A couple years ago I noted that Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands, is best remembered for presaging the 9/11 attacks, and Roo_ster found “echoes of Jerry Pournelle and his sci-fi buds from the 1960s through the 1980s,” which led Bruce to mention Jerry Pournelle’s foreword for Roswell by Karl Pflock. An old Jerusalem Post piece recounts Pournelle’s explanation for (some) UFOs:
During the Cold War there were reports of UFOs in Chile and Peru witnessed by thousands. And there was even a government conspiracy and cover-up related to the incident.
There are treaties in place that stipulate that no nation may place weapons in orbit and no nation may build or test orbital bombardment systems. This was also generally interpreted to exclude what’s known as fractional orbital bombardment systems, abbreviated with the acronym, FOBS. What is an FOBS? An FOBS is a weapon that is launched into Earth orbit, but is then de-orbited and made to re-enter the atmosphere before it makes a complete circuit around the globe. The Soviets thought they could launch a missile into orbit, swing it around the South Pole and then deorbit it so it came at the US from our southern border and thus avoid all our early warning systems which were watching for Soviet missile launches from the north. One day they decided to develop and test their system, despite the treaties, and they had their dummy missiles re-enter the atmosphere over South America. They hoped no one would notice.
Unfortunately, those re-entering dummy warheads were seen by tens of thousands of people in Peru and Chile, making it impossible to simply dismiss all the reports as hallucinations. So the KGB quickly concocted an explanation. They spread UFO stories and even made up tales of aliens being spotted.
Meanwhile, our government didn’t want the Soviets to know just how much we knew about their experiments. So the CIA did nothing to counter the Soviet rumors. Thus, the test was covered up by both the Soviets and the Americans, each for their own reasons, but with the same result: people believed they had seen “real” UFO’s.
The March 1971 Air Force Magazine claims a Soviet FOBS passed over the tip of South America and returned to Soviet territory near the Caspian.
Got this from ChatGTP, which says the Soviet FOBS were normally passing over southern South America but did not reenter.
It would take looking through all South American media reports of strange lights in the sky and comparing them to all Soviet launches of the period to have a better idea of what was happening.
Pournelle had good contacts in aerospace where he worked, but I don’t think any big confirmation has surfaced yet.