1966 encounter prompts challenge: ‘Come on out and tell the truth’

MINOT, ND — On an early September morning in 1966, David Schindele tried to enjoy his morning coffee, but a news report caught his attention. Strange lights seen over Mohall, North Dakota.

The report disturbed him then as a lieutenant, a missileer and deputy commander overseeing the launch center controlling 10 nuclear-tipped Minuteman ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles, at Minot Air Force Base. He had heard of “flying saucers” a month before.

The Forum published a story about an August 25 sighting, featuring news from the

Saturday Evening Post in an article

entitled “Are Flying Saucers Real?” UFOs, officially called UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) by the military, had been spotted flying around Minot Air Force Base.

“An Air Force officer in charge of a North Dakota missile crew suddenly found that his radio transmissions were being interrupted by static. At the time, he was sheltered in a concrete capsule some 60 feet below the ground,” the article stated.

While the officer attempted to fix the problem, guards on the surface reported seeing a glowing-red UFO in the sky, rapidly descending and ascending, which was picked up on radar at 100,000 feet, the article continued.

Unsettled, Schindele, who regularly underwent rigorous testing and security clearances and later retired as a captain, drove to his post at the launch center called November flight, three miles west of Mohall.

“I did my required inspections and went in through the back door of the facility, like I normally do, and right away, the site manager greeted me and said, ‘Did you hear what happened overnight?’” Schindele told Forum News Service during a recent interview.

“I said, no, I really didn’t. He says, ‘Well, come with me.’ And he took me to the west-facing windows of the day room and he spread his arms out to show the breadth of this thing that they saw outside the security fence overnight,” Schindele said.

“This thing hovered above the ground and by the way he gestured with those arms I was guessing maybe 80 to 100 feet wide. He couldn’t really distinguish what this thing looked like except it had bright flashing lights,” Schindele said.

The hovering UFO stayed in place for a few minutes, then moved to the main gate on the north side.

“Everybody was there, the cook, the site manager, the guards and so forth, and they were all looking at this thing. Nobody wanted to go outside and approach this thing, they were scared to death. I could tell by the tones in their voices and the looks on their faces that it was an experience that they wish they didn’t have,” Schindele said.

Minutes later, the UFO vanished “in a flash,” Schindele said. “I was shaking, myself, to hear their stories and see the expressions on their faces.”

After Schindele’s commander finished with his debrief, they strapped on their .38 revolvers, and descended 60 feet to the control capsule, through two massive blast doors, where they would relieve the night crew and work their 24-hour shift.

“When we walked into the capsule, we looked at the launch control capsule and we saw all red lights … which indicated all missiles were off alert and were unlaunchable,” Schindele said.

“We’d never seen anything like that before,” said Schindele. “It was a real mystery. The technology that these things had was way, way beyond what we had. I knew this stuff was not of this world, and I held my tongue for 40 years.”

The conspiracy theories behind the Air Force’s investigations into extraterrestrial or unidentified phenomena, including Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, arguably began with the Roswell Incident of 1947. A flying disc was seen by many near Roswell, New Mexico. A local rancher, W.W. Brazel, who found the debris, turned out to be a weather balloon, investigators reported.

“New Mexico rancher is surprised at all the excitement created by his ‘disc’overy,” a headline in the Clovis News-Journal read.

For the next 80 years, however, the phenomena of otherworldly bright lights, “flying saucers” moving at incredible speeds, even abductions and experiences like the one Schindele experienced,

were wrapped in mystery and later stigmatized

as the Air Force and the

Central Intelligence Agency lied to the public

as they tried to explain the unexplainable, according to a 1997 New York Times news story.

Secrets piled up. Many who believed investigators were hiding the truth were denounced as mentally ill by leaders like the last chief officer of Project Blue Book, Lt. Col. Hector Quintanilla.

In the 1950s, news articles across the country reported that the Air Force claimed there was no such thing as “flying saucers” or extraterrestrial UFOs.

A 1964 report called “The UFO Evidence,” published

by National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena or NICAP, said its main goal was to conduct research on the topic and encouraged full reporting to the public.

Calling one faction who favored complete secrecy within the Air Force the “The Silence Group,” they published a scathing rebuke and claimed unidentified flying objects were real, rather than the result of the imagination.

“The U.S. Air Force is charged with the official investigation of UFOs, but has practiced an intolerable degree of secrecy keeping the public in the dark,” the report stated.

By 1969 when Project Blue Book was shut down, the Air Force had investigated more than 12,618 UFO sightings, concluding that 701 of the incidents were truly unexplainable,

according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation

and GODORT, or the Government Documents Round Table of the American Library Association.

