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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.
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The remaining bank of batteries were removed from the LCF on 10 October and replaced with new batteries on 14 October. The LCF was examined and found to be in operational status and was brought back to alert status on 15 October. The investigation of the incident could not discover the cause of the incident, but it was believed to be a freak incident. 91
MISSILE INCIDENTS - Echo Flight Testing
In direct relation to the Echo Flight incident as covered in the April - June 1967 History of the 341st SMW was the Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) testing conducted throughout the quarter. The EMP tests were conducted by SAMSO, later joined in the testing by the Boeing Company. The EMP tests by SAMSO and Boeing were to discover the weak spots in the different type of Minuteman configurations within the EMP field. Whenever a weak or faulty area was found, an ECP was to be initiated to correct the discrepancy, or eliminate it. $ ^{92} $
The EMP tests were conducted at LF Sierra-39 of the 564th SMS. The tests were scheduled to last until mid-January 1968, but could be extended if there were still apparent problem areas to investigate. The primary reason for the Boeing tests were to determine EMP affects on the Real Property Installed Equipment (RPIE) of the Minuteman sites. During the tests, various voltages of electricity were inserted into the equipment on the site to Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.