The Malmstrom AFB Incident (1967): The UFO That Shut Down Nuclear Missiles

On the morning of March 16, 1967, all ten Minuteman I missiles of Echo Flight at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, dropped off alert within seconds of one another. A full flight going down at once was unprecedented, and it is documented: the 341st Strategic Missile Wing's unit history records the shutdown and an investigation. Security personnel at the sites reported strange lights that morning, though the unit history does not connect the two.

Robert Salas, then a first lieutenant and deputy missile combat crew commander, has said since the 1990s that he was on duty underground at Oscar Flight, on a date he places at March 24, when a guard called down to report a glowing red object hovering over the front gate, and that his missiles then went into no-go status one after another. He has told the story to Congress, at the 2010 National Press Club "UFOs and Nukes" event, and in his own books, and other former officers have supported parts of it.

Boeing engineers investigated the Echo Flight shutdown at length and reproduced a plausible cause: an electrical noise pulse on the logic coupler could send the missiles into no-go simultaneously. They could not establish where such a pulse had come from. Researcher James Carlson, whose father commanded Echo Flight that morning, has argued forcefully that no UFO was involved and that Salas's Oscar Flight account is unsupported by records. Salas and researcher Robert Hastings maintain the documents were sanitized.

Malmstrom is the anchor case for the claim that UFOs take an interest in nuclear weapons, a pattern Hastings traced across dozens of bases and that later witnesses, including the Ellsworth airmen, fit into. The documented fact is a full flight of missiles failing at once; the disputed fact is whether a glowing object was overhead. Either way it is the case that put the "UFOs and nukes" question in front of Congress.