Australian intelligence officer argues large UFO knocked down by the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test

[humanoid]

This concerns the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test.
It was one of many interesting claims compiled in Jesse Michels' recent "UFOs Are Monitoring Nuclear Weapons GLOBALLY". Michels summarizes a segment from an interview Australian Intelligence Officer Geoff Cruickshank did with Coulthart. Cruickshank argues that a craft, presumably alien, was caught on video falling away from the blast, and that this was censored from some of the footage, crudely, with the addition of a big white triangle.

In his recent writeup about it in liberation times, Cruickshank corroborates this with logs from the ships involved, finding a notable omission in a log entry from the day of the recovery, and otherwise unexplained levels of radiation exposure among the ship's crew.

The Bluegill Triple Prime test detonated a nuclear warhead 48 kilometers above Earth to study how high-altitude explosions affect ballistic missile systems.

Decades later, newly declassified evidence suggests something far more extraordinary—a possible collision with an unidentified object, which I believe was a craft advanced non-human origin.

Footage, scientific reports, and naval recovery logs hint at a dramatic event where nuclear weapons technology intersected with the unknown.

This test was a key Cold War experiment.

The XW-50-X1 warhead was built to emit high-energy X-rays, designed to disable missile re-entry vehicles by causing intense heat and internal damage, a process called thermo-mechanical spall.

While the test aimed to push missile defense technology, the evidence shows it may have done much more.

The recording in question starts at 50:00 in this video: https://archive.org/details/StarfishPrimeInterimReportByCommanderJTF8 First the IR (or xray?) version with the white triangle. In visible light recording with no sanitization triangle at 51:45 you see something quickly falling down, seeming to leave a short trail of smoke, as soon as the explosion begins.

The inconsistency between the two films suggests a divergence in classification judgments between the laboratories responsible for analyzing the footage, raising further questions about what was seen—and why it was partially hidden from public view.

I wonder whether the object seen was pod 6 (the one that was closest to the blast). Another missile footage redaction comes up in this conversation, previously discussed (Atlas 8F missile test), and according to another participant in the Atlas 8 tests whose memories seem to be much more detailed than that of the UFO whistleblower's memories were, it was classified because it revealed a vulnerability in major weapon systems ("The Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarter analystssubsequently recognized this as a shortcoming of a major weapons system and classified the film as top secret.") Perhaps pod 6 fared worse than the others to a degree that it would constitute a classifiable vulnerability? But these pods were just being used to measure the blast, they don't sound like weapon systems to me.

I also wonder if the white triangle was actually just some object that was partially obstructing the IR camera on one of the planes. Cruickshank says that both of these cameras were mounted on KC-135s ("Captured by modified KC-135 aircraft equipped with specialized cameras, these films were produced by the renowned Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, Inc. (EG&G), under contract with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, CA.")

Official deck logs document the recovery of various pieces of debris, some of which were described as "anomalous."

I was unable to find the word "anomalous". I'm not used to reading handwring, someone else should take a look.

Although its crew had no officially recorded duties involving radioactive materials, they reported unusually high radiation exposure levels following the recovery mission.

This anomaly suggests the retrieval of unconventional debris, potentially linked to the unidentified object observed in the KETTLE 1 footage.

Note that the very first video on the page mentions that the sensor pods being recovered would be radioactive after the test. Hopefully Cruickshank has checked the radiation exposure levels and checked to see where all of the pods went.

In 1983, the Kaman Tempo Group, commissioned to investigate radiation exposure among Operation Dominic participants, discovered that the logs for the Point Barrow were missing.

 

[FatPhil]

Ah, the classic trope:
"a possible collision with an unidentified object, which I believe was a craft advanced non-human origin."

I don't know, therefore the wierdest thing possible.

 

[Jack Mallory]

Ah, the classic trope:
"a possible collision with an unidentified object, which I believe was a craft advanced non-human origin."

I hit the brakes as soon as I saw "Jesse Michaels," then opened the door and rolled onto the pavement when I saw "Ross Coulthart."

(No disrespect to the OP.)

