by Mack Maloney
The only other action the officer could think of was to authorize the airman to fire on the UFO. While the airman appreciated the officer’s authorization, he remarked that considering what he was looking at, shooting it wouldn’t do any good.
The UFO flew away shortly afterward.
* * *
A few weeks later, in the early morning of March 16, a blaring alarm went off across Malmstrom. One of the facility’s ICBMs had suddenly gone off-line and was now inoperable.
Command post officers phoned the affected missile site. The prevailing thought was that a maintenance crew had caused the malfunction. Instead, the security guard at the site responded that no maintenance had been performed at the silo that morning — but people had seen a UFO hovering over the site.
The command officers did not take this report seriously — but then other warnings started coming in. More missiles were shutting down, one after the other. In just a few seconds, ten of Malmstrom’s ICBMs were inoperable.
This was serious. A large part of America’s national security depended on the capability of these missiles — and at the moment, they were useless.
The command post officers had to get the missiles up and running again immediately. To do so, though, they had to know what had gone wrong.
When the silos were checked, it was discovered that a fault in the guidance system of each missile had caused the malfunctions. Nobody had a clue why. The sites had not lost electric power per se, and the missiles showed no signs of tampering.
It was known that the only thing that could interfere with an ICBM’s guidance system was an electromagnetic pulse — a big one — targeted directly at the missile’s shielded circuits. While it was technically possible to produce such a huge power surge, it would require highly specialized equipment to do so. Such equipment did not exist at Malmstrom.
It took until late that night for maintenance crews to bring all the affected ICBMs back online. But there was no denying that on March 16, 1967, a significant part of America’s nuclear arsenal would not have been available had an enemy chosen that day to attack the United States.
* * *
A week later, on March 24, an airman at one of Malmstrom’s launch facilities spotted two bright objects in the sky.
They were moving in bizarre ways — so much so, the man called the base’s deputy security officer. But for some unfathomable reason, especially in light of what had happened at the base just a week before, the security officer was unconvinced this was something important. He told the airman to alert him only if the objects came closer.
A minute later, the airman’s terrified NCO (noncommissioned officer) called the security officer back and shouted that a red, saucer-shaped UFO was at that moment hovering outside the silo’s gate.
After ordering the NCO to secure the site, the security officer contacted his commander. While the two men were discussing what to do, an alarm sounded throughout the command post. One of the base’s missiles had gone off-line. Ten seconds later, another missile went down. Then another and another.
In a virtual repeat of the events of the week before, in less than a minute, eight of Malmstrom’s ICBMs had become inoperative.
One witness who’d helped restart this round of stricken missiles provided a personal account of what happened next, along with some baffling and unnerving details.
Before this man’s particular replacement team left to begin their restart work, they received a special briefing from an NCO who told them starkly that the base was having big problems. UFOs were in the area, and they were shutting down the missile sites. The replacement crews were then given strict procedures on what to do if they saw a UFO out in the field.
The instructions went like this: If the crew saw a UFO while approaching a missile silo, they should stop immediately and call in their location. If they should see a UFO after arriving at a silo, they should stop what they were doing and leave immediately. If they were actually working on a missile and saw a UFO, the team should take the missile’s targeting tapes, then descend deep into the silo, closing all the hatches behind them.
This scenario would leave an unlucky guard behind, up on the surface. It would be his duty to report to the command post what was happening aboveground.
Luckily, none of these situations ever played out.
* * *
The Malmstrom commanders arranged for engineers from the Boeing Company, which had built the missiles, to examine their ICBMs and explain why they’d so mysteriously shut down. But the civilian contractors were baffled, too. One engineer who was there said no data could explain how or why the missiles were knocked off alert. However, neither the air force nor Boeing even considered UFOs in their analysis.
The cause of the Malmstrom shutdowns remains a mystery to this day.
“Launch in Progress!”—The Panic at Minot Air Force Base
Perhaps the most frightening UFO incursion at a U.S. ICBM facility happened at Minot Air Force Base three months after the bizarre events at Malmstrom.
Minot is located in the northern part of North Dakota. In the 1960s, it was home to both an ICBM base and a wing of B-52 nuclear-armed bombers.
One night in late July 1967, base security personnel reported a large, bright object flying over the vast Minot range. Subsequent reports said the object was moving from missile silo to missile silo. Within an hour, all of Minot’s launch facilities had reported that a UFO had been over their location.
Then suddenly, as the UFO passed over one particular site, the missile’s indicators started flashing: “Launch in Progress.”
* * *
Minot was no stranger to UFO incursions.
One night earlier that year, NORAD had contacted Minot’s command post with an urgent message: A UFO was, at that moment, descending over one of Minot’s missile silos. NORAD knew this because there were tracking the intruder on their all-powerful, all-seeing radars.
