The Shield And The Signal

From Star Wars to Golden Dome: When Our Skies Watch Back

(Photo: US Air Force)

President Donald Trump has reignited a very old ambition with a very new name.

Last week, he unveiled a plan for ‘Golden Dome’ - a next-generation missile defence shield designed to protect the United States from ballistic and hypersonic missile threats. Though few technical details have been released, the name evokes an all-encompassing, possibly multi-domain sensor[1] and interception system that is readily familiar to any defence analyst who can cast their mind back a decade or three.

The implication is that Golden Dome will watch everything, everywhere, all at once and keep America safe.

But here's the thing. The sky sometimes has a way of watching back.

If Golden Dome materialises, it will be the latest in a long line of US missile defence programmes - each born of geopolitical anxiety, each bristling with sensors and exotic tech. Golden Dome may be pitched as a response to modern threats from China, Russia and rogue states, but its conceptual lineage goes back nearly a century.

In the 1940s and '50s, early work on anti-aircraft and anti-missile defence systems at sites like White Sands Missile Range set the foundation.

Then came the 1970s Safeguard Program in North Dakota - briefly operational (at Grand Forks AFB) before being dismantled under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

In the 1980s, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as ‘Star Wars’, envisioned kinetic kill vehicles, space-based lasers (as depicted in the 1984 artist’s concept above), and even nuclear-pumped X-ray weapons.

The Cold War ended before most of these were deployed, but the research continued.

The George W. Bush era saw the rise of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, with interceptor silos installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg AFB in California. These were joined by sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense ships, equipped with powerful SPY-1 radars and Standard Missiles. The Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) is a ship-based interceptor developed to destroy short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the midcourse phase of their flight.

It’s well known in UFO circles that sightings cluster around nuclear weapons sites.

From the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State during the WW2 Manhattan Project, to the 1967 missile shutdown at Malmstrom AFB in 1967, to sightings near the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in 2019, the pattern is well established.

But here’s what’s less often said: a parallel pattern exists around missile defence installations. If nuclear weapons production and storage sites were the original UFO attractors, missile defence sites account for a fair share of sightings too. Here’s a breakdown of some hotspots and their associated programmes past and present:

• White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico (SDI, GMD, directed energy (DE) weapons trials): Orbs, pilot encounters, radar anomalies. A weapons test area since the 1940s, it’s become a magnet for strange aerial activity.

• Vandenberg Space Force Base, California (SDI, NMD, GMD): Site of the 2003 ‘red square UFO sighting’ (the object was described as the size of a football field), testified to in Congress in 2023. Historically used for ICBM and interceptor launches.

• Kirtland AFB, New Mexico (SDI and DE weapons development generally): Multiple orb and light anomaly sightings since the 1940s. Home to Sandia National Laboratory and DE labs.

• Pacific Missile Range Facility, Hawaii (NMD): In 2022, F-22s were scrambled over Hawaii after lights were spotted near this key SM-3 test site.

• Schriever AFB, Colorado (GMD): Reports of UFOs and synchronised anomalous lights in the Colorado Springs area generally. Schriever is a nerve centre for US Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

• Fort Greely, Alaska (GMD): In the remote Alaskan interior, numerous UFO sightings and anomalous radar returns have been linked to this ballistic missile interceptor base.

Even naval systems associated with missile defence haven’t been immune from visitation.

The 2004 ‘Tic Tac incident’, in which a UAP was tracked and visually observed off the coast of California by the USS Nimitz carrier strike group, involved the USS Princeton, whose SPY-1 radar had been upgraded for ballistic missile tracking and discrimination. Though the ship wasn’t operationally configured to fire SM-3 missiles at the time, it had received the radar upgrades necessary for ballistic missile tracking. In this sense, it was already embedded in the broader missile defence sensor web.

With this in mind - it’s not just nuclear weapons and energy technology that has received visitations historically from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) - in the context of Golden Dome, if I were giving a high-level briefing to a politician or a senior military official on the actual association between sophisticated, networked weaponry and UAP, I’d lay it out something like this:

• UFO sightings disproportionately cluster around sites tied to missile defence systems - especially those with advanced radar, IR, and optical sensors, directed energy weapons (DEWs), and their associated tracking systems.

• The phenomena seem to show interest in sensor performance, test windows, and command-and-control nodes.

• This cannot be fully explained by sensor bias. The sightings are not merely noise picked up by sensitive instruments. Many are visual, radar-verified, or reported by trained observers.

• These patterns date back to the earliest days of missile testing and persist into the modern era.

