Testimony of Mr. Franklin Carter, US Navy

December 2000

Mr. Carter was trained as an electronic radar technician in the Navy in the 50’s and 60’s. He tells of an incident where he witnessed a clear, unambiguous radar contact speeding along at 3,400 miles an hour. There were other radar operators as well who, at various times in 1957 and 1958, also witnessed these unusually fast moving objects. At the time, the fastest human aircraft clocked in at 1,100 miles and hour. In one case an Air Force operator tracked one of these UFOs 300 to 400 miles out in space. When these reports repeatedly kept coming in to General Electric who manufactured the radar, their technicians came in and modified the electronics so that the radar would limit it’s reporting to 12 to 15 miles out into space.

…But we had a very unusual experience one night. I was a radar specialist and my job was to maintain the radar’s aboard the ship…

I got off-duty one night at midnight and went to bed and was called and told to come fix the radar, there was something wrong with it. When I got up to CIC and I asked them what the problem was. They said, well, we are tracking an aircraft here at 3,400 miles an hour. And I said, well, there is something wrong. So I took that radar offline, put the stand-by radar online and went to work. And I started running all the tests. And everything was normal. And I completed all of the preliminary tests that you would run to check out a radar and everything checked out absolutely normal…

They told me this had been an absolute stellar contact -- this was a blip that was better than a half-inch across which indicated a really large target or something very close. It tracked every sweep. And if you get anomalies usually what will happen is every sweep or every other sweep you’ll get a blank or maybe every 10 sweeps but it’ll blank out. But this one was solid on every sweep and that indicates a solid target…

Then one night I was on the plot board, maybe three or four months later. And here comes this contact. And with the second blip you could see that this thing was really moving. It was moving like three or four inches on a 360-mile scale. And so sure enough, I plotted it and it was 3,400 miles an hour. And again we didn’t report it. But they say there is nothing wrong, this is our friend back. We didn’t make a big deal out of it but we sure would have liked to know what that was: 3,400 miles an hour in 1957! The closest thing that we had was about 1,100 miles an hour then.

It continued to happen during the year, the last part of ‘57, and up until May of ‘58. It happened at least three more times. And I had radar operator friends that would tell me, well, we had another one of those fast ones last night. And it always was at night…

We tracked them at 3,400 miles an hour. He said, the interesting part of it was we tracked them 300 and 400 miles out in space. And he said, we complained to General Electric who had built the system. And so we kept reporting these events and they kept telling us we couldn’t report that stuff. So we said, well, we are doing it and it is real. And so they came in and actually made movies of the scope and when they took them back and analyzed what they were seeing, they came back and put a fix into the radar so their distance into space was like 12 or 15 miles. They said, that’s all the ballistic missiles will ever go. You don’t need to see any further. So they just limited the receivers to where the scope would only expand to where they could see 12 to 15 miles out in space. His name was Dave Wallace…

When people claim that these UFOs may be the figment of my imagination, I say I was a damn good E.T. [electronics technician]. I knew my radar. It was my love at the time. And I know the systems and that there was nothing wrong with those systems. I knew that we were tracking real contacts. I knew the difference between what they call running rabbits and all of the other test bogeys that they would give us.

I doubt very seriously that in 1956 and ‘57, that the U.S. had craft, even in the experimental stage, that could fly 3,400 miles an hour, repeatedly…

They didn’t want anybody to know anything about what we were seeing. And I think that started the cover-up. And then it got out of hand.

But I know that the only people that they are keeping it secret from today are the Americans. Everybody else knows about it and accepts it. And all of the other Governments in the world except England and the U.S. primarily, are accepting it.

It’s very irritating to me personally, to see that go on…

I think it is important that we recognize that there are civilizations that we need to communicate with. And I think we’ve reached that point in our evolution as a human race that we need to recognize that. And the thing that disturbs me is that the U.S. is going to be a third world nation in that field if we are not careful by having all of this secrecy and refusing to set up any kind of diplomatic protocols as I know that you [SG] have called for and which I believe in very strongly. Because they are out there. Other nations recognize them and they are going to talk to the people [ETs] that are willing to talk to them on a peaceful basis. I’m hoping that people will come to their senses and stop hiding this stuff from the U.S. citizens…

