Nearly six decades after seminal Montana UFO incidents, air force vets brief Pentagon

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On the night of March 24, 1967, Robert Salas was a 26-year-old U.S. Air Force lieutenant cocooned 20 metres below the Montana prairie overseeing weaponry that could obliterate millions.

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Instead, without any warning, Salas said his menacing cluster of 10 Minutemen 1 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) burrowed beneath the Malmstrom Air Force base a five-hour drive southeast of Calgary seemed to be prey.

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“I felt we were under attack,” said Salas in a phone interview from his home near Ventura, Calif.

But the assailants, he said, weren’t any Cold War foes.

Soviet technology couldn’t have abruptly disabled the missiles’ guidance and control systems, which is what happened that night.

“You would have to have sent individual signals to each missile and within seconds, we had (no power),” said Salas, 82.

“This had never happened before and we have nothing that could do that now.”

Salas said what transpired above his concrete and steel bunker holds the answer, or at least one of them.

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Oval-shaped form with glowing light spotted

Just moments before the systems failure, a non-commissioned security officer on the surface made a series of increasingly frenzied phone calls to Salas, describing an oval-shaped form within pulsating, glowing orange-red lights hovering over the installation.

The NCO had also described the approach of the silent object which “was making unusual, controlled maneuvers, such as flying very fast, coming to a dead stop, then reversing course and making ninety-degree turns,” said Salas, who was locked into the subterranean capsule for security reasons.

“He was screaming in the phone, terrified . . . I told him to secure the facility at all costs.”

Responding to his orders, other security guards scrambled to other launch sites in the complex, only to see glowing objects hovering over them, said Salas.

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“It was reported they lost radio contact with the flight security controller and were very shaken by the experience,” he said.

Less than a minute after the pulsating object had arrived over his launch control centre, it had quickly departed, said the U.S. Air Force veteran.

The dumbfounded officer soon found himself in a meeting with his squadron commander and a special investigations officer and was told the incident didn’t involve any kind of air force exercise.

Non-disclosure agreements signed

Salas said he was also told to never speak of the incident as it was now classified.

“I signed a non-disclosure agreement . . . I didn’t start talking about it until 1996,” he said.

He recalls at that time in 1967 his colleague, Col. Fred Meiwald telling him there’d been an earlier, similar incident at Malmstrom but only discovered decades later it had occurred just eight days before his own experience.

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He also learned 10 ICBMs had been disabled under identical circumstances in September 1966 at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

“Within a span of six months, we lost 30 nuclear missiles to UFOs,” said Salas, who provided an air force document declassified in 1996 regarding the March 16 incident at Malmstrom, east of Great Falls.

The March 17, 1967 communication contains clear expressions of alarm and bewilderment.

“All ten missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom lost strat(egic) alert within ten seconds of each other,” it reads.

“The fact that no apparent reason for the loss of 10 missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern at this headquarters.”

Official discussion of UAPs facilitated as U.S. forms new office

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During his remaining two years on missile duty at Malmstrom, Salas said he never once heard the incidents mentioned but added he rebuffed security officer witnesses’ agitated pleas to discuss March 24 soon after it happened, out of fear of breaching an order.

But with the release in recent years of U.S. Navy videos of pilots’ encounters with unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAPs) and a trickle of other evidence, that taboo has thawed and last year, the U.S. Department of Defence created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which Salas describes as a conduit for whistleblowers.

“The mission of the AARO will be to synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and, as necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security,” states a July 20, 2022 press release.

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“This includes anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.”

On Feb. 15, Salas said for nearly two hours he briefed by phone an AARO official on his 1967 experience in what he called a watershed moment.

He’s convinced the military and government has covered up incidents it’s known of all along.

“It is a milestone for me because I have never told my story to a government office,” he said, adding the AARO official seemed receptive and appreciative.

“I went through all the details extensively . . . it shows they’re at least open to listening to witnesses and making an official record of what we say.”

Salas said he provided AARO with 22 pieces of documentary evidence including written notes and video.

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Affidavits signed by several other officers 13 years ago attest to the occurrences at Minot and in Montana, which extended over months and whose frequency even necessitated “special UFO briefings.”

Patrick McDonough was an airman 1st class doing surveying work at launch sites at Malmstrom in September 1966 when he says a brilliantly-lit craft 20 metres in diameter hovered about 100 metres above them.

