Robert Hastings

Robert Hastings (born 1950) is an American researcher and arguably the defining chronicler of the nukes-and-UFOs pattern: reported UAP activity over nuclear weapons facilities. His interview archive of military veterans is often described as the largest ever assembled on the subject.

Hastings's interest began in 1967 at Malmstrom AFB, where his father was stationed and where, he says, he personally observed unidentified radar targets being tracked during a base incident, months before the famous missile-shutdown events. He spent his career as a laboratory analyst while conducting research and delivering over 500 college lectures on the topic.

Across five decades he interviewed more than 160 veterans, missile launch officers, security policemen, targeting teams, describing incidents at Malmstrom, Minot, F.E. Warren, Walker, and other bases, and at weapons storage areas abroad, including the Soviet side (he documented the 1982 Ukraine incident in which missiles reportedly activated during a UFO event). His book UFOs and Nukes (2008, revised 2017) is the standard compendium. On September 27, 2010, he organized the National Press Club "UFOs and Nukes" conference, where seven veterans, including Robert Salas and Charles Halt, described incidents on the record, an event covered worldwide and later echoed in his 2016 documentary.

Hastings claims a documented pattern: whatever the phenomenon is, it has shown recurring interest in humanity's nuclear arsenal. His contribution is the testimony archive itself, now cited in congressional-era discussions and paralleled by AARO-era reporting acknowledging nuclear-site incidents among its cases.

Skeptics, principally James Carlson on the Malmstrom cases, argue documents contradict key stories and that Hastings's witnesses embellish across retellings; Hastings has answered in long published exchanges. His late-career disclosure that he and a colleague experienced what he interpreted as abduction phenomena drew both sympathy and criticism regarding objectivity. The archive's core, dozens of named officers on the record, remains the strongest testimony block in the field.

Hastings has largely retired from public work, his files and book the standing reference for the pattern PURSUE-era records keep touching.