UFOs - Leslie Kean [76]
Later that year, Congressman Leonard G. Wolf entered an “urgent warning” from Vice Admiral Hillenkoetter into the Congressional Record, stating that “certain dangers are linked with unidentified flying objects,” particularly since UFOs could cause accidental war if mistaken for Soviet weapons. He pointed out that General L. M. Chassin, NATO coordinator of Allied Air Services, warned that a global tragedy might occur. “If we persist in refusing to recognize the existence of the UFOs, we will end up, one fine day, by mistaking them for the guided missiles of an enemy—and the worst will be upon us,” he said. Based on a three-year study by the well-known National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) with which Hillenkoetter was associated, Rep. Wolf stated that all defense personnel “should be told that the UFOs are real and should be trained to distinguish them—by their characteristic speeds and maneuvers—from conventional planes and missiles.… The American people must be convinced, by documented facts, that the UFOs could not be Soviet machines.”6
Later, a different type of national security concern was registered that didn’t involve the Russians, but concerned the safety of our own military bases. Just two years before the Air Force told the public that UFOs were not a national security threat, an event occurred which some former military officers believe dramatically contradicts that conclusion, even though any intent—purposeful or directed action—on the part of the UFO remains impossible to determine.
On the morning of March 24, 1967, Air Force First Lieutenant Robert Salas, a missile launch officer, received a call from a frightened security guard reporting a glowing red, oval-shaped object hovering directly over the Oscar Flight Launch Control Center at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. With an “above Top Secret” clearance, Salas was stationed there as part of a team in charge of the missile sites and responsible for deploying the nuclear-tipped warhead missiles in the event of a war. Salas immediately went to wake up the crew commander, First Lieutenant Fred Meiwald, who was napping on his break. Then, within one minute of the phone call, the missiles started shutting down, one by one.
“They went into no-go while the UFO was overhead,” Salas says. “This means they were disabled, not launchable.” There were ten missiles at Oscar Flight, and Salas remembers losing all of them. The missiles were located five to ten miles from the control center where the UFO hovered, and were about a mile apart from one another with independent backup power sources. A week earlier, on the morning of March 16, 1967, about thirty-five miles away from Oscar Flight, UFOs had visited the Echo Flight facility as well, and all of its missiles went down, too. In total, twenty missiles were disabled within the span of a week.
A formerly classified Air Force telex states that “all ten missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom lost strat alert [strategic alert] within ten seconds of each other.… The fact that no apparent reason for the loss of ten missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters.”7 Salas learned from Boeing engineers years later that technicians checked every possible cause for the missile failures, but were not able to find any definitive explanation for what happened. At the time, it was suggested that the most likely cause would have been some kind of electromagnetic pulse directly injected into the equipment.8 Whatever force was involved had to penetrate sixty