Just last week, I
suggested that we were reliving the history of UFO investigations and the
attempts by various government agencies including the Air Force to discredit
witnesses, dismiss evidence and convince us that there was nothing to the tales
of flying saucers. Although not mentioned in the article, one of the best
examples of this was the claim that a nonexistent Project Mogul flight was
responsible for the debris found by Mack Brazel and taken to Roswell in 1947. And
that’s not to mention the 1953 CIA sponsored Robertson Panel that suggested
ways of convincing the public that aliens were not visiting Earth.
(Note: This article is much longer
than it should be but I thought the topic important. For those unfamiliar with
the Robertson Panel, you can read more about it here:
https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/07/coast-to-coast-operation-mockingbird.html
There are other links embedded in
the text that will take you down other rabbit holes in this long-term debunking
of UFO sightings.
For those interested in the equally
ridiculous claim that Project Mogul explained the Roswell crash, might I
suggest reading Roswell in the 21st Century which contains a
long appendix about Mogul and all the lies told about it. Just click on the
link to the left. For those who dislike me sending you off to buy one of my
books, you can read more about Mogul here:
https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2025/02/david-rudiaks-analysis-against-mogul.html
https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-end-of-project-mogul.html
Or, you can just type Project Mogul
into the search engine to the left you’ll find all the other postings I have
made on this topic.)
Now, thanks to the Wall
Street Journal, we are treated to the latest deception about UFOs. We are
told that the DoD spread stories about UFOs and flying saucers to hide the
development of the latest weapons systems. We are told that ALL, and I stress
that, all significant UFO sightings are mistaken sightings, institutional
misunderstanding and Cold War pranks. Really? Cold War pranks? Are we dealing
with a professional military or a bunch of college boys engaging in hazing
pledges?
This
frat boy mentality apparently lasted for decades. According to one of AARO’s
investigators, a former Air Force officer, who was unnamed in the article, said
that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier which
frightened him. He was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be
jailed or executed. Really? Executed? This same claim would be repeated to more
AARO investigators by other retired military men who were also unnamed. After
decades of unnamed sources who had been feeding misinformation to reporters who
repeated it without attempts to verify it, I’ll take a pass on more unnamed
sources.
Sean Kirkpatrick, one time head of
AARO.
According
to the story, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified
programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of
paper with a photo of what looked like a crashed flying saucer. The officers
were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of
an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never
to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. In the spring of 2023, the
defense secretary’s office sent a memo out ordering the practice to stop
immediately.
This
tale was printed without comment. No one realized how dumb the claim was. Why
would they brief incoming officers on a project that was highly classified and
for which they had no need to know? Holding a top-secret clearance does not
allow the holder access to everything classified as top secret. The person must
also have a “need to know.” This tale strikes me as a poor attempt to dismiss
the tales from officers who were exposed to information about UFO events without
a good reason but who now are talking. It was just another frat boy prank, but
I suspect any commander who engaged in this nonsense would lose his command if
caught by his superiors spreading the lie and then threatening execution.
But then, the first
sentence in the WSJ article tells us all that we really need to know about
their reporting and the reason for the leaks. “U.S. military fabricated
evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real
secret-weapons programs.”
This wasn’t the first
time that this dodge had been attempted. We have read about the CIA use of UFOs
to disguise secret projects and to their claim that many UFO sightings were of
spy planes but the true answer couldn’t be offered because of national security.
National security was often used as the dodge so that the difficult questions
could be ignored.
This was all part of a
“public disclosure that left out the truth behind some of the foundational
myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames,
in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with
disinformation.”
So, the question that
is not answered is when did all that disinformation begin. Was it in 1947 when
the idea of flying saucers first burst into public conscience or was it
something designed after the CIA’s Robertson Panel decided that the public
should be deceived about UFOs… not as a cover for classified projects but as a
way of diverting interest in the topic? And is this why every chief of Project
Blue Book can be described as hostile to the idea of alien visitation with one
notable exception?
Probably
the most egregious example of this is the claim that the 1967 shut down of a
flight of ballistic missiles at Malmstrom AFB was part of an experiment to
determine if the electromagnetic pulse from the detonation of an atomic bomb
would disable the weapons system. We are now supposed to believe, that at the
height of the Cold War, the Air Force decided to attempt to disable the
missiles by an outside source on an active flight of ballistic missiles. The
artificial EMP, they claim took down the whole flight. Of course, the missiles
were brought back on line rather quickly, which overlooks the fact that the EMP
pulse would fry the electronics, rending the missiles useless without extensive
replacement or repairs, something would take weeks if not months.