 

[FatPhil]

I hit the brakes as soon as I saw "Jesse Michaels," then opened the door and rolled onto the pavement when I saw "Ross Coulthart."

(No disrespect to the OP.)

Perhaps because I am blessed with zero short-term memory, I did go "Jesse who?". But, answering my own question with a quick googoo search, I'll just say that I hope I never encounter that name again. However, maybe I hang around on the wrong websites to be sure of avoiding that.

 

[Ann K]

I'm going to assume that if something was unidentified in 1962, then it's going to remain unidentified.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Douglas Dean Johnson recently published an article examining the claims made by Mr. Cruickshank in the Liberation Times article, the NewsNation interview with Ross Coulthart, and laid out more comprehensively in Cruickshank's Supporting Evidence for Bluegill Triple Prime UAP Shootdown Theory document.

Mr. Johnson references primary source material such as the declassified Optical Phenomenology of High-Altitude Nuclear Detonations report to potentially identify the plane and cameras used for the two movies showing a falling object, which he refers to as "Falling Object Movie Alpha" (FOM-A) and "Falling Object Movie Beta" (FOM-B), and concludes the object is likely the falling Thor rocket that delivered the sensor pods and warhead. He also consults with experts on the nuclear tests and resulting films to determine the third video showing the white triangle ("white-triangle movie" (WTM)) is showing an effect present on the film emulsion and not a "sanitization" effect applied afterwards, as well as potentially identifying the camera and an explanation for the triangle. He also finds nothing anomalous about the recovered debris, and finds a prosaic explanation for high recorded radiation levels on crew radiation badges.

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/bluegill-triple-prime-nuclear-ufo/

The article is long and well-documented so I will only quote highlights. I recommend reading the article for fuller context and discussion of the points excerpted below and links to all the primary sources.

All quotes below are from the article and italics and bolding are in original.

FOMs

I believe that FOM-B is most likely Film Number 95226, which was taken from a KC-135 plane designated as KETTLE 2 and also as "aircraft 60376." That plane was at a line-of-sight distance of about 41 statute miles from the detonation. If I have identified the correct film, then it was taken with a Photo-Sonics 4C camera with a 50mm lens, using Ektachrome ER (EDER) film, at an original frame rate of 2500 frames per second, a frame-rate allowing for super-slow-motion playback. That super-slow-motion frame rate would have been greatly adjusted during the process that produced a film for public release; my guess is that the viewing version slows down real time by a factor of about 10. The images may have also been cropped and enlarged on an optical printer. In the paper Optical Phenomenology, the terse notes on Film Number 95226 state, "Long, persistent record of central core. Shows early fireball dissipation. Small image."

I believe that FOM-A is derived from Film Number 95218, also taken from the KC-135 designated as KETTLE 2 / "aircraft 60376." That film was shot with a Flight Research-Cine camera through a 35mm lens, on XR film. It was shot at 20 frames per second; I believe that the speed of the event that we see on the screen when watching FOM-A approximates real time. I believe that other analysts who have interpreted this film as a slow-motion film were mistaken. In Optical Phenomenology report, the terse "Results" notes on Film Number 95218 say, "Excellent record 380 feet. Burnhole on first frame." (I think the first frame is not included in this public release version.)

Crucial to Cruickshank's entire thesis is his belief that there was no large conventional object in the vicinity of the nuclear detonation that could account for the large tumbling object seen in FOM-A and FOM-B. In his August 2024 interview with Ross Coulthart, Cruickshank asserted that the falling object seen in the movies must be a UFO, because "the scientists put that denotation at a point in space and time where there was no other debris or aircraft or anything in that local area." Likewise, in his Supporting Evidence, Cruickshank wrote, "The warhead was delivered to the detonation point via a Mark IV Re-Entry vehicle on a high apogee trajectory, so the Thor missile delivery vehicle remnants were also not within the detonation area and [this] is documented in the 1961 test plan."

