On a March morning in 1967, all ten nuclear missiles in one flight at a Montana Air Force base dropped off alert within seconds of each other, and the engineers sent to find out why could not determine a cause.
Malmstrom Air Force Base, outside Great Falls, Montana, was home to the 341st Strategic Missile Wing and its Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each underground launch control center, crewed by two officers, commanded a “flight” of ten missiles in silos spread across the plains.
Two events from that month are at the heart of this case. The first, at Echo Flight on March 16, 1967, is documented in the Air Force’s own records. The second, at a neighboring flight called Oscar, rests on the later recollections of men who served there, and it is disputed. Both have come to be associated with reports of unidentified objects over the missile sites.
This NPI Preliminary Review sets out what the records say, what the witnesses have said, the strongest counterarguments, and why the case still matters to anyone concerned with nuclear security.
Sources: 341st Strategic Missile Wing unit history excerpts, released under FOIA by Malmstrom AFB (2001), via The Black Vault · affidavits of Robert Salas and Robert Jamison (2010)
The investigation teams at Malmstrom were unable to determine a logical cause for the incident.
341st Strategic Missile Wing unit history1967 (declassified excerpt released under FOIA)
Echo Flight: What the Record Shows
The Air Force wrote down exactly what happened at Echo Flight. It just never fully explained why.
According to the wing’s unit history, “On 16 March 1967 at 0845, all sites in Echo (E) Flight” shut down with “No-Go” indications. “All LFs in E Flight lost strategic alert nearly simultaneously.” The crew estimated the losses happened within 10 to 40 seconds. No other flight in the wing was affected. The missiles were later returned to alert “without any LF equipment replacement.”
Strategic Air Command called in a team of engineers from the Air Force’s Ogden Air Materiel Area, Boeing, Autonetics and the 15th Air Force. Their first conclusion is in the record: the team was “unable to determine a logical cause for the incident.”
Testing continued for months. At Boeing, engineers found that a very short electrical pulse, 30 microseconds long, injected into one line of the missile’s logic coupler, shut the system down in seven of ten tries. Their best candidate for the source of such a pulse was a failed power-line transformer in the Echo Flight area. But field tests of that theory were “essentially negative,” and the history concludes only that the cause appeared to be “of the EMP or electrostatic nature.” The same history notes a smaller shutdown at Alpha Flight in December 1966, when three missiles went down.
Sources: 341st SMW unit history, Jan. to June 1967, pp. 33 to 45 (OCR text checked against the FOIA scan)
The UFO Question in the Record
The Air Force’s history addresses UFOs directly, in one line.
“Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of fault were disproven,” the unit history says. As evidence, it cites a Mobile Strike Team that “had checked all November Flight’s LFs on the morning of 16 March 67,” who “were questioned and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed,” and a radar squadron that reported nothing unusual.
That line deserves a careful reading. It confirms that UFO reports were circulating at the time. And the team it cites had been checking November Flight, a neighboring flight, not Echo.
The Echo launch crew have not agreed with each other since. The deputy commander that morning, Lt. Walter Figel, has told researchers that a security team reported seeing an object over one of the launch facilities, though he has also said he does not personally believe UFOs caused the shutdown. The crew commander, Eric Carlson, has said there were no UFO reports at all.
Sources: 341st SMW unit history, p. 39 · Robert Hastings, interview notes with Figel (2008) and Carlson · Skeptoid (2022), quoting Figel and Carlson
Oscar Flight: The Account of Robert Salas
The best-known story from Malmstrom comes from a missile officer who was underground and saw nothing himself, and who says so.
In March 1967, Robert Salas was a first lieutenant and deputy missile combat crew commander in the 490th Strategic Missile Squadron. In a sworn affidavit in 2010, he described a night on duty at the Oscar Flight launch control center that he dates to “on or about March 24th, 1967.”
His flight security controller called down to report lights in the sky “making unusual maneuvers.” Minutes later, Salas says, the controller called back, “highly agitated,” to report “a large glowing, pulsating red oval shaped object hovering over the front gate.” As Salas woke his commander, Lt. Fred Meiwald, the console began to show faults: “The indicators for all or nearly all ten missiles showed as red-colored FAULT lights which meant that the missiles were disabled.” After debriefing, Salas says, an officer from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations told the crew the matter was classified and not to discuss it.
A second officer, Lt. Robert Jamison, a missile targeting team commander, said in a 2010 affidavit that his team was held back that night until UFO reports from the field had ceased, and that a noncommissioned officer told him guards at the affected flight “had in fact reported a UFO moments before the missiles malfunctioned.”
The Air Force’s own files show that the night of March 24 was a busy one. A message from the wing to Air Force headquarters that night reported that “NUMEROUS REPORTS WERE RECEIVED BY MAELSTROM AFB AGENCIES OF UFO SIGHTINGS IN THE GREAT FALLS, MONTANA AREA,” including a reported landing near the town of Belt, investigated by sheriff’s deputies.
