“This UFO Shut Down 10 Nukes!” - Air Force Officer Robert Salas

In March 1967, First Lieutenant Robert Salas was on duty as a missile launch officer at Oscar Flight, a Minuteman nuclear missile site near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, when a UFO incident caused all 10 missiles in his flight to go off alert status and become unlaunchable. The event is one of the most well-documented cases linking UFO activity to nuclear weapons and has become a central case in the broader pattern of UFO incursions at nuclear facilities worldwide.

• The incident began with a call from a topside security guard who reported strange lights in the sky performing impossible maneuvers — stopping midair, reversing course, making 90-degree turns with no engine noise. Salas initially dismissed the report, but minutes later the guard called back in a state of terror, reporting a huge red-orange pulsating light hovering over the facility, with guards pointing weapons at it. Before Salas could brief his commander, a launch alarm sounded and one missile after another went from green (ready) to red (no-go), shutting down all 10 missiles in sequence.

• The missiles showed guidance and control system failures. Boeing was brought in to investigate and found that a component called the logic coupler — essentially the onboard computer for the Minuteman I’s inertial guidance system — could theoretically be disrupted by an external electrical signal. However, Boeing could not explain how such a signal could have been introduced into all 10 missiles within seconds, given that the cables were triply shielded against electromagnetic interference. Boeing’s own report concluded the cause was external but admitted they could not determine the mechanism.

• A nearly identical incident had occurred just eight days earlier at Echo Flight, another missile flight at Malmstrom, where Lieutenant Walt Feele’s 10 missiles also went off alert during UFO sightings. Security personnel and maintenance crews on site reported objects hovering directly above the launch facilities. Between September 1966 and March 1967, a total of 30 missiles at Malmstrom were shut down during UFO activity.

Salas’s account is part of a much larger documented pattern of UFO interactions with nuclear weapons, a phenomenon that has been reported across decades and continents.

• Journalist Robert Hastings documented 167 cleared witnesses in his book UFOs and Nukes, establishing the link between UFOs and nuclear facilities as ubiquitous and widespread. Incidents have been reported at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and numerous sites in the former Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.

• At Malmstrom alone, there have been multiple additional incidents beyond 1967, including radar tracking of unknowns by NORAD in March 1967, a 1975 NORAD report of UFOs over missile bases, and a 1993 incident where a missile technician and others saw a UFO hovering around the base. A janitor at Malmstrom in 1967 was shown radar tracks of five unknown objects by a radar operator around the same time as Salas’s incident.

• The pattern extends beyond the US: Russian officials including a former Russian president and a Russian general have acknowledged UFO activity around nuclear sites. In Italy, radio engineer Guglielmo Marconi was reportedly assigned by Mussolini to investigate a 1933 crash in Magenta, Italy, with documentation suggesting the craft may have been transferred to Nazi Germany for study.

The military response to these incidents has consistently involved secrecy, non-disclosure agreements, and what Salas describes as a systematic cover-up by what he calls a “secrecy cabal.”

• Immediately after the Oscar Flight incident, Salas and his commander were ordered to sign non-disclosure agreements by an agent from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), despite already holding above-top-secret clearances. Salas was not told he was in violation of his NDA until 1996, when his former commander clarified they had been at Oscar Flight, not Echo Flight as Salas had believed.

• The Condon Commission (1966–1968), ostensibly an impartial scientific study of UFOs at the University of Colorado, was in fact a whitewash from the start. A memo from deputy director Robert Low stated the investigation would appear scientific but would find nothing. The Air Force’s Colonel Robert Hebert told Low the Air Force believed EMP from nuclear testing was the cause — a claim that was false, as no nuclear tests were conducted on the relevant dates. Base UFO officer Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Chase, who had written telegrams documenting the UFO activity, later denied everything to Condon investigator Roy Craig.

• Edward Condon himself had a controversial background: he had been removed from the Manhattan Project over security concerns, lost his Q clearance during the McCarthy era, and was accused in a letter to Congress by J. Edgar Hoover of being a Russian spy. His appointment to head the UFO study coincided with efforts to regain his security clearance, raising questions about his motives and independence.

In 2024, the Wall Street Journal published an article by journalist Joel Shectman attempting to discredit Salas’s account, claiming the missile shutdowns were caused by an experimental non-nuclear EMP device tested on the missiles.

• The article cited a specific EMP model that was not operational until 1971–1973, making its use in 1967 impossible. The article ignored the testimony of the guards who saw the UFO, the parallel Echo Flight incident, and all other documented cases of UFOs at Malmstrom. It also failed to explain how a device requiring a 60-foot test stand and days of setup could have been wheeled up to the base without anyone reporting it.

• Salas submitted a 1,200-word rebuttal listing 14 reasons the EMP explanation was impossible; the Wall Street Journal rejected it as too long, offering him only 270 words — roughly 5% the length of their original article. The article was reportedly based on information provided by Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), suggesting coordination between the Department of Defense and the Journal to discredit witnesses.

• Salas notes that the same EMP cover story was used by Colonel Hebert in 1967, demonstrating a consistent disinformation playbook spanning decades. He also reveals that a former cabinet-level official had submitted an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal expressing frustration about lack of civilian oversight of UFO programs, which was rejected — yet the Journal published the hit piece against him.

Salas believes the motivation for discrediting him and other witnesses is rooted in nuclear deterrence — the foundational doctrine of US national security.

• If an unknown force can disable nuclear weapons at will, the entire logic of nuclear deterrence collapses. The Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review states that “nuclear deterrence is the backbone of our national security.” Acknowledging that UFOs can neutralize nuclear missiles would require the Pentagon to explain what it is doing about the problem — and it has already said there is nothing it can do.

• The global nuclear landscape is increasingly dangerous: there are approximately 20,000 nuclear weapons worldwide, nine nuclear-armed nations, and growing tensions involving Iran-Israel, Pakistan-India, Russia-Ukraine, and the risk of Pakistan becoming a failed state with al-Qaeda presence in its northern territories. Salas argues that nuclear deterrence is unsustainable and that the phenomenon may represent an intervention by an advanced intelligence to push humanity toward abolishing nuclear weapons.

Salas’s personal trajectory reflects the broader experience of nuclear UFO witnesses: a career derailed by an event the military refuses to acknowledge, followed by decades of advocacy for transparency.

• He lost confidence in the integrity of the Air Force and abandoned his planned military career. Unlike some colleagues — such as Bob Jacobs, who faced career reprisals after his 1964 Vandenberg incident — Salas says he has not experienced direct backlash, possibly because he violated his NDA only unknowingly until 1996 and chose to continue speaking out.

• He has testified before Congress, given a two-and-a-half-hour briefing to AARO, and spoken at conferences worldwide. AARO complimented his documentation but declined to verify his account with the Air Force, citing a lack of cooperation from the military on other cases.

• Salas has also spoken with a trusted friend from the Air Force Academy who confided that he had flown a recovered craft of non-human origin, suggesting that back-engineering programs exist. He believes a well-organized, well-funded international secrecy cabal maintains control over recovered technology and that disclosure may only come during a crisis — perhaps a moment when nuclear weapons are about to be used and explicit intervention occurs, similar to what happened at Malmstrom in 1967.