footage based on the way it interacts with the light."

This is seen most clearly in the earliest frames, where the triangle first appears severely distorted in the initial pulse of the fireball.

Even after that first split-second, the intense light of the blast continues to bleed around and distort the shape of the triangle. These effects would only be seen if the triangle was part of the original emulsion image. A redaction mask added in the laboratory would be crisp, clean, identical in every frame.

Wellerstein also told me, "On the triangle thing. When they redact film they just cut the frames entirely, they do not do cute things like redact little pieces of them with a mask. At least, I’ve never seen such practices (and can’t imagine why they’d do it). I do not think it is redaction, though. It is clearly part of the original film footage based on the way it interacts with the light."

A day later, he said, "I’m asking a few people I know about the triangle thing. At this point I am 90% convinced it is just an indicator on the edge of the camera, and the camera wasn’t quite pointed in the right direction." (emails, March 23-24, 2025)

Nuke film expert Peter Kuran independently made similar points: "If there was some kind of classification issue, they would have just removed that particular clip from release." And, "The protrusion or triangle as I am calling it does not look like it was put on after the fact....[it] was probably there in the original photography. Technically, they could not have pulled this off any other way."

Both Kuran and Wellerstein independently told me they had seen small triangles in the bottom of the frames of other nuclear-test movies, and believed that these were something integral to some of the instrumented cameras. Wellerstein wrote on March 23: "At 1:03:33, one sees a black triangle briefly. It looks like it is some part of the camera. The earlier frames are inverted in color, which would match the black triangle, although the size is obviously too large/obscuring. My guess is that camera was aimed wrong and what was meant to be a small thing at the bottom of the frame instead was in the center of it. The photo reports (e.g. ADA995489) imply that a lot of cameras were mis-aimed because the anticipated burst point was off a bit. (My guess is that these “orange” ones are shots on XR film, which produces this kind of orange/blue coloration.)"

Kuran sent me a sample photo, apparently taken at a test range, in which there is a triangle within a notch at the bottom of the frame, apparently some manner of indexing aid. However, it is both marginal and perfectly centered, whereas in the WTM the triangle is much larger, taking up roughly 15 percent of the frame, and is a bit to the left of center. I address these issues further down.

In email exchanges, Kuran seemed to agree that Film Number 95318 was a plausible candidate for the WTM. He commented: "When they say [in the declassified report remarks] 'Good record but burst is low in frame. Shows many shock waves,' that film record could in fact have been put onto an optical printer, blown up so the image was more close up and centered in frame. [That] would explain the triangle. That is something EG&G [Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier (EG&G), the photography contractor] would have had the capability back in the day [in the 1960s], such as a Producer's service optical printer types 102 and 103. Also, they had an arrangement with Cinema Research Corp in Hollywood to do optical printing of records. That would primarily have involved blow ups, re-positions and step printing of film records. This would have been done back in the 1960's and an XR blow up on an optical printer to a Kodachrome dupe makes sense."

Kuran even sent me a diagram to illustrate, under the 95318 theory, where the fireball would have appeared in the original full frame, and how the cropping to the red-box area would have had the side effect of enlarging a single frame pointer and setting it slightly off center.

However, Kuran also warned me that such reconstructions are speculative, and that certitude would require examination of the original film. I subsequently have filed FOIAs with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for any available records on Bluegill Triple Prime Film Numbers 95218, 95226, and 95318, but as of the date of this publication, the agency has failed to acknowledge even receipt of those requests. Regarding the efficacy of FOIA for this purpose, "Don't hold your breath," Kuran told me early on.

DR. BYRON RISTVET

In his Supporting Evidence, Geoff Cruickshank wrote: "At the declassification review in 1998, the Defense Special Weapons Agency team led by Dr. Bryon L. Ristvet applied a large white triangle as a sanitization device on the KETTLE 2 footage, within the area of the fireball that the object can be seen tumbling from in the KETTLE 1 footage." I think many readers might have read that to mean that Cruickshank had received some affirmative testimony or documentation that Ristvet's team had "applied a large white triangle" – information obtained either from Ristvet himself or from somebody else in a position to know.