But a moment of
digression. During one of the hearings, two men from DoD, including Under
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security Ronald Moultier and Scott
Bray, described as the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, were providing
examples of recent UFO sightings. The hearing was chaired by Congressional Representatives
Andre Carson, who by the way, is a Democrat providing proof of the bipartisan
nature of the interest in UAP, contrary to WSJ’s allegation this was only
Republican interest and this is a digression in the digression.
Scott Bray pointing at a UAP.
During the Q&A, one
of the participants asked about Malmstrom event in 1967. Both men said they
knew nothing about it, which tells us a couple of things. First, they were
either not as fully informed as many of us in the UFO community as they should
have been or they were lying. Later, one said he was vaguely aware of the case,
which meant the first answer had been a lie. They did know something about it.
I believe this was a cover up of that mistake by suggesting there was nothing
alien involved and therefore it would outside they investigation.
(Once again, I wrote a detailed
analysis of the case in The Government UFO Files. If you are annoyed
when I promote a book here, you can read my take on this particular hearing
here:
https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/05/coast-to-coast-am-more-on-congressional.html
It provides the details of the
exchange between the DoD representatives and the Congressmen.)
While the WSJ article
focuses mainly on the report made by former Air Force missileer Robert Salas
and his testimony about the evident, they conveniently omit the series of UFO
sightings in the area at that time. There were multiple witnesses to an object
hovering near one of the missile control centers. The official story now is
that Salas was telling the truth about disabling the missiles, but it was part
of that radical and dangerous experiment I mentioned earlier. According to
documents in the Project Blue Book files, “Between the hours of 2100 and 0400
MST numerous reports were received by Malmstrom AFB agencies of UFO sightings
in the Great Falls, Montana area.”
There were reports of a
landing near Belt, Montana that were made by several witnesses including
Cascade County sheriff’s deputies. The Project Blue Book files contain lists of
a few of the witness statements but all reference to radar reports are missing.
In the end, the case, investigated by LTC Lewis Chase, the UFO Officer at
Malmstrom, was labeled as unidentified.
Project Blue Book
reveals that on March 24, 1967, near the small town of Belt, Montana, a truck
driver, Ken Williams, saw a domed object land in a canyon near the road. He was
curious enough that he stopped, got out of his truck and began to walk toward the
object. The UFO then lifted off, flew further up the canyon and touched down
again, now hidden from the highway by a ridge.
Williams, in a
handwritten document filed with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomenon, a NGO, told the whole story of what he had seen that night. In
response to their request, on April 7, 1967, Williams wrote:
Gentlemen:
Object was first observed
approximately 5 miles southeast of Belt, Montana. I was traveling North on
Highway 87 enroute to Great Falls, Montana. Object was approximately 1 mile to
my left and appeared to be about 5 or 6 hundred yards [1500 – 1800 feet] altitude.
I would estimate its speed to vary from 40 to 50 miles per hour. I am judging
this speed by the speed I was traveling as object seemed to be running evenly
with me. Its appearance was that of a large doomed [sic] shaped light or that
of a giant headlight. Upon climbing up the Belt Hill in my truck, I looked to
my left and about ½ mile up a gully. I witnessed the object at about 200 yards
[600 feet] in the air in a still position. I stopped my truck and the object
dropped slowly to what appeared to me to be within a very few feet from the
ground. [Underlining in original]. It was at this time that I felt
something or someone was watching me. As a very bright effecting light emerged
from the object it momentarily blinded me. This extremely bright light seemed
to flare three times. Each time holding its brightness. By the third time the light
was so bright [underlining in original] that it was nearly impossible to
look directly at it. It was at this time that I drove my truck onto the top of
the hill which was about another ½ mile. I stopped a car and asked the people
[Don Knotts of Great Falls] if they would stop at a station at the foot of the
hill and call the Highway Patrol. I went back down the hill and viewed the
object for several more minutes. It was while watching it the second time that
it rose and disappeared like a bolt of lightning. I went back to the top of the
hill where my truck was parked and just as the Highway Patrolmen [sic] Bud
Nader, arrived the object appeared once again. About 2 miles away and traveling
in a Northeast direction, whereas it stopped once again and appeared to drop
to the ground [Underlining in the original.]. There are several deep gullys
[sic] in the area where it appeared to drop out of sight. This was my last
sighting of the object.