Due to the fact Golden Dome will have a DEW component - comprising lasers and maybe more sophisticated weapons still - it may be appropriate to speculate that it will be under ‘outsider’ scrutiny more than previous missile defence systems. This is because - if this is the way you’re conditioned to look at threats, perceived or actual - speed-of-light weapons, which is what many DE weapons are, will be able to engage UAP with greater success probability than comparatively pedestrian missile systems.

No wonder, then, ‘the others’ have been taking interest in sites - I’m thinking particularly of Kirtland AFB and Los Alamos National Laboratory - where, over the years, a lot of DE development work has been taking place.

As these sites are also associated with nuclear weapons work, however, the precise focus of their interest in these locations isn’t necessarily clear.

Now let’s head even further off-piste.

Let’s imagine that cognitive scientist Professor Donald Hoffman - a particular hero of this column - were to weigh in here.

Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception argues that we do not see reality as it is, but only as a species-specific user interface (much like the graphical user interface [GUI] of a computer) that has been shaped over eons by evolution. What we think of as real solid things, including us, he says, are merely ‘icons’ - like the icons and apps displayed on a computer screen - that provide us with an ‘operating system’ for navigating our material reality.

That so, I’d argue that operational missile defence installations - past, present and future - are not just sophisticated military sites, but points of human perceptual augmentation.

Radar sees where eyes cannot. Directed energy operates at the quantum level. A charged particle weapon, for example, would defend against incoming missiles by scrambling their component systems at sub-atomic scales - below levels most of us can comprehend. And IR systems capture heat trails beyond our visual perception.

In The Light Beyond The Mountains, we look deeply into the question of whether the world we experience is a simulation - or, more precisely, a ‘rendered interface’ shaped by deeper computational or conscious processes. We also ask whether ‘anomalies’ on this interface - of which UFOs constitute a prime example - yield clues to the nature of the universe’s underlying architecture. If the answer is yes, then actions that force the system to reveal its seams are both philosophically and operationally significant.

Missile defence sites, with their powerful sensor arrays and high-energy emissions, may represent localised disruptions in our interface with reality. In Hoffman’s Interface Theory, this would mean these sites are not simply staring at physical reality and responding - they are interrogating the frontiers of our perceived world. And the anomalies that emerge might be forms of ‘debug output’ from a system strained by our probing.

In software terms, debug output is the raw data a system emits when under stress or being interrogated - normally hidden but surfaced when something breaks or is pushed beyond standard operation.

From an Interface Theory perspective, missile defence sites - especially those projecting high-energy emissions or operating ultra-sensitive sensors - may be doing just that: probing the underlying ‘code’ of our perceptual environment. What emerges in response - plasma orbs, impossible craft, and anomalous radar traces - may not be structured vehicles or the non-human intelligences (NHIs) of ufological lore, but reactive artefacts from the rendered interface itself - our ‘GUI’ blinking under pressure.

Last week, I spoke with Dr. Rudy Schild, a Harvard astrophysicist and longtime collaborator at the Center for Astrophysics. In a recent paper, Schild proposed something remarkable along these lines: that these anomalies - these perceptual ‘glitches’ - might not be ‘intrusions’ at all, but part of a universal repair mechanism. Drawing on quantum entanglement theory, he suggests that when ‘long-range entangled systems’ become disrupted, the fabric of reality may respond by attempting to re-bind those broken chains.

By ‘long-range entangled systems’, Schild is referring to quantum connections formed early in the life of the universe - entanglements that may persist across cosmic distances, or even between conscious observers and the structure of spacetime itself. These may include methods by which NHI are able to ‘hack’ the interface of our perception and observe us remotely, much as remote viewers do - but this, in a sense, is a diversion.

Whatever they are, these entangled chains that underlie the informational substrate of the universe we see, Schild suggests, can be disrupted by high-energy phenomena such as radiation bursts, exotic weapons testing, or even directed acts of perception or intention[2]. When that happens, he speculates, the universe may respond with a kind of repair protocol - a re-binding of informational or energetic coherence.

Here, then, is the provocative twist: what we perceive as UFOs or orbs may not be vehicles at all, but manifestations of that repair mechanism rendered in the only form our perceptual interface can handle. Not craft, per se, but correction - expressed through symbolic phenomena at the edge of visibility and comprehension.

UFOs over these sites may, of course, be what they appear to be - non-human intelligences surveilling our most sophisticated networked defence systems.

But we must also entertain the possibility that we’re witnessing communication from the substrate itself.

That when we push too far, probe too deeply, or poke at our limits of perception, something emerges from beyond the interface - not as a warning, but as a recalibration.

If this is the case, we might want to think twice before aiming - or worse, firing - our weapons at the unknown.

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[1] Multi-domain here means it operates across air and space, as well as other domains, including cyber

[2] Think here, perhaps, CE5 protocols (for Close Encounters of the 5^th Kind), in which humans invite contact with NHI