Sources: Affidavit of Robert L. Salas (Sept. 2010) · Affidavit of Robert C. Jamison (Sept. 2010) · Project Blue Book file, Belt, Montana, March 24, 1967 (via NICAP) · Great Falls Tribune, March 25 to 29, 1967
Skepticism and Alternative Explanations
The Oscar Flight story has real problems, and NPI will not paper over them.
No paper trail for Oscar. Echo Flight is documented. Oscar Flight is not: no released record describes missiles failing there. In July 1967, replying to questions from the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division about the Belt sightings, the base’s UFO officer, Lt. Col. Lewis Chase, wrote: “This office has no knowledge of equipment malfunctions and abnormalities in equipment during the period of reported UFO sightings.”
An account that moved. Salas first went public in 1996. Over the years his accounts placed him at Echo Flight and then at November Flight before he settled on Oscar, on the recollection of his commander, Meiwald. He saw nothing himself; what he reports is what the security controller told him by phone. Skeptics, including former missile officers, argue that a real memory has been joined to the wrong event.
A technical cause. The Air Force record points to an electrical pulse inside the Minuteman I system, a vulnerability engineers were able to reproduce.
The 2025 “EMP test” report. In June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources, that the shutdown had been caused by a classified test of electromagnetic pulse effects. No supporting document has been released. The 1967 records themselves describe engineers searching for the source of a pulse, not a test that produced one, and in 1967 Lt. Col. Chase wrote that “no validity can be established to the statement that a classified government experiment was in progress.”
What is still open. The one event that is beyond dispute, ten missiles going down nearly at once, was never conclusively explained in the released record, and the Air Force’s dismissal of UFO reports rests on questioning a team that had been at a different flight. Officers from different units at Malmstrom have said in sworn statements that UFO reports were tied to missile failures that month. Their accounts can be challenged on dates and details, but no official finding on them has ever been published.
Sources: Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase letter, July 3, 1967 (Blue Book file, via NICAP) · Great Falls Tribune, Aug. 13, 1996 · Robert Hastings, “UFOs and Nukes” (2008) · James Carlson, “Echo Flights of Fantasy” · Robert Sheaffer · Skeptoid (2022) · Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2025)
“I Am Bringing It to Your Attention”
At a House Intelligence subcommittee hearing in May 2022, the first open congressional hearing on UFOs in more than fifty years, Rep. Mike Gallagher raised Malmstrom directly: reports that “ten of our nuclear ICBMs were rendered inoperable” while “a glowing red orb was observed overhead.” He was careful: “I am not commenting on the accuracy of this.”
Scott Bray, then the deputy director of naval intelligence, answered: “That data is not within the holdings of the UAP Task Force,” and “I have heard stories. I have not seen the official data on that.” Asked whether anyone was looking at it, Bray said, “We have not looked at that incident.” When Under Secretary Ronald Moultrie said the department would look at it if it were officially brought to their attention, Gallagher replied: “I am bringing it to your attention.”
Source: Official transcript, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation, May 17, 2022
Why Malmstrom Matters
Robert Salas has spent nearly three decades asking the government to examine what happened. In November 2024, after the House Oversight hearing on UAPs, he spoke at a New Paradigm Institute gathering on Capitol Hill. “We are being very, very foolish in holding these weapons of massive, massive destruction,” he told the crowd.
Whatever happened at Oscar Flight, the record at Echo Flight is not in dispute: ten nuclear missiles went off alert within seconds, the engineers could not find a definite cause, and the official file dismissed UFO reports with a single line. Fifty-five years later, the head of the Pentagon’s UFO task force told Congress it had never looked at the incident. When reports of unidentified objects near nuclear weapons go unexamined for half a century, the problem is not only what happened in 1967. It is that no one in government was required to find out. That is what the UAP Disclosure Act is for.
Further Reading
- 341st Strategic Missile Wing unit history excerpts (FOIA release, 2001), The Black Vault
- Affidavits of Robert Salas and Robert Jamison (2010), DocumentCloud
- Project Blue Book file, Belt, Montana, March 24, 1967 (NICAP)
- Robert Salas and James Klotz, Faded Giant (2005)
- Robert Hastings, UFOs and Nukes (2008)
- Brian Dunning, “The Day the UFO Deactivated the Nukes,” Skeptoid, July 26, 2022
Citizens for Disclosure
A member of Congress had to ask, on the record, before anyone in the Pentagon would even say they hadn’t looked. Citizens for Disclosure is NPI’s national volunteer network, and our members are the reason questions like that get asked: free to join, no donation required, and our team will help you find your place in it.
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