1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO incident
1967 nuclear missile shutdowns during UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana
47°29′1″N 109°20′57″W / 47.48361°N 109.34917°W / 47.48361; -109.34917 The Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO incident refers to a series of events at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in March 1967 in which unidentified flying objects were observed over Minuteman ICBM launch control facilities during the simultaneous, unexplained shutdown of multiple nuclear missiles — the most extensively documented case of UAP interference with nuclear weapons systems in U.S. military history. A 2025 Pentagon report attributed the shutdowns to a classified test of an electromagnetic pulse device; witnesses and investigators have disputed this, noting that the Boeing engineer who inspected the missiles found them technically flawless and that no EMP-consistent damage signature was present.
A Minuteman nuclear missile launch control center
Echo Flight — March 16, 1967
Map of the missile facilities operated by 341st Missile Wing. Echo Flight is labelled 'E'.
On March 16, 1967, at 0845, all ten Minuteman ICBMs in Echo Flight — operated by the 341st Missile Wing from an underground launch control facility between Hilger and Winifred — shut down simultaneously with no-go indications, losing strategic alert. No other Wing I configuration lost strategic alert at that time. The Air Force recorded the malfunction as the "Echo Flight Incident", with maintenance crews dispatched to the affected launch facilities. The Echo Flight commander was Eric Carlson; his deputy was Walt Figel, later retired as a lieutenant colonel. Security and maintenance crews stationed at the surface reported UFO sightings over the launch facilities during the shutdown. The official unit history, however, recorded that "rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of the fault were disproven" and that a mobile strike team "stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed." Skeptic Brian Dunning later characterised the shutdown as a commonplace commercial power failure, arguing that a civilian UFO report surfaced "in a town 50km away" eight days later and that there was "no rational reason to conclude one thing had anything to do with the other."
A Strategic Air Command telex obtained via FOIA took a different tone: "the fact that no apparent reason for the loss of ten missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters." The Boeing engineer sent to investigate, Bob Kaminski, told Dwynne Arneson — a USAF communications officer in Great Falls with top-secret SCI TK clearance — that "those missiles were perfect. Clean": no technical fault could be identified. Arneson also confirmed personally seeing a cryptographic message stating "that a UFO was seen near the missile silos and the missiles were deactivated." The missiles were brought back online within a day.
Oscar Flight — March 24–25, 1967
Eight days later, at the Oscar Flight Launch Control Facility, deputy missile combat crew commander Robert Salas received a call from his security guard reporting strange lights in the sky. A second call came in an intensified tone: the guard reported a bright glowing red oval-shaped object hovering outside the front gate with all guards outside with weapons drawn. Within minutes, between six and eight of Oscar Flight's missiles went into a no-go condition — rendered unlaunchable — one after another. Skeptic Robert Sheaffer proposed that the observed object was Mars, which was unusually bright and visible at the time, and argued that the Oscar and Echo events had been conflated — at Oscar a UFO he took to be Mars was seen but no missiles went offline, while at Echo missiles did go offline from an electronic glitch unrelated to any UFO.
Bob Jamison, the targeting officer sent to investigate Oscar Flight, testified that simultaneous failure of multiple missiles had no plausible mechanical explanation: "Very rarely does a missile malfunction and I don't think any much more rare would be two at the same time, but never ten." After reporting to the command post, Salas was informed that a very similar incident had already occurred at Echo Flight, "where UFOs were sighted over the launch facilities." A similar pattern of UFO sightings over missile silos preceding disruption had occurred at Minot Air Force Base in August 1966; Salas later obtained the complete report on that incident via FOIA.
Aftermath and disclosure
Salas first spoke publicly in an August 13, 1996, Great Falls Tribune article, where he described the sequence of events but denied being a "UFO junkie" and did not suggest extraterrestrial involvement, saying he wanted to solve the mystery and inviting anyone with information to contact him. The story received coverage in regional papers from 2000, the Missoula Independent in 2001, and the Missoulian in 2002. Air Force documents on the incident were released under FOIA in 2001 and made available through the Black Vault. At the 2001 Disclosure Project conference, Salas stated that approximately twelve witnesses could verify parts of the incident, including a retired full colonel. In a videotaped interview for the Disclosure Project, Salas stated that between sixteen and eighteen ICBMs had gone down while UFOs were in the area, that a senior Air Force officer had ordered the investigation halted with no final report to be written, and that many of the guards who reported the incident were afterward sent to Vietnam.
Salas authored Faded Giant in 2005, speculating the government was suppressing evidence of extraterrestrial interference with nuclear systems and was concealing the phenomenon in order to exploit the recovered technology for weapons development. In 2008, Robert Hastings, who compiled testimony from over 150 veterans at nuclear sites, published UFOs and Nukes, describing the Malmstrom case as the central pillar of his research. Salas defended the book in a letter to the Albuquerque Journal. That same year, Salas appeared on CNN alongside Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine and retired USAF Sergeant Jim Penniston; when asked if Salas was lying, Shermer replied "No, not at all" but cautioned that "we're not always reliable observers" and that one should "first make sure that it's not in it" before concluding an event was extraterrestrial. Penniston, who was not present at Malmstrom, described a separate encounter while a security supervisor at Bentwaters–Woodbridge, where he and other personnel sat with a landed UFO for some 45 minutes before it rose above him and shot into the sky. Mick West later wrote that the military investigation found no connection to any UFO sighting and that the story persisted largely due to Salas's promotional efforts. Dunning speculated that Salas was "honestly mistaken in piecing together certain memories" and had "erred on the side of confirmation bias."
On September 27, 2010, Salas appeared at the National Press Club alongside other military personnel reporting UAP incidents at nuclear facilities. He published Unidentified: The UFO Phenomenon in 2014 and UAPs and the Nuclear Puzzle in 2023. The Great Falls Tribune marked the incident's 50th anniversary in 2017.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon noted in 2021 that the case remained officially unacknowledged despite retired officers coming forward "in their retired uniforms... with their documentation": "This is the backbone of our nuclear deterrence strategy. It's really the crown jewels of our freedom and independence... if someone can come in there and turn these things off, that it's just shocking."
See also
References
This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "1967 Malmstrom UFO incident", as of October 21, 2025, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.