Minot’s base command immediately dispatched a security team to investigate the situation. Arriving at the silo, the astonished security team saw a metallic disk-shaped object, surrounded with bright flashing lights, moving over their heads.
Suddenly the UFO stopped and went into a hover 500 feet above the missile silo. In the meantime, NORAD had scrambled two F-106s to intercept the UFO, but it disappeared before they arrived.
* * *
Now, on this hot July night, Minot’s control room personnel were looking at a “Launch in Progress” warning. The control room personnel rushed to activate the missile’s “Inhibit” switch. The procedure was successful, and eventually all of the missile’s indicators returned to normal.
But it was apparent to all concerned that the UFO had probed the missile’s controls and had somehow switched them on. Had any of the inhibit commands failed, the missile would have launched.
Still, the following day, one of the base’s top officers announced to everyone involved that officially, “Nothing happened.”
* * *
Interestingly, a comparable event occurred in the Soviet Union about fifteen years later. In October 1982, a saucer-shaped UFO appeared over an ICBM base near Byelokoro-viche, a village in Ukraine. Many of the villagers, as well as base personnel, saw the object.
While the UFO hung over the base, the automated launch sequence on several missiles within was suddenly activated. A missile engineer at the base, interviewed in 1997 on ABC’s Primetime Live, recounted how the launch crew watched helplessly as the countdown continued for fifteen terrifying seconds. Then, just as suddenly, the sequence aborted and the missiles returned to their normal standby status.
Another retired army officer who was there added: “During this period, for a short time, signal lights on both the control panels suddenly turned on. The lights showing the missiles were preparing for launch. This could normally only happen if an order were transmitted from Moscow.”
Official explanations later said that the hovering object had been a “military flare.”
An “Inspection” at Malmstrom
In 1966, the United States began a program to upgrade its long-range nuclear-armed missiles.
All of SAC’s ICBMs were replaced with either the Minuteman II or the Minuteman III missiles, requiring a complete renovation of all of the air force’s launch facilities. This immense task was finally completed in January 1975, but according to a report on NUFORC, UFO sightings still continued unabated at SAC’s ICBM bases throughout this period.
For instance, in early January 1972, Malmstrom Air Force Base received an odd report from the nearby NORAD headquarters. Sensors around one of Malmstrom’s missile silos showed that the ground temperature had inexplicably risen some 80 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few minutes.
The Malmstrom watch commander quickly checked the silo in question. None of the silo’s perimeter sensors had indicated any intrusion. Nor were there signs that anything had “walked up” to the site.
A security team was rushed to the silo; when they arrived they saw something incredible. A UFO was sitting on the ground, and the cover to the missile silo had been removed. Apparently the UFO’s “crew” had broken into the launch facility.
The security team was close enough that, even though no description was ever recorded, one member claimed he saw the UFO crew inside the silo, examining the missile’s circuitry. On being discovered, the UFO occupants hurried back their craft. The UFO lifted off, shooting straight up at a speed estimated to be 50,000 miles an hour.
Afterward, the controller and the shaken security team were told by base higher-ups that the incident “didn’t happen.”
The Loring Mystery
Around Halloween 1975, Loring Air Force Base in Maine suddenly became the center of attention of the UFO incursions.
Located in the far northeastern corner of the state, very close to the Canadian border, this usually frigid place was not an ICBM base. It was the home of the 42nd Strategic Bomb Wing — and in the 1970s, “strategic” meant “nuclear.” The base stored the hydrogen weapons that U.S. B-52 bombers would drop on the Soviet Union in the event of war.
As documented extensively by NICAP, on the evening of October 27, 1975, a member of the base security police saw what he thought was an airplane, flying unusually low along the base’s northern perimeter.
The unidentified craft had also appeared on the base radar. The control tower officer tried to contact the errant aircraft to warn it off but met with no success. The ATC officer immediately reported the situation to Loring’s base command.
A few minutes later, the wing commander arrived on the scene and called a high-level security alert.
Meanwhile, the mysterious “aircraft” began circling the base’s nuclear weapons storage area, at this point flying only 150 feet off the ground. This continued for more than a half hour, even as security vehicles poured into the area, scouring the weapons facility and the ground directly beneath the intruder’s flight path.
The mystery craft eventually disappeared, only to briefly reappear on radar again, heading in the direction of New Brunswick, Canada.
* * *
Loring’s base command took this incident very seriously.
They notified the air force chief of staff and SAC headquarters, among others. The message they sent was clear: “The (intruder) definitely penetrated the Loring Air Force Base’s perimeter.”
Loring command also reached out to civilian authorities, including the FAA and state and local police. They wanted help in identifying the mysterious craft. But no one had any idea what it was or where it came from.
Then, the following night, it happened again. At the same hour, 7:45 P.M., a UFO approached the base. Brightly lit and clearly showing up on radar, it crossed the base perimeter and started moving toward the weapons storage area again. Witnesses watching from a distance said the UFO moved in stops and starts. At some point, its lights went off and the witnesses lost sight of it. A few moments later, though, it reappeared again just 150 feet above the weapons storage area.
