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This Black Vault release contains the Air Force's 2001 response from the 341st Space Wing FOIA office at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, to a request about the 16 March 1967 Echo Flight missile shutdown, with excerpts from 341st Strategic Missile Wing histories covering 1967 to early 1968. The histories say all ten Echo Flight launch facilities lost strategic alert almost simultaneously. Investigators could not find a logical cause and found rumors of UFOs near Echo Flight to be unfounded.
“Seattle”11 pages
The only possible means that could be identified by the team involved a situation in which a coupler self test command occurred along with a partial reset within the coupler. This could feasible cause a VRSA 9 and 12 indication. This was also quite remote for all 10 couplers would have to have been partially reset in the same manner. $ ^{8 0} $
Further studies of this problem will be accomplished at the contractors facility since a full engineering investigation is not feasible at this level. (U)
In the researching of other possibilities, weather was ruled out as a contributing factor in the incident. 81 (U)
A. check with Communication maintenance verified that there was no unusual activity with EWO-1 or EWO-2 at the time of the incident. (U)
Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of fault were disproven. A Mobile Strike Team, which had checked all November Flight's LFs on the morning of 16 March 67, were questioned and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed. (U)
The 801st Radar Squadron, Malmstrom AFB, gave a negative report on any radar or atmospheric interference problems related to Echo Flight. $ ^{8 4} $ (U) Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.