Veteran Air Force pilot Robert Hopkins, who is also the author of one of my favorite reference books, The Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker: More Than a Tanker, flew RC-135S Cobra Ball missile tracking planes during the twilight of the Cold War. Cobra Ball was one of America’s most important intelligence-gathering assets as it collected high-fidelity data on adversary ballistic missile tests. The flights were critical to U.S. national security with many missions originating out of the highly remote and windswept Shemya Air Force Base in the Aleutian Island chain and aimed at spying on Russian ballistic missile test launches.
On two of these flights, while monitoring tests of Russia’s SS-20 Saber intermediate-range ballistic missile, Hopkins and his copilot experienced something incredibly bizarre. It was a phenomenon that ended up drawing extreme interest from America’s intelligence community, which thought the RC-135S had encountered a new secret weapon that could alter the strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