“It seemed to have pulsating lights going around it and a white light from the centre looking down into the silo, there was no wind, no noise,” he told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in September 2010.

“From this dead stop, it shoots off to the east, just like ‘now you see it, now you don’t.’”

A police officer his team encountered soon after the sighting, he said, told them there had been more than 20 UFO sightings reports in the area that night.

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‘My mind was blown … I didn’t believe in UFOs when I was growing up’

The day before Salas spoke to AARO, U.S. Air Force veteran Dr. Bob Jacobs shared with the office his recollections of Sept. 14, 1964, the day he said he viewed film of a UAP shooting down a warhead off the coast of California.

“I’ve been trying for 40 years to get the government to listen to me and (the AARO official) said ‘now you are,’” said Jacobs of the nearly three-hour telephone briefing.

“I was not interrupted . . . he only asked me to not name names, and I didn’t.”

What he did tell AARO is how he operated an experimental photo project capturing the trajectory of an Atlas D using an extremely powerful telescope and high resolution camera.

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A few days after the launch at Vandenburg Air Force Base, Jacobs said he was summoned to a meeting attended by his military superior and two men in grey suits, and viewed a 16 mm copy of the original 35 mm film of the missile’s journey.

In it, a saucer-like craft appeared near the missile’s dummy nuclear warhead travelling up to 9,000 mph at the edge of space and hit it four times with some kind of beam, toppling it into the ocean below, he said.

“When I saw it, my mind was blown . . . I didn’t believe in UFOs when I was growing up,” said the retired first lieutenant from his home in southern Missouri.

“UFOs are real.”

At the meeting, the air force veteran said he was asked if he and his colleagues had doctored the film, a suggestion he vehemently denied.

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“I said ‘it looks like we’ve got a UFO’ and was told ‘you’re never to say that again, this never happened.’ ”

He’s convinced the original film and its print were destroyed, adding he was mysteriously harassed, even violently, after first publicly speaking about the episode in the early 1980s.

He’s lost teaching jobs for speaking out, he says, but doesn’t regret doing so.

Pentagon reviewing phenomenon dating back to 1945

When asked by Postmedia why the U.S. government is now interested in its veterans’ recollections and what will be done with them, a Pentagon spokeswoman said they’ve been directed to review the phenomenon from Jan. 1, 1945 to the present.

“This review includes oral history interviews, open source analysis, interviews with current and former U.S. government officials, review of national archives and records, and other relevant sources,” Susan Gough said in an email.

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“AARO is committed to pursuing all viable leads to ensure a thorough and comprehensive historical review.”

A heightened willingness to confront the phenomenon isn’t confined to the United States.

A year ago, after receiving decades of reports of drone or UAP sightings over Canadian nuclear power installations in several provinces, Manitoba MP Larry Maguire asked Deputy Minister of Natural Resources John Hannaford if he was aware of them. Hannaford told the standing committee on natural resources he wasn’t, but that “I can say overall security of our nuclear facilities is obviously of extraordinary importance.”

He also told the committee he’d “certainly take under advisement” Maguire’s suggestion that Atomic Energy of Canada consult with its American counterpart over its similar experiences with UAPs.

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In a subsequent letter to Hannaford, Maguire said encounters with UAPs “have been reported through normal Canadian Armed Forces channels. However, no information or investigative efforts or conclusions has ever been made public.”

In June 2021, then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan was reportedly briefed on the issue.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind’

As for the U.S. military videos that have gone viral in recent years, skeptics have dismissed them as optical illusions amplified by distance and other factors. A long-awaited report issued by the Pentagon in June 2021 was unable to give an explanation for many of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) encounters with its naval airmen over nearly two decades.

But both men said it’s telling that governments find they can’t ignore the issue and are adamant their experiences are proof earth is being visited.

“Those were extraterrestrial objects, there’s no doubt in my mind — because of what they did,” said Salas, who’d like to see the briefings be a catalyst for congressional hearings.

And Jacobs and Salas said the visitors’ focus on humanity’s nuclear capability is likely meant as a warning and one more relevant than ever given global tensions heightened by the war in Ukraine.

“It’s a shot across the bow,” said Jacobs.

BKaufman@postmedia.com

Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn