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.

An entry from the index of Optical Phenomenology, a declassified report containing technical data and images from the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test of October 26, 1962.

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. In a classified report from the 1960s (later declassified) I found two textual references to a published image showing the booster "as a small white dot some distance below the burst," at 2.5 seconds after detonation.

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 disprove 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]

Geoffrey Cruickshank

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.

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