But, no, apparently not. When I contacted Ristvet directly, he clearly rejected any suggestion that the triangle was a redaction device. He wrote in part:

I have not gone to look at the original master print of the film retained by DoD. For the classification/sanitization of the films, we did a direct transfer from the master print Kodachrome 16 mm films to DigiBeta then to BetacamSP for review, in which only classified images, or sound track, or both were identified to be redacted.  Those segments were then removed from the original DigiBeta transfer and then rerecorded on Betacam SP for final review.  The transferred films were reviewed by two each NNSA and DoD classification personnel. As far as the triangle goes, there have been many films with pointers like this in the frame. But it had to be in the frame during photography and not "fixed in post"... [email, March 30, 2025; boldface added for emphasis)

UNFOUNDED SPECULATION ABOUT TWO LABORATORIES

Cruickshank never offered any explanation that was remotely plausible, in my opinion, for why the Energy Department would use a crude "sanitization" device to cover up a movie of a falling UFO, or anything else they thought was sensitive, when they were under no obligation to declassify or release the imagery at all. Most of the thousands of movies of nuclear tests have never been digitized or released. As Ristvet noted in the email quoted above, each film proposed to be release first was reviewed "by two each NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] and DoD [Department of Defense] classification personnel." Anything troublesome would simply have been deleted, or set aside entirely. [10]

Cruickshank imagined that the Los Alamos lab decided to release film showing the tumbling UFO, and the Lawrence Livermore craft decided to release a film that crudely pasted a triangle over the same UFO, because of a disagreement about "classification rules" between the two labs. He called this a "theory" that was "supporting by well documented animosity between LASL, LRL, and DASA (Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and Defense Atomic Support Agency, respectively) and scientists involved in Operation Fishbowl and follow-on analysis."

The sources Cruickshank cited as evidence for "well documented animosity" were decades-old oral histories and a paper about competition between the laboratories, going back to establishment of the Livermore lab in 1952, with Livermore sometimes considered to take a more adventurous approach to various situations, while Los Alamos was "more conservative." For various reasons, Los Alamos rested on a more secure foundation of political support, while Livermore at times was in danger of being eliminated as redundant. This history is interesting, but I found nothing that I think would justify characterizing the competitive relationship as "animosity." And even if there was indeed animosity during some period over technical matters, philosophical matters, political vectors affecting allocation of resources, or whatever, I fail follow the leap to imagined decisions made about declassifying images of a purported UFO in or about 1998.

In response to my inquiry, Sarah Scoles, an award-winning science writer who wrote the well-received Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons (Bold Type Books, 2024), which deals with the nuclear laboratories, commented on this point:

I have never heard anything about different classification rules between the labs. The handling of sensitive nuclear information was standardized through the Atomic Energy Act, a piece of federal legislation whose initial version also created the labs' parent organization, the Atomic Energy Commission. Taking the leap that competition between the labs meant different classification standards, despite the same act ruling over them, seems unjustified without evidence, and a leap from that leap to UFO secrecy is a bridge very far. As an interesting note, the rivalry was purposeful--Livermore and Los Alamos were set up, in part, to compete in a way that spurred innovation. (email, May 20, 2025)

When I pressed Cruickshank by email about the supposed divergence in classification standards, I found his response illuminating:

I believe Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory might be the "more progressive" laboratory with regards to Disclosure - but that is just my opinion from what I have read. Imagine being a scientist that has evidence of the greatest discovery in human history, yet the management of the Laboratory won't let you do it. It would be incredibly frustrating - "accidently" declassifying footage that shows an anomalous object falling out of a million degree fireball would be one way of "getting even". [email, May 8, 2025]

The key verb in that paragraph is "imagine."

I see no reason at all to suppose that anybody involved in the declassification of the Bluegill Triple Prime movies thought that the films showed anything anomalous. Two films briefly showed a smoking Thor booster, which was unremarkable. A third film was most likely cropped to center the fireball image, which had the side effect of enlarging a triangular feature that, in any event, was clearly part of the images on the original emulsion film. The entire elaborate scenario of two labs in conflict about whether to release images of a falling UFO, supposedly resulting in simultaneous surreptitious "disclosure" and crude concealment, were purely the products of Cruickshank's imagination, driven by poorly constrained confirmation bias.

