Minot AFB B-52 UFO Incident

In 1968, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota belonged to Strategic Air Command. It flew B-52H bombers and guarded the Minuteman missiles of the 91st Strategic Missile Wing. Thursday, October 24. The early hours. For over three hours, the missile field would fill with reports.

It began at about 2:15 am. A camper team at site O-6 radioed that they had seen "a large glowing object go down by some trees not far away." By 2:30, SSgt William Smith at Oscar-1 could see it too. Maintenance technicians Robert O'Connor and Lloyd Isley were driving to site N-7. O'Connor saw "a big ball of white-light" that later turned dim green, then dim amber. "I saw it raise up and start paralleling our truck going down the road," he said. When they turned out their headlights, it seemed to hover or stop. Isley was certain. "It just seemed to stay with us."

Around 3:30, a security team from N-1 watched it hover, move slowly, then speed up, always alternating in colour. Airman Joseph Jablonski saw smaller lights come off it. They looked like shooting stars. They were not. They were maneuvering. Then another object, exactly the same, appeared out of the East. Smith watched the light "separate in two parts and go in opposite directions and return and pass under each other."

Meanwhile, B-52H JAG 31 was coming home from a 10-hour training mission. Radar control asked the crew to watch for orange glows. The weather radar was picking something up too. Navigator Patrick McCaslin found a very strong return about 3 miles off the right wing, "as big or bigger than a KC-135." The bomber turned 180 degrees. The echo moved with it and ended 3 miles off the left wing. It descended as they descended. Then, in a single sweep, it was one mile away. "I don't know of anything that could go laterally in 3 seconds, 2 miles, and just stop," McCaslin said. In that moment, both UHF radios stopped transmitting. They worked again as soon as the echo disappeared. A camera above the scope caught 14 frames.

Later, circling to land, co-pilot Bradford Runyon and Maj. James Partin saw a light on the ground. Runyon described a dull red body, a "metallic cylinder, sort of like stainless steel or shiny aluminum protruding from the end," and a translucent crescent with green and yellow lights inside. He judged it about 200 by 100 by 50 feet. Partin called it "a miniature sun placed on the ground."

At 4:49 am, the alarms went off at Oscar-7. The gate stood open. An access door was unsecured. There were "no tracks, prints or impressions."

Lt Col Arthur Werlich led the base inquiry. He decided "almost 80 per cent were looking at the B-52." Yet he listed four things still unexplained: the radar echo, the radio loss, the matching air and ground sightings, and the break-in. At Project Blue Book, Lt Col Hector Quintanilla wrote that it was "most probably a plasma of the ball-lightning class." The final report of 13 November 1968 settled on the B-52, the star Sirius, plasma, and perhaps Vega or a light on the ground.

The crew were not convinced. "How could it be a star if you're looking at the ground?" McCaslin asked. In 2000, Runyon contacted the Center for UFO Studies. Thomas Tulien's Sign Oral History Project went on to interview the crew and ground witnesses. Tulien found that SAC's debriefings, the radarscope analysis and the weather radar confirmation never reached Blue Book. He argues plasma cannot explain a stable echo that keeps station, or radios failing at the same instant. Radar analyst Martin Shough tested the conventional explanations and found "none... convincing."