Robert L. Hastings is an American ufologist, author and filmmaker who has spent more than four decades collecting testimony from U.S. Air Force veterans about unidentified objects reported at nuclear missile sites, weapons storage areas and test ranges. His book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, first published in 2008 and reissued in an expanded edition in 2017, made him the best-known advocate of the view that UFO activity has concentrated on nuclear arsenals.

Hastings was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on May 6, 1950, the son of an Air Force serviceman stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. As a teenager he worked as a janitor in the base's air traffic control tower, and he says that in March 1967 he and the controllers watched radar track five unidentified objects maneuvering near the missile silos, the same month as the Malmstrom missile shutdowns. He earned a fine arts degree in photography from Ohio University in 1972, worked as a photographic technician at Northern Illinois University, studied electron microscopy, and from 1988 to 2002 was a laboratory analyst at Philips Semiconductors in Albuquerque.

He began lecturing on government UFO secrecy in 1981 and says he has presented his research at more than 500 colleges and universities and interviewed more than 150 military veterans. On September 27, 2010, he hosted a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington at which seven Air Force veterans, among them former missile launch officer Robert Salas, described UFO incidents at nuclear facilities. He directed the 2016 documentary UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed and co-wrote Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed (2019) with Bob Jacobs, the former Air Force photographic officer known for his account of a filmed 1964 missile test. Skeptic Benjamin Radford has called the nuclear-UFO material "merely a rehashing of old, discredited reports."

Hastings's case files ran through much of the 2026 discussion of nuclear-site encounters. Confession first brought to public attention the account of Mario Woods, the former security policeman whose reported 1977 encounter near an Ellsworth Air Force Base missile site returned to prominence when Jesse Michels reunited Woods with his former partner on American Alchemy in September. In August, Hastings put Matt Ford's Good Trouble Show in touch with his ranching neighbors, who went public on the program with reports of strange lights and craft and of missing and mutilated cattle. In a clip shared in September by Joe Murgia, Hastings said he had published veterans' accounts of classified incidents because he felt "the public's right to know was more important than that principle," and recalled receiving silent phone calls after interviewing veterans in 1982.

Hastings has written that Earth "is being visited by beings from another world, who for whatever reason have taken an interest in the nuclear arms race," an interpretation that remains his own and has not been confirmed by any government. His more lasting contribution is the archive behind it: named, on-record statements from missile officers, security police and technicians that turned nuclear facilities and UAP from scattered anecdotes into one of the most frequently cited themes in the modern disclosure debate.