The haunting connection between UFOs and America's nuclear weapons is laid bare in fascinating new study which concludes: They're trying to stop us from annihilating ourselves

Do they come in peace? UFO reports over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift from sites where the bombs were made to missile silos and US air bases as the Cold War arms race grew. Above, an officially 'unexplained' UFO case from the Air Force's Project Blue Book files, a July 16, 1952 encounter photographed by Coast Guard seaman Shell Alpert of four UFOs seen through the window of a photographic laboratory near Salem, Massachusetts Among the hundreds of cases included in their analysis was the infamous March 16, 1967 Malmstrom case in which Air Force witnesses reported that ten nuclear missiles were switched off by a UFO, confirmed by a US Strategic Air Command report. A Strategic Air Command document released under the Freedom of Information Act says 'all ten missiles in echo flight at Malmstrom lost strat alert within ten seconds of each other' and notes a 'grave concern' about the case From 1948 to 1952, as America's production of atomic weapons first ramped up, waves of UFO sightings began cropping up over Washington state's Hanford nuclear production complex, as well as Los Alamos and other sites for the Manhattan Project. These patterns in the historical UFO record, according to the researchers, was also accompanied by another clear trend: As the UFOs appeared more and more over armed and ready nuclear weapons sites, the apparent craft also started to appear more at night In one illustrative case from May 21, 1949, Hanford personnel spotted a 'silvery, disc-shaped' UFO hovering over the plant, whose B Reactor had generated the plutonium used in the first atomic bomb test at Trinity.