I also investigated a military sighting by a friend of mine. We knew each other in business for about seven or eight years. And he did not know that I had any interest in UFO’s. And I did not know that he knew what a UFO was until I saw him make a report of a sighting one day. So I called him up and talked to him about it. He told me about his sighting when he was a Lieutenant in the Air Force. He was a navigator on a RB-36, which had the big cameras and they did all of the secret photographing back in the ‘50’s. He was the navigator on one of these with 22 people aboard his plane. They were up over North Dakota and somebody called from the tail gunner section and said look out over the left wing. And out- they estimated 100 yards from the left wing- was this 100-foot disc. And this was as clear as day. He says they talked to the radar control tower and they had it on radar. All of the guys got up and went and took pictures of it. They had been given cameras. Now this is another part of it- the secrecy thing. They had been given 35mm cameras and told how to fill out a report if they saw a UFO. He said all 22 guys got up and looked out the window and saw this thing for about five or six minutes and then it just took off…

What was interesting was that when he landed they were met by an Air Force group. They debriefed all of these people and told them that they could not discuss it for 12 years, and that they were under a secrecy oath. And then a week later a group from Washington came out and debriefed them and reminded them of their secrecy oath. They confiscated all of the camera and the films and everything. And then when he was discharged from the Air Force he was a Colonel in the Reserves, they reminded him again that he had signed a secrecy oath about this. His name is Jim Lloyd.

Testimony of Mr. Neil Daniels, Airline Pilot

November 2000

Mr. Daniels is a pilot with over 30,000 of flight time spanning 59 years. He entered the Air Force and became a B-17 pilot surviving 29 combat missions. After leaving the Air Force he worked for United Airlines for 35 years. He tells about the time in March of 1977 when he was flying a commercial flight from San Francisco to Boston. The plane was on autopilot when by itself it began to bank left. He looked out the window and noticed a brilliant bright light. The first and second officers both saw it also. They were perplexed because all three compasses reported different readings.

…The one and only sighting that I had was in March of 1977. I was flying a DC-10 on a flight from San Francisco to Boston. And it was United Flight 94. We were about halfway between Buffalo and Albany at 37,000 feet, fog cover underneath, dark night, when all of a sudden the airplane which was on auto pilot started a 15 degree turn to the left. And of course I looked out the window and I saw this brilliant light.

The first officer saw it and the second officer got out of his seat and took a look. And that’s when the Air Traffic Control in Boston wanted to know what was happening. So we told them when we figured it out we’d give them a call. And about that time the first officer hit the auto pilot release button and went back to manual control. As I was looking out the window this thing that we had seen disappeared back towards the left of the airplane and to our rear at a very rapid rate. The whole event took place in probably less than three minutes or so…

Well, the first officer’s autopilot, which is connected to the Captain’s compass, is out in the left wingtip of the airplane. And apparently for some reason or another the magnetic force was interrupted to cause the aircraft to veer off course because it is hooked up to the compass. All three compasses were giving different readings, which is very unusual. So what we gathered was it was an enormous magnetic force in whatever that ball was that we saw out there, that white light.

After we turned the autopilot off and the first officer straightened out the airplane the magnetic interference that had made the compasses all different readings ended and all returned to normal. And the object had disappeared away from us. So everything returned to a normal state…

In the past pilots that had seen things and had talked about it were let go. Some were released from their flying and treated as nutcases and things like that. So that was the last I said of it for many, many years.

Quite a few pilots have told me of their incidents and their sightings and what has happened. And one especially, was a sighting back on the east coast and he saw this thing for a long time, something like 18 minutes. And when he reported it to his boss, it was a different airline not United Airlines, they investigated it and the Government said, well, that’s swamp gas. At 18,000 feet, doing 250 knots, swamp gas! No one really wanted to admit that there might possibly be something there.

Testimony of Sgt. Robert Blazina (retired)

August 2000

Mr. Robert Blazina is a retired military man with a top-secret clearance. He worked transporting nuclear weapons all over the world. He personally witnessed a UFO maneuvering in the clear nights sky at an incredible speed straight up. Another time he and a civilian 747 both saw on their radar screens an object travel an estimated 10,000 miles an hour directly at them.

… My first experience with UFOs was in 1952. I was on a flight from Seattle, coming back to Sacramento. It was between 10 and 12 midnight. It was a clear, dark night. Sitting there, looking ahead, I saw this orange glow in front of us….

