INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: Brigadier-General Benjamin R. Jackson, NATO theatre commander for Iceland & North Atlantic region; 23rd April 1958.
“It was 5.23am when we picked it up. I remember looking up at the clock and thinking to myself, “Y’know, this ain’t a bad time for the world to end; everyone’s still tucked up in bed.” We thought it was a missile at first, y’see. It was traveling far too fast to be anything else. If it were aimed our way, that woulda been it. Nuclear dawn across the whole damn world.
“We got on the line to NORAD to warn ‘em about it. From what I heard afterwards, every missile base in the US hit DEFCON 1 within ten minutes. Every radar station on the whole Atlantic seaboard was trying to track the signal, find out where it was headed. It was probably our trajectory data that stopped the Pentagon from ending the world that morning. We had the blip headed for some distant part of Ohio, and there ain’t nothing there but wheat and tractors. There was only one missile too – hardly a full strike. So we watched and waited for a few minutes, seeing if anything else was coming our way, and then suddenly the damn thing changed course completely. Started heading towards Iceland. That’s when we knew it weren’t a missile. Missiles just don’t do that. Flat out can’t, they ain’t built that way.
“Well, we scrambled pretty much every jet we had on the entire Atlantic coast. The command room was chaos; just a wall of noise. I privately figured it must have been some kind of experimental Soviet jet, but whatever it was, we knew we wanted a damn good look at it. It must’ve been about then that the Kremlin got on the lines and started screaming at us. Their radar stations in Cuba must’ve picked up us launching our jets and their own squadrons were starting to light up radar screens in Europe. I’m pretty sure if a single one of our planes wandered into their airspace, or went anywhere near Cuba, the entire Cold War woulda turned real hot, real fast. Anyways, diplomacy ain’t my area of expertise – it’s way above my pay grade. I passed them to the boys at the Pentagon, because I was confused as hell. Didn’t sound like the Soviets had any idea what was happenin’ either.
“A squadron of F-8s caught up with the thing about eighty miles off the coast of Iceland and started sending back pictures. Well, we guessed pretty quickly that it weren’t the Soviets that had built it. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before, a massive yellow bullet pushing through the air like it just wasn’t there. It was as big as a goddamn battleship – we couldn’t believe anything that large could move so fast. Or have such a small radar cross-section, come to think of it.
“The pilots tried to hail the ship. Tried all the radio frequencies, nothing. Then when they closed in to take a closer look, it started shooting. The squadron had six F-8s, and only one limped back to base. It were missing half its tail, too. I saw the plane with my own eyes later that day – the fin had been sliced clean in half, as if someone had taken an angle grinder to it. We interviewed the pilot; he said there was a flash of light and the other jets were just gone. Burned to cinders. He unloaded his missiles and got the hell outta Dodge. Don’t blame him. Woulda done the same thing myself.
“I guess it was then that someone suggested the nuclear option – all our lines went red hot. Everyone was demanding information on the status of our missiles - if they were ready to launch and whether they could hit that thing we had heading towards us. I told them we had a chance if we set the warheads to airburst, and targeted them manually. They told me I had five minutes to get ready.
“Five minutes later, we were issued launch orders for half a dozen missiles. It took us a couple more minutes to actually configure the warheads properly, but we sent six medium-range Thor ballistic missiles in a spread pattern. Like a giant nuclear shotgun, I s’pose, just making sure we hit the thing. Nine minutes later they lit up the Atlantic with half a dozen nuclear fireballs. It seemed to work; the blast knocked the UFO right out of the sky. Washington was celebrating, but I had a sinking feeling right then. Anything that could soak up eight megatons of explosive force and still be in one piece afterward was bad news, real bad news. We watched it crash on our screens, tracking it all the way down to the ground. It slammed into southern Iceland, miles away from anywhere.
“I knew what the orders would be even before the phones started ringing. The local troops were heading to secure the crash site straight away, in choppers or on trucks or even marching there on foot. The place was a nightmare to reach, but the boys knew what was at stake. When Pentagon got on the line telling me to lock down the area, I told them I was already on the job. Another pip on my collar, I thought.
“Then someone patched through some Soviet Admiral, who was screamin’ bloody murder at me. I’d forgetten about ‘em, to be honest, but I guess they had good reason to be mad. They can’t have been happy with us scrambling our jets, but they went ballistic when our nukes went off over the Atlantic. I guess the only reason they hadn’t already wiped us off the face of the planet was that Iceland’s on our side, not theirs. But it sounded like they were pretty close to just firin’ everything they had at us anyway. I patched him back over to the Pentagon, let them deal with him. I didn’t know what the official line was meant to be, but I was willing to bet it didn’t involve little green men from Mars.
“Turns out I was wrong. I guess we were never goin’ to be able to cover up troop movements on that sorta scale, and we sure as hell didn’t want to get bombed back into the Stone Age. The Pentagon briefed the Kremlin on what was going on, and invited them to send their own troops to the crash site . The idea was both sides could approach the crash site together. Sensible, I guess. Anyway, that eased the situation a bit, and my men were ordered to cool it and keep their distance from the crash site until further orders arrived.
“About thirty minutes after that, NORAD phoned me and formally relieved me of my command. It was going to take the Soviets a good few hours to get their troops to Iceland, and that gave our guys time to fly in some real Army top brass to take over the ground operation. I was to stay in my command room and keep the area under radio blackout. The bigger boys were going to do my job for me.
“To tell you the truth, I was pretty angry at the time. But after what happened at the crash site… well, I thank the Lord every day I was sat in a bunker fifty miles away.”
