Missile Shutdowns

Whatever they are, they keep visiting the silos. Launch officers keep testifying.

Imagine you're sitting sixty feet underground in a launch control capsule in rural Montana. It's March 1967, the height of the Cold War, and your job is to sit at a console ready to turn keys that could end the world. You are one of the most carefully vetted humans on the planet. And then, one by one, your missiles start to die. So here's where it gets strange. This is the account given by former U.S. Air Force officer Robert Salas, and it centers on Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to fields of Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. Salas says that early one morning, security guards on the surface frantically called down to his capsule reporting a glowing red object hovering over the front gate. And while that was happening, Salas says, his missiles began going offline. Not one. Not two. According to his account, an entire flight, up to ten nuclear missiles, dropped into a 'No-Go' status, unable to launch, one after another, in a matter of seconds. He has stated this under oath and repeated it consistently for decades, including at that 2010 press conference you'll read about in the neighboring UFOs and Nukes file. Now, here's the part where we owe you the full picture, because this case is a perfect example of how a story can be real testimony and still be disputed. Salas is a real officer. He really was stationed at Malmstrom. And missiles really did go offline that spring, that part is not in question. What is in question is the cause. The U.S. Air Force's own engineering investigation at the time concluded that the missile failures were most likely caused by an electronic problem, a noise pulse traveling through the system, possibly linked to faults in the logic couplers, not by anything hovering in the sky. In other words, the USAF has a documented, terrestrial explanation on the record. So you have a genuine conflict of accounts. On one side, a credible eyewitness officer who says a glowing UFO was overhead at the precise moment his weapons failed, and who has never wavered. On the other side, the Air Force's technical finding that says the shutdowns were an internal electrical fault, with the reported light either coincidental or unrelated. There are even debates about the exact dates and which flight was affected, the kind of detail that matters enormously to investigators. But here's the honest truth, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. We cannot resolve this for you. We can't tell you Salas is mistaken, because he was there and we were not. And we can't tell you the Air Force is covering something up, because a noise-pulse failure is a real, documented engineering phenomenon. What we can do is put both accounts side by side and let them stand: the witness and the official record, disagreeing about what happened over a missile field in 1967. This single episode is the sharpest point of the larger pattern explored in UFOs and Nukes, the thread of strange lights appearing over our deadliest weapons. On our map, Missile Shutdowns sits out in the cold missile fields of Montana, U.S.A., one capsule, ten silent missiles, and a light nobody agreed on.