The Project Blue Book
file on this case contains what was known as a Project Record Card, which was a
4 x 6 card that outlined the details of the case. While the case is labeled as
“unidentified,” it also noted that there was “(1 witness),” which they believed
to be so important that it was underlined. But that isn’t true and other
documents in the Blue Book files prove it.
According to a letter
written by LTC Lewis D. Chase, and addressed to Dr. Edward Condon at the
University of Colorado, there was, at least, one other witness. According to
Chase, “Mr. Nader [sent by the Highway Patrol] reported that upon reaching the
scene he observed an unusual light emanating from the area that the truck driver,
Mr. Williams, claimed the object had landed a second time.”
The
Newspaper Accounts
The Great Falls Leader carried a series of
articles about the UFO sightings in the area at the time. Interestingly, some
of what was printed in the newspaper was not found in the Blue Book files.
Those who conducted the military investigation should have been aware of these
other sightings, but there is no mention of them. It seems that, to the Air
Force anyway, those sightings never happened.
Ron Rice, a staff
writer on the newspaper said that there had been UFO sightings all over the
state that day. He wrote, “Before midnight it was the Belt area; after 3 this
morning, Malmstrom Air Force Base where one was picked up on the bottom of a
Federal Aviation Agency radar scope which tracked it for a time before it
disappeared in the direction of the Belt Mountains.”
There were visual
sightings as well. Airman Second Class (A2C) Richard Moore, a
communicator-plotter said that he had seen something about five or ten miles
from the base at 3:30 a.m. Airman Third Class (A3C) said that he had seen an
object that he said was a bright light with orange lights on the bottom. This,
according to Moore, was close to the ground and it was what the FAA radar had
detected.
Moore also said that a
sabotage alert team had located another object about 4:40 a.m. directly over
Malmstrom. Moore said that he saw it as well, but it was more a point of light
moving across the sky than anything else. He said it wasn’t a satellite because
it was zigzagging.
Another airman, Warren
Mahoney, said that Moore had told him about the UFO at 3:10 a.m. and that at
3:42 he had received a call from the FAA that there was an object on their
radar northwest of the base providing corroboration for the sightings. Three
minutes later it had turned, flying toward the southeast. At 4:26 a.m. it
disappeared from the FAA radar.
Rice also mentioned
that there had been a search of the canyon where Williams and Nager saw the UFO
that appeared to be landing and they found some evidence, though it isn’t clear
exactly what that evidence was. Sheriff’s deputies Keith Wolverton, Jim Cinker
and Harold Martin, searched the ground for about two and a half hours and
discovered some freshly broken twigs on bushes and branches of the trees around
the alleged landing site. They thought it might have been cattle, but there
were no cattle in the area at the time of the sighting. Martin was also reported
as saying, “Some of the trees are 25 feet high, and had limbs broken from them,
and some bushes below them were broken. All were fresh breaks.”
According to the Great Falls Tribune, Trudy Fender
provided a rough drawing of an object she had seen with a steady white light on
one end, a blinking white light on the other and a red light in the center. She
had been waiting for her ride on March 26. The sighting isn’t important because
of the object, but the fact that she saw something and drew make an
illustration of it. That refuted a theory that there had been no UFO sightings
in Montana other than Williams sighting two days earlier.
The
Project Blue Book file
With all that was going
on that night, with the news media alerted and with local law enforcement
involved, there wasn’t much that the Air Force could do other than respond. Air
Force regulations in affect at the time required it. The Blue Book file, in a
teletype message that was unclassified revealed, “Between hours of 2100 and
0400 MST numerous reports were received by Malmstrom AFB agencies of UFO
sightings in the Great Falls, Montana area.”
The message noted that
“Reports of a UFO landing near Belt, Montana were received from several sources
including deputies of Cascade County Sheriff’s Office. Investigation is being
conducted by LTC Lewis Chase… The alleged landing site is under surveillance.
However, daylight is required for further search.”
The investigation was
apparently completed several days later and on April 8, 1967, LTC Chase wrote a
report that he sent on to Dr. Edward Condon at the University of Colorado who
was leading the Air Force sponsored “scientific” investigation into UFOs. After
setting the scene, Lewis wrote:
Numerous reports were being
received by the dispatcher at Base Operations, plus questions from the public.