THE DEBRIS RECOVERY EFFORT

For the small fleet of ships arrayed on the ocean below the detonation site, the highest priority was recovery of the three instrument pods, which I discuss in detail in Appendix A. The first pod, B1, was located and picked up by the Safeguard shortly after the detonation, and returned to Johnston Island before daylight. Pods B2 and B3 were returned by helicopter after daylight. "All pods were radioactive, the highest level was 14 r/hr, 8 hours after the event," a report noted.

Cruickshank has written of what he believes is evidence that Navy ships also recovered radioactive debris "potentially linked to the unidentified object..." The following passage appeared in his Liberation Times piece as originally published in December 2024:

Several ships, including the USS Safeguard, USS Engage, and USNS Point Barrow, were tasked with retrieving debris from the surface zero area where the detonation occurred.

Official deck logs document the recovery of various pieces of debris, some of which were described as “anomalous.”

The USNS Point Barrow, in particular, played a unique role in these operations.

Although its crew had no officially recorded duties involving radioactive materials, they reported unusually high radiation exposure levels following the recovery mission.

This anomaly suggests the retrieval of unconventional debris, potentially linked to the unidentified object observed in the KETTLE 1 footage.

I wasted a fair amount of time searching various ship logs for some reference to "anomalous" debris. There was no such reference. In late March 2025, Cruickshank edited the Liberation Times article to remove the quote marks around the word anomalous, although he retained the adjective. In my opinion, the use of the adjective is without justification even without the quote marks.

In reading the old declassified reports, it seems to me that a great many things were expected to fall from the sky after an atmospheric test, and the ships were apparently expected to recover as many objects as possible. For example, in the hour that followed the detonation, 28 separate "sounding" rockets were launched from Johnston Island, containing various instruments. Among the rockets used were Nike-Cajun and Nike-Apache, both of which utilized cylindrical boosters that were 12 feet long and 16 inches in diameter, with second stages carrying instrument payloads of various configurations.

All of this hardware fell back into the ocean. It appears to me that the crews took the approach of picking up objects whether or not they could identify them. For example, the log of the lead recovery vehicle, the USS John S. McCain, for the hours just after the Kingfish atmospheric detonation over Johnston Island, November 1, 1962, shows the ship picking up various objects both identified and unidentified– yet nobody has associated any UFO knockdown with the Kingfish test.

In his August 2024 interview with Ross Coulthart, Cruickshank provided more detail on information he said he found in the Safeguard logbooks. He said that the Safeguard had recovered "spherical debris" of a type they'd not encountered before, and that when they got that debris into a net, the ship lost all electrical power, which he said was a technically unlikely event, since the ship had two independent power sources. I could not find much support for such a narrative in that source.

In email correspondence in early April, 2025, Cruickshank pointed me to the logs of the ship named Engage. The Engage log for the day of the test (October 26, 1962) did contain notes on recovery of various objects, all of which were found to be radioactive: among these, a "black ball" recovered in "the pod recovery area," a "green tube," and "a cylindircal [sic] object" (the last while steaming in the "nose cone recovery area").

Given the number and diversity of sounding rockets and associated instrument packages that went up and came down, along with other prosaic stuff, it is not clear why we should regard any of those entries as anomalous. There is nothing in the Engage logbook to suggest that the seamen regarded any of it as extraordinary. This appears to be yet another instance of Cruickshank approaching every information source strongly committed to the belief that a nonhuman craft was knocked down, and then forcing one or another ambiguous data point into that rigid matrix.

For example, one Engage log entry noted the recovery of "a black ball." Cruickshank regarded this as anomalous. But I found that one rocket that was sent up after the detonation released "a free-falling 7-inch rigid sphere that contained a transit-time accelerometer with omnidirectional characteristics." Mind you, I do not know whether the "ball" that the Engage recovered was this same 7-inch sphere, but neither does Cruickshank know, I think.

