Malmstrom AFB Echo and Oscar Flight Missile Shutdowns

The 341st Strategic Missile Wing at Malmstrom AFB, Great Falls, Montana, ran Minuteman I missiles for Strategic Air Command. Launch officers sat 60 ft underground. They saw nothing of the surface. Everything came to them by radio or telephone from the security police up top.

March 16, 1967. 08:45. All ten missiles in Echo Flight lost strategic alert nearly simultaneously. A SAC message the next day recorded the loss of all ten missiles within ten seconds of each other for no apparent reason. It called the event cause for grave concern.

Walter Figel, Echo's deputy commander, told researcher Robert Hastings in 2008 that a guard radioed about a large round object hovering directly over one of the launch facilities as the missiles failed. The guard "was serious but I wasn't taking him seriously." In 2010 Figel wrote that he "saw no UFO" and "took the report as a joke." His commander, Eric Carlson, consistently denied any UFO report.

Robert Salas was 26. A first lieutenant. Deputy crew commander under Capt. Frederick Meiwald. First the security NCO reported lights. Salas thought it might be a joke. Then the NCO called back, agitated and distraught.

"The UFO had a red glow and appeared to be saucer shaped. He repeated that it had been immediately outside the front gate, hovering silently."

Then the missiles. "Immediately, our missiles began shutting down from 'alert' status to 'No-Go' status in rapid succession." A guard who approached the object was injured and evacuated by helicopter, Salas says. Meiwald later recalled a bright flying object at low level and a security team "scared to death." He remembered six to eight missiles going off alert.

Boeing engineers tested on site and in Seattle. Salas and Klotz write that the fault could only be reproduced by "directly introducing a 10 volt pulse onto a data line." Boeing engineer Robert J. Kaminski later wrote that the incident was reported as a UFO event, and that "We were also told that we were not to submit the final engineering report." The unit history, declassified around 2001, reads differently: "Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of the fault were disproven." On the night of March 24, sightings spread around Great Falls. Near Belt, sheriff's deputies were among those reporting a landing.

Skeptics say two separate events were blended in memory. Echo went down on March 16. The Belt flap came eight days later. Salas's own account has moved from Echo to November Flight to Oscar. Former Malmstrom launch officer Tim Hebert argues that only a noise pulse from the launch control center could hit all ten missiles. Brian Dunning points to a power transient. Robert Sheaffer suggests the orange-red object was Mars. In 2025, AARO officials told the Wall Street Journal the shutdown came from an electromagnetic pulse test. Former AARO deputy director Timothy Phillips described a cascading transformer failure instead. Salas rejects both.

Salas went public in 1996 and co-wrote Faded Giant with James Klotz. In 2010 he joined former Air Force officers at the National Press Club for the UFOs and Nukes press conference, which CNN streamed live. In 2023 he briefed AARO staff. The official answers still do not agree. The missiles, on the record, still went down.