Montana a UFO hotspot dating back to 1950s
Montana a UFO hotspot dating back to 1950s
By STACY HASLEM
Tribune Staff Writer
The story goes something like this:
The date was March 16, 1967. Missile maintenance crews from Malmstrom Air Force Base were camped out at a missile site about 30 miles north of Lewistown.
Suddenly an alarm horn sounded.
A Minuteman missile had gone off alert and become inoperable. Upset and believing that the maintenance personnel had failed to tell him they were doing work that would create this “off-alert” warning, a first lieutenant called the missile site.
He didn’t get the response he was expecting.
An on-site security guard told him that no maintenance had been done on the missile that morning. A UFO hovering over the site was a more likely culprit, he said.
Soon other missiles started going off-line as well. Within seconds, the other nine missiles were down.
About 20 miles southeast at the Oscar flight, a topside airman reported to his below-ground crew commander that strange, nonaircraft lights were zigzagging around the sky.
The commander didn’t take the report seriously and told the airman to call back if anything more significant happened.
After a few minutes, the airman called again, clearly frightened and shouting: “Sir, there’s one hovering outside the front gate!”
“One what?”
“A UFO. It’s just sitting there. We’re all looking at it. What do you want us to do?”
Moments later, several other Oscar missiles were down as well.
This report and others like it have made northcentral Montana a UFO hot spot dating back to the 1950s.
“It’s been a pretty active area, and there are a lot of world-documented sightings going way back,” said Jeff Goodrich, state director of the Montana chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
A video recording of two bright, silvery objects zipping around the sky on Aug. 15, 1950, brought national attention to the Electric City.
Nick Mariana, general manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball team, noticed the objects and quickly scrambled to record the incident on the 16-mm camera he kept in his glove box. The “Montana Movie,” as it came to be known, is considered one of the best UFO films of all time.
More recently, a series of mysterious cow mutilations has locals baffled and questioning whether space aliens have perhaps paid us another visit.
UFOs are for real
It’s a fact: UFOs are out there. Astronomers, scientists, government officials and ufologists all agree on that. The dispute is whether little green or gray or purple men are piloting these aircraft, if that’s even what the objects are.
Ray Kelly, owner of Kelly Signs, always has been a believer and even has a few sightings to boot.
“I’ve always felt this universe is just too vast for us to be the only people or living creatures,” he said.
Kelly’s first sighting came in the 1990s. As he pulled into his alley after work one night, a bright star caught his attention. Then, suddenly, it shot straight up.
Some years later, Kelly took direction from the popular 1990s television series “Sightings” and propped his Zenith camcorder on a tripod in his backyard and focused it on the sun’s corona, or surrounding halo of light. If you block out the main part of the sun you’ll catch bustling UFO activity in the outer rim, the theory suggests.
“These objects are kind of invisible to the naked eye until they fly into the corona,” Kelly said.
Sure enough, Kelly captured glowing objects of all shapes and sizes moving at different speeds and directions in and out of the corona. He also recorded what he believes to be two UFOs traveling across the sky. One moves on a straight west-to-east plane. The other flies the same direction but instantly changes directions at two different intervals.
UFO mania
The UFO era began in June 1947 when a Boise businessman and pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine mysterious objects flying around Mount Rainier in Washington. He described them as flying close together, saying their movement reminded him of a rock or saucer skipping across the top of water. He is credited for coining the term “flying saucers.”
Following Arnold’s sighting and the alleged crash at Roswell, N.M., where ufologists believe an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien occupants were recovered in July 1947, flying saucer mania began. The interest and curiosity in UFOs paired with the looming threat of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union had people nationwide and across Montana looking toward the heavens.
While the government opened an official investigation of UFOs, more reports trickled in from all over Big Sky Country. A couple weeks after Mariana’s sighting, two Great Falls men reportedly saw a silvery mass over the eastern horizon near Geyser. They said the large, oblong object had a long tail and flew extremely high. It vanished over the western horizon in about eight seconds. The following week two Air Force veterans reported six amber-colored objects flying over Great Falls, passing each other at alternate intervals.
In November 1957, a Great Falls woman reported seeing an oblong, illuminated object that was twice as large as the moon and had a flashing light on one end. Later that month a Sidney resident reported a white ball of fire with towering red columns rising up and green lights projecting from the base moving slowly across the sky.
Several UFO reports have come from MAFB and its missile sites.
The investigation that followed the 1967 missile incidents turned up no reasonable cause for the missile shutdowns, though a number of airmen as well as the deputy launch controller from that day have come forward to credit UFOs. However, the Air Force reportedly maintains that no UFO incident ever has affected national security.
Public affairs officials at Malmstrom say the base doesn’t have any records related to UFOs.
