OPINION: Are UAPs nuclear sentinels? Part 1: The destroyer of worlds

Spanish Conquistadors named a desolate basin in southern New Mexico with prophetic insight: the Jornada del Muerto — Dead Man's Journey. In the summer of 1945, in the middle of this barren stretch of desert, humanity crossed a threshold from which there was no return.

At 5:29 on the morning of July 16, a 100-foot steel tower at the White Sands Proving Ground held aloft a device conceived by physicists experimenting with the building blocks of reality. Soldiers and scientists lay facedown behind concrete barricades 6 miles away, eyes squeezed shut against the coming inferno.

The tower vanished in a brilliant flash visible for hundreds of miles, including above the planet. At that moment, the largest man-made explosion that had ever occurred embodied Einstein's equation — atoms transformed into fire like a newborn sun. The desert sand melted into jade-green glass, spreading in every direction.

The surrounding mountains, illuminated many times brighter than daylight, bore witness to what that forbidden desert had become: not merely a journey of death, but the birthplace of a threat to all life on Earth. The radioactive cloud and debris from the blast reached an altitude of nearly 50,000 feet, contaminating the region and nearby towns.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, had given the site the code name Trinity. Recalling the test, he reflected: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried."

Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Within weeks, atomic weapons were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another era began concurrently with the atomic age. Military officers and scientists at Manhattan Project laboratories — the very sites where atomic energy was born — reported strange incursions. Unidentified flying objects with impossible flight characteristics appeared over heavily-guarded, classified facilities at Hanford, Washington, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, both before and after the first bombs were detonated.

This pattern began in 1945. As the plutonium used in the first nuclear test was being processed at Hanford, UFOs were seen over the site and on radar. They easily evaded fighters in the restricted airspace and were described in Army Air Force documents as "unidentified aircraft" — over the most sensitive nuclear facility in the country.

Since then, official dismissals and ridicule have overshadowed serious consideration of what has been occurring at nuclear labs and bases with strategic weapons. Documentation and testimony point toward unidentified aerial phenomenon visibility and intention. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena published a comprehensive 1964 report, "The UFO Evidence," which stands as the first serious assessment. The nonprofit organization, founded and administered by former military officers and scientists, assembled a convincing body of data that has been sidelined or buried for decades.

Official attempts to minimize consideration that humans on Earth are not alone enable a contemporary geocentrism — the assumption that humanity uniquely stands at the center of the universe.

Public attitudes and perceptions defy those efforts. The openness to extraterrestrial sentient life has been supported by congressional hearings over the past few years.

Testimony from reliable witnesses about UAP adds a new dimension to the debate, though skeptics continue to claim that solid proof is lacking. There is, however, an increasing body of information suggesting the existence and behavior of UAP close to nuclear activity.

Between 1949 and 1958, astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California conducted the first comprehensive photographic survey of the northern hemisphere's night sky. Over nine years, they captured nearly 2,000 images on 14-inch glass plates, creating an archive that would sit largely untouched for decades.

The plates were digitized in the 1990s and 2000s. Then, in 2016, researchers began examining them with advanced digital processing software, hunting for transient phenomena — brief flashes of light that appeared and vanished. What they found defied conventional explanation.

In October, a peer-reviewed study analyzing these photographs was published in Scientific Reports. The research, part of the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, is led by Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer and physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden. Her team identified over 100,000 transient flashes in the digitized images. Most were previously undocumented astronomical phenomena. A small proportion could be attributed to contamination or scanning defects. The vast majority remained unexplained.

The flashes appeared to be reflections of sunlight on smooth surfaces at low altitudes above Earth. They weren't meteors or asteroids, which have distinctly different visual profiles. And critically, the original photographs were taken before the satellite age — ruling out any known human technology.

To determine whether these transients might correlate with terrestrial activity, the astronomers cross-referenced their timing against unique datasets. Dates of nuclear weapons tests and UFO sightings from the early 1950s showed significant correlations.

The numbers were striking. On days without atomic testing and no UFO reports, the photographs showed an 11% baseline rate of transient flashes. Within 24 hours of nuclear weapons testing, that rate jumped to 68%. The flashes increased substantially when both atomic tests and UFO reports occurred on the same day.

