Captain Robert Salas And The UFO Missile Shutdown
Last week I had breakfast with retired Air Force Captain Robert Salas, who was proflled in Paul Kimball’s 2008 film Best Evidence, Top 10 UFO Sightings. He struck me as a sincere and very intelligent man who was deeply affected by his strange and literally alarming experience.
Early on the morning of March 16, 1967, Captain Salas was on duty as Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander at the Minuteman ICBM site, 85 miles from Malmstrom Air Force Base in central Montana. Salas recalls that the crews manning the missile facilities were assigned to duty shifts where they were locked underground for 24 hours at a time. When the UFO incident occurred, he only knew what was going on by the confused and frightened telephone calls from the security guards above ground, reporting a 40-foot saucer-shaped object pulsating with red light. They saw most of the missiles they had under their command suddenly go offline (later it was discovered that the targeting systems were the only components affected.) In Salas’ words:
I immediately went over to my commander, Lt. Fred Meiwald, who was on a scheduled sleep period. I woke him and began to brief him about the phone calls and what was going on topside. In the middle of this conversation, we both heard the first alarm klaxon resound through the confined space of the capsule, and both immediately looked over at the panel of annunciator lights at the Commander’s station. A ‘No-Go’ light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of our missile sites. Fred jumped up to query the system to determine the cause of the problem. Before he could do so, another alarm went off at another site, then another and another simultaneously. Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a ‘No-Go’ (inoperable) condition.
More details are available at CUFOS page on the incident.
Although I knew he had told his story perhaps hundreds of times, I asked him to repeat it for me. He patiently went through the particulars of his experience. Then I asked what he thought about it personally. “I think someone was trying to tell us to get rid of our nuclear weapons,” he said. “It was kind of like a tap on the shoulder, a subtle thing.”
How does he (or did the Air Force) know that this was not some sort of wild, but possible malfunction due to mundane circumstances? He said that the only thing that might be able to affect the heavily shielded electronics (which were robust 1960s components, not fragile silicon circuits) was a very strong electromagnetic pulse. He knows of nothing then or now which could penetrate the underground facility, much less selectively shut down the targeting systems of so many missiles at once. (Another UFO appeared over a nearby facility on the same night, with similar results.)
The Boeing company, who built the the affected components, conducted tests to try and reproduce the shutdown incident. Nothing conclusive was found, apart from a very specific pulse sent to one of the logic circuits, which worked 80% of the time it was tested. How this sort of electrical impulse could be sent to such a specific component at the same time to so many missiles was never determined.
In 2005, Salas and UFO researcher Jim Klotz co-authored a book on the incident entitled Faded Giant. They asked for and received FOIA documents on the incident, but did not mention anything about UFOs in their query. The released pages confirmed the date and results of the shutdown, significantly stating “Rumors of UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) around Echo Flight [the designator for the missile facility] during the time of fault were disproven.”
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Mar 16 2009 
March 16th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
What bothers me about this case is that none of he missile crew saw the ufo. They’re completely reliant upon what they were told over the phone. I’ve often wondered if this was some kind of exercise or experiment.
March 17th, 2009 at 12:23 am
It certainly could have been an exercise, but its hard to believe
that fact wouldn’t have come out
eventually. It reminds me uncomfortably
of the film Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, but I suspect thats only
co-incidence. Finding the above-ground
personnel would seem to be critical-
surely it can’t be that hard to find
the duty rosters for the facilities?
March 17th, 2009 at 8:00 am
It would seem a a lot to go through, but plausible that it was some sort of exercise, but why use UFOs as the cause? It would seem that this was the least likely of any scenario that would cause the missiles to shut down.
Salas said that a couple of the guards called him a few days later wanting to talk about the incident, but he had signed an oath not to talk to anyone, not even other AF personnel. He also said that of all the people called in to investigate the incident, the AFOSI man seemed almost bored with the proceedings, as if he knew what was going on or had been through it before. Perhaps this is a vote for the security exercise scenario.
It also brings up a lot of questions. One is, why would the AF want Minuteman missile personnel to believe that aliens could shut down sophisticated weapons systems at will? Wouldn’t that sort of erode their confidence?
Perhaps a lot of these questions might be answered in the Faded Giant book. I will ask Mr. Salas if he would like to read and comment on this thread.
I just realized that this was my 500th post.
March 17th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
@ disownedsky:
Great point. Strangely, thats never really occurred to me despite seeming like a fairly obvious point to consider.
I guess what gives the story credibility is the fact that its not the only time something like that has happened.
If even 50% of the material Robert Hastings presents is true, then bright lights over military installations was a pretty common theme over the past 60yrs.
March 18th, 2009 at 5:44 am
…Can’t forget that Mr. Salas is well supported by the research of Robert Hastings as is the whole affair, otherwise.
March 18th, 2009 at 7:05 am
Greg — I posted the below a year ago and also a blogger said that Robert Hastings would look into this — but nothing was reported back.
Nick — I have some fascinating information about Robert Salas, from the son of the Captain who Salas used as a source. Turns out the Captain’s son states Salas is a liar and there never was a UFO sighting.
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t78477-250.html
This was posted, by surprise, by the son himself, on a thread I started which also includes tons of debate about your research as well.
