By Robert L. Hastings
© Copyright 2008 - 2013
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Of all the interviews I’ve conducted with former or retired ICBM launch officers over the past three decades, this was perhaps the most disturbing. According to the source, David H. Schuur, a UFO had apparently activated the launch sequence in most of his Minuteman missiles.In August 2007, Schuur told me, “I saw your request for information in the [June 2007] Association of Air Force Missileers Newsletter. I was involved in a UFO incident at Minot AFB in the mid-1960s. I had read your earlier article [in the September 2002 AAFM Newsletter] but was hesitant to respond.” I asked Schuur why he had been hesitant. He replied, “Well, we were basically told, way back when, that it was classified information and, you know, it didn’t happen and don’t discuss it. I guess I was still operating on that idea when I saw your first article.”
Schuur had obviously had a change of heart. He continued, “Anyway, I was a Minuteman missile crewmember in the 455th/91st Strategic Missile Wing at Minot from December 1963 through November 1967. I was a 1st Lieutenant during that period and the deputy commander that night. Since the incident occurred some 40 years ago, my memories are a bit foggy but, based on who my commander was at the time, I would say it occurred between July 1965 and July 1967.”
I asked Schuur if he could narrow the time-frame during which the incident occurred, by associating it with another event. He replied, “Not really, but my sense is that the incident occurred toward the end of my duty in the [missile] field, so it was probably during 1966, or ’67. I was pulling alert in the Echo [Launch Control] Capsule and was at the console at the time, probably early in the morning when the commander was sleeping. I know I was at Echo because that’s where I pulled almost all of my alert duty. My crew commander at the time has died. He was a Lieutenant Colonel at Minot, in his 50s—he was in the reserves, an old Korea veteran, who was recalled to duty in the early 1960s.”
“As far as the incident, here’s my best recollection of it: Alpha capsule, which was east of us, reported on PAS—the Primary Alerting System—that their security personnel were observing a large, bright object hovering over some of their missile sites. It was moving from missile to missile. I think the Alpha missile crew also reported that they were receiving ‘spurious indicators’ on their missile control console, but I’m not certain about that. I know that a few minutes later our capsule had spurious indicators—anomalous readings—from some of our missiles.”
I asked Schuur to explain PAS. He said, “It was an open line between SAC headquarters and the wing command posts. There was a speaker in each launch capsule and when the command posts issued a directive, or whatever, we were able to hear it. When Alpha had their UFO sightings, they alerted the command post, at which time the command post called SAC headquarters. So, when the report of the sightings went out, we all heard it on PAS.”
Schuur continued, “But it wasn’t just Alpha and Echo. Over the next hour or so—I don’t recall exactly how long it was—all of the flights reported that their [Security Alert Teams] were observing a UFO near their facilities. The path of the object could be followed as it passed over each flight area by the reports on the PAS. The object moved over the entire wing from the southeast to the northwest, following the layout of the wing.”
Schuur elaborated, “All of them—Bravo Flight, Charlie, Delta, right on down the line to Oscar—were reporting sightings of this object. Minot’s missile field is laid out like the letter ‘C’. Alpha is located southeast of the base, and the other flights—Bravo, Charlie and so forth—were south, southwest, west, northwest, then north of Minot. Oscar, the last flight, is at the top of the ‘C’, north of the base. The object—as far as I know, it was only one object—came across Alpha Flight, then moved all the way around the flights and ended up at Oscar. We could hear that on PAS. At Echo, it didn’t come close to the Launch Control Facility, it just visited the LFs (silos), then passed onto the next flight.”
“As far as our flight, Echo, a few minutes after hearing the report from Alpha, I received a call from topside security that a large bright light—actually, a large, bright object would be more accurate—was in the sky, to the east of the launch control facility. When the guard called down, he may have used the term ‘UFO’ but I don’t recall. He didn’t describe it’s shape or altitude because it was too far away. It never got close enough to the LCF to see any detail. At its closest, it was two, three, maybe four miles away from us, near one of the missile sites.”
Schuur continued, “However, when the object passed over our flight, we started receiving many spurious indications on our console. The object was apparently sending some kind of signals into each missile. Not every missile got checked [out] by the object, but there were several that did. Maybe six, seven, or eight. Maybe all ten got checked, but I don’t think so. As this thing was passing over each missile site, we would start getting erratic indications on that particular missile. After a few seconds, everything reset back to normal. But then the next missile showed spurious indicators, so the object had apparently moved on to that one, and did the same thing to it. Then on to the next one, and so on. It was as if the object was scanning each missile, one by one. The Inner Security and Outer Security [alarms were triggered] but we got those all the time, for one reason or another. However, on this particular night, we had to activate the ‘Inhibit’ switch because we got ‘Launch in Progress’ indicators! After a few minutes, the UFO passed to the northwest of us and all indicators reset to normal.”