At 2205 [10:05 p.m.], Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase, Base UFO Investigating Officer,
was notified by the Command Post of a reported landing. Sequence of events
following notification were as follows:
2215 – Check was made with Base
Operations as to aircraft movement in the area. An outbound transient aircraft
departed Great Falls enroute to Glasgow, Montana. Departure time was 2109 [9:09
p.m.]. All other aircraft were accounted for.
2230 – Discussion with the Sheriff
of Cascade County revealed that he had dispatched additional deputies to the
area. Requested that he notify me of any significant findings. While talking to
the sheriff, he contacted one of his mobile units. The man reporting said that
they were at the scene and that there was no activity at the time. Requested
the sheriff to forward any subsequent developments.
2330 – I called the Sheriff of
Cascade County for a status report. He put one of his deputies on the line
(Ziener?) who had been at the scene and had interviewed the truck driver and
highway patrolman. While on the phone, Sheriff Martin from Belt, Montana,
called in from the scene. He discussed the possibility of manpower assistance
from Malmstrom and/or helicopter support. Informed him that daylight would be
the first possible helicopter support and that I would discuss the other
manpower request with Colonel Klibbe.
2345 – Discussion with Colonel
Klibbe. He suggested that I go out and evaluate the situation and make my recommendations
from there.
0030 – Departed the base in radio
equipped station wagon accompanied by Major John Grasser of the Helicopter
Section, for an evaluation of the terrain for any possible helicopter survey at
daylight, a driver, and the alert photographer.
0100 – Arrived at the scene. Was
met by Sheriff Martin, who repeated the previous reports. He had been on the
scene continuously. A study of the terrain revealed the hopelessness of any
ground survey at night. A tentative plan was agreed upon – the sheriff’s office
to conduct a ground search of the reported landing area on the morning of 25
March 1967, while concurrently a helicopter survey of the area would be
performed by Malmstrom. (It had been reported by Major Grasser that a
helicopter training flight was scheduled for 0730 Saturday morning. This
procedure was later approved by 15th AF, provided no landing was
made). Sightseers were in the area due to radio publicity and Martin reported
some had gone on the ridges before he could stop them.
0215 – Reported to Colonel Klibbe
the tentative plan agreed upon with Sheriff Martin. He approved.
0230 to 0340 – Numerous sightings
reported.
0350 – Discussed the make-up of a
message with Captain Bradshaw, Wing Command Post, IAW [In Accordance With] AFR
[Air Force Regulation] 80-17, to notify concerned agencies, including CSAF
[Chief of Staff, Air Force], of numerous sightings, plus the reported landing
under investigation. Was concerned with resulting publicity and the need to
notify other agencies prior to press releases. Message will merely state
reported landing, that it is under investigation, that daylight hours are
required to complete investigation, and that a subsequent report will be
submitted. Preliminary message dispatched.
0800 – Sheriff’s ground search and
Malmstrom aerial survey completed with negative results. Follow-up messages
dispatched to interested agencies (AFR 80-17) stating negative results of the
investigation.
The last part of the
report confirmed that Chase had conducted it and provided contact information
for him. He later, in a teletype message reported, again, that there had been
negative results but this does show that AARO and the WSJ omitted this information
from their reports because it would conflict with their EMP effect theory.
All mention of the
radar reports is missing from the official files, as are the reports from Air
Force personnel. Even if Chase was uninterested in most of the civilian
sightings, he should have interviewed airmen who saw something, if for no other
reason than to explain those sightings. This is a flaw in that investigation.
The radar sightings,
with the corroborative visual reports would seem to be a very important part of
the case. This would make it a stronger case, but Chase didn’t follow up on it.
He didn’t explore the radar sightings, he did not request information from the
FAA, and he didn’t interview any of the radar operators. The newspaper files
suggest that the information had been reported the next day. Chase should have
known about it given that it already knew of the sightings.
There might have been
something else operating here, and that was the mission of Malmstrom AFB. It
was a minuteman missile base, and just days before, an entire flight of
missiles had suddenly fallen into a “No-Go” situation which meant that they had
been deactivated. This was an issue that was a matter of national security and
that might explain the reason the Belt, Montana sighting was so poorly
investigated.