It is true that a 1961 "test plan" for the entire series of atmospheric nuclear tests contained a passing comment suggesting that the Thor rocket could be adjusted to place the spent booster far from denotation site. But many changes later were made to plans for specific tests, and we obviously should rely primarily on the abundant records that are specific to the Bluegill Triple Prime test.

I found explicit textual references showing that during the Bluegill Triple Prime test, the 65-foot intact Thor booster was still in the vicinity of the warhead when it detonated, and was identified as such in photographs published not long afterwards. In the Optical Phenomenology paper, embedded above, the table of contents describes Figure 5.31 as a photo showing "Thor booster below fireball at 2.5 seconds, taken from Aircraft 60376."

Moreover, in the main text, on page 198, we read regarding the same Figure 5.31, "The Thor booster is also evident as a small white dot some distance below the burst."

Importantly, the Optical Phenomenology paper attributes the described image 5.31 to "Aircraft 60376," which is the same plane (KETTLE 2) that took Film Numbers 95218 and 95226, which I postulate to be the falling object movies, respectively designated as FOM-A and FOM-B.

When Optical Phenomenology was declassified in 1985, most of the pages containing images of the detonation were redacted (i.e., they remained classified), including page 253, which contained the actual image designated as Figure 5.31. Figure 5.31 was not singled out for redaction – most of the pages devoted to reproducing photographic images from the test were redacted in their entirety. This was probably the default practice at the time; in the same paper, the redacters did the same thing with images from nuclear tests other than Bluegill Triple Prime, tests for which no one has ever constructed any UFO story.

All of this establishes to my satisfaction that the falling Thor booster was visible to the cameras on that plane (aircraft 60376, KETTLE 2), and supports the conclusion that we are seeing that same object hurling away from the fireball in the movies under discussion. I see no reason to discount the contemporary records and still images that explicitly document that the 65-foot Thor booster was in the vicinity of the nuclear device when it detonated, and that it was photographed falling, in favor of a theory that the tumbling object was a nonhuman craft. The scientists who recorded the event saw nothing extraordinary about the object; they knew what it was, and they had seen this sort of thing before. (For example, a description of a photo taken during the July 9, 1962 Starfish Prime test said, "The small bright object at eight 0' clock from the burst point is the Thor booster which evidently had been heated to a faint incandescence by the X-rays...")

WTM

Crucial to his theory, Cruickshank asserted that the white triangle in the WTM was a "sanitization" device added by government actors to cover up the falling UFO that he believes is visible in the FOMs. I believe that this explanation for the white triangle is narrative-driven, implausible on its face, and lacks any substantial documentary or credible testimonial evidence in its support. Several passages of Supporting Evidence seemed to offer authorities for such a claim, but under scrutiny, each such data point evaporated or at least could not be substantiated.

In his 2024 writings Cruickshank associated the WTM with the KETTLE 2 plane (i.e., aircraft 60376), but he did not provide much if any documentation for that association. I concluded that the WTM was derived from film shot by a camera on Johnston Island. I have tentatively identified the WTM as being derived from Film Number 95318. If so, it was taken with a Triad camera with a 25mm lens, on XR film, at 16 frames per second. In Optical Phenomenology, the terse notes on 95318 state, "Good record but burst is low in frame. Shows many shock waves." At first glance that may seem a poor fit, since the WTM shows a fireball centered in the frame, but I believe that the original 95318 images were cropped through use of a device called an "optical printer," as discussed below.

My identification of the WTM with Film Number 95318 may be further supported by the statements in Optical Phenomenology that in photographs taken from the aircraft the fireball initially appeared elliptical, but that "from Johnston Island the fireball appeared as a circular disk...No trace of an elliptical shape is apparent." To my eye, the fireball as seen in Film Number 95318 is circular. [...]

In a series of email exchanges, nuclear-film expert Peter Kuran conveyed to me that he did not believe that the WTM had originally been shot in slow motion (at a very high frame-per-second rate), as had been asserted by Cruickshank. Kuran said that he believed the WTM was shot on XR film and probably at 16 frames per second. Looking over the tables of the cameras used during the Bluegill Triple Prime test, he said he felt that the most likely candidates for the WTM were film numbers 95120 and 95318, both of which were shot on XR file at 16 fps using a camera designated as "TRAID." I will explain further on why I settled on 95318. [...]

