Vandenberg UFO

At 8:45 a.m. on October 14, 2003, according to the Security Forces blotter at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a technical sergeant from the 576th Flight Test Squadron called the base's security control center to relay a report of "a red square object hovering in the air above LF 21," one of the base's missile launch facilities. The entry lists three Boeing employees as witnesses. Two security forces members were dispatched, and "upon arriving on scene there was no evidence of any hovering objects in the vicinity"; range control and base operations reported no sightings on their radar. That redacted page, supplied by former base police officer Jeff Nuccetelli and published by the WEAPONIZED podcast in April 2025, is the contemporaneous core of what has come to be called the Vandenberg Red Square.

The story first reached Congress secondhand. At the July 26, 2023 House Oversight hearing, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves said a group of Boeing contractors had given him their account of a "very large, 100-yard-sided red square" that approached the base from the ocean, hovered at low altitude over a launch facility for about 45 seconds and darted off over the mountains, followed after sunset by reports of objects approaching security guards at high speed, as the Santa Barbara Independent reported. Nuccetelli spoke publicly for the first time that November in a podcast interview with Graves.

On September 9, 2025, Nuccetelli, who served 16 years as an Air Force military police officer, testified before the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. His written testimony describes five incidents between 2003 and 2005 at a base then conducting launches that he said the National Reconnaissance Office called "the most important in twenty-five years." It dates the red square to October 14, 2003, and says that later that night, while he was on duty, guards at a launch site reported a bright, fast-moving object, and that five witnesses described to him a rectangular craft "larger than a football field" that hovered for about 45 seconds before speeding away. About a week later, he testified, a patrol saw a light approach from the ocean, and the object "hovered briefly or landed" before vanishing; he said that witness was later threatened into silence. He also described a 2005 patrol report of a triangular craft larger than a C-130 and his own off-duty sighting of a glowing orb. DefenseScoop quoted his complaint that "we got no guidance down on how to handle these events."

The documentary record is narrower than the testimony. The released blotter covers only the morning report, records it as relayed by telephone, and notes that patrols and radar found nothing. The Anomaly Archives catalog notes that Nuccetelli was not a firsthand witness to the red square itself, a point the skeptic Mick West also made on his Metabunk forum when Nuccetelli first spoke in 2023, and later retellings have varied on the year, given as 2003 or 2004, and on whether the object was a square or a rectangle. Nuccetelli testified that official Air Force records of the event are now held by AARO and the FBI; neither agency has made them public. The episode is separate from the 1964 Vandenberg UFO Incident, the disputed missile-film case from the same base.

In 2026 Nuccetelli kept the account in circulation, discussing the incursions in a livestreamed question session with whistleblower Matthew Brown hosted by journalist Leslie Kean in August and in a September conversation with filmmaker James Fox. The case remains one of the few modern UAP claims at a strategic launch base backed by a contemporaneous base police record, although that record documents a report from witnesses rather than an object seen by the responding patrols.