We added power and we kept getting closer and of course it got larger until we got up to about Redding, California. It went into a descent and we followed it. We picked up quite a bit of speed in a shallow dive and it went clear into Sacramento and across the city and right over the capital building. We were right on it. We had the aircraft redlined, as fast as it could go. At that point, it went vertical and it disappeared in a matter of two seconds, straight up...

While in the Air Force Reserves in the 1970s, we were coming back from Germany. We were in a C-141 and we were, at the time, 35,000 feet plus. We were around two hours out of Dover, Delaware. Again, it was clear skies, but dark. We observed this object on our radar screen. We had two of the scopes on board, the pilots had one and the navigator had one, and it was on both of them. It would come directly at us, but we couldn’t see it visually and then it would turn off. It made several passes at us, in fact, one time it came directly on our nose, so close that the pilot took evasive action.

At the same time, there was a civilian 747 off to our right that we could see. We contacted him and the pilots talked back and forth. They were seeing the same thing on their radar that we were seeing and we couldn’t figure it out.

The navigator, he worked it out and said that it (the UFO) was traveling 10,000 miles per hour, plus…

Testimony of Lieutenant Frederick Marshall Fox, US Navy (retired)

September 2000

Lieutenant Fox was in the Navy in the 60’s flying attack planes. He had a top-secret clearance and served in Vietnam. He is a retired pilot of 33 years with American Airlines. In his testimony, he reveals that there is a publication called JANAP 146 E that has a section which states that no one is to share any information regarding the UFO phenomenon under penalty of $10,000 fine and 10 years in prison. During one incident in late 1964, while flying an A4 Skyhawk, he says that all of a sudden a darkened saucer shaped object about 30 feet in diameter appeared on his left side. There were many other events over the course of his career where he observed saucer shaped and cigar shaped UFOs over military installations as well as one time seeing two red lights traversing the night’s sky from horizon to horizon in three seconds. He was afraid to bring up these events to others due to the inherent ridicule in the subject.

…In the Navy my rank was Lieutenant and I was a nuclear weapons delivery pilot so I had a top-secret clearance.

Well, as far as the Navy goes I was Code 4 PUBS, which was a confidential publications and communications officer. There is a publication called JANAP 146 E that had a section that says you will not reveal any information regarding the UFO phenomenon under penalty of $10,000.00 fine and ten years in jail. So they were quite adamant that whatever experiences you had you were not to go public with it without their permission…

I was out about 180 miles from the carrier one night by myself at about 20,000 feet when an object showed up on my left side. It didn’t have any hostile intent; it was just there observing me. And I sort of observed it and came away with a very peaceful feeling. I never said anything to anybody until later in my career with the airlines. I later found out a fellow shipmate of mine had a similar incident.

The object was maybe 30 feet in diameter… Maybe it was an intelligence gathering disc. It was saucer shaped…

The subject never came up with Air Traffic Control. In any event I would never have opened my mouth. There was a Captain, Pete Killian, who was written about in some of the UFO books. He was a Captain with American Airlines back in the ‘50’s that evidently had a sighting and testified before the Senate committees. And then there was another captain that actually took a photograph of a UFO off his wings. And of course they were subject to ridicule. I didn’t want to go that direction. So, I never reported anything to FAA or the military. A lot of pilots just did not want to get involved in this because of peer pressure and ridicule. So the secret has been kept…

I have a very personal friend that was a B-24 pilot during W.W.II that got into [the] O.S.S. And he was one of the first people into Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. He ended up on Project Bluebook, Section 13, which I believe was the top-secret portion of that investigation. At the time he was a captain in the Air Force. He’s in his late ‘70’s now and he is still being carried on active duty as a captain. I don’t know if he’s being paid but if he’s on active duty he should be a three star general with time and rank and he should be paid. And the whole reason that they have kept him on active duty is to keep his national security oath active because of what he knows. There are certain things that he will not talk to me about because of that security oath even though I had a top secret clearance with the Navy and we are both very interested in the same thing.

For whatever reason the Government, or those agencies of Government, deem necessary to protect their agendas, which obviously now, aren’t our agendas. I think it is time for us to act, to end this charade. And to take whatever steps are necessary to insure that the human race evolves properly and enjoys the fruits of that evolution.

