A former Minuteman commander at an underground nuclear silo with launch facility secrets blasted Pentagon officials for not mentioning a 1967 incident where an alleged UFO reportedly shut down ten nuclear missiles.
Robert Salas, who served in 1967 as on-duty commander of the underground launch facility at Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, alleged that on March 24 of that year an airman standing watch witnessed “a star begin to zig-zag across the sky” before it drew near to “hover outside the front gate.”
Klaxons and warning lights underground sounded to warn that the missiles had become inactive. Salas claimed, adding, “Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a ‘No-Go’ condition,” according to the Daily Mail.
“The fact that no apparent reason for the loss of ten missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters,” a Strategic Air Command document stated at the time of the incident. “We must have an in-depth analysis to determine cause and corrective action and we must know as quickly as possible what the impact is to the fleet, if any.”
Salas claimed he told his superiors at the time as well as the government’s UFO task force in 2021.
But on Tuesday, when the first congressional hearing regarding UFOs in roughly 50 years was held, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, asked about the incident, replied, “That data is not within the holdings of the UAP [unidentified aerial phenomena] task force… I have heard stories; I have not seen the official data on that.”
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie also was questioned by the House Intelligence Committee.
Last October at a press conference, Salas played a recording of a phone call between himself and the Echo Flight Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander Colonel Walter Figel regarding the 1967 incident. Figel asserted that security guards informed him of a “UFO hovering over the site.”
Prior to that event, Salas claimed, he sent his evidence to the Department of Defense Inspector General examining the work of the government’s UFO unit.
“I sent the Inspector General my information, documents, my story in some detail, and of course invited them specifically to attend my press conference in D.C.,” Salas said. “’After the conference, I contacted somebody who was in touch with the UAP Task Force. The response I got was: ‘We already know your story so unless you’ve got something new, we don’t need to hear what you’ve got to say.’”
“That’s why it shocked me that Mr. Moultrie didn’t seem to know anything about it – or if he did, he was wanting to avoid the topic,” he concluded.
“The FOIA documents describe the results of an official investigation into the incident, which concluded it ‘could not discover the cause’ and chalked it up as a ‘freak incident,’” the Daily Mail, which interviewed Salas, reported.