Malmstrom Air Force Base

Malmstrom Air Force Base (Malmstrom AFB; Great Falls, Montana) is one of three United States Air Force bases operating Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile wings, and is the most documented site of UAP-related nuclear launch inhibition events in the United States. On 16 March 1967, UFO incidents at Echo Flight caused the simultaneous shutdown of all ten Minuteman missiles under Robert Salas's command — an event Salas reported to the Air Force and later disclosed publicly.

1967 missile shutdown incidents

The 10 March and 16 March 1967 incidents at Oscar and Echo Flights respectively resulted in the confirmed shutdown of a combined 20 Minuteman missiles while UAP were reported overhead or near the launch facilities. Robert Salas wrote about these incidents in Faded Giant (2005). Both incidents were reported up the Air Force chain of command, and witnesses underwent debriefing and instructed to classify the reports. The Air Force has never offered a satisfactory technical explanation for the simultaneous shutdowns.

Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has named Malmstrom among the nuclear-weapons cases most in need of an official answer: retired Air Force officers have testified about what happened there, and Freedom of Information Act documents support their accounts, but the Air Force has never acknowledged the episodes and Congress has never put the question to it.

Vandenberg Air Force Base parallel incidents

Malmstrom is part of a broader pattern of UAP incursions at nuclear missile installations. Richard Barth, a former missile security guard at Vandenberg Air Force Base, described a comparable pattern of UAP "tag-alongs" observed tracking Atlas missile test launches in 1964, and a personal abduction experience at a Minuteman missile site guard shack. Barth described what his abductors communicated: "They needed to get the information on the site, the data out of the missiles in the missile."

Researcher Jesse Michels described Vandenberg as a comparable hotspot: "Vandenberg is definitely a hot spot. It's one of these places like Malmstrom Base in Montana, where throughout the years you have recurring patterns of UFO sightings."

Between 2003 and 2005, five separate UAP incidents occurred at Vandenberg, beginning on October 14, 2003, when Boeing contractors reported a massive glowing red square-shaped object over the base.

Declassified security incident report

A declassified security incident report from the 48th Missile Security Squadron at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota (a contemporaneous Minuteman base), documents an alarm activation and security violation at missile site K-9, approximately 20 miles southwest of Nisland, South Dakota, in November 1977. The report references unexplained intrusion events at launch facilities and the deployment of security response teams.

Later witness accounts

Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA officer who served as a missile crew commander at Malmstrom in the 1990s, reported witnessing a comparable incident during his tenure — multiple missile system shutdowns with a UAP component — for which the command post received no diagnostic follow-up from the chain of command, only acknowledgment of receipt.

Barth, who corresponded with Salas after coming forward, noted the significance of UAP non-intervention in nuclear conflict: "They're not gonna, you know, they're not gonna let us go to nuclear war, you know, come hell or high water."

References

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