Testimony of Captain Massimo Poggi

September 2000

Captain Poggi is a senior 747 captain for Alitalia . He relates an event where when flying from Rome to Sao Paolo in July of 1999 he witnessed a glowing green halo soaring past just 500 feet below his 747. The aircraft experienced a sudden jump when this UFO passed underneath. Very noisy static came through his headphones during this experience. At another time while flying over Turin Italy in 1992, he saw a distant elliptical sphere maintaining a very steady position relative to the clouds as if stationary. He saw this UFO through a spotting scope. After looking away to briefly speak to his co-pilot, he looked back and it was gone.

My name is Massimo Poggi. I am a senior captain, of a Boeing 747 in Alitalia, Italy’s airline.

On the 1st of July, 1999, I was flying from Rome to Sao Paolo, Brazil. Almost at the mid-Atlantic position we had a background noise on our headphones which was increasing and became very, very noisy with static. Then in a couple of seconds we saw a halo, a glowing green, glowing light, diffuse, just flying very fast below our nose, below our aircraft. At the same time the 747 had a sudden jump, just one, only one jump. Half a second later the noise and light had disappeared. That’s the only jump we had in eleven hours [of] flight.

This object was very, very near. We were flying at 930 kilometers per hour, about 500 knots, and the object that crossed under us was a lot faster - I think 1,000 knots, or much more.

The object was below us but not by much - maybe 500 feet. It was very near, yes. For an aircraft flying, it was a near collision.

Testimony of Lieutenant Bob Walker, US Army

October 2000

Lieutenant Walker was a 2nd lieutenant in the Army. After World War II at a NASA (then NACA) open house he saw a 30-foot saucer-shaped craft which had been brought back from Germany for study. On another occasion he was piloting an aircraft for a TV station when a disc shaped object came in from the west. He had his camera and climbed to 12,000 feet to take some photos of it. After landing, he immediately had the pictures developed and enlarged. The object turned out to be a football shaped silver object with points at each end. His film was subsequently taken from him under unusual circumstances. In his testimony he also speaks of a time when he happened into a diner late at night near Ft. Campbell in Kentucky and overheard conversations from MPs about how a flying saucer had landed next to a nearby farmhouse and the MP’s were there cordoning off the area. Creatures were present and were shot at by the frightened farmhouse owner.

…I happened to catch a strange transmission from the tower. The tower said that there was a disc shaped object coming in from the west. And I thought, "Well this is a pretty good opportunity. I will take a look and see if I can see it." I guess now if I were to estimate altitude the object would be somewhere not less than 50,000 and on up.

So I called the tower after they were making people alert of what was coming over the area. And the tower said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "If you don’t mind, will you release me from 2,000 and let me go to 12,000, which was my maximum altitude without oxygen. And they said, "Go right ahead." And it took me several minutes to climb from two to twelve and I got up and about that time a silver ball was passing over and I took a number of shots on 35mm film as it was going over.

And the next thing that I knew it was gone. After I had gotten down, I asked what happened and they said, "Well, they had alerted the fighters at Langley to take a look at what it was. And by the time they could get scrambled and get in the air and get to that altitude, it was gone…

I didn’t make it known to anybody but somehow somebody knew that I had this picture and I got a call, probably about six or eight weeks later. And they said, "We are into this area of gathering information on possible UFOs and I understand that you took some pictures and would you mind loaning them to us so that we could just take a look." I didn’t ask for credentials or anything like that and I said, "Well, in addition to pictures I also have kind of an interesting collection of news items that have come over AP for the past five years." And, they said, "Well, bring those along. We are interested. We would like to look at that."

The house was not furnished as though it was a home. It was very lightly furnished. It was an older home and didn’t have anything in it of any value, as I recall. No antiques and no oriental rugs or anything. In fact, it was kind of shabby. It kind of made me curious as to what he did and who else was in the house. But I turned it over to him and I thought, "Well, call me when you are finished or else I will come back and get it." And he didn’t call me for about two or three weeks. And I thought, "Well, that is enough time."

