by Mack Maloney
And no, these weren’t the Russians doing this. This secret nuclear crisis was caused by the mysterious entity we’ve all come to know as UFOs.
* * *
During the Cold War, the most powerful section of the U.S. military, and likely the most powerful body on earth, was the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command.
More readily known as SAC, it controlled all of the air force’s nuclear-armed bombers, plus all of America’s ICBMs, those hundreds of nuclear-tipped missiles that would be launched should World War III break out. It was SAC’s collective fingers that were resting on the doomsday button.
SAC’s main headquarters was located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. (SAC’s replacement, the U.S. Strategic Command, is headquartered there still.) Then or now, there is probably no other U.S. military facility as crucial to America’s national security as Offutt.
That’s why what happened there in September 1958 was both baffling and frightening — and a harbinger of some very unsettling things to come.
* * *
It was September 8, just after sunset, and the sky above Offutt was clear.
Several people noticed what at first appeared to be a harmless vapor trail high above the base. But as the witnesses studied it further, the vapor trail began displaying characteristics not found in leftover contrails. It became extremely bright, like a magnesium flare, in one person’s description. As the light grew in intensity, more people on the ground became aware something strange was happening.
One witness called the base’s control tower. As he talked to the ATC personnel, the light high above them began changing color. Suddenly it was reddish orange. And what had previously been of undefined vaporous appearance now took on the distinct form of a cigar-shaped object standing on its head. The witnesses below, many of them veteran pilots of World War II and Korea, were stunned.
But the sighting only got stranger. From the bottom end of the object came a mass of small black flecks, like a swarm of bugs, a description used at least once during a World War II foo fighter episode. These things poured out of the object for more than a minute, flying off in every direction before they all disappeared.
Then the object itself began moving. First, it changed its attitude, swinging around 45 degrees to strictly horizontal. Then it began slowly drifting west. The witnesses watched this transformation for about five minutes before the object changed attitude again, returning almost but not quite to its previous upright position.
Then the object simply faded away.
Again, those watching on the ground were just bewildered. One officer gave a detailed report of the incident to higher brass and was told that he’d be hearing from ATIC, as in Project Blue Book, within forty-eight hours.
But that call never came.
* * *
For the most part, the missiles in America’s top secret ICBM bases in the 1960s were known as Minutemen. Each was capable of carrying 1.2 megatons of nuclear explosive, meaning just one Minuteman contained fifty times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Minuteman missiles were primarily deployed to bases throughout the geographical center of America, and to a degree, they were concentrated in Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. Each base commanded between 150 and 200 missiles, all of them housed in separate silos built deep in the ground and constructed of heavily reinforced concrete.
Each missile silo was connected to a launch control facility. These underground control rooms were staffed twenty-four hours a day. They had their own guards as well as mobile security teams.
To increase survivability, the missile silos were spread out over vast open areas, each silo usually located many miles from any other. For example, missiles controlled by Warren Air Force Base, headquartered near Cheyenne, Wyoming, were deployed over 9,600 square miles; some of them spilled over into western Nebraska and northern Colorado in addition to those in eastern Wyoming.
This was the makeup of America’s massive long-range nuclear weapon delivery system. Situated mostly on isolated flatlands and prairies, well away from population centers, each missile was aimed at a Soviet (or Soviet-allied) target, a thirty-minute transpolar flight away from igniting Armageddon.
There were almost a dozen major ICBM bases in all — and by early 1967, every one of them had reported UFO incidents.
Unlike most of the sightings of foo fighters during World War II, the incidents at America’s ICBM bases were reported by people on the ground, not by the crews of aircraft in flight. So, what these witnesses described could not have been the result of the distortion that can occur when two objects are in motion relative to each other, or engine exhausts from another aircraft, or meteorological-induced electrical discharges, or flak, or some enemy’s secret wonder weapon or any other kind of misleading aerial phenomena.
This was something else.
* * *
That UFOs would start appearing over America’s nuclear facilities probably shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to the U.S. military.
No less than four times between 1945 and 1952, UFOs were reported hovering over the Hanford Engineering Works, in Hanford, Washington, the site of America’s first nuclear reactor. One report in 1945 said the interloping UFO was the size of three aircraft carriers put together. UFOs had been reported over other U.S. nuclear facilities as well, such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
But these particular UFO incidents occurred at reactors. The UFO haunting of America’s ICBM bases was a different case because these places housed nuclear weapons.
With thanks to Robert Hastings, author of the definitive UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, the National UFO Reporting Center (www.nuforc.org) and NICAP, what follows are some of the most unusual and frightening accounts of what happened to a large part of America’s ground-based nuclear arsenal in the 1960s and ’70s.
Something almost inconceivably strange.
Something that’s never been explained.
The Scariness Begins…
Like the foo fighters of World War II, the ghost fliers of 1933–34 and other unusual UFO episodes, this one began with a single odd incident.
