I immediately went over to my commander who was taking a nap— we have a little cot down there for rest periods—and I was telling him about the telephone call we just received. As I was relating this to him our missiles started shutting down one by one. By shutting down, I mean they went into a "no-go" condition meaning they could not be launched. So we get bells and whistles—a red light no-go condition.
These weapons were Minuteman One missiles and were of course nuclear- tipped warhead missiles.
As they started shutting down, immediately he gets up and we both start querying the status board. We've got the ability to query and deter- mine what the cause of the shutdowns was. As I recall, most of them were guidance and control system failures. And then he started report- ing to the command post. In the meantime I called upstairs to find out what the status was of this object and the guard said, well, the object has left—it just left at high speed.
The Air Force did an extensive investigation of the entire incident and was not able to come up with a probable cause for the shutdowns. And I've got quite a few witnesses that will testify to that—we've got a couple of people who worked on the investigative team—and I've got correspondence from the man who actually organized the investigative team. There was no viable explanation for this [shutdown of multiple ICBMs]. Each missile is basically self-supporting. Most of them are powered by commercial power but each missile has its own power generator.
At our site anywhere from six to eight went down but they went down in rapid succession which again is an extremely rare happening. We rarely had more than one missile go down for any reason at all.
After I talked to my guard upstairs, my commander talked to the command post. When he finished talking to the command post he turned to me and said, "The same thing occurred at ECHO Flight." ECHO Flight is another squadron, I'd say probably 50 - 60 miles away from our location but they had the same sort of thing happen. They had UFOs that were hovering, not at the launch control facility but at the actual launch facilities where the missiles are located. They had some maintenance and security people out there at the time and they observed the UFOs at those sites. Now they lost all ten of their weapons—all ten.
It was the same morning. So that morning we lost anywhere from between 16 to 18 ICBMs at the same time UFOs were in the area and were observed by airmen. Those missiles were down the entire day because we've got testimony from Colonel Don Crawford, who relieved the crew at ECHO Flight and he was there when the missiles were being brought up to alert status and he said it took the whole day. So I'm assuming it took our missiles all day to be brought back up also.
I wrote up a report about this incident; it was in my log and I turned it in. When we got to the base we had to report to our squadron com- mander right away. And in that room with my squadron commander was a fellow from AFOSI (we had an Air Force Office of Special Investigations on the base). He was there in the office with the com- mander. He asked for my logs and he wanted a quick briefing although it seemed to me he knew pretty much what had happened already. But we gave him a quick briefing and then he asked us both to sign a non- disclosure agreement saying this was classified information- we were not to release this to anybody, and that was it. We couldn't talk; he told us we could not talk about this to anyone, including any of the other crews, our spouses, our family, even amongst each other.
I've got a copy of a telex which we received under FOIA coming from SAC headquarters and coming to Malstrom and other bases right after the morning that happened saying that this incident was of extreme concern to SAC headquarters because they couldn't explain it. Nobody could explain what happened. And yet we never got de-briefed. And we were cleared for very high classification because
these are nuclear weapons we're dealing with.
We did get the security incursion alarms at those sites when the mis- sile went down. That is unusual because usually when a missile went down for something like guidance failure, we wouldn't get security incursion alarms, which means a perimeter is breached, an object crossed the fence, or something broke the security alarm system that we had on the perimeter of the launch facility. I did send out guards to a couple of those facilities to investigate that.
The reason I think this story is very significant is because, going back to August of 1966 at Minot, ND, a very similar thing happened at one of the launch control facilities at Minot Air Force Base. They had the same kind of weapon system that we had—they had M-1 missiles. This [UFO] was observed on radar, there was some communication failure and the object was observed over the launch control facility.
That happened in August 1966 and that's a well-documented inci- dent. About a week prior to my incident, in March 1967, I've got a record of a call from one of the security guards who was out roaming looking at the launch facilities and saw an object very similar to what I just described over the launch facility.
Bob Kominski headed up the organization to look at all aspects of these shutdowns. Kominski relates to me in writing that at some point he was told by his boss that the Air Force said, "Stop the investigation; do no more on this and in addition do not write a final report." Again, this is very unusual especially in light of the fact that CINC-SAC headquarters was stating that this was of extreme importance to find out exactly what happened here. And yet, the head of the investigative team was told during the investigation to stop the investigation and not write a final report.
Professor Robert Jacobs: Lt. US Air Force
We sent the (UFO) film back down to the base and- I don't know exactly how long it was after the event, it might have been a day or two— I was called into Major Mansmann's office at the First Strategic Aerospace Division Headquarters. I walked into his office and they had a screen and a 16mm projector set up. There was a couch and Major Mansmann said, "Sit down." And there were two guys in gray suits, civilian clothes, which was fairly unusual. Major Mansmann said, "Watch this" and turned on the film projector. I watched the screen and there was the launch from the day or two before.
We watched the third stage burnout. And then on that telescope we could see the dummy warhead. It's flying along and into the frame came something else. It flew into the frame like and it shot a beam of light at the warhead.
Now remember, all this stuff is flying at several thousand miles an hour. So
this thing [UFO] fires a beam of light at the warhead, hits it and then it [the UFO] moves to the other side and fires another beam of light, then moves again and fires another beam of light, then goes down and fires another beam of light, and then flies out the way it came in. And the warhead tumbles out of space. The object, the points of light that we saw, the warhead and so forth, were traveling through subspace about 60 miles straight up. And they were going somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 to 14,000 miles an hour when this UFO caught up to them, flew in, flew around them, and flew back out.
Now, I saw that! I don't give a Goddamn what anybody else says about it. I saw that on film! I was there!
Now when the lights came on, Major Mansmann turned around looked at me and said, "Were you guys screwing around up there?" And I said, "No, sir." And he said, "What was that?" And I said, "It looks to me like we got a UFO." Now the thing that we saw, this object that flew in, was circular, was shaped like two saucers cupped together with a ping- pong ball on top. The beam of light came out of the ping-pong ball. That's what I saw on film.
Now Major Mansmann said to me after some discussion about it, you are never to speak of this again. As far as you are concerned, this never happened. And he said, "I don't need to emphasize the dire con- sequences of a security breach, do I?" I said, "No, sir." And he said, "Fine. This never happened." As I started for the door, he said, "Wait a minute." He said, "Years from now if you are ever forced by someone to talk about this, you are to tell them it was laser strikes, laser tracking strikes."