I consulted the three experts independently, and all agreed that the white triangle is not a redaction device. There is ample evidence in the images themselves that their assessment is correct.

Alex Wellerstein observed, "I do not think it is redaction. It is clearly part of the original film footage based on the way it interacts with the light."

This is seen most clearly in the earliest frames, where the triangle first appears severely distorted in the initial pulse of the fireball.

Even after that first split-second, the intense light of the blast continues to bleed around and distort the shape of the triangle. These effects would only be seen if the triangle was part of the original emulsion image. A redaction mask added in the laboratory would be crisp, clean, identical in every frame.

Wellerstein also told me, "On the triangle thing. When they redact film they just cut the frames entirely, they do not do cute things like redact little pieces of them with a mask. At least, I've never seen such practices (and can't imagine why they'd do it). I do not think it is redaction, though. It is clearly part of the original film footage based on the way it interacts with the light."

A day later, he said, "I'm asking a few people I know about the triangle thing. At this point I am 90% convinced it is just an indicator on the edge of the camera, and the camera wasn't quite pointed in the right direction." (emails, March 23-24, 2025)

Nuke film expert Peter Kuran independently made similar points: "If there was some kind of classification issue, they would have just removed that particular clip from release." And, "The protrusion or triangle as I am calling it does not look like it was put on after the fact....[it] was probably there in the original photography. Technically, they could not have pulled this off any other way."

Both Kuran and Wellerstein independently told me they had seen small triangles in the bottom of the frames of other nuclear-test movies, and believed that these were something integral to some of the instrumented cameras. Wellerstein wrote on March 23: "At 1:03:33, one sees a black triangle briefly. It looks like it is some part of the camera. The earlier frames are inverted in color, which would match the black triangle, although the size is obviously too large/obscuring. My guess is that camera was aimed wrong and what was meant to be a small thing at the bottom of the frame instead was in the center of it. The photo reports (e.g. ADA995489) imply that a lot of cameras were mis-aimed because the anticipated burst point was off a bit. (My guess is that these "orange" ones are shots on XR film, which produces this kind of orange/blue coloration.)" [...]

In email exchanges, Kuran seemed to agree that Film Number 95318 was a plausible candidate for the WTM. He commented: "When they say [in the declassified report remarks] 'Good record but burst is low in frame. Shows many shock waves,' that film record could in fact have been put onto an optical printer, blown up so the image was more close up and centered in frame. [That] would explain the triangle. That is something EG&G [Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier (EG&G), the photography contractor] would have had the capability back in the day [in the 1960s], such as a Producer's service optical printer types 102 and 103. Also, they had an arrangement with Cinema Research Corp in Hollywood to do optical printing of records. That would primarily have involved blow ups, re-positions and step printing of film records. This would have been done back in the 1960's and an XR blow up on an optical printer to a Kodachrome dupe makes sense."

Kuran even sent me a diagram to illustrate, under the 95318 theory, where the fireball would have appeared in the original full frame, and how the cropping to the red-box area would have had the side effect of enlarging a single frame pointer and setting it slightly off center.

However, Kuran also warned me that such reconstructions are speculative, and that certitude would require examination of the original film. I subsequently have filed FOIAs with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for any available records on Bluegill Triple Prime Film Numbers 95218, 95226, and 95318, but as of the date of this publication, the agency has failed to acknowledge even receipt of those requests. Regarding the efficacy of FOIA for this purpose, "Don't hold your breath," Kuran told me early on.

In his Supporting Evidence, Geoff Cruickshank wrote: "At the declassification review in 1998, the Defense Special Weapons Agency team led by Dr. Bryon L. Ristvet applied a large white triangle as a sanitization device on the KETTLE 2 footage, within the area of the fireball that the object can be seen tumbling from in the KETTLE 1 footage." I think many readers might have read that to mean that Cruickshank had received some affirmative testimony or documentation that Ristvet's team had "applied a large white triangle" – information obtained either from Ristvet himself or from somebody else in a position to know.