This time, however, some base personnel got a closer look at the mysterious craft. Several members of a B-52 ground crew saw the UFO while it was hovering at the end of the flight line.
The men commandeered a nearby truck and sped toward the object. Their pursuit took them into the weapons storage area, where they got within a few hundred feet of the UFO. They would later describe the object as being as long as four cars put together and looking like an orange and red stretched-out football. They saw no propellers, rotors or wings.
One of the men said that what he observed made him think of the desert. “You see waves of heat rising off the desert floor,” he was quoted in an affidavit later on. “This is what I saw. There were these waves in front of the object and all the colors were blending together. The object was solid and we could not hear any noise coming from it.”
By this time the men could hear the sirens of the base security teams rushing to the scene. Being in a restricted area, where they had no right to be, the men turned their truck around and hurried back to the flight line. The police ignored them, though. They had more important things to worry about: namely, the strange object over the weapons area. As soon as their searchlights raked the area, the UFO took off.
As on the previous night, radar tracked the UFO as it headed toward New Brunswick.
* * *
Again, the base higher-ups sent priority messages about the intrusion to higher commands. They also braced themselves for further incidents.
They were wise to do so. On Halloween night, a UFO was spotted four miles northwest of the base. Anticipating just such an event, a base helicopter was immediately launched to intercept the object but had no success. The object disappeared. Two hours later the base radar center detected another unidentified object moving slowly within the base perimeter. The helicopter took off again, but as before, the crew found nothing.
Now the Loring detachment of the OSI sent a message to higher authority. The message described another “unidentified ‘helicopter’ ” sighted at low level over Loring AFB over the past two nights (October 31–November 1). It also referred to the intruder as an “unknown entity.”
What makes all this even stranger is that Loring wasn’t the only SAC base being probed by UFOs during this time. On the night of October 30, personnel at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan spotted what they thought was a helicopter flying around their perimeter. The object, which seemed to have one white light shining downward and two red lights at the rear, did not maintain a consistent altitude. Instead it was seen bobbing up and down.
A few minutes later, Wurtsmith’s security police reported a second unidentified “helicopter” inside the perimeter. Like the UFO at Loring, this craft hovered low over the nuclear weapons storage area. Base radar confirmed that there were two objects flying over the base at low altitudes.
Further confirmation came from the crew of a KC-135 that was airborne at the time. They caught glimpses of the two UFOs, but their plane could never get close enough to distinguish any details.
The Malmstrom 1975 Sightings
Once again, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana was the site of an ominous UFO incursion.
On November 7, 1975, an alarm sounded across the base, indicating that security at one of the base’s missile silos had been violated. The two officers inside the particular launch facility had no way of seeing what was happening above them. Following standard procedures, they requested a security team to investigate.
As this team approached the silo, they reported seeing an enormous orange disk hovering low over the area. By one description it was at least 300 feet across. On hearing this, the officers down in the launch facility ordered the security team to continue to the site — but the security men refused to get any closer to the terrifying object.
The air force scrambled two F-106 jet interceptors from nearby Great Falls, but the disk took off before they arrived, roaring to a height of some 75,000 feet and quickly disappearing.
The base immediately sent technicians to the silo in question to check out the missile. To their horror, they discovered that the targeting info stored in the warhead’s guidance system had been changed. The technicians were ordered to remove the reentry vehicle, which contained multiple nuclear warheads, from the missile. These warheads were then painstakingly checked at the base. But nobody could understand how the targeting info had been altered.
In the end, the entire missile was replaced.
The Straight Edge of Space
One of the eeriest stories Hastings tells in UFOs and Nukes took place in January 1979. It begins with a technical team working inside an ICBM launch silo at Ellsworth Air Force Base.
The team was performing a targeting alignment procedure on the missile, which is a painstaking process. Suddenly the site guard, who was patrolling up on ground level, started banging on the ladder that led underground. He told the techs to come up top immediately.
The team chief and one of his techs climbed out of the silo into the cold South Dakota night and were instantly deafened by a loud, low-frequency hum, a noise with no evident source. The vibration was so powerful it was shaking the access hatch and a truck parked next to it.
The frightened guard informed them that the noise had started five minutes before and that he had already reported it to the base command post.
But then the guard, even more terrified, told the men to look up into the sky. What they saw was incomprehensible. Right above them everything was black — featureless black. Yet when they looked off in any other direction they could see the starry night sky. Something was hovering right above them.
One technician later described what he saw as “a straightedge in space” blocking off the stars. But the three men could make out no details of the object over their heads. They opened the gate on the north side of the silo and walked out, trying to follow on the ground what seemed to be the “boundary” of whatever was floating above them. Strangely, as soon as they stepped outside the security gate, the earsplitting hum stopped.