Aside from components of sounding rockets and instrument packets, technical papers and photo descriptions from Bluegill Triple Prime contain many references to "debris" visible in the sky around a nuclear fireball and falling from a nuclear fireball. The table of contents for the Optical Phenomenology paper lists 32 photographic images from the Bluegill Triple Prime test, and in 14 of these the captions refer to "debris" visible in the photos. Nowhere did I find any remarks by scientists that they considered such debris remarkable or anomalous; it seems to have been an expected aspect of a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere. Likely some of this debris were fragments of the blasted 65-foot Thor booster; perhaps the high-tech AVCO Mark 4 re-entry vehicle was not entirely vaporized by the 200 kiloton blast as I would have expected; and I will leave it to those with the requisite technical expertise to comment on other possible sources. I found nothing in the old reports to indicate that the Bluegill Triple Prime test was unusual with respect to debris. For example, in the same paper the captions for most of the images of the King Fish atmospheric nuclear test, conducted November 1, 1962, also refer to visible "debris."

Naturally, it was expected that everything that had been near the detonation or that passed through the radioactive cloud afterwards would be radioactive when it landed; the seamen were trained and equipped to measure the radiation levels of any recovered object and then handle them with special procedures and equipment.

Again: Nothing in the ship logs that I examined conveyed that the Navy personnel who picked up any of the described objects regarded them as exotic, alarming or "anomalous." In truth, the logs of the Bluegill Triple Prime recovery ships do not make for very interesting reading unless one comes to them with a strong fixed belief that somewhere among the thousands of entries there must be evidence of a recovered nonhuman craft. [11]

RADIATION EXPOSURES

In his Liberation Times article, Cruickshank suggested that another ship involved in the recovery operation, the Point Barrow, had somehow become involved with UFO-related debris. His main evidence for this claim was that a consulting firm called the Kaman Tempo Group, hired in 1983 to review radiation exposures by the recovery-fleet personnel, found that some Point Barrow crew had experienced some of the higher exposures, and they were unable to locate logs for the Point Barrow. The Safeguard log for October 27 mentions a rendezvous with the Point Barrow and delivery of something called "LORAN electronic gear," which refers to a radio-navigation system in use during that era. I'm afraid that for any of this to be interesting, one must already be pretty convinced that an alien craft had fallen nearby, for which evidence is lacking.

The mystery that Cruickshank imparts to the purported radiation exposures on Point Barrow appears in a different light when the reader learns that the Point Barrow was merely one of 16 ships on which crew members' radiation badges showed readings much higher than explainable by any radiation that they should actually have been exposed to. The authors of the report attributed these high readings to faulty seals on the radiation-detecting film packs, referring to "the extremely high correlation between film damage and elevated reading."

CONCLUSION

There are no contemporaneous documents or credible witness accounts that associate the Bluegill Triple Prime test with a UFO-knockdown event (as distinguished from people coming forward with contradictory stories a half-century or more later). Originally classified reports contained images of the 65-foot Thor booster illuminated near the fireball, and I see no reason to seek any more exotic candidate for the falling object seen in the movies. A triangle seen in a third movie of the fireball is distorted at points by the intensity of the light hitting the film; it is clearly part of the original image, not a laboratory redaction device (the public release of a film employing a crude redaction device being an implausible idea in the first place). This film was likely cropped using an optical printer in order to enlarge and center the fireball, which had the side effect of enlarging a frame feature that otherwise would have been invisible or inconspicuous. There is nothing in any of the available logs of recovery ships that truly suggests that the personnel involved regarded anything they found as surprising or anomalous.

If the U.S. government has ever recovered all or part of a nonhuman craft, I see no objective basis for believing that such a thing occurred on October 26, 1962.

END NOTES

[1] I personally handed copies of Robert Hastings' UFOs & Nukes USAF General Lt. General Jeffrey A. Kruse on November 10, 2021, when he was military liaison to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, asking that he pass it on to Haines, which he promised to do. (Since February 2024, Kruse has served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.) Also, on April 30, 2024, I gave a copy to Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), a member of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees. I've provided copies for some congressional staff members as well.