Since I didn’t hear from him and I didn’t have his telephone number, I thought I would go on back to the house and pick it up. Well, I got to the house and the house was empty. I had no idea who the person was. I was very naïve- more so because I didn’t keep a negative on it and I didn’t keep a print. These were original things that I had. The newspaper didn’t keep a copy either because when we did that we were just doing it for our own interest. It wasn’t for print or publication. And they disappeared from my life forever…

Another time, I was interviewing the Director of NASA at Langley and we began talking about flying saucers. I got the typical nebulous but not evasive answers. And one of the things we were talking about was different aircraft and UFOs and we were kind of blending the subject in together very nicely. So I said, "Well what about aircraft in the future? What are they going to be like? And he said, "We have aircraft now. We have vehicles or aircraft now that we could actually fly but they are so unique and so unorthodox that the public would not accept them.

He was explaining that these craft were not conventional. I guess he was referring to the fact, no rudder, no tail, no wings or whatever…

Testimony of Mr. Don Bockelman, US Army

September 2000

Mr. Bockelman was a Launch Area Electronics Technician for the US Army. He was also trained as a systems analyst and worked on Nike Hercules missiles. For two years he worked for Honeywell making nuclear tipped torpedoes. Mr. Bockelman heard numerous first hand accounts from various radar operators that they were seeing extremely fast targets moving at 3500 miles an hour. Some of these were making impossibly small-radius turns. At one time he witnessed an attempted to shoot one down with an air defense missile near Mount Vernon, WA.

… There are technicians and operators dealing with really high speed, very mobile targets which were UFOs on radar. I heard a number of those accounts from operators. They were stationed at different places around the world. Integrated Fire Control is where the radars were stationed in relation to the missiles and it is a whole bunch of radars. They would recount stories where vehicles would come in and they would track them and pass them off and they would be going 700 miles an hour and accelerate to 3,500 miles in the atmosphere quite rapidly. It was off the scale in terms of what the technology for our potential Russian targets were. It was off the scale. I want to say that these operators are very adept. They are trained to determine the difference between radar strikes and any atmospheric disturbances that can approximate targets. They are experts at it.

So when they were tracking targets, they were tracking the actual physical objects in the atmosphere. They were 100% convinced that there were physical targets that were in the atmosphere and were involved in a variety of different types of travel. That was in the late 1960s that I was hearing these reports. The reports went back into the 1950s because a lot of the older operators had been on Ajax sites and they were tracking them…

After leaving the military, one evening I was sitting in my living room and it was in October of 1978 and I had all the lights off and I was just sitting there letting my mind wander and quite abruptly all of a sudden four amber lights started shining in the room and filling it with a diffuse amber light. Needless to say, I turned around quite rapidly to determine what it was that I was seeing. And there were three lights who were approximately equal distance from each other and a fourth one off of the equal distance spacing a little bit, but in the same plane…

Then this jet came from due west. I saw this object while I was standing on the back porch of my house, and it was then attacked and fired on by an air defense missile. As it turned out it was a high explosive missile right at the target. Shrapnel was falling to the ground. It had exploded and the object was accelerating away at a mind-boggling speed away from where the attack occurred. The actual attack on the craft occurred about ten miles east of Sedro Woolley. I would say about three miles north of the area called Lyman [and] Hamilton.

About the objects which we tracked on radar while I was in the military, outside of the speed, the thing that was most impressive about these targets is their capacity to have abrupt turns. People who are in air defense look at mass and turning radius. We had nothing that was capable of matching their capacity for minuscule turning radiuses. We are talking about virtually no radius turns at high speeds. 2,000 miles an hour and right angle turns. And not only turns but descents and ascents. They would descend rapidly. It didn’t seem to make any difference to them in which direction where they went…

 

 

Back to Contents

 

3.8.3  SAC / NUKE

Introduction

(transcribed and edited from an oral presentation by Dr. Greer)

This section deals with the Strategic Air Command and UFO events involving nuclear facilities. I wish to emphasize again that the witnesses we have here are diverse. They range from the Atomic Energy Commission to people who have been at Strategic Air Command facilities and at missile launch control facilities throughout the United States and Canada. These witnesses give unmistakably clear testimony about the fact that these extraterrestrial vehicles appear to be quite concerned with our weapons of mass destruction. And in fact, more than one of these witnesses have stated to me that they believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles were there because they were very concerned that we might blow ourselves up- or that we might begin to go into space and be a threat someday to other civilizations.

