The Missile Shutdowns

Background

Malmstrom Air Force Base, outside Great Falls, Montana, was home in 1967 to the 341st Strategic Missile Wing and its Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles were grouped into flights of ten, each controlled by a two-officer crew in an underground launch control center. Security teams on the surface guarded the sites, and crews could only learn what happened above ground by phone or radio.

Robert Salas was then a young Air Force lieutenant serving as a deputy missile crew commander. He has said he signed a nondisclosure agreement after the incident he describes and did not speak publicly until 1996. His account later appeared in Faded Giant (2005), which he self-published with James Klotz, and in researcher Robert Hastings’ book UFOs and Nukes (2008).

What was reported

The documented event happened at about 8:45 a.m. on March 16, 1967, when all ten missiles in Echo Flight dropped off alert in quick succession. An Air Force message dated the next day, later declassified, said the ten missiles had lost strategic alert ‘within ten seconds of each other’ and called the lack of an obvious cause ‘cause for grave concern’.

Salas describes a separate incident at Oscar Flight. He has said a frightened guard phoned to report a glowing red or orange object hovering over the front gate, and that the missiles in his flight then went offline one after another. He has said he was ordered to sign a nondisclosure statement the day after the incident. His account of the date has varied; in Faded Giant he and Klotz placed the Oscar event ‘on or about’ March 24, eight days after Echo and a date on which UFOs were reported near Belt, Montana.

Investigations and official findings

The wing’s command history, released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2001, records the Echo shutdown and states that rumors of UFOs near Echo Flight ‘were disproven’; a mobile strike team checking another flight reported nothing unusual. The local power company, Fergus Electric, reported a fault at a substation serving the area, and investigators from the Air Force and Boeing examined whether a power transient or electronic noise could have tripped the missiles. According to a 1969 Air Force history of the missile program, tests at Malmstrom, at Ogden and at Boeing’s Seattle plant pointed to an electronic noise pulse similar to the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast. No Air Force record of a shutdown at Oscar Flight has surfaced.

Explanations and debate

Echo’s two launch officers, Capt. Eric Carlson and Lt. Walter Figel, have said no UFO was involved; Figel told an interviewer that Oscar flight ‘NEVER had any problems.’ Skeptics including Brian Dunning argue that Salas has honestly conflated the Echo failure with later rumors, and, as West has noted, some skeptical investigators think the red light may have been the planet Mars.

Salas and Hastings point to the timing of the guards’ reports and to statements from other former missile personnel. At a National Press Club event on September 27, 2010, Hastings said more than 120 former service members had told him of UFO sightings near nuclear sites. In June 2025 The Wall Street Journal reported that Pentagon investigators linked such accounts to secret Air Force tests of a device that simulated an electromagnetic pulse and could glow orange. Salas rejects the test explanation and published a rebuttal in the Ojai Valley News, while skeptics questioned whether such a test would have been run near live missiles.

Why it still matters

Malmstrom is the best-known of several claims that unidentified objects have interfered with nuclear weapons, a theme repeated at press conferences and in documentaries. Salas has carried the story to national television, including a 2008 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, where skeptic Michael Shermer said he did not think Salas was lying but that ‘we’re not always reliable observers.’ The Echo shutdown itself remains a well-documented reminder of how vulnerable early missile electronics were.