By WILL MANLY

will@thestironline.com

A guest lecturer in town this week intends to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that unidentified flying objects do, in fact, exist.

They take a particular interest in nuclear missile sites, Robert Hastings says.

Hastings is a speaker who says he will use interviews with highly credible former military personnel and declassified government documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act to prove the existence of UFOs.

"UFOs are real. Their technology is better than ours," Hastings said, quite bluntly, in an interview. "We're dealing with visitations from somebody."

Those visitations, Hastings said, occur near nuclear missile launch sites at an alarmingly frequent rate.

And he said he's visited with multiple retired Air Force personnel who related to him a chillingly similar tale: That of a flying saucer appearing over nuclear launch sites, hovering for several moments, and then, mysteriously, the launch site's missiles activating without authorization from authorities. In each case, the missiles were immediately powered down by military personnel.

"If you have 100 former launch officers who are saying, 'There are flying saucers that have hovered over our nukes,' That obviously is a front-page story," Hastings said. "You have to ask yourself why 100 people who had their finger on the button are suddenly going crazy."

"Long story short, there's some very strange and spooky things going on at the missile sites," Hastings said.

The interviews he's conducted and the documents he's reviewed will be presented at Hastings' lecture in Hays, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Cody Commons of Fort Hays State University's Memorial Union. The event is free to the public.

Hastings began UFO research after an incident in 1967. His dad was in the Air Force, stationed at Malmstrom Air Base, near Great Falls, Mont. And Hastings was a kid working a part-time job as a janitor at the base when, one night while he was sweeping up in an air traffic control tower, he witnessed something that made the controller extremely nervous.

Five UFOs were tracked on radar for several minutes, Hastings said. Air Force interceptor jets were scrambled to meet them. As the jets closed in, the UFOs skeedadled -- at a rate so fast they could not have possibly been of this world.

Since, Hastings said, he has researched constantly. He has conducted interviews, reviewed documents, and shared his findings in more than 500 lectures. And he says he tries not to persuade audiences of anything he can't back up with evidence.

"I'm very nuts and bolts in my approach. I just let the documents and the retired Air Force personnel do the talking," Hastings said.