In the tense autumn of 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis gripped the world, a startling incident unfolded that would remain buried in secrecy for decades. A former senior aide to four U.S. presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—revealed before his death that a mysterious “orb” UFO was shot out of the sky by a U.S. missile and retrieved by the Navy. This extraordinary claim, shared by Harald Malmgren and later detailed by his daughter, economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren, offers a glimpse into a shadowy intersection of Cold War technology, extraterrestrial encounters, and high-stakes geopolitics.
Harald Malmgren, who passed away on February 13, 2025, at the age of 89, was no ordinary government official. As a key White House and Pentagon figure, he oversaw budgets for missile testing programs during one of the most perilous periods in modern history. In his final months, he decided to unburden himself of a story he’d kept secret for over 60 years, driven by a sense of duty to history. What he described was a missile test on October 25, 1962, during which a “white orb” appeared on video, circling a rocket mid-flight. This wasn’t just any missile—it was equipped with an experimental X-ray-emitting nosecone, designed to disable enemy nuclear warheads with intense radiation. But that day, the X-rays didn’t just target a hypothetical Soviet missile; they brought down something far stranger.
According to Malmgren, the orb—a UFO—was knocked out of the sky by the missile’s radiation burst. The U.S. Navy swiftly retrieved it from the ocean, marking a moment that would ripple through classified briefings and, allegedly, influence the course of the Cold War. This wasn’t an isolated incident, either. Malmgren claimed these orbs, nicknamed “tagalongs,” had been spotted shadowing U.S. missiles before. “We knocked a ‘tagalong’ out of the sky,” he reportedly said, hinting at a pattern of encounters that left military officials both intrigued and unnerved.
The story takes an even more surreal turn with Malmgren’s account of handling a piece of the downed craft. In 1963, he was briefed in Albuquerque by Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional chief of the Atomic Energy Commission—and, coincidentally, the grandfather of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Gise handed Malmgren materials from the crashed UFO and asked him to describe his reaction. What followed was straight out of science fiction: Malmgren said a voice began speaking inside his head. He never revealed what it said, only noting that some people “interact” with these materials while others don’t. This eerie experience led to further briefings at Los Alamos and an off-the-record conversation with Richard Bissell, a former CIA heavyweight who’d overseen secretive projects like Area 51. Bissell, Malmgren said, felt he needed a “heads up” in case the topic ever surfaced in presidential discussions.
The incident’s fallout reached the highest levels of government. On December 7, 1962, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson were briefed at multiple secure locations, including Strategic Air Command Headquarters in Nebraska and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Malmgren’s daughter claims this encounter with the unknown spurred JFK’s push for de-escalation talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The realization that humanity wasn’t alone—and that these “strange craft” were vulnerable to X-rays—shifted the stakes of the arms race. It wasn’t just about outgunning the Soviets anymore; it was about understanding a larger, cosmic context.
Hints of this event linger in declassified records and grainy footage. A high-altitude nuclear test explosion on October 26, 1962, near Johnston Island shows an object tumbling from the fireball, later obscured in edited versions of the video. Weeks earlier, another UFO was filmed trailing a missile off Cape Canaveral at astonishing speed. Navy logs from the October test describe retrieving “anomalous” debris—an experimental pod, a black ball, and a faintly radioactive green tube—while one ship’s crew reported unusually high radiation exposure. Strangely, that ship’s records have vanished from the archives.
Malmgren’s revelations paint a picture of a Cold War far stranger than the history books suggest. Beyond the brinkmanship and missile silos, there were encounters with “otherworldly technologies” that challenged everything America’s leaders thought they knew. As he put it, “We learned something from the UFO crashes.” What that “something” was remains a mystery—one that Malmgren took to his grave, leaving us to wonder what else lies hidden in the shadows of the past.
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