I believe this is very important because, while none of these witnesses has stated that there ever was any hostile action taken by these objects, it is quite clear that they are concerned about what we may do with weapons of mass destruction. And this speaks to something very profound: That we have reached the point where the only possible future is one that is peaceful. The weapons are too powerful and the stakes are too high to advance any further and contemplate the use of such weapons. We must advance forward into space without using these vast weapons within our arsenal against any life form. The extraterrestrial civilizations, which appear to be monitoring our activity and have been doing so for decades, may indeed have this as one of their chief concerns. And it is very likely that entry into inter-planetary society has as its primary requirement the ability for a people to advance into space peacefully. For we are not talking now of muskets and canons and swords but of thermonuclear weapons, pulsed laser weapons, and exotic technologies which can rip the fabric of time-space. It must be clear to all that the only survivable future is a peaceful one. This peace is the hallmark of the maturation of the human race.

It is also possible that people within the national military command structure, as well as the national security apparatus of the United States and other countries, have misinterpreted some of the actions from these extraterrestrial vehicles as a violation of our airspace or our sovereignty. I think we must take a wider look at this and consider the fact that if we were to come across a planet which, within a hundred years, had gone from an agrarian civilization to one capable of the early stages of space flight and which had thousands of thermonuclear devices capable of destroying worlds, that perhaps we would be concerned as well. I think that we have to begin to look in the mirror as a people and ask ourselves what we should be doing to ensure a peaceful future for our planet and also to guarantee that we keep these weapons out of space forever.

In discussing this issue about the Strategic Air Command facilities and nuclear events, you will learn that on some occasions these objects, which have hovered over control launch facilities or missile silos, have been able to take these devices off-line: That is, they have been able to render inert intercontinental ballistic missiles. I do not believe that this is a sign of any hostility on their part but their way of saying, "Please don’t destroy this beautiful planet; and know this: we will not let you destroy ours." I think it’s very important for people to understand that such actions however, may have been misinterpreted by certain authorities within the vacuum of secrecy and this is something we must look at very carefully as a civilization. What happens within the darkness of secrecy? Secrecy grows on itself, and it creates an information and perspective vacuum where there’s not enough give and take with people of differing views or from different walks of life. In that milieu, it’s very easy for paranoia and misinterpretation to set in and that is one of the great inherent risks of obsessive secrecy -- the kind of secrecy which President Eisenhower warned us about in January of 1961.

Testimony of Captain Robert Salas

December 2000

Captain Salas graduated from the Air Force Academy and spent seven years in active duty from 1964 to 1971. He also held positions at Martin Marietta and Rockwell and spent 21 years at the FAA. In the Air Force, he was an air traffic controller and a missile launch officer as well as an engineer on the Titan 3 missiles. He testifies about a UFO incident on the morning of March 16, 1967 where 16 nuclear missiles simultaneously became non-operational at two different launch facilities immediately after guards saw UFOs hovering above. The guards could not identify these objects even though they were only about 30 feet away. The Air Force did an extensive investigation of the incidents and could not find a probable cause. At a debriefing about the incident, an officer from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations required him to sign a non-disclosure form and told him that he was not to talk about the event to anyone including his family or other military staff. At a time during the Cold War when minor technical anomalies were openly communicated amongst the staff, this incident was not and to this day Captain Salas thinks this to be very unusual.

RS: Capt. Robert Salas   SG: Dr. Steven Greer

RS: My name is Robert L. Salas and I graduated from the Air Force Academy and spent about seven and a half years in the Air Force on active duty from 1964 to 1971. Then I went to work for Martin Marietta first in Denver and then Rockwell International here in the southern California area. I worked for the FAA in 1974 and worked for them for about 21 years and retired in 1995 from federal service.

In the Air Force I was an air traffic controller- we called it ground control intercept controller. And then I was a missile launch officer. After that I was an engineer on the Titan 3 propulsion system out of Los Angeles Air Force station.

The UFO incident, happened on the morning of March 16, 1967. I was on duty along with my commander Fred Mywald. We were both on duty at Oscar Flight as part of the 490th strategic missile squad and there are five launch control facilities assigned to that particular squadron. We were at Oscar Flight.

