The Week in UFOs: A US Cabinet Secretary 'Cried Himself to Sleep Every Night' While Getting Briefings. USAF Pilots Saw Nukes Turned Off. A Missile Gets Shot Down by 'a Beam of Light.'

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We're a couple of weeks removed from perhaps the wildest week in history when it comes to Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. I mean, it's not every day NORAD scrambles jets to take down UAPs in remote regions of the Yukon Territories and over Lake Huron with $400,000 missiles fired from $140 million aircraft. Objects that might have been an invasion fleet sent by our future extraterrestrial overlords, or $13 toys belonging to the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade. All we know is whatever they were, the government of the United States immediately lost interest in looking for the remains of these things and coming clean to the people paying for all that armament, namely you and me. 

But just because the federal government suddenly went radio silent on matters so important that they conducted military operations over North America does that mean there's been no news on the UAP/UFO front. There are too many people asking too many questions these days for there not to be some sort of alarming news. Even if that news is old news. 

You may remember Tom DeLonge as the leader of Blink 182. But his days fronting the most popular band to come out of Southern California's skate-punk scene and being the guy your girlfriend was thinking about when she let you get to second base in the back bench seat in your mom's Mazda MPV are long since over. Today he's one of the founders of To the Stars … Academy of Arts & Sciences. TTSA's mission has included research into, and disseminating knowledge of, the UFO phenomenon. So it was with some interest that he posted this interview with TV executive Bryce Zabel, who along with his co-creator Brent Friedman, produced the UFO drama Dark Skies in the '90s.

“Prior to creating Dark Skies, I met with my partner Brent Friedman, and I didn’t know him at the time, and he told me a story about when he was an 18 year-old and he had been hired to drive a car across the United States to deliver it to someone who was in Reagan’s cabinet who lived in the neighborhood he was at and was a family friend,” Zabel begins the story. 

“And that this person was the Undersecretary of the Navy in the first term, and Secretary of Energy in the second term, and that he told Brent some harrowing things. … [S]uffice it to say this person felt that his very basis of reality had been challenged. That he had been briefed and the briefing wasn’t so good and I’ll just give you the one quote.

“He said he cried himself to sleep every night during the briefing period. Which apparently was six to eight weeks and Brett asked him why. And he said because I have daughters and this is the world they’re going to live in. …

"I’ve looked into it and I know Brent’s truthfulness."

Now, there haven't been that many Secretaries of Energy, so it didn't take long to check Wikipedia and see that the SoE in Reagan's second term was a guy named John Herrington, who earlier served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. So there's our man. Herrington was a 1st Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Graduated from Stanford Law. Served eight years in an administration that conducted several military campaigns, counter terrorism operations, the Challenger explosion and various natural disasters. And what made this US Marine officer cry himself to sleep at night? What he was told about UFOs. Holy moly.

Maybe that's why they're not telling the public anything? I mean, I think I want to know all that they know. Because it's human nature to want to know all there is to know about … well, human nature. But if a guy who's seen it all can't handle being told, maybe blissful ignorance and a quality night's sleep is the way to go. 

One more thing about this. When Reagan was meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev to hammer out a nuclear arms treaty (this was before Rocky Balboa ended the Cold War on his own), he famously asked the Soviet leader what his country would do if the US was attacked by aliens. And Gorbachev answered that of course, his people would fight on the American's side. Supposedly that was the breakthrough the two needed in order to reach an agreement to reduce their stockpiles. Now hearing this about one of Reagan's own cabinet secretaries, it's hard not to think that monumental question was more than just hypothetical. Especially if the POTUS and his staff had been briefed on this other old news that just came out. Courtesy of the government task force that was just formed to look into these matters:

Daily Mail -  Two Air Force veterans told DailyMail.com they have testified to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) this month about their experiences of UFOs interfering with US nuclear missiles.

One email shows AARO staff contacted former US Air Force ICBM launch officer Robert Salas to gather information about his chilling encounter with an orange flying disc that inexplicably turned off 10 warheads at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana in 1967.

And another former officer, Dr. Robert Jacobs, has briefed AARO on a 35mm film he shot for the Air Force in 1964 that allegedly caught a flying saucer shooting a test missile out of the sky.  …

He claims that he reviewed footage of a September 15 1964 launch where a disc flew up to the moving missile, shot a series of 'beams' at it and sped away, causing the dummy warhead to topple out of the sky.

'We watched the third stage burn out, and into the frame came something else,' the former lieutenant, 84, said in a 2000 video interview.

'It flew into the frame and it shot a beam of light at the warhead.

'Now remember, all this stuff is flying at several thousand miles an hour. So this thing fires a beam of light at the warhead, hits it, and then it moves up… fires another beam of light… goes down and fires another beam of light, and then flies out the way it came in. And the warhead tumbles out of space.

'The object, the points of light that we saw, the warhead and so forth, were traveling through subspace about 60 miles straight up. And they were going somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 to 14,000 miles an hour when this UFO caught up to them, flew in, flew around them, and flew back out.

'Now I saw that. I don't give a goddamn what anybody else says about it. I saw that on film. I was there.'

Well alrighty then. These mysterious craft can not only evade our best weapons systems, disable our most sophisticated technology, and operate through the skies and the ocean in ways that are impossible by any known means of propulsion, they can shut down our nuclear arms like turning off a lamp. And they can blast an intercontinental ballistic missile to smithereens with a space laser the way a bug zapper takes out a moth. Oh, and they had this capability 50 years ago. Obviously our weapons tech has advanced in the last half century. But given what we're learning every other day now, we're basically flying paper airplanes as far as these craft are concerned. 

Who knows what they're not telling us? Or what kind of terrifying thing we're going to learn in the days and weeks to come. Until then, if anyone needs me, I'll be crying myself to sleep.