The hodgepodge of reports over the years indicate that UFOs come in all shapes, sizes and colors and travel at various speeds. Some are described as balls of light that explode in the sky. Others resemble flying cars.
Of course, there also are curious reports of what “visitors” leave behind.
Alien forensics?
The first Montana report of a mutilated cow came from the Sand Coulee area in August 1974. In the few years that followed, sheriff’s deputies investigated more than 65 mutilation reports from Cascade, Judith Basin, Chouteau, Teton and Pondera counties.
The most recent reported mutilation occurred on Oct. 9 of this year on a ranch in Valier. There are similarities to the mutilations of three decades ago.
What’s left behind has raised doubt that the killings were caused by humans or predators.
Often the tongue, an eye and all or part of the ear are removed along with a portion of the udder, the genitals and the anus. Facial skin is scraped off with great precision, and the exposed bones are squeaky-clean. Many of the animals are drained of blood. There is no mess, no footprints and no one hears a sound.
What’s even more bizarre, hungry predators steer clear of the carcasses for weeks.
The early cases from around the nation prompted a federally funded investigation that resulted in a 300-page report concluding the cows were killed by natural predators. Even still, ideas swarm about the mysteries, some pointing fingers at satanic cults, government or military conspiracies and, of course, space aliens.
Local UFO group
Various groups have formed over the years to investigate UFO sightings, of which a majority are re-classified as IFOs, or identified flying objects.
“The vast majority of them are misidentified known objects, some probably classified aircraft,” said Goodrich, who’s retired from the military and works for a civilian contractor at MAFB. “I think a small number of them would very well be alien spacecraft.”
Goodrich has been involved with MUFON, a national organization dedicated to finding scientific explanations for UFOs, for 25 years. As state director he assigns field investigators to Montana sightings. But with a dwindling statewide membership (currently eight members), Goodrich said it’s impossible to investigate every report.
“The ones that are more worthy of investigation are daylight sightings of metallic objects,” he said. “They are much fewer in number.”
Goodrich said that when folks see a UFO they either should fill out the sighting report form online at www.mufon.org or call the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) telephone hotline, 206-722-3000, in Davenport, Wash.
Goodrich said local law enforcement officers and public relations officers at Malmstrom usually direct UFO-related calls to MUFON or NUFORC. The NUFORC hotline is staffed 24/7, so it may be the better route, he said.
And while Great Falls has a reputation for some of the more credible UFO reports, Goodrich said folks aren’t going to get much attention without a photograph or other physical evidence.
“Anecdotal evidence doesn’t really go very far as far as reaching a firm scientific conclusion,” he said.
Hogwash!
Arthur Alt, the author of the Tribune’s daily Skywatch column who has a doctorate in science education and nine other degrees, doesn’t believe aliens from outer space are visiting planet Earth, abducting its inhabitants and flying away with cow teat souvenirs.
“Everybody on this planet sees UFOs — unidentified flying objects,” said Alt, a science professor at the University of Great Falls. “That does not translate into little green men flying spaceships. There is not one single solid thread of evidence that they exist.”
Alt doesn’t think the people who report UFOs are gullible or are telling tall tales. Rather they just have a hard time identifying what they see. Some of the explanations he offered for the misidentified objects in the sky include weather balloons, planets, meteors, iridescent goose wings, and lenticular clouds, which actually resemble flying saucers.
He added that hallucinations and optical illusions also play tricks on the brain.
“Our brain works in a linear fashion,” he said, adding he teaches his UGF students to think in a nonlinear fashion and manages to change most of their minds regarding flying saucers by the end of the semester.
Though Alt doesn’t believe space aliens are visiting the Earth, he believes they exist.
“I’m absolutely convinced there is intelligent life in the universe outside the Earth,” he said.
However, Alt theorizes that the amount of energy, time and food it would take to visit the Earth would not be worth it to any species. He said the nearest star system is about 4 1/2 light years away, which would mean a 10-years roundtrip for a vehicle traveling at the speed of light.
And for what purpose? Ten years is a lot of time just to satisfy curiosity, he said.
Alt added there’s no good reason why aliens would collect samples of unintelligent animals like cows, noting the missing cow pieces wouldn’t provide much information about reproducing the animal. He believes people, perhaps cult members, are responsible.
Just another Montana Movie
Kelly doesn’t have a theory on the cattle mutilations, but he does believe his video shows something of an extraterrestrial nature.
Relaxing in his lawn chair while barbecuing one afternoon, Kelly captured footage of an illuminated object moving across the sky. His video shows a UFO passing behind limbs of a tree and then eventually getting lost in the garble.
“I got pretty excited about it,” Kelly said. “I showed my wife right away.”