Echo
Flight
Years later, Robert
Salas and Jim Klotz were the first to tell the story of Echo Flight, originally
in an online article at cufon.org and later in their book, Faded Giant. Robert Hastings, in his UFOs and Nukes, provided additional information. The story they
told started early on the morning of March 16, 1967, when two missile
maintenance teams who had been working on two of the flight’s widely scattered
launch facilities said they had seen strange lights in the sky near where they
were located. A mobile security team confirmed this, saying they had seen the
lights as well. All of this was told to Colonel Don Crawford by Captain Eric
Carlson and 1st Lieutenant Walt Figel as Crawford came on duty, at
least and according to what Salas had been told during his 1996 taped interview
with Figel. Hastings had been told virtually the same things during his own
interviews with Figel, confirming that Salas had reported the information
accurately.
About 8:30 a.m., that
same morning, as both Carlson and Figel were performing routine checks, the
flight’s missiles began to drop off line. Within seconds, though Figel would
later suggest it was minutes, all ten missiles were inoperable. In the event of
war, they could not have launched. This was a major national security issue and
a point that would become important later.
Hastings wrote,
“Immediately after the malfunctions at Echo, the launch officers ordered two
separate Security Alert Teams to drive to each of the launch facilities where
the UFOs had been sighted. Nevertheless, the maintenance and security personnel
at each site reported seeing UFOs hovering near the missile silos.”
He added, “…some months
after my book came out, in July 2008, I interviewed Figel on tape. He said one
of the two SAT teams reported seeing the UFO over one of the silos. In 1996, he
told Salas that both teams had seen it. A faded memory, it seems…”
But the story wasn’t
quite so mundane, as Hastings learned during his interviews with Figel. When
Hastings talked to Figel, a retired Air Force Colonel on October 20, 2008, he
was told that one of the guards had suggested the UFO had shut down the missiles.
Figel thought the guard was joking. He told Hastings, “I was thinking he was
yanking my chain more than anything else.”
Hastings asked, “He
seemed to be serious to you?”
And Figel responded,
“He seemed to be serious but I wasn’t taking him seriously.”
Hastings wanted to know
what the man had seen and Figel said that it was just a large, round object
that was directly over the launch facility.”
To clarify the
situation Hastings and Figel discussed the security procedures. Figel said,
“[When] the missiles dropped off alert, I started calling the maintenance
people out there on the radio… [I asked] ‘What’s going on?’ … And the guy says,
‘We got a Channel 9 No-Go. It must be a UFO hovering over the site.”
Figel, of course,
didn’t believe him. He said that one of the Strike Teams, they had dispatched
two, but one of them thought they had seen something over the site. They told
Figel that a large object was hovering there.
All of this, of course,
suggests that UFOs were somehow involved with the sudden shut down of the
missile systems. Although the government officials rejected the idea, there is
a great deal of eyewitness testimony for the UFO sightings in the area.
The maintenance teams
were dispatched and once they had located the problem, they were able to bring
the missiles back on line, but the process was not simple and required hours
for each missile. There was an extensive investigation that involved not only
the Air Force but also the contractors who had designed and built the missiles.
According to the 341st
Strategic Missile Wing Unit History, recovered through Freedom of Information:
On 16 March 1967 at 0845, all sites
in Echo (E) Flight, Malmstrom AFB, shutdown with No-Go indication of Channels 9
and 12 on Voice Reporting Signal Assemble (VRSA). All LF’s in E Flight lost
strategic alert nearly simultaneously. No other Wing I configuration lost
strategic alert at that time.
Guidance & Control channel 50
dump data was collected from E-7 facility and E-3 Facility and all 10 sites
were then returned to strategic alert without any LF equipment replacement. All
10 sites were reported to have been subject to a normal controlled shutdown…
The only possible means that could
be identified by the team involved a situation in which a couple self test
commands occurred along with a partial reset within the coupler. This could
feasible cause a VRSA 9 and 12 indication. This was also quite remote for all
10 couplers would have to have been partially reset in the same manner…
In the researching of other
possibilities, weather was ruled out as a contributing factor in the incident.
A check with Communications
maintenance verified that there was no unusual activity with EWO-1 or EWO-2 at
the time of the incident.
All of which, in the
short term, did not explain why the missiles all went off line at virtually the
same time. In a very technical aspect of the Unit History, it explains that a
“30 micro sec Pulse… was placed on the Self Test Command (STC) line… Seven out
of 10 separate applications of a single pulse would cause the system to shut
down with a Channel 9 & 12 No-Go.”
Or according to the
Blue Book files, a randomly introduced electronic pulse which might be
considered an EMP, which shouldn’t have affected the missile systems, had shut
them down. The point of insertion was apparently the Launch Control Facility,
but all those areas should have been shielded from just such an occurrence and
that includes an EMP.
The information about
the Echo Flight was, quite naturally, communicated to the Condon Committee, and
Dr. Roy Craig responded. Craig was working on the government contract for the
Air Force when he made his notes on his meeting with LTC Chase at Malmstrom.
Craig’s notes on the meeting said:
After Colonel Chase and I exchanged
pleasantries in his office, I asked him about the Echo incident. The Colonel
caught his breath, and expressed surprise that I knew of it. ‘I can’t talk
about that’… If I needed to know the cause of this incident, I could arrange
through official channels, to see their report after the completion of the
investigation… Although local newspapers carried stories of UFO sightings which
would coincide in time with Echo, Colonel Chase had assured me that the
incident had not involved a UFO… I accepted the information as factual and
turned review of Major Schraff’s report (on the Echo incident) over to Bob Low
[Dr. Robert Low, also a member of the Condon Committee], who had received
security clearance to read secret information related to the UFO study… Low, in
turn, had to interface with his Air Force Liaison in Washington, Col. Hippler
[Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler] …. [Low wrote to Craig] ‘Roy, I called
Hippler and he said he would try to get this, but he suspects it’s going to be
classified too high for us to look at. Says he thinks interference by pulses
from nuclear explosions is probably involved.
So, it seems that a
cause had been found, or rather it seemed to have been found, but the ultimate
source of the pulse was not identified. Hippler, speculating about the source
of the pulse came up with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a nonexistent atomic
blast. That the pulse shut down all the missiles made it a national security
issue, which changed the level of the classification.
(To digress one more time, there
had been communication between Hippler and Low before the contracts were signed
to begin the investigation. Hippler told Low what the Air Force wanted and Low
responded in the positive. If you wish to dive into that rabbit hole, you can
read more about it here:
https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html
And, of course, I have published
additional information on this. Just type Hippler Letter into the search engine
at the right.)
Oddly, in the 341st
SMW Unit History, it noted, “Rumors of Unidentified Objects (UFO) around the
area of Echo Flight during the time of the fault were disproven. A Mobile
Strike Team, which had checked all November Flight’s LFs [Launch Facilities] on
the morning of 16 March 67, were questioned and stated that no unusual activity
or sightings were observed.”
But that doesn’t seem
to be quite accurate. Hastings interviewed James Ortyl who had been assigned as
an Air Policeman at Malmstrom. Ortyl said:
I was an Airman 2nd
Class [A2C] at the time. We were working the day-shift at Kilo Flight in March
of 1967… It was mid-morning and three or four Air Policemen were gathered in
the launch control facility dispatch office. Airman Robert Pounders and I were
facing the windows looking out to the yard and parking lot. The others were
facing us. As we were conversing, I witnessed a shimmering, reddish-orange
object clear the main gate and in a sweeping motion pass quickly and silently
pass by the windows. It seemed to be within 30 years of the building. Stunned,
I looked at Pounders and asked, “Did you see that?!” He acknowledged that he
had.
To be fair, Ortyl
didn’t know the exact date, but said that in was near his birthday of March 17th.
But then there is Craig’s interview with Chase which also moves in the
direction of UFO sightings on the proper date. Craig’s notes indicate that he
had the names of some of those involved with the UFO sightings at the time of
Echo’s shut down, but he never contacted any of them.
Craig also had the name
of Dan Renualdi who, in March 1967, was a member of the Site Activation Task
Force (SATAF). He said that he had been within a few feet of an object. There
was also a sergeant with the Air Force Technical Evaluation Team who said he
had seen a flying saucer. There is no record of Craig talking to either of
these men, nor are there any reports in the Project Blue Book files to suggest
that the sightings had been reported through official channels. That was a
violation of the regulations in force at the time, although it could be argued
there were contradictory regulations.
All this demonstrates
is that there was another reported UFO around the time that Echo Flight had
gone down, contrary to what the Unit History said. It does not prove that the
UFOs had anything to do with the anomalous pulse.