Hastings tells us it happened in the summer of 1962. A worker at a yet-to-be-completed ICBM base near Oracle, Arizona, spotted a very bright light hovering over a half-built missile silo. The silo was empty at the time, but nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base was contacted anyway. Two jet interceptors were sent to the scene, but the light disappeared as soon as they arrived. Yet no sooner had the jets departed than the light reappeared.
It was seen hovering over the unfinished silo for a short while longer before leaving for good.
The Walker Sightings, 1963—64
Located in southeast New Mexico, Walker Air Force Base received its first ICBM in early 1962. Within a year, personnel assigned to the vast facility were reporting UFOs either hovering or moving very fast over their missile sites.
According to Hastings, one officer assigned to Walker at the time recalled up to nine occasions when guards reported seeing UFOs shining bright lights down onto missile silos. Though these incidents were reported to higher authorities, the air force brass did nothing about them.
In fact, right from the beginning of the odd goings-on at Walker, the air force seemed either uninterested, reluctant or under orders not to investigate anything having to do with UFO sightings.
This baffling lack of interest was confirmed by another officer assigned to Walker, who said in the fall of 1964, security personnel reported seeing an extremely bright light repeatedly hovering over one particular missile site, then racing away, returning, and hovering again. Many people witnessed this inexplicable behavior, yet the air force never debriefed any of them.
Still another airman at Walker contacted his superiors when he saw two starlike objects moving over his launch facility. As it turned out, the objects were already being tracked on Walker’s radar, a
nd two jet fighters from a nearby air base had been scrambled to intercept them. Witnesses even saw the jets streak toward the mysterious objects only to see the UFOs accelerate to an incredible speed and disappear from sight. But later reports said that Walker’s commanders not only denied that anyone saw UFOs that night, they even denied they’d requested any fighters to intercept them.
But then one missile technician at Walker had an encounter with a UFO that was so up close and personal, it was hard to ignore.
This man was working deep inside one of the missile silos one night when a guard up top reported that strange lights had appeared outside the silo’s perimeter. The technician emerged from the underground facility to see that what he later described as a “noiseless, brilliant and seemingly dimensionless object” had landed on the ground close to the missile silo.
Flashlights in hand, the technician and the guard slowly approached the strange object, only to have it suddenly disappear, then reappear briefly 30 feet away before vanishing for good.
The technician later told his story to a member of the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, the somewhat shadowy OSI. But the man was never told whether a formal report was ever filed or not.
So many strange things had happened at Walker Air Force Base during 1963–64 that one worker finally contacted NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. In a letter written in December 1964, the worker said the UFO sightings at the base had become so numerous, many guards were too frightened to go on duty. Yet the air force insisted that everything related to the sightings should be considered “top secret.”
Even more disturbing, at least for some hard-core true believers, is that this worker also told NICAP that one missile site at Walker in particular had endured many recurring UFO sightings.
That site was Site 8, located just south of Roswell, New Mexico. In fact, before it was renamed for Kenneth Walker, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, Walker AFB was known by another name: Roswell Army Airfield.
The Warren Sightings
Warren Air Force Base, located about three miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, is one of the oldest military bases in America, having started life as a frontier fort in 1867. It is also one of the largest nuclear missile bases in the world.
In 1965, multiple UFO sightings were reported at the base. On the night of August 1 alone, there were eleven reports about strange objects flying over the huge missile facility; one of these reports was made by the base commander himself. Some witnesses that night saw single objects; others saw up to nine UFOs. Many of these sightings were corroborated by different people seeing the same things at the same time, just from different vantage points.
On another occasion, one of the base’s security policemen saw eight brilliant lights hovering over an isolated missile silo. The lights were grouped in pairs and were motionless, at least at first. Then one of the lights began to move among the others, apparently going from pair to pair. The policeman watched this bizarre activity for several minutes before reporting it to his commander.
The policeman was told that NORAD (the all-seeing North American Aerospace Defense Command, located near Colorado Springs, Colorado) had notified the base that its radars had been tracking the eight unknowns as well, but before anything else could happen, the UFOs disappeared.
A week later, another strange incident was reported at the same missile silo. In this case, the site’s security team was sitting in a camper-type vehicle parked near the silo. Without warning, the vehicle began to shake violently. The security men looked out of the window and saw a bright white light hovering directly overhead. The shaking lasted until the light above disappeared.
The rash of sightings at Warren Air Force Base continued for almost a month. During that time, ranchers in that part of Wyoming also reported seeing UFOs, and some even claimed that they had cattle missing. An airman testified that one night, when the base police tried to preserve a suspected UFO landing site, they were ordered by base higher-ups not to do so.
From all reports, the U.S. Air Force brass at Warren simply ignored the incidents.
