Transcript from CIA interview with Brigadier-General Benjamin R. Jackson, NATO theatre commander for Iceland & North Atlantic region on 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 travelling far too fast to be anything else.

"We got on the line to NORAD, warning them about it. Every radar station on the whole Atlantic seaboard was trying to track the damn thing, find out where it was headed. From what I heard afterwards, the Pentagon was about ready to launch a full retaliatory strike on the Soviets with everything we had. Thank god they didn't.

"It was probably our trajectory data that convinced them not to in the end. We had the blip headed for some remote 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, and then suddenly the damn thing just changed course completely. Started heading towards Iceland. We couldn't believe it. Missiles just don't do that, they flat out can't. But it was moving far too fast to be any plane we'd ever heard of.

"Well, we scrambled pretty much every jet we had. We were shouting at each other in the command room, guessing what it might be. I figured it must have been some kind of experimental Soviet plane, but whatever it was, we knew we wanted a damn good look at it. It was about then that the Kremlin got on the line and started shouting at us. They'd picked us up scrambling our jets and started launching their own. They told us if we wanted a fight, they'd give us one. I passed them back to the Pentagon. I think they spun them some bullshit about a search-and-rescue operation or something. I didn't care too much. We had more important things to worry about.

"Anyways, a squadron of F-8s caught up with the thing about two-fifty 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 silver 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 weak radar signal.

"The pilots tried to communicate with the ship. Tried all the radio frequencies, nothing. Then when they closed in on it, it started shooting at them. Out of a squadron of six F-8s, only one made it back, and it was missing half its tail. The fin had been cut clean in half, like someone had just sliced a chunk out of it with a blowtorch. The pilot said he saw a flash of light and the other jets just disintegrated. He unloaded his missiles at the thing but they hardly seemed to scratch it, so he just spun around and got the hell outta Dodge. Don't blame him, myself.

"NORAD and the Pentagon started panicking, and then someone must have suggested the nuclear option because suddenly all our lines went red hot. Everyone wanted to know the status of our missiles, whether they were ready to launch - and whether they could track that thing we had heading towards us. I told them we could set the warheads to airburst, and manually target them. They told me to get on it. So I did.

"Five minutes later, they gave me launch orders for half a dozen missiles. So six medium-range ballistic missiles went up, Thor IIs, and two minutes later the Atlantic was lit up with half a dozen nuclear fireballs. That knocked the UFO right out of the sky, but to be honest all of us were astonished it survived at all. We tracked it all the way down. It slammed into southern Iceland, slap bang in the middle of one of the rocky bits where nobody lives.

"I knew what the orders would be even before the phones started ringing. My troops were heading to secure the crash site straight away, in choppers or on trucks or even marching there on foot. The Pentagon were on the line telling me to secure the crash site at any cost, and I was telling 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. With good reason, too, I suppose. The Soviets had been pretty alarmed at us scrambling our jets, so you can imagine why they completely blew their tops when they picked up nuclear detonations in the Atlantic. The only reason they hadn't wiped us off the face of the planet was the fact that, technically, the Atlantic was ours. This guy was going ballistic at me, demanding to know why on Earth we were nuking our own territory. You could tell he had no idea what was happening. They'd probably planned for us launching a strike on them, but it didn't look like they had a plan for us doing this. I patched him over to the Pentagon too, let them deal with him.

"Anyway, I think it was pretty clear at that stage that the Soviets were on a hair trigger and if we didn't want the Cold War to get real hot real fast, we needed to calm them down. The Pentagon briefed the Kremlin on what was going on, and invited them to send their own troops so both sides could approach the crash site together. That calmed 'em down, so I ordered my men to cool it and keep their distance from the crash site.

"Then NORAD phoned me and formally relieved me of my command. It'd take the Soviets a few hours to get their troops to Iceland, and that gave them time to fly in some real Army top brass to take over the ground operation. They left me back in my command room, and told me to keep the country on radio lockdown.

"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 fifty miles away."