There is another aspect
to this. Quite naturally, the Air Force wanted to know what had happened. The
man who conducted the investigation for Boeing, the Defense Contractor for the
missile systems was Robert Kaminski. In a letter dated February 1, 1997 to Jim
Klotz, he wrote:
At the time of the incident, I was
an engineer in the MIP/CNP (Material Improvement Project/Controlled Numbered
Problem) group…. The group was contacted by the Air Force so that Boeing could
respond to specific Air Force Minuteman Missiles problems that occurred in the
field…
I was handed the E-Flight CNP
assignment when it arrived by the group supervisor. As the internal Boeing
project engineer I arranged meetings necessary with management and technical
personnel required to determine a course of action to be taken, in exploring
why 10 missiles had suddenly fallen from alert status – green – to red, with no
explanation for it. This was an unusual request and we had no prior similar
incident or experience to this kind of anomaly….
Since this was a field site
peculiar incident, a determination was made to send out an investigative team
to survey the LCF and the LFs to determine what failures or related incidents
could be found to explain the cause…. After a week in the field the team
returned and pooled their data. At the outset the team quickly noticed a lack
of anything that would come close to explain why the event occurred. There were
no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would come close to
explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert. This indeed turned out to be a
rare event and not encountered before. The use of backup power systems and
other technical system circuit operational redundancy strongly suggests that
this kind of event is virtually impossible once the system was up and running
and on line with other LCF’s and LF’s interconnectivity….
The team met with me to report
their findings and it was decided that the final report would have nothing
significant in it to explain what happened at E-Flight. In other words there
was no technical explanation that could explain the event… Meanwhile I was
contacted by our representative… (Don Peterson) and told by him that the
incident was reported as being a UFO event – That a UFO was seen by some Airmen
over the LCF at the time E-Flight when down.
Subsequently, we were notified a
few days later, that a stop work order was on the way from OOAMA to stop any
further effort on this project. We stopped. We were also told that we were not
to submit the final engineering report. This was most unusual since all of our
work required review by the customer and the submittal of a final Engineering
report to OOAMA…
However, as I recall nothing
explained this anomaly at E-Flight.
I’ll step in here again
to note that if an EMP was responsible for the missiles going off line, there
were have been evidence of that when the engineers checked. The fried circuits
would have been a clue, but according to this, they found no reason for the
failure.
Hastings, in a review
of the material in 2013, wrote, “Actually, the large
round object sighted by the missile guard, and reported to launch officer Lt.
Walter Figel, had been hovering over one of the Echo missile silos, not the
launch control facility itself. Nevertheless, Boeing engineer Kaminski’s
revealing testimony essentially confirms Figel’s account of a UFO presence
during the incident.”
Oscar
Flight
In March 1967, Robert
Salas was a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander (DMCCC) at Malmstrom AFB. When
he first told his tale in 1995, he had thought he had been assigned to Echo
Flight, later he thought it might have been November Flight, but once he located
his former commander, Fred Meiwald, he learned it was Oscar Flight. The story
he told, in 1995, was essentially the same as that about Echo Flight, or in
other words, that all ten missiles had gone off line within seconds of each
other.
According to what Salas
would report, while he was sixty feet underground in the capsule, he received a
call from an NCO in the Launch Control Facility telling him that they had seen
some UFOs nearby. They were just lights and they just weren’t sure what they
might be. But not long after that, the NCO reported that the object, later
described as a red glow that was saucer shaped, was now over the gate. Before
the NCO completed the report, he said that one of the men had been injured,
apparently by the UFO. He hung up to go assist.
Salas said that he woke
the commander and began to tell him about the UFO sightings. Within seconds,
their missiles began to go off line. Later, there would be some question as to
how many of the 10 missiles they lost. It might have been part of them or it
might have been all of them. In May 2013 Salas told me he had believed it was
all of them but his commander thought it was only five or six. In his first
reports, Salas just split the difference.
In fact, Salas would
say that once he mentioned what was happening outside, his commander, Meiwald
said that he had heard about a similar event the week before. Meiwald said that
there had been an intrusion alarm that went off and that a two-man security
team had been ordered to respond. As the team approached the site, they saw a
UFO hovering over it. They raced back to the Launch Control Facility, shaken by
what they had seen.
