Twenty years ago this October, military contractors working for Boeing reported ‘a gigantic floating red square’ UFO — over 100 yards long — hovering in the morning air over a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The eerie 2003 event first exploded into public view this July, in sworn testimony before Congress, but now an ex-US Air Force security officer has come forward to detail his official, rapid-response investigation into the UFO on the day it occurred.
‘This is not a joke,’ ex-USAF senior patrolman, Jeff Nuccetelli, told the Merged podcast Tuesday. ‘These are contractors with top secret clearances.’
Nuccetelli also revealed a second reported encounter with the ‘red square,’ in which two of his fellow USAF police patrol officers ‘got buzzed by the UFO.’
‘When I showed up, it’s just mayhem,’ as Nuccetelli recalled it. ‘Everybody’s excited. They’re scared. Everyone’s freaked out.’
ex-US Air Force security officer Jeff Nuccetelli has come forward to detail his official, rapid-response investigation into a 100-yard long, ‘red square’ UFO as it occurred in October 2003. Nuccetelli said the UFO had over half a dozen witnesses and ‘at least 80 people’ on base knew
The never-before-public second sighting of the gigantic ‘red square’ UFO took place above Vandenberg AFB’s Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4), leased today by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Above, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg with a satellites payload in 2018
To the best of his recollection, Nuccetelli interviewed ‘about six people’ then posted to guard SLC-4, with his superior officer, or flight chief, alongside him: ‘Basically what they described was this object came in, was moving strangely, erratically. It got bigger and brighter as it came’
‘I’m getting ready to jump in the car,’ Nuccetelli told Merged host, retired US Navy fighter pilot Lt. Ryan Graves, ‘and then all hell breaks loose and they start screaming over the radio, ‘It’s coming right at us. It’s coming right for us. Now it’s right here.”
‘It was hard to hear,’ the former USAF patrol officer said, ‘because they were screaming and they were scared.’
This never-before-public second sighting, which Nuccetelli said he recorded in a police blotter with copies still in his possession, took place above Vandenberg AFB’s Space Launch Complex 4, which is leased today by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The veteran Air Force security official told that podcast that he had high confidence in the half a dozen fellow USAF police who witnessed the giant red UFO’s flyby.
‘These guys are trained observers,’ Nuccetelli emphasized to Lt. Graves, founder of the new nonprofit, Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is devoted to resolving flight safety concerns around such ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (UAP).
‘They’re posted out there, you know, 24/7,’ Nuccetelli continued. ‘They know what aircraft look like. They know what fishing boats look like.’
‘I didn’t feel like they were just jumping the gun, because there had been a UFO.’
Nuccetelli gave Lt. Graves his recollection of driving to the launch site, SLC-4 or ‘Slick 4,’ as base police radio transmissions about the UFO came pouring in.
‘This is all playing out on the radio and the dispatchers are communicating with them trying to get more information,’ Nuccetelli said. ‘It’s just chaos, you know? The dispatchers are basically advising everybody to go on alert trying to get information.’
Nuccetelli told his story to retired US Navy fighter pilot Lt. Ryan Graves, host of Merged and founder of the new nonprofit Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is devoted to resolving flight safety concerns around such ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (UAP)
Three Boeing contractors, Nuccetelli said, signed sworn statements that they saw the UFO, ‘a big square object, the size of a football field, silently floating over the launchpad, red in color, glowing,’ at low altitude. Above, right, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch from October 29, 2023
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‘Then things calmed down a bit,’ the former USAF policeman continued. ‘They said the object flew off.’
To the best of his recollection, Nuccetelli then interviewed ‘about six people’ then posted to guard SLC-4, with his superior officer, or flight chief, alongside him.
‘I talk to everybody,’ he recalled. ‘Basically what they described was this object came in, was moving strangely, erratically. It got bigger and brighter as it came in.’
‘Then it came at a high rate of speed and flew right up to the entry control point, and stopped. And they all stared at it. And it just shot off.’
Their sighting was preceded earlier that day by the encounter reportedly witnessed by aerospace contractors for Boeing, first disclosed to the public by Lt. Ryan Graves this July, during his testimony to the House Oversight Committee hearing on UFOs.
Three Boeing contractors, Nuccetelli said, signed sworn statements that they saw the UFO — ‘basically just a big square object, the size of a football field, silently floating over the launchpad, red in color, glowing’ — at a low altitude.
In this first sighting, ‘which began October 14, 2003 8:45am,’ the ex-USAF patrolman said, the ‘red square’ hovered over Vandenberg’s Launch Facility 21: at the time, a ‘Minuteman’ missile site being repurposed for a new missile defense system.
‘As far as I know, it wasn’t a cube. It was like a flattened square,’ Nuccetelli recollected.
‘The call came in from Range Control. They said, ‘the contractors say there’s this gigantic floating red square over the launch facility.”
‘Later, they brought in the technical sergeant from Range Control,’ Nuccetelli told Merged listeners, ‘that received the complaint from the contractor saying there’s this UFO.’
‘They brought that person in and had him write us a written statement, I have his written statement. And I also have the blotter entry.’
All told, Nuccetelli believes that there’s at least 80 people that know this happened, you know, and then plus the contractors and the other cops that actually saw it with their own eyes.’ And he’s actively working to track them down for fresh interviews.
The former senior USAF police officer, who went to work in an administrative role for the US Marshals after 16 years in the Air Force, has also delivered what he knows to the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
Despite controversy over the Pentagon UFO office’s reliability, and a heated public feud between its director, physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick and UFO whistleblower David Grusch, Nuccetelli told Merged his AARO experience was really positive
‘In fact, the investigator that contacted me spent a tremendous amount of time talking to me, over an hour for sure,’ Nuccetelli said.
‘I felt that they were genuinely, genuinely, interested in the case. And genuinely interested in looking into it.’
His next steps, he told Lt. Graves, are to assist AARO in locating more witnesses to these two October 14, 2003 sightings.’
‘What I’m trying to do now is track down all the people,’ the ex-USAF policeman said, ‘because my recollection of who was there, and all the particulars, and the details are flawed, right? Because I wasn’t there when these things happen. It’s all secondhand.’
‘I haven’t talked to these people for 20 years. And then all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s get in contact’ […] ‘let’s talk about the UFO.”