He reported the incident to MUFON and the “Coast to Coast” radio program, but it didn’t amount to anything. He didn’t pursue the effort further because he was satisfied enough.
“I finally saw one,” he said. “I’m happy.”
Kelly believes humans are being observed by other life forms from other planets or even dimensions.
“A lot of these could be government secret propulsion programs, too,” he said.
And he doesn’t believe UFOs pose any threat to himself, his family or mankind in general.
“I’m not afraid … as long as I’m not a cow,” he said.
See Ray Kelly’s video here.
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Jan 02 2007 
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I remember years ago as a young pup seeing the Great Falls, Montana, UFO footage and being tremendously impressed with it. Heard a lot of hooey over the years re: what those two objects “really were”, and never took said explanations to be anything BUT hooey. Those are flying thingamajigs, folks…not “birds”, “planes” or anything else “common” and “misidentified”.
Fly on, you Great Falls UFOs! Loved ya then, love ya now!
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:58 am
There was also the various sightings around Montana in 75 re the phantom helicopters, etc., too.
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Recently posted by Frank Warren and found elsewhere.
1865 - Trapper Reports Witnessing Crash of ‘Compartmented Craft With Strange Hieroglyphics’
A STRANGE STORY-REMARKABLE DISCOVERY
The Missouri Democrat
10-19-1865
Mr. James Lumley, an old Rocky Mountain trapper, who has been stopping at the Everett House for several days, makes a most remarkable statement to us, and one which, if authenticated, will produce the greatest excitement in the scientific world. Mr. Lumley states that about the middle of last September, he was engaged in trapping in the mountains about seventy-five or one hundred miles above the Great Falls of the Upper Missouri, and in the neighborhood of what is known as Cadotte Pass.
Just after sunset one evening, he beheld a bright luminous body in the heavens, which moved with great rapidity in an easterly direction. It was plainly visible for at least five seconds, when it suddenly separated into particles, resembling, as Mr. Lumley describes it, the bursting of a sky-rocket in the air. A few minutes later, he heard a heavy explosion, which jarred the earth very perceptibly, and this was shortly after followed by a rushing sound, like a tornado sweeping through the forest. A strong wind sprang up about the same time, but suddenly subsided. The air was also filled with a peculiar odor of a sulphurous character.
These incidents would have made a slight impression on the mind of Mr. Lumley, but for the fact that on the ensuing day he discovered, at the distance of about two miles from his camping place, that, as far as he could see in either direction a path had been cut through the forest, several rods wide-giant trees uprooted or broken off near the ground- the tops of hills shaved off and the earth plowed up in many places. Great and widespread havoc was everywhere visible.
Following up this track of desolation, he soon ascertained the cause of it in the shape of an immense stone driven into the side of a mountain. An examination of this stone, or so much of it as was visible, showed that it was divided into compartments that in various places it was carved with curious hieroglyphics. More than this, Mr. Lumley also discovered fragments of a substance resembling glass, and here and there dark stains, as though caused by a liquid.
He is confident that the hieroglyphics are the work of human hands, and that the stone itself, although but a fragment of an immense body, must have been used for some purpose by animated beings.
Strange as this story appears, Mr. Lumley relates it with so much sincerity that we are forced to accept it as true. It is evident that the stone which he discovered, was a fragment of the meteor which was visible in this section in September last. It will be remembered that it was seen in Leavenworth, Galena and in this city by Col. Bonneville. At Leavenworth it was seen to separate into particles or explode.
Astronomers have long held that it is probable that the heavenly bodies are inhabited — even the comets — and it may be that the meteors are also. Possibly, meteors could be used as a means of conveyance by the inhabitants of other planets, in exploring space, and it may be that hereafter some future Columbus, from Mercury or Uranus, may land on this planet by means of a meteoric conveyance, and take full possession thereof — as did the Spanish navigators of the New World in 1492, and eventually drive what is known as the “human race” into a condition of the most abject servitude. It has always been a favorite theory with many that there must be a race superior to us, and this may at some future time be demonstrated in the manner we have indicated.”
It’s possible that this particular geographic region has been a hotspot for some time as Cadotte Pass is also located in Montana. Just to the east, at the westward base of Roberts Mountain, there is a very interesting appearance of something skidding through the forest leading up to the side of the mountain (or so it seems).
Here are a few Google Earth images of the area.
Image 1
Image 2
Not saying this is anything other than interesting but it might be worth a look.
Best wishes for this project in the New Year and a tip of the hat to all involved. It seems off to a good start.
January 4th, 2007 at 5:53 am
Jonah
Many thanks for taking the time to send the story and comments. I’m going to look into this one deeper and see if there are other leads, etc.