In a letter to Salas
dated October 1, 1996, Meiwald wrote, “…Topside security notified us the mobile
team had reported observing the “UFO” while responding… to the situation at an
outlying LF…”
Hastings interviewed
Meiwald in 2011 about the events at Oscar Flight. Meiwald said:
…essentially, I was resting—whether or not I was
sound sleep I don’t recall—but I know Bob got me up because we had unusual
indications on the consol [sic], plus we’d had a security violation and, uh,
the response team that [inaudible] had gone out to investigate at one of the
LFs. They reported unusual activity over there and—by that time I was up—and
saw consol indications. [I] also directed that the strike team return to the
LCF while maintaining radio contact on the way back. As they came back we did
lose radio contact for a short period of time, however, the flight [security]
leader—the person who was in charge at the time—recognized the team as it was
approaching the LCF and opened the gate so that his troops could get in.
He also confirmed that
those above ground had seen something in the sky. Meiwald didn’t remember much
about that but did confirm they had seen something in the sky. Hastings asked
him about the Flight Security Crew saying that it was a bright red oval-shaped
object but Meiwald said that he could only remember something about a bright
object, confirming, at least, the UFO sighting.
Later, Meiwald said
that he and Salas had been called in for a debriefing by the AFOSI. He
confirmed that they had been asked to sign nondisclosure statements, but to him
that was not a big deal. That sort of thing apparently happened occasionally.
At the Citizen Hearing in May 2013, Salas told me, as well as others, that they
had been required to sign the nondisclosure statements. “It was then designated
a highly classified incident,” according to Salas.
The trouble at Oscar
Flight was also reported by 1st Lieutenant Robert C. Jamison, who
was Minuteman ICBM targeting officer at Malmstrom in March 1967. According to
what he told Hastings and reported in UFOs
and Nukes, he, Jamison, said had been tasked to assist in the restart of
“an entire flight of ten Minuteman ICBMs which had simultaneously and
inexplicably shut down immediately after a UFO was sighted in the vicinity…”
More importantly,
Jamison said that before he was sent into the field, he and his team were told
to remain at Malmstrom until all UFO activity had ended, and then they received
a “special briefing.” They were told to report any UFO they saw in the area. If
they saw something they were at the missile silo, they were to enter the
personnel hatch and wait until the UFO left. The Air Police guards, who were to
accompany the team, would remain outside to watch the UFO.
While he was in a
hangar waiting to go into the field, Jamison overheard a two-way radio
conversation about a UFO on the ground. This is a clear reference to the Belt
sighting and dates Jamison’s recollections to March 24. Jamison said that one
of the highest-ranking officers on the base was on the scene of the landing.
According to the newspaper accounts and the Blue Book files, this was Colonel
Fred Klibbe.
The special briefing
apparently was not just a one-time affair. He said that for two weeks after the
missile shut down, his team received a UFO briefing prior to heading into the
field. This is something that would be repeated in other, similar events at
other Air Force bases.
This seemed to be a
repeat of the situation that happened just days earlier. Salas was convinced,
later, that this happened on March 24, which was the date of the Belt, Montana
sightings.
But unlike the Echo
Flight incident, there was no official record of this event. The Unit History
doesn’t mention it, and there is no documentation for it. It is as if it never
happened and for that reason, there are some who think that this is a hoax. The
only reason for the mention of UFOs in Blue Book files is that the news media
was already involved with the Belt sightings and they couldn’t be ignored. Had
that not happened, then neither the Echo Flight nor the Oscar Flight events
would have leaked into the public arena.
I will note here that
if what Salas said was true, and the latest AARO confirms what he said, they
just provide a non-alien reason for it. AARO’s investigation saying that Salas
witnessed part of the experiment, then two missile flights were shut down, not
just one. That is, twenty missiles, part of the MAD strategy were taken off
line by a US experiment that was conducted during a series of UFO sightings,
made by civilians, law enforcement and military personnel. These sightings were
corroborated by FAA radars but apparently the AARO investigative team never
bothered to verify this information. They boiled it down to a single witness
and then provided what seemed to be a plausible explanation counting on the
media failing to ask the legitimate follow up questions about the timing. WSJ
seemed to ignore the idiocy of conducting such an experiment on part of our
missile defense shield. Rather than be outraged by the risk of doing that, they
all just nodded and said, “Got it.”
The WSJ concedes there
was a cover up, but it wasn’t of an alien event but of a ridiculous experiment
to use an EMP to shut down an active missile flight rather than conduct the
experiment away from the Air Force base where no harm could be done. They fail
to mention the UFO sightings in the area at the time of the experiment or that
the EMP is nearly impossible to reverse, rending the missiles useless.
