...is laid bare in fascinating new study which concludes: They're trying to stop us from annihilating ourselves

Do they come in peace? The question has hung over the UFO mystery forever, but a new study comes closer to an answer than ever before.

Since the United States detonated its first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in 1945, dozens of accounts of UFOs have been logged by military witnesses and government scientists working with America's sensitive nuclear arsenal. 

Skeptics have often turned to questioning the veracity and the memories of these military witnesses, or blaming faulty equipment. 

But the connection between UFOs and nuclear sites has persisted in India, Russia and elsewhere across the globe, leading many to wonder: are aliens stopping us from exterminating ourselves?

UFO sightings over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift their interest from the making of the bombs to silos and bomber bases as the Cold War arms race grew (above)

Now a new, decades-long study has analyzed over 500 of the best supported UFO cases from the heights of the Cold War and hauntingly concluded: 'This intelligence understands atomics, and they understand atomic weaponry.'

UFO reports over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift from sites where the bombs were made to missile silos and US air bases as the Cold War arms race grew.

That's one of the key findings from the new work, a series of three studies led by a retired US Air Force staff sergeant, Larry Hancock, and a data analyst affiliate with Harvard's UFO-hunting Galileo Project, Ian Porritt, along with their research team.

The group focused their analysis on official military and police reports of UFOs from 1945 to 1975, avoiding poorly supported accounts and ambiguous newspaper stories, to focus on cases with multiple witnesses and signals evidence, like radar.

Their study, which only covered US cases, also used reports of UFOs spotted above non-nuclear army bases and nearby civilian centers to act as control groups to test against their findings of any UFO trends at America's sensitive nuclear installations. 

Their qualified, but haunting conclusion: Data from this three decade-long period lends credence to the idea that extraterrestrials, or some other intelligence, has methodically surveilled America's rise to a nuclear power. 

'This intelligence understands the developmental cycle. They have some contextual knowledge of what they're looking at and what they're looking for,' Hancock told DailyMail.com, given these shifts in reported UFO sightings over time.

Hancock and Porritt's most recent report on the connection, 'UAP Activity Pattern Study 1945-1975 Military and Public Activities,' was published in March and presented before the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies this past weekend.

Above, an officially 'unexplained' UFO case from the Air Force's Project Blue Book files, a July 16, 1952 encounter photographed by Coast Guard seaman Shell Alpert of four UFOs seen through the window of a photographic laboratory near Salem, Massachusetts

Among the hundreds of cases included in their analysis was the infamous March 16, 1967 Malmstrom case in which Air Force witnesses reported that ten nuclear missiles were switched off by a UFO, confirmed by a US Strategic Air Command report.

It is the third study by Hancock and his coauthors, who told DailyMail.com that future work on this connection between UFO sightings and nuclear sites is on the way. 

A Strategic Air Command document released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) says 'all ten missiles in echo flight at Malmstrom lost strat alert within ten seconds of each other' and notes a 'grave concern' about the case

From 1948 to 1952, as America's production of atomic weapons first ramped up, waves of UFO sightings began cropping up over Washington state's Hanford nuclear production complex, as well as Los Alamos and other sites for the Manhattan Project.

'What we know now is that, inside the Air Force for the first seven to 10 years they sincerely believed it was the Russians,' Hancock told DailyMail.com.

'And when they couldn't prove that,' he said, 'it became very political.'

This phase of the Air Force's official UFO investigations, when paired with that era's police UFO reports, documented over 40 cases of UFOs seen near these facilities. 

In one illustrative case from May 21, 1949, Hanford personnel spotted a 'silvery, disc-shaped' UFO hovering over the plant, whose B Reactor had generated the plutonium used in the first atomic bomb test at Trinity.

The UFO was simultaneously tracked on radar by nearby Moses Lake Air Force Base, which scrambled an F-82 fighter jet to 'intercept it in hopes that it might be a disk,' according to a now declassified Air Intelligence Information Report.

'UFO's were faster than jet,' Air Force investigators noted of the failed pursuit.   

These patterns in the historical UFO record, according to the researchers, was also accompanied by another clear trend: As the UFOs appeared more and more over armed and ready nuclear weapons sites, the apparent craft also started to appear more at night (above)

In one illustrative case from May 21, 1949, Hanford personnel spotted a 'silvery, disc-shaped' UFO hovering over the plant, whose B Reactor had generated the plutonium used in the first atomic bomb test at Trinity. 'UFO's were faster than jet,' Air Force investigators noted (above)

These years of strange encounters were much more likely to have occurred in broad daylight than later years of UFO sightings and often involved multiple UFOs in formation performing dazzling maneuvers, Hanford and his co-authors found.

And, for each of the four major US nuclear weapons-making facilities, they also collected and tracked UFO reports from nearby cities and non-nuclear military sites as control groups. 

These control regions — Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example to contrast with the Los Alamos nuclear site — helped ensure that any spike in sightings they was not a misinterpretation of their data.

'This period, here, we've got only four sites, that would be the key stuff that you would focus on,' Porritt told DailyMail.com. 

'And they are the four sites they [the UFOs] focus on. You get the same sort of pattern with with all four sites,' he said.

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