It was still dark out and we’re sixty feet underground [at the ICBM launch control facility]. It was early in the morning and I received a call from my topside security guard who’s the flight security controller and he said that he and some of the guards had been observing some strange lights flying around the site around the launch control facility. He said they were acting very unusual just flying around, and I said, "You mean UFO? He said, well, he didn’t know what they were but they were lights and were flying around. They were not airplanes; they weren’t making any noise. They were not helicopters; they were making some very strange maneuvers and he couldn’t explain it. Well, I just kind of shook my head and said, "Call me if anything more important happens."

Basically we just ended the conversation. It wasn’t more than a few minutes- maybe a half hour later- and he calls back and this time he’s very frightened; I can tell by the tone of his voice he’s very shook up. He says, "Sir, there’s a glowing red object hovering right outside the front gate -- I’m looking at it right now. I’ve got all the men out here with their weapons drawn". Of course he was very disturbed while he was telling me this; he was very excited.

I didn’t know what to make of it but he wanted me to give him instructions or orders, tell him what to do. And I think I said something like, "Make sure the perimeter fence is secure." Then right away he said, "I’ve got to go sir, one of these guards has been injured", and he hung up.

I immediately went over to my commander who was taking a nap -- we have a little cot down there for rest periods -- and I was telling him about the telephone call we just received. As I was relating this to him our missiles started shutting down one by one. By shutting down, I mean they went into a "no-go" condition meaning they could not be launched. So we get bells and whistles- a red light no-go condition.

As I recalled at the time, it seemed like every one of them shut down but later in recalling this incident with my commander Mywald, he said he felt we only lost maybe seven or eight of these weapons.

SG: Can you describe what these weapons were, for the record?

RS: These weapons were Minuteman One missiles and were of course nuclear-tipped warhead missiles.

As they started shutting down, immediately he gets up and we both start querying the status board. We’ve got the ability to query and determine what the cause of the shutdowns were. As I recall, most of them were guidance and control system failures. And then he started reporting to the command post. In the meantime I called upstairs to find out what the status was of this object and the guard said, well, the object has left- it just left at high speed.

The injured guard was apparently trying to climb this barbed wire but it had nothing to do with the UFO firing anything or injuring this airman. I asked him what the object looked like and all he could say was that it was an oval shape glowing a reddish orange around the object.

SG: How far away and what altitude was it?

RS: Well, he said it was hovering right over the fence and that would have been within about 30 feet from him. The fence was maybe eight feet high.

There was also another incident that happened within a week of this, just after, where there were radar reports and quite a few more witnesses.

[See the corroborating testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Arne Arneson]

The Air Force did an extensive investigation of the entire incident and was not able to come up with a probable cause for the shutdowns. And I’ve got quite a few witnesses that will testify to that- we’ve got a couple of people who worked on the investigative team- and I’ve got correspondence from the man who actually organized the investigative team. There was no viable explanation for this [shutdown of multiple ICBMs]. Each missile is basically self-supporting. Most of them are powered by commercial power but each missile has its own power generator.

The only connection between the capsule and the missile sites themselves is what we call SIN-lines or sensitive information network lines. They’re basically buried cables but inside the capsule itself and these lines go to the missiles directly. The missiles are not connected to each other so having a fault at one site would not affect missiles at another location.

At our site anywhere from six to eight went down but they went down in rapid succession which again is an extremely rare happening. We rarely had more than one missile go down for any reason at all. And this was very rare. Weather was ruled out. Like I said an extensive investigation was done and power surges were ruled out. There was only one possibility that was looked at by one of the Boeing engineers that did some test in the laboratory and he thought that some kind of an electromagnetic force or field might have caused the signal to go. But it would have had to go through the buried cable to each of these missiles.

After I talked to my guard upstairs, my commander talked to the command post. When he finished talking to the command post he turned to me and said, "The same thing occurred at ECHO Flight." ECHO Flight is another squadron, I’d say probably 50 - 60 miles away from our location but they had the same sort of thing happen. They had UFOs that were hovering, not at the launch control facility but at the actual launch facilities where the missiles are located. They had some maintenance and security people out there at the time and they observed the UFOs at those sites. Now they lost all ten of their weapons- all ten.

SG: This is around the same time?

RS: It was the same morning. So that morning we lost anywhere from between 16 to 18 ICBMs at the same time UFOs were in the area and were observed by airmen. Those missiles were down the entire day because we’ve got testimony from Colonel Don Crawford, who relieved the crew at ECHO Flight and he was there when the missiles were being brought up to alert status and he said it took the whole day. So I’m assuming it took our missiles all day to be brought back up also.

