Loring AFB Incursions and the 1975 Northern Tier Overflights

Loring Air Force Base sat at Limestone, in Aroostook County, Maine. It was a Strategic Air Command base. At its northeast corner lay the weapons storage area, the old Caribou Air Force Station. In late October 1975, something began to visit it by night.

Monday, October 27. 7:45 p.m. Staff Sgt. Danny K. Lewis of the 42nd Security Police Squadron saw an aircraft at about 300 feet near the north perimeter. It showed "a red navigation light and a white strobe light." On radar, Staff Sgt. James P. Sampley had an unknown return 10 to 13 miles east-northeast. The craft entered the perimeter, began to circle and "came to within 300 yards of the restricted nuclear storage area at a low altitude of 150 feet." Radio calls went out on every military and civilian band. None was answered. Later it broke away toward Grand Falls, New Brunswick.

Tuesday night it came back. Guards watched "an object with a flashing white light and an amber-colored light" hover, turn out its lights, then reappear "making jerky motions." Sgt. Steven Eichner, a B-52 crew chief, drove toward it with Sgt. R. Jones. About 300 feet in front of their truck, "about five feet in the air," was a reddish-orange "stretched-out football," about four car lengths long. No doors. No windows. No visible propellers or engines. "It was totally silent." The colors seemed to blend together, Eichner said, like "waves of heat rising off the desert floor."

On October 30, guards at Wurtsmith AFB in Michigan reported an unidentified helicopter with no lights hovering low over their weapons storage area. A KC-135 crew gave chase. "Each time we attempted to close on the object it would speed away from us," Capt. Myron Taylor stated. In Montana, Malmstrom missile crews reported a "large red to orange to yellow object" on November 7. The next night, height-finder radar logged seven returns and two F-106 interceptors were scrambled. Crews said the objects turned off their lights when the jets arrived and back on when they left. Minot and the Canadian radar station at Falconbridge, Ontario, followed on November 10 and 11.

Loring's wing commander asked two NORAD regions for fighter cover. Both refused. A Maine Army National Guard Huey flown by CWO Bernard Poulin searched low with its searchlight. "We never saw the craft," he recalled in 1982. Base radar tracked the helicopter, but "radar was not painting the object." The Joint Chiefs received regular updates through the National Military Command Center. One assessment judged that the intruder "has demonstrated a clear intent in the weapons storage area, is smart and a most capable aviator." A NORAD message dated November 11 linked all five sites.

The official record says "unidentified helicopter." In 1977 the Air Force conceded: "The helicopter assumption was based on the sound and light perceptions of the eyewitnesses." Eichner's silent object does not fit that label well. Aircrews were told the press would hear of a Canadian helicopter. Yet the Border Patrol said the one helicopter report it had was "too slow and too small." A later claim that it was a training drill has no primary source. No official finding ever identified the craft.

The documents came out through the Freedom of Information Act in the late 1970s. The New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post reported them in 1979. In 1984, Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood took the title of their book, Clear Intent, from that one line. One security policeman had served three tours in Vietnam. He "had never been as scared as he was those nights."