Operation Laser Strike
Operation Laser Strike was a classified United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) counter-narcotics operation conducted primarily in Peru during the mid-1990s, involving up to 20 U.S. agencies and serving as the context for the 1997 Peru UFO crash retrieval alleged by Lance Corporal Jonathan Weygandt.
Mission and structure
Laser Strike was one of numerous classified U.S. SOUTHCOM operations targeting narcotics trafficking in Peru, preceded in 1996 by Operation Green Clover, a similar but smaller-scale operation focused on narcotics transfer in Peru and Colombia. The operation ran three phases targeting illegal airspace use, alternative transportation modes, and production capabilities, conducting missions from three primary locations in Peru: Iquitos, Ando, and Atico. Radar systems deployed included TPS-43 and RELOCATABLE ABLE ARCHER (ROTH) platforms, with possible covert support from Defense Support Program satellites operated by the NRO. In the twelve months from April 1996 to April 1997, Laser Strike radar tracked 45,000 aircraft; 5,390 were "tracks of interest," only 150 were suspected of drug trafficking, and only 21 were forced down — with the exact number of shoot-downs itself classified.
Among the special forces units attached to Laser Strike was the U.S. Army 7th Special Forces Group (Green Berets) out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which had previously served in Operation Snow Cap — a DEA counter-narcotics operation in nine Latin American countries. SOUTHCOM authorized up to 14 special forces deployments to the region during 1997.
Weygandt's deployment
Jonathan Weygandt joined the Marine Corps in 1995 and served until 1998, assigned to the 2nd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion within Marine Corps Air Control Group 28 (MACG-28), stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. In February 1997 his unit was deployed to Bupa, Peru under Laser Strike to provide perimeter security for radar installations and replace aging MIM-23 Hawk missile batteries with Stinger and Avenger platforms. While performing guard duty at the radar installation's command center, Weygandt overheard U.S. Air Force personnel discussing radar tracks of aircraft flying in and out of the atmosphere at Mach 10+, re-entering, stopping, and reversing direction — behavior he recognized as inconsistent with any known conventional or natural phenomenon.
UFO incident
One night between March and April 1997, at approximately 11:00 p.m., Weygandt was approached by Staff Sergeant Monte Legg, Sergeant Allen, and Sergeant Adkins and told there was a downed aircraft — possibly friendly — requiring a security detail. By 3:00–4:00 a.m., Weygandt was in the vanguard of a convoy of Humvees carrying eight Marines toward the crash site. After driving and trekking through jungle, the Marines arrived at dawn to find a massive gash in the landscape where something had sliced through the jungle "almost like a warm butter with a knife."
Weygandt and the two lead sergeants climbed to the top of a granite ridge and observed the craft — a massive metallic egg or teardrop shape approximately 10 meters high and 20 meters long, embedded at a 45-degree angle in the cliff face. The craft exhibited a purplish-green coloration that fluctuated and shimmered in a "mother of pearl" effect, appeared to absorb rather than reflect light, cast no shadow despite direct sunlight, and featured gill-like vents along its sides that Weygandt speculated were propulsion elements. A clear, syrup-thick liquid leaked from a partially open hatch and had spread over the surrounding vegetation; the liquid discolored Weygandt's uniform like acid and removed the hair from his legs permanently.
From one of the three hatches, Weygandt observed what appeared to be a four-fingered arm hanging limply — a detail he reported to Steven Greer's team but which was excised from the 2000 published testimony. The crash was likely caused by a Peruvian Air Force MIM-23 Hawk surface-to-air missile battery. A DOE NEST rapid response team was dispatched from the continental United States and secured the crash zone, detaining and threatening Marines who had reached the craft first. Attorney Daniel Sheehan, drawing on his own investigation of government UAP programmes, stated that crash retrieval operations were "not just a passive program" but that the government had "developed technology to knock some of these things down" and that "a number of the vehicles that were recovered intact" were "vehicles that were forced down by this technology." Elements of Laser Strike remain classified as of 2024.
Steven Greer independently referenced the Peru incident in a conversation with Joe Rogan, describing a witness "who was manning a facility on the Peruvian-Bolivian border" in the early 1990s during a period when the United States was "using an SDI Star Wars system to track ET craft and hit them with electromagnetic pulse weapons," and that "one was downed and crashed on the Peruvian-Bolivian border."
NEST response and cover-up
The rapid deployment of a Department of Energy Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) to the Peru crash site is significant. NEST is the U.S. government's primary rapid-response unit for nuclear and radiological emergencies, and its deployment to a remote jungle site with no known nuclear incident suggests that the recovered craft was assessed as having exotic energy or propulsion characteristics that triggered nuclear protocols — or that NEST serves a secondary function as a UAP crash retrieval asset. UAP Gerb investigator notes that NEST jets flew from the continental United States to reach the site, indicating the unit was pre-authorized for rapid international deployment in non-nuclear UAP recovery contexts.
Marines who reached the craft before the NEST team were immediately detained, had their weapons confiscated, and were subjected to threats against themselves and their families. Weygandt was told directly that he had never been in Peru, had never seen what he had seen, and that reporting what he had witnessed would result in his disappearance. The experience left him deeply affected, and he remained silent until he came forward to Steven Greer's Disclosure Project in 2000, where his account was recorded for the 2001 National Press Club event — though the portion describing the non-human arm hanging from the hatch was removed from the published testimony at Greer's editorial discretion.