March 18th, 2009 at 8:39 am
First, we crewmembers were not allowed to open the capsule door except under strict security procedures and usually only when relieved by another crew, so we were not able to go topside to look at the object. Since there was no control capability of our missiles topside, this could not have been a planned hoax by topside personnel.
Second, there are many reasons why it is highly unlikely this incident could have been an Air Force ‘exercise’. The most compelling is that USAF would have had to have a secret flying machine with the capability to hover and fly silently and emit a red glow so that ground observers could not make out detail design features in 1967. In addition, this craft would have had the ability to emit an electro-magnetic pulse capable of penetrating 60 ft. of earth and triple shielded cables in order to send a signal to shut down our missiles. If we had had that capability in 1967, surely we would have seen that craft operational by now. There are many other reasons but I won’t list those now.
March 18th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I haven’t read Hastings’ book, although I believe he gave me a bad review in the CUFOs journal saying that things were left out of Project Beta which were clearly in the text. My rebuttal was not published. That’s probably no reflection on his investigative expertise in his own work, though.
March 18th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Hey Robert Salas — glad to see you respond! I DID see such craft with such secret capabilities. A black equilateral triangle with some sort of plasma propulsion flew over the north end of my parents’ yard, summer of 1997. It was right over the trees, going slowly, emitting a buzzing noise — a hum – with lights on each corner, no fuselage. The reason I saw it was because the lights were originally on the horizon, catching my sister’s attention right after the X-files ended. She got bored because she had seen such lights before but I realized the lights were doing inexplicable manuevers — each light a different color — red, green, yellow. And then I noticed the craft — beyond my neighbors, heading towards our house. Anyway I discovered later the area is a military flight test corridor and the local newspaper had a UFO flap with several photos — from the 1970s, including cattle mutilation. So I do think the military has this technology.
March 19th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Greg,
Bob Salas is one of the most decent and likeable people I’ve met in the world of UFOs. That doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth, of course, but if he’s lying then he’s done a darn fine job of it, for no real personal gain.
The incident itself is backed up by documentation, so it doesn’t rely solely on Salas’ recollection. That doesn’t mean they were aliens from Zeta Reticuli (or wherever else believers think they’re from these days), but it does mean that something happened to those missiles, and that it was of understandable concern to the USAF.
Viewed in isolation, a case like this might ultimately be dismissed as an exercise I suppose. The problem is that this isn’t the only case like this. As noted in my film, and in Hastings’ work, there are dozens of cases involving military and civilian nuclear facilities. That’s a pattern that can’t just be ignored, and is worthy of further study.
Paul
March 20th, 2009 at 6:29 am
In addition to looking at the above-ground personnel, it occurs to me that
another useful line of inquiry would be
to look at what proceedural changes were
made ( if any ) subsequent to the event.
I’ve never been to Montana, but I well
remember driving past the isolated, but
very secure looking ‘ranch houses’ that
were the only above-ground evidence of the launch sites in my youth in North
Dakota. I wish my interest in the subject had resurfaced sooner-I would
have liked to ask my late father if he
had heard of any incidents like this-
he worked at both the MSR and PAR sites
during the brief heyday of the ABM
program.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:43 am
Drew,
I don’t know how it necessarily follows that the military has the technology of the type you describe simply because your object was sighted near a military area.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:46 am
Paul,
Thanks for getting me in touch with Mr. Salas. You’re right that he seems to be a nice and well-meaning guy. We have exchanged books (mine for his) and we’ll be meeting again after we read them. I warned him that ufology takes a hit in Project Beta (at least a gullible segment of it) but he didn’t seem to mind. We’ll see after he finishes the book!
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 am
Craig,
Good line of thought. Didn’t your family live at Kwajelein for awhile? I seem to remember you writing about that.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:21 am
Greg: Some of my family moved to Culver City — and I’ve been there. I just want to clarify that where I saw the big black triangle was in the country-side — just farms and state parks and wildlife refuges and a “town store.” It’s in the St. Croix river valley, a national park. I’m not sure how the newspaper lady discovered it is part of a “military flight test corridor” but she certainly had several photos of other “UFOS” during a flap in the 1970s, when the cattle mutilation occurred as well. So the triangle I saw flew from the horizon, over a forest, over the neighbor’s BARN, over the top of the hill at my parents and then right over the tree on the north side of my parent’s yard and then over their garage — and off across the forest-farm-prairie towards the river valley.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Drew,
I still don’t see how that necessarily proves that the object was a military craft. although I agree with you that it was the most likely explanation.
How did Culver City come up?
April 15th, 2009 at 5:44 am
I was 7 or 8 before me and my brother witness ufo’s and aliens and other sightings. My father died in 1975 but it wasnt until 30 years later that it all started making sense. I learned that we live in Great Falls MT in 1967 and my father was a missle inspector for Boeing at The Malmstrom Air Force Base with access to top secreat information and the highest level security. My Father name was gerald Cabell not sure if we are related to Gen. Charles Cabell (project Blue book)but some how the Aliens took an interst in my Father and the Events I witness at the time could not confirm but now I can. I am in the process of writing my story. Something did happen at the missle silos that evening it not only affected our security but also the lives and the family of the people who were there and i happen be one of them. Maybe Bob Salas didnt see what happen, but i belive him.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
klove,
Very interesting info. It does follow a pattern of experiences by others, (i.e. witnesses and their families are often involved in other strange occurrences after an initial sighting.)