The investigations led to one publicly-stated conclusion: “UFOs do not exist, and they’re harmless,” said Schindele, acknowledging that such statements have only led to public mistrust and more conspiracy theories. In recent years, the CIA, the FBI, the Air Force and the Navy have legitimized leaked photographs and declassified some reports, but whistleblowers like Schindele and others insist the truth is still hidden.

Schindele and his commanding officer were in shock. Nearly two decades after America — arguably the most powerful nation on earth that ended World War II with an atomic bomb with an explosive yield of about 15,000 tons of TNT over Hiroshima — they both now stood helpless before 10 lifeless nuclear missiles with an explosive yield of more than 1.2 million tons of dynamite.

“We signed over the missile site, and my commander and I took over 10 missiles that we couldn’t do anything with. We could query each missile. We’d push a button and it would talk to us. And each missile said: ‘guidance and control system malfunction.’ This was really, really mysterious because we had a slew of other kinds of errors that the missiles could talk to us about,” Schindele said.

“But to have each missile tell us this, it meant there’s a certain thing that malfunctioned in the guidance system of the missile,” Schindele said.

They wondered if the control center had been hit by an electromagnetic pulse — which can damage or destroy electronic devices — and accompanies a nuclear explosion, but there had been no detonation, and nothing else in the capsule except for the missiles were affected, Schindele said.

“So how could a special signal get from our launch control center to each missile? Really, we were just — we couldn’t figure it out,” Schindele said.

Eventually, circuit boards were replaced and the missiles were reset, Schindele said.

Schindele, now 84 years old, knew what he and his missileers witnessed was “not of this world,” but for decades he has been bothered by the fact that Air Force investigators never asked him what happened.

“The Air Force has never talked to me. I’m always looking behind my back. I always have been. Things have happened, however, that I’ve wondered about, especially with the phones and my computers,” Schindele said.

Unlike others who had witnessed similar phenomena, Schindele was not forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but was told never to discuss the phenomena with anyone, including fellow soldiers, his wife or anyone else.

He decided to speak out after a fellow soldier, Robert Salas, broke his silence about a similar encounter at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which was eerily similar to his own. Schindele

wrote a book about his experience entitled

“It Never Happened: US Air Force UFO Coverup Revealed,” and began speaking about his experience in the early 2000s.

Salas kept his silence for nearly 30 years, ending it in 1996 after the taboo of reporting UFOs thawed, and the Department of Defense now has a conduit for whistleblowers.

“There is no reason the Air Force can’t come out and admit that UFOs are real and that they’ve been here for a long time. That they’ve investigated this stuff because, first of all, they wanted to back engineer the stuff they’ve captured from Roswell forward, and they’ve got a lot of this stuff,” Schindele said.

“The CIA is heavily involved in this. Everybody knows they’ve been hiding this thing away. It was 58 years ago that I was involved in an incident, and my goodness, there are so many whistleblowers out there now. Come on out and tell the truth,” Schindele said before making a challenge to the Air Force.

“You can’t hold the secret anymore. They need to recognize how many people have been impacted by all of this and offer apologies to them. At least, honor them as patriotic Americans, which they really are. So many people have been thrown into the trash. If you want to get to the truth, get those NDAs dismissed,” Schindele said.

Declassified secret documents within Project Blue Book that Forum News Service found made no discoverable mentions of the 1966 incident that Schindele described, but other similar incidents across the Midwest occured later between the 1950s and 1968.

Large, round ships with a row of lights were landing

frequently at Allen Lund’s farm near Missoula, Montana, in 1964, scaring wild game like deer and bear away. “Every time the UFO is in the vicinity, their oil furnace lights itself … but strangest of all is the fact that their son … has told his parents of a man with whom he talks alone in the barn,” Project Blue Book reported.

Each time Lund’s son visited the man — whose name was unpronounceable — dogs would run into the house, the furnace would light itself and the television lost reception.

One of the most well known sightings of an anomalous phenomena occurred on August 27, 1979, when Marshall County Sheriff’s Deputy Val Johnson was struck by an unidentified flying object in his rust-colored squad car.

Johnson, who was on patrol near Warren, Minnesota, saw a bright light suddenly appear on State Highway 220, according to a news article published in the Minneapolis Star in 1979.

“One minute it was a mile and a half distant and the next minute it was right on top of me. It struck my vehicle. Everything got extremely, painfully bright. There was no object I could see at all. I heard the sound of breaking glass. And that’s the last I remember,” Johnson told the Minneapolis Star.

He woke up in a ditch 30 minutes later with burns around his eyes. The windshield and one headlight of his 1977 Ford LTD were smashed, and both radio antennas were bent sharply back. Strangely, his wristwatch and the dash clock were both 14 minutes slow.

The vehicle, dubbed the “UFO car,” is still on display at the Marshall County Historical Society Museum.