[2] For example, the "Trinity UFO crash" popularized by Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris in their book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, first published in 2021, turned out under my investigation to be a laughably crude hoax, perpetrated by two not-very-sophisticated storytellers. My initial articles on the hoax were published in May, 2023. Vallee has since deployed a succession of gross evasions, egregious misrepresentations, and, in the 3rd edition of the book published in April 2024, outright fabrication, all attempting to deny or deflect attention away from the many well-documented antics and lies of his "best possible witnesses," Reme Baca and Jose Padilla. Details here and here and here and here. The second UFO-crash story that I personally investigated in great depth was the "Kingman 1953 crash"; I have not yet published my findings on that made-up tale.

[3] Geoff Cruickshank sent me his LinkedIn profile, which I have embedded below.

[4] In an appearance on the Jimmy Church’s program Fade to Black, broadcast August 30, 2016, at the 1-hour and 58-minute mark, Tom DeLonge spoke of a UFO event that he associated with the 1962 Starfish Prime nuclear test.

Jimmy Church: And so, Operation Starfish Prime. I can't believe you went there. Go ahead and tell everybody about it. [The Starfish Prime nuclear test occurred on July 9, 1962]

Tom DeLonge: Well, for people who don't know, that was a nuclear test – quote-unquote “test” in space – and we learned quite a lot from that test. It was the main test where we really were able to study and learn about EMP [electromagnetic pulse]. This is also happening during (oddly enough) the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Church: That's right, 1962. [The Cuban Missile Crisis is generally considered to have run 13 days, October 16-28, 1962. The U.S. conducted two atmospheric nuclear tests during that period. The Bluegill Triple Prime test, the second of the two, occurred at 5:59 AM EDT October 26, 1962.]

DeLonge: When the whole world was focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis, something else was going on. And that something else may have brought something down. And that something that brought down may have may have--we may have learned a lot about that, about EMP specifically and its ability to catch things that are hiding, if that makes sense.

Church: Yes, it does. You have to be deep in your research to get to what Tom is talking about here. Now the tests were done—they're were high-altitude tests that were done out over the Pacific. And could you imagine, Tom – like living in Hawaii and watching that thing go off in the atmosphere like that?

DeLonge : Oh my god, you would think that like Jupiter was like crashing into our sky, you know. [This appears to be a description of the atmospheric display created by the July 1962 Starfish Prime test, which was seven times more powerful than the later Bluegill Triple Prime test, and which occurred at 249 miles altitude, much higher than Bluegill Triple Prime, and much lower, "only" 30 miles altitude.] It's a big deal. It's just unreal. I think one of the– you know, everyone has to remember what happened once we started playing with nuclear weapons. UFOs showed up everywhere.

Church: Every time.

DeLonge: Every time, and you got to think, why? Well, there's a big reason why – because nuclear weapons will “eff up” those little those little ankle-biters bad, and they know it. And even they as advanced as they are, they can't get away from it. And makes you really wonder why we did so many nuclear tests. It makes you really wonder why we did like 30,000 tests all over the world, in oceans, underground, up in the sky. [The actual total as of this date was 2,081.] And why did we have so many nuclear weapons? It's a big deal , you know. I'm not going to say it's all for this. But I was told something really, really, really important: The entire Cold War we were working with the Soviet Union. We were together with them. And it was the one thing that kept the Cold War from going hot, was our relationship together on this issue. We weren't dumb and just went and lit up a nuke when we were in a standoff with Russia, you know, [during] the Cuban Missile Crisis, like, “Oh my God, we're all gonna die,” and we said “Well then, we might as well do a nuke test." It's like, no, it doesn't work that way. They [the Russians] knew we did the nuke test. They were probably in the room with us when we did that test, because there was a small group of people on both sides that were trying to do exactly what they did, which was fly swat some bugs out of the sky.

The Starfish Prime atmospheric test did indeed produce a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which disabled some electrical equipment in Hawaii, 900 miles away (line of sight distance in statute miles). But, as Cruickshank noted in his Liberation Times article, the Starfish Prime test occurred in July 1962– three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Two U.S. nuclear tests occurred during the crisis – Checkmate (October 20) and Bluegill Triple Prime (October 26). The Bluegill Triple Prime test employed a nuclear device crafted to produce exceptionally intense X-rays; this test was not associated with an exceptional EMP. Cruickshank surmised that DeLonge "conflated" the two tests. Again, however, I have as yet uncovered no documentation, no anecdotal accounts, and no other ufological folklore linking a UFO event to either the Starfish Prime test or the Bluebill Triple Prime, prior to the 2016 DeLonge claims, for which no source or evidence has been put forth.

[5] Another interesting paper cited by Geoff Cruickshank in his Supporting Evidence is An Account of the Return to Nuclear Weapons Testing by the United States After the Test Moratorium 1958-1961, by William E. Ogle, U.S. Department of Energy Nevada Operations Office, October 1985 (document unclassified with deletions), which I have embedded below.

[6] In his Supporting Evidence (page 2), Cruickshank wrote, "Ogle states that two of the KC-135s were almost directly below the nuclear denotation to film the fireball and X-ray phenomenology..." This is erroneous. On the page cited by Cruickshank, Ogle was merely quoting discussion that occurred at a meeting on November 30, 1961, talking in general terms about the entire series of tests that were in an early planning stage ("Two planes would be close in with the instruments looking almost vertically.") But we have much more specific post-detonation information on the actual placement of the two KC-135s during the Bluegill Triple Prime test. A KC-135 designated as KETTLE 1 in some records and as "Aircraft 53120" in other records, was about 41 miles (horizontal distance in statute miles) nearly due north of the detonation. A KC-135 designated as KETTLE 2 in some records and as "aircraft 60376" in other records was about 41.5 miles (horizontal distance in statute miles) east of the detonation point. Both aircraft were flying at 37,500 feet. The detonation occurred at an altitude of about 157,480 feet (about 30 miles), so taking into account the difference in elevation, by direct line of sight each plane was about 47 miles from the warhead when it detonated. Their cameras were shooting mostly sideways but also upwards.

[7] It appears that the KC-135s originally assigned to the Fishbowl series were those designated Nos. 53120 (MSN 17236) and 53144 (MSN 17260). However, on August 8, 1962, after a flight from Dayton-Wright Air Force Base to Bedford-Hanscom Field in Massachusetts for modification of test equipment, on landing approach 53144 "clipped the tops of trees and crashed into a boulder," killing the three crew members. Another KC-135, designated 60376 (MSN 18151) was then fitted out as a replacement. The paper Optical Phenomenology explained (p. 185), "Although one-for-one replacements of instruments was not possible, the replacement instrument complement had almost the same time and intensity range as the original instruments."

[8] One of the more interesting items that I encountered during this investigation was a short documentary produced by the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory in 2017, describing its project to preserve vintage films of nuclear tests. I have embedded it below.

[9] According to the Optical Phenomenology report (p. 183), "At main engine cutoff, three instrument pods weighing 1200 pounds each were released from their positions on the missile body. They followed separate trajectories and were at altitudes slightly below the burst point at detonation." See Appendix A for more details on the pod system.

[10] In Supporting Evidence, Cruickshank wrote, "The reason for this sanitization was questioned [by Cruickshank] in personal communications with a former LASL [Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, now Los Alamos National Laboratory] scientist Dr John Zinn, who witnessed the test and later wrote several Restricted data reports on this specific event...[Zinn] suggested the reason was most likely different people with different opinions of classification rules. Dr. Zinn refused to speculate on what the tumbling object depicted in the KETTLE 1 footage may have been." I hoped to reach Dr. Zinn to ask whether he really thought there was any chance that the distorted triangle was a sanitization device, but I learned that Dr. Zinn had died in February 2025. On May 8, 2025, I submitted to Cruickshank a request that he release to me his correspondence with Dr. Zinn. At date of initial publication of this article (May 21, 2025), Cruickshank had not sent me that correspondence (nor, of course, is he under any obligation to do so).

[11] I do recognize that these Navy logs are parsimonious in their language, with few adjectives employed, and so they are subject to various interpretations, especially by persons without direct experience in such matters, which certainly describes me and I think Cruickshank as well. I am not sure how vivid a description one would find in such a log even if a Navy ship someday really did pick up a scorched saucer full of X-ray-blasted dead aliens; it might say something like "unidentified craft and deceased crew taken aboard at ___ hours."