When we got relieved, I went upstairs and the first thing I did was look in the guard’s eye and say, "Hey, were you telling me the truth about this object?" He swore up and down he was telling the truth. I believed him for a couple of reasons. I knew he was frightened when he called me down there and then when I looked him in the eye and he told me about the situation I certainly believed him.

I wrote up a report about this incident; it was in my log and I turned it in. When we got to the base we had to report to our squadron commander right away. And in that room with my squadron commander was a fellow from AFOSI (we had an Air Force Office of Special Investigations on the base). He was there in the office with the commander. He asked for my logs and he wanted a quick briefing although it seemed to me he knew pretty much what had happened already. But we gave him a quick briefing and then he asked us both to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying this was classified information- we were not to release this to anybody, and that was it. We couldn’t talk; he told us we could not talk about this to anyone, including any of the other crews, our spouses, our family, even amongst each other.

That was the end of that. I was there at Malmstrom [phonetic sp] for another two years after that and in that time we were never given a de-briefing on any of the incidents- neither the ECHO incident or our own, which is very unusual because we got briefed every morning on any of the anomalies that were going on with the equipment. We got briefed and we discussed these technical issues that were going on with the weapons but we never heard anything else about these incidents. And these were major happenings. These were major happenings.

I’ve got a copy of a telex which we received under FOIA coming from SAC headquarters and coming to Malstrom and other bases right after the morning that happened saying that this incident was of extreme concern to SAC headquarters because they couldn’t explain it. Nobody could explain what happened. And yet we never got de-briefed. And we were cleared for very high classification because these are nuclear weapons we’re dealing with.

We did get the security incursion alarms at those sites when the missile went down. That is unusual because usually when a missile went down for something like guidance failure, we wouldn’t get security incursion alarms, which means a perimeter is breached, an object crossed the fence, or something broke the security alarm system that we had on the perimeter of the launch facility. I did sent out guards to a couple of those facilities to investigate that.

The reason I think this story is very significant is because, going back to August of 1966 at Minot, ND, a very similar thing happened at one of the launch control facilities at Minot Air Force Base. They had the same kind of weapon system that we had- they had M-1 missiles. This [UFO] was observed on radar, there was some communication failure and the object was observed over the launch control facility.

That happened in August 1966 and that’s a well documented incident. About a week prior to my incident, in March 1967, I’ve got a record of a call from one of the security guards who was out roaming looking at the launch facilities and saw an object very similar to what I just described over the launch facility. The commander reported it to command post. About a week to ten days after our incident, there’s a very well documented incident that happened at Malstrom. In this case, near Malstrom Air Force Base, a UFO was tracked by radar and was observed at relatively close range by a truck driver and highway patrolman. The Air Force did an investigation and there’s an extensive report on the Air Force investigation of this UFO sighting because it flew around the base and very close to the base.

So this is a whole series of things that happened having to do with the same kind of weapon system, the Minuteman Missile.

The reports that were made to me by my guards were official reports. These were not jokes- they were not meant to be anything but official reports because we were dealing with strategic weapons during the Cold War, during the Vietnam War. They were professional, these guards, and they were not about to joke about weapons being down, about what they were seeing. So these were not rumors, they were official reports. If they were recanted for any reason, these men should have been court-martialed for giving false reports during a very sensitive incident. And none of that happened.

Bob Kominski headed up the organization to look at all aspects of these shutdowns. Kominski relates to me in writing that at some point he was told by his boss that the Air Force said, "Stop the investigation; do no more on this and in addition do not write a final report." Again, this is very unusual especially in light of the fact that CINC-SAC headquarters was stating that this was of extreme importance to find out exactly what happened here. And yet, the head of the investigative team was told during the investigation to stop the investigation and not write a final report.

I heard that many of the guards that reported this incident were sent off to Vietnam, as a matter of fact. I know for a fact - this I can attest to- that one of the guards that I sent out to the launch facilities and observed an object came back and was very shaken by the experience. And he was taken off guard duty from then on. He was sent somewhere else because he was too shaken by the experience.

[See the official government documents regarding these and related UFO events at or near nuclear facilities. SG]

Back to Contents   or   Continue with SAC / NUKE