UFOs are no laughing matter on Capitol Hill. Beyond alleging the existence of surreptitious government programs to retrieve and reverse-engineer exotic craft of “non-human” origin, Congress mandated that the Department of Defense document and report any UFO incidents “associated with military nuclear assets, including strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships.”

Lawmakers are right to focus on the nexus between UFOs and nuclear technology. Many of the best-known and most credible unexplained sightings occurred in alarming proximity to our most sensitive nuclear assets and facilities.

In 2004 and 2015, for example, U.S. Navy fighter jets flying off nuclear-powered aircraft carriers recorded the three UFO videos that catalyzed significant public and congressional interest in the phenomena.

But interactions between UFOs and ultra-sensitive U.S. nuclear assets date back nearly eight decades. New Mexico, ground zero for America’s nuclear weapons development programs, is the site of a remarkable number of baffling, unsolved UFO incidents.

In late 1948, for example, dozens of pilots, defense personnel and scientists associated with the famed Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons programs began seeing mysterious “green fireballs” in the sky. Such objects were frequently observed flying on a perfectly horizontal trajectory, often moving directly toward nearby aircraft. In 1949, two major Los Alamos conferences on the incidents, which drew the likes of famed nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller, failed to identify the source of the phenomena.

Lincoln LaPaz, then one of the world’s leading authorities on meteorites, observed the “fireballs” personally and, in partnership with the Air Force, conducted a thorough study of the mysterious phenomena. As Time and Life magazines reported contemporaneously, LaPaz “blasted” the notion that the objects were meteorites, bolides or other naturally occurring phenomena.

The bizarre incidents, along with their apparent connection to nuclear weapons research, remain unexplained.

Nearly a decade after the first “green fireball” sightings, an extraordinary UFO incident was reported at Kirtland Air Force Base, a key nuclear weapons testing and storage facility in New Mexico.

On Nov. 4, 1957, two control tower operators with more than 20 years of combined experience said they watched from a remarkably close range as an elongated wingless and engineless object descended slowly over the runway and hovered over the base’s nuclear weapons storage area. The craft........

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