APPENDIX A: THE INSTRUMENT PODS

When I first starting showing people the FOM-A and FOM-B films, one source immediately suggested that the falling object might be one of the three large instrument pods that jettisoned from the Thor rocket during the Bluegill Triple Prime test. I briefly entertained this possibility, but came to agree with Cruickshank that the falling object seen in FOM-A and FOM-B is not an instrument pod (even though photographs of the falling pods, illuminated by the fireball, do appear in declassified reports). For reasons I set forth above, I am satisfied that the falling object was the Thor booster, which was about ten times as long as each instrument pod, more elongated in shape (like the object seen in the movies), and not designed to withstand blast effects.

Notwithstanding, the instrument pods were a major element of the Bluegill Triple Prime test, and I think it worthwhile to present some additional information on these engineering marvels.

The deployment and recovery of three large metallic pods filled with scientific instruments was one of the most important and technically challenging aspects of the Fishbowl test series, including the Bluegill Triple Prime test. The pods – each about 6.7 feet long and 30 inches wide– were bolted to the Thor rocket that carried the warhead aloft. They were designed to detach as the rocket was still headed upward, coast into the desired positions near the anticipated detonation site while maintaining specific axes of orientation in order to record X-rays and other effects, and then land in the sea intact to be covered by the waiting ships.

The purposes, design, and performance of the Thor/pod system are discussed in detail in a sanitized version of a technical report (OPERATION DOMINIC Fish Bowl Series Project Officer's Report - Project 9.4b, POD and Recovery Unit Fabrication, August 14, 1964; Extracted version prepared Sept. 1, 1985). The system "originated from the need to measure the close-in weapon effects of scheduled high-altitude bursts. The weapon effects measurements include blast effects, nuclear radiation, thermal radiation, and X-ray impulse."

Other detailed information on the pods is found within the Project Officer's Report--Project 8A.3, Close-in Thermal and X-ray Vulnerability Measurements – Shots Blue Gill and King Fish, by F.D. Adams, Project Manager (original publication date April 6, 1965; extracted version prepared for the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, September 1, 1985), which included helpful diagrams and photographs.

The key role of the instruments pods was featured in an 11-minute Air Force film titled "Starfish Prime Interim Report," which also depicted recovery of a pod. I have embedded a clip from the film below.

Yet another partly declassified report explained that in the Bluegill Triple Prime test, all three pods were released simultaneously. (ADA995461, Weapons Effects and Tests, December 30, 1963; extracted version Sept. 1, 1985, page 102; the entire paper is embedded below.) As I understand it from this and other reports, the release occurred after both the main booster rocket and the vernier (guidance) rockets had shut down, but while the Thor was still headed upward. The rocket continued to its high point (apogee), curved down, and released the "re-entry vehicle" that contained the warhead. Meanwhile the three pods, on their own ballistic arcs, stayed in a fairly tight vertical array, each maintaining vertical orientation, and were arrayed between 6000 and 9000 feet from the warhead when it denotated, close to their ideal planned positions– quite impressive precision, in my view.

A paper on "External Neutron Flux Measurements" showed the distance of each pod from the point of detonation (ADA995304, External Neutron Flux Measurements, Dec. 30, 1963, extracted version April 1, 1985, page 18; entire paper embedded below):

In one of the technical papers, dated 1965 and largely declassified in 1985, there are actually two photographs showing falling pods in the same photo frame with the fireball. Unfortunately the reproduction quality in the PDF is pretty poor– yet the images do seem to prove that the pods were big enough to show up in photos taken by at least one camera on one of the two KC-135s, or on Johnston Island. One of the declassified papers actually contains photographic images of pods falling in the light of the fireball.

Another paper contained the interesting detail, "...the pod velocity at burst point was in excess of 10,000 ft/sec. Calculations indicated that the pod had to be within 3,000 feet of the burst to be overtaken by the shock wave. Beyond 3,000-foot separation [as all three pods apparently were], the pod would outrun the shock wave." (ADA995461, p. 154)