The data gathered with scientific rigor adds quantifiable confirmation to what military personnel had been reporting for decades: Starting in the early years of the nuclear age, something from above was appearing and seemingly observing the development of the most powerful weapons ever created on Earth. Whatever the source of these transient flashes, visible only through systematic astronomical analysis, they coincided precisely with what ground observers and pilots were reporting as UFOs.

Other astronomers are no longer reflexively dismissing UAP as misidentified planets or meteors. They are searching for physical evidence of nonhuman technology. In July 2021, Harvard professor Avi Loeb launched The Galileo Project, a systematic scientific effort to collect and analyze UAP data using advanced instrumentation. The endeavor operates on the premise that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations. By treating UAP investigation as legitimate science rather than fringe speculation, Loeb, a highly respected astrophysicist, has opened the field for other researchers to engage without career risk.

Anomalous objects in the sky have been previously reported and dismissed with explanations that insult competent observers. Indeed, if the UAP trajectory represents nonhuman intelligence monitoring nuclear technology over decades, inquiry becomes essential — and that investigation must start with evidence of activity and motive.

The current state of the planet presents a compelling case for intervention: weapons sufficient to end civilization, decision time compressing toward zero, arms control frameworks collapsing, regional tensions escalating and institutional paralysis preventing meaningful response.

New START — the last remaining treaty limiting U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals — expired Feb. 5. For the first time since the 1960s, there are no binding constraints on the world's largest nuclear forces. Russia and the U.S. could each expand beyond the current limit of 1,550 deployed warheads. China, currently at about 600 warheads, plans to reach 1,500 by 2035. The total global stockpile stands at 12,331 warheads, with expansion accelerating.

Meanwhile, the technology grows more dangerous. Hypersonic delivery systems compress decision time from launch detection to impact to under 10 minutes. Artificial intelligence has been integrated into command and control systems, creating new failure modes.

The testing of nuclear weapons, which could be reinstituted, has been previously disastrous.

Between 1945 and 1963, the United States detonated over 200 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. The Castle Bravo test in March 1954 — which yielded 15 megatons — intensified international concern. Evidence of worldwide radioactive fallout, which peaked in 1963 and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, galvanized action, leading to the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.

Atmospheric testing initiated just a fraction of the damage that a nuclear war could cause. The devastating weaponry with varying delivery systems and capabilities represents humanity's unchecked obsession with warfare.

The U.S. Navy alone has 14 Ohio-class submarines, capable of firing up to 20 Trident II ballistic missiles. Each nuclear-tipped weapon is 30 times more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima.

A large-scale atomic exchange would trigger nuclear winter — particulate injection into the stratosphere, causing global crop failure and civilizational collapse. Researchers estimate 100-300 warheads in a concentrated exchange would suffice. Current global arsenals exceed this threshold by a factor of 40.

World War II ended with the explosion of the first atomic bombs, followed by an undisguised race to increase strategic arsenals. The trajectory is clear: Humanity's recent history of global hostility and reckless experimentation has advanced the possibility of an apocalyptic event.

It is not difficult to imagine that the possible self-destruction of Earth's technologically advanced, unique sentient species would attract off-planet visitors. The motive for intervention can be extrapolated from undisputed facts. Evidence has appeared at strategic bases where Air Force officers have documented persistent attention by unknown invasive objects throughout the nuclear age.

A reassessment of events surrounding strategic bases since the mid-1940s is revelatory. The most pertinent information and direct accounts have been ignored.

For example, Col. William H. Blanchard was a highly decorated World War II pilot who had supervised the delivery of the first atomic bomb. After the war, he became commanding officer of the 509th Atomic Bombardment Group — at the time the only air wing training with and prepared to drop nuclear weapons.

In July of 1947, the 509th was based at Roswell, New Mexico — where the most controversial incident in UFO history would soon unfold.

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Next week: Part 2 — Roswell Revisited

David Marks is a veteran investigative journalist and documentary producer whose work has appeared on the BBC and PBS, including "Nazi Gold," which exposed Switzerland's role in World War II.