The Whiteman 1966 Sighting
Whiteman Air Force Base is located about 70 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri. Formerly a glider training base, today it is the home of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. In the late 1990s, B-2s from Whiteman flew nonstop round-trip bombing runs to Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis. They did the same thing a few years later in support of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
During the 1960s, though, Whiteman housed a vast ICBM complex, containing up to 150 missiles. It was there that one of the scariest, most inexplicable UFO incursions occurred.
According to a report given to NUFORC, it started around 9 P.M. on the night of June 16, 1966, when the base’s control tower personnel detected a saucer-shaped object flying over the southernmost part of the missile complex. The object’s flight path eventually took it over one of the base’s ICBM launch silos. When it passed over this site, the missile inside the silo lost all electrical power. This very serious condition is known as “going off alert status.”
The electricity returned to the missile silo as soon as the UFO left the immediate area. But then the same thing happened to the next silo the object came to. The power went out, coming back on as soon as the UFO had passed over. Then it happened to the next silo, and the next — and the next.
Incredibly, the UFO flew around the Whiteman complex for the following two hours, killing power in all 150 missiles controlled by the base, all while these missiles were armed. Finally, the object flew off to the north and disappeared again.
The Ellsworth Intruder
Ellsworth Air Force Base is located close to Rapid City, South Dakota, in the southwest corner of the state.
Once a training site for B-17 Flying Fortresses, these days Ellsworth is home to a wing of B-1B Lancer bombers. But in the 1960s, the sprawling facility was an ICBM base, and it was there, not two weeks after the bizarre happenings at Whiteman, that another incredibly strange UFO incursion took place.
As Hastings reports in UFOs and Nukes, on the night of June 25, 1966, two technicians were sent to one of the base’s missile silos, code-named Juliet-3. All electrical power to the silo’s ICBM had mysteriously failed. The technicians corrected the problem and completed the missile’s automatic restart procedure. Returning aboveground, though, the technicians heard via their radio that a security alarm had gone off at another silo nearby. Code-named Juliet-5, its missile had lost all power, too.
As they continued to monitor the radio transmission, the two technicians soon heard the excited voices of the security team sent to investigate the Juliet-5 alarm. They were shouting that a strange object was resting on the ground inside the silo’s security fence. The security team leader described the object as a metal sphere supported by a tripod-style landing gear.
It sounded crazy, but from their location at Juliet-3, the two technicians and a security guard who’d accompanied them could see an intense glow coming from Juliet-5, four miles away.
As the astonishing radio transmission continued, the technicians heard the Juilet-5 team leader twice refuse orders to approach the mysterious object, instead asking the base’s top security officer for permission to fire at it. Clearly under stress — the ICBM inside the Juliet-5 silo was armed and targeted at the Soviet Union — this officer ordered the security team not to use their weapons until the situation had been clarified. He then reassured the security team that a helicopter was on its way to the Juliet-5 site.
Subsequent radio transmissions made it clear that Ellsworth’s base commander, wing commander and missile maintenance commander, among others, were on board the helicopter heading for Juliet-5.
Such a collection of upper brass being in one place at one time was extremely rare. For them all to be put on a helicopter, at night, when rotary-wing flying wasn’t the safest, was almost unheard of.
But just as the helicopter w
as approaching Juliet-5, the security team leader was heard shouting that the mysterious object was leaving. At that exact moment, the three witnesses at Juliet-3 saw a bright beam of light rise up from Juliet-5 and fly off at an incredible speed.
The helicopter landed moments later, and its high-ranking passengers entered the sealed-off area. They saw three indentations in the ground, each about 25 feet apart, forming a triangle. The marks were just what would be expected from the landing gear the security team leader had described.
And at that moment, to everyone’s amazement, the electricity at Juliet-5 suddenly came back on, restored as mysteriously as it had been lost.
When the two technicians and the security man who had followed the incident from Juliet-3 returned to base ops, they were questioned extensively about what they’d seen and heard.
The security guard admitted he’d overheard the radio chatter. But knowing that others had been punished for talking about UFOs, the techs lied, saying they’d been underground when it all happened and had witnessed nothing unusual.
The three men were questioned again the next day, this time in the presence of an unidentified civilian, most likely a member of the air force’s OSI.
The techs stuck to their story. The security man stuck to his. Nothing happened to the techs, but neither saw the security guard again.
The Malmstrom Shutdowns
According to several published accounts, including one by Hastings, Malmstrom Air Force Base, near Great Falls, Montana, was the next target of the UFO incursions.
In early February 1967, some local residents saw strange objects flashing across the sky. These would be a prelude to what happened next.
One night in mid-February, a Malmstrom security officer took a call from an airman doing a routine check of one of the base’s isolated launch facilities.
The airman was frightened. He told the officer that he was looking at a huge shining object hovering over the missile silo. The officer didn’t believe the airman at first — it just sounded too fantastic. The airman’s repeated pleas finally convinced the officer, though. He, in turn, notified Malmstrom’s command post — but, incredibly, he was told that the command post no longer took “those kinds of reports.”