But, no, apparently not. When I contacted Ristvet directly, he clearly rejected any suggestion that the triangle was a redaction device. He wrote in part:

I have not gone to look at the original master print of the film retained by DoD. For the classification/sanitization of the films, we did a direct transfer from the master print Kodachrome 16 mm films to DigiBeta then to BetacamSP for review, in which only classified images, or sound track, or both were identified to be redacted. Those segments were then removed from the original DigiBeta transfer and then rerecorded on Betacam SP for final review. The transferred films were reviewed by two each NNSA and DoD classification personnel. As far as the triangle goes, there have been many films with pointers like this in the frame. But it had to be in the frame during photography and not "fixed in post"... [email, March 30, 2025; boldface added for emphasis)

Debris and radiation

Cruickshank has written of what he believes is evidence that Navy ships also recovered radioactive debris "potentially linked to the unidentified object..." The following passage appeared in his Liberation Times piece as originally published in December 2024:

Several ships, including the USS Safeguard, USS Engage, and USNS Point Barrow, were tasked with retrieving debris from the surface zero area where the detonation occurred.

Official deck logs document the recovery of various pieces of debris, some of which were described as "anomalous."

The USNS Point Barrow, in particular, played a unique role in these operations.

Although its crew had no officially recorded duties involving radioactive materials, they reported unusually high radiation exposure levels following the recovery mission.

This anomaly suggests the retrieval of unconventional debris, potentially linked to the unidentified object observed in the KETTLE 1 footage.

I wasted a fair amount of time searching various ship logs for some reference to "anomalous" debris. There was no such reference. In late March 2025, Cruickshank edited the Liberation Times article to remove the quote marks around the word anomalous, although he retained the adjective. In my opinion, the use of the adjective is without justification even without the quote marks.

In reading the old declassified reports, it seems to me that a great many things were expected to fall from the sky after an atmospheric test, and the ships were apparently expected to recover as many objects as possible. For example, in the hour that followed the detonation, 28 separate "sounding" rockets were launched from Johnston Island, containing various instruments. Among the rockets used were Nike-Cajun and Nike-Apache, both of which utilized cylindrical boosters that were 12 feet long and 16 inches in diameter, with second stages carrying instrument payloads of various configurations. [...]

All of this hardware fell back into the ocean. It appears to me that the crews took the approach of picking up objects whether or not they could identify them. For example, the log of the lead recovery vehicle, the USS John S. McCain, for the hours just after the Kingfish atmospheric detonation over Johnston Island, November 1, 1962, shows the ship picking up various objects both identified and unidentified– yet nobody has associated any UFO knockdown with the Kingfish test. [...]

In his August 2024 interview with Ross Coulthart, Cruickshank provided more detail on information he said he found in the Safeguard logbooks. He said that the Safeguard had recovered "spherical debris" of a type they'd not encountered before, and that when they got that debris into a net, the ship lost all electrical power, which he said was a technically unlikely event, since the ship had two independent power sources. I could not find much support for such a narrative in that source.

In email correspondence in early April, 2025, Cruickshank pointed me to the logs of the ship named Engage. The Engage log for the day of the test (October 26, 1962) did contain notes on recovery of various objects, all of which were found to be radioactive: among these, a "black ball" recovered in "the pod recovery area," a "green tube," and "a cylindircal [sic] object" (the last while steaming in the "nose cone recovery area"). [...]

Given the number and diversity of sounding rockets and associated instrument packages that went up and came down, along with other prosaic stuff, it is not clear why we should regard any of those entries as anomalous. There is nothing in the Engage logbook to suggest that the seamen regarded any of it as extraordinary. This appears to be yet another instance of Cruickshank approaching every information source strongly committed to the belief that a nonhuman craft was knocked down, and then forcing one or another ambiguous data point into that rigid matrix.

The mystery that Cruickshank imparts to the purported radiation exposures on Point Barrow appears in a different light when the reader learns that the Point Barrow was merely one of 16 ships on which crew members' radiation badges showed readings much higher than explainable by any radiation that they should actually have been exposed to. The authors of the report attributed these high readings to faulty seals on the radiation-detecting film packs, referring to "the extremely high correlation between film damage and elevated reading."

Conclusion

There are no contemporaneous documents or credible witness accounts that associate the Bluegill Triple Prime test with a UFO-knockdown event (as distinguished from people coming forward with contradictory stories a half-century or more later). Originally classified reports contained images of the 65-foot Thor booster illuminated near the fireball, and I see no reason to seek any more exotic candidate for the falling object seen in the movies. A triangle seen in a third movie of the fireball is distorted at points by the intensity of the light hitting the film; it is clearly part of the original image, not a laboratory redaction device (the public release of a film employing a crude redaction device being an implausible idea in the first place). This film was likely cropped using an optical printer in order to enlarge and center the fireball, which had the side effect of enlarging a frame feature that otherwise would have been invisible or inconspicuous. There is nothing in any of the available logs of recovery ships that truly suggests that the personnel involved regarded anything they found as surprising or anomalous.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Douglas Dean Johnson recently published an article examining the claims made by Mr. Cruickshank in the Liberation Times article, the NewsNation interview with Ross Coulthart, and laid out more comprehensively in Cruickshank's Supporting Evidence for Bluegill Triple Prime UAP Shootdown Theory document.

So, Johnson did the actual research that journalists like Coulthart and others seem incapable of or choose not to engage in. But I guess Harold Malmgren corroborated these claims when he was running the US governments anti-missile, nuclear response, lesion to the JCStaff and confidant of the Kennedy family.

 

[Mendel]

I'm going to assume that if something was unidentified in 1962, then it's going to remain unidentified.

If there's classified material involved, that became declassified over time, that might not be true (but often is, alas).

 

[elvenwear]

Let's see. Alien civilization millions of years older than ours develops interstellar travel, locates human life and then wants to watch as humans develop nuclear weapons technology. Strangely, they don't know that they shouldn't fly next them while they are being detonated.

 

[Mendel]

Let's see. Alien civilization millions of years older than ours develops interstellar travel, locates human life and then wants to watch as humans develop nuclear weapons technology. Strangely, they don't know that they shouldn't fly next them while they are being detonated.

Well, Tom DeLonge's 2016 theory was that the atmospheric nuke tests during the cold war were really an effort of the superpowers working together to defend Earth from aliens.

nuclear weapons will "eff up" those little those little ankle-biters bad, and they know it. And even they as advanced as they are, they can't get away from it.

See footnote 4 at https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/bluegill-triple-prime-nuclear-ufo/ .

 

[elvenwear]

Well, Tom DeLonge's 2016 theory was that the atmospheric nuke tests during the cold war were really an effort of the superpowers working together to defend Earth from aliens.

nuclear weapons will "eff up" those little those little ankle-biters bad, and they know it. And even they as advanced as they are, they can't get away from it.

See footnote 4 at https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/bluegill-triple-prime-nuclear-ufo/ .

So the cold war was the real hoax? Hmm. Now I wonder why they stopped doing atmospheric testing if it was so good at repelling UFOs. Also, why wouldn't the UFOs just fly over cities instead of remote testing areas?

 

[FatPhil]

Well, Tom DeLonge's 2016 theory was that the atmospheric nuke tests during the cold war were really an effort of the superpowers working together to defend Earth from aliens.

nuclear weapons will "eff up" those little those little ankle-biters bad, and they know it. And even they as advanced as they are, they can't get away from it.

See footnote 4 at https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/bluegill-triple-prime-nuclear-ufo/ .

Wow, human exceptionalism as a coping mechanism seems to know no bounds. They've travelled interstellar distances, which all we can do is fantasize about, but they must also be physically inferior to us, and we will beat them with our single-digit-percentage-efficiency scary weapons? I'm unsure if it's an upper bound or a lower bound being breached with that particular outburst.