I wanted to be certain about what I had just been told. I asked Schuur, “So, if you get a Launch in Progress indicator, does that mean the launch sequence has been triggered—that the missile is preparing to launch?” Schuur replied, “That means the missile has received a launch signal. When that happens, we get an indication in the capsule that a launch command has been received by that missile. If that happens, without proper authority, you flip what’s called an “Inhibit” switch, to delay the launch for a given period of time. If an Inhibit command comes in from another launch capsule, that shuts down the launch totally. But if that second command doesn’t come in, the missile will wait for a specified period of time and then launch automatically at the end of that expired period—theoretically. Of course, that night, we had all kinds of other indicators coming on from each missile so, in that situation, the launch probably would have aborted itself. I honestly don’t know.”
I asked Schuur if the Launch in Progress indicator had ever been triggered on any other occasion, either before or after the UFO incident, while he was on alert duty. He replied, “No, never.”
I asked Schuur if he had heard about missile maintenance teams having to replace components or whole systems in the affected missiles—the ones that generated the spurious readings. He replied, “No, if that happened, I never heard about it.”
Schuur said, “Upon returning to the base the next day, my commander and I were met by the operations officer. He just said, ‘Nothing happened, nothing to discuss, goodbye.’ Our logs and tapes were turned in. Every capsule had a 24-hour tape that, as I recall, recorded the communications that went over the PAS system, so all the reports would have been on that tape. But we were essentially told that nothing had happened that night and to discuss it no further. It was a non-event. We were never debriefed, by OSI or anyone else. We just went home. Most of the returning missile crews drove back to the base from their facilities, so they all arrived at different times. There was no group debriefing that I know of. I never heard another thing about the incident.”
I asked Schuur, “I know that you were given no feedback from your superiors, but what is your personal assessment of the event?” He replied, “Oh, I think something was up there, uh, scanning the missiles, seeing what was going on. Some kind of a scanning process.” I asked Schuur whether he thought the launch activation had been incidental or deliberate. He seemed surprised by my question and said, “I think that the scanning just set it off. It set all kinds of things off, we were getting all sorts of indicators. There were some kind of signals being sent [from the UFO] to the missile that inadvertently triggered the launch activation, but I don’t think it was deliberate. I hope not! That would have been—.” Schuur didn’t finish this sentence. His voice broke and he heaved a deep sigh. Apparently, the thought that those aboard the UFO might have deliberately attempted to launch his nuclear missiles that night had caused him to pause—and probably shudder—over 40 years later.
I obviously accept Schuur’s report as credible, but am of course attempting to locate other former members of his squadron who are willing to corroborate it. As Schuur candidly admitted, after reading my first article in the September 2002 AAFM newsletter, he waited some five years before approaching me. It was only after my second published request for information from former/retired USAF missileers, that he decided to unburden himself. This hesitant response is not atypical. Many of my former missile launch officer sources have not readily or easily divulged their UFO experiences to me, for one reason or another.
Importantly, to my knowledge, Schuur’s testimony represents the only credible report on record of a UFO temporarily activating a U.S. nuclear missile. However, there is one other reliable report of such an activation—in the Soviet Union. That incident will be discussed at length in a later chapter.
* From the book UFOs and Nukes by Robert HastingsNote-Below are comments made By "James Carlson," son of Captain Eric Carlson, member of the "Echo-Flight Missile Combat Crew"; a complete rejoinder to Mr Carlson's charges can be found here:
* Available only at www.ufohastings.com (after July 18, 2008)
Did UFOs Cause the Shutdown of ICBMs at Malmstrom AFB, in March 1967?
See Also:
UFO Witness Over Air Force Base Speaks!
Expert Discusses UFOs, Students Still Skeptical
SHARE YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE
~~BOOK SALE~~
I'm reposting this from a website forum (http://unexplainedmysteries.com) where I debated several posters on this issue and then the following was posted for clarification. This is very important information on this issue:
ReplyDeleteYou state here: "Captain Robert Salas -- Airforce base, Montana 1971 Minuteman Missiles sees red glow, oval hovering outside gate and losses 6 to 8 missiles -- confirmed by retired colonel. Echo-flight also lost 10 weapons with a UFO -- confirmed by Captain Eric Carlson and Lt. Colonal Walt Feigel with FOIA documents from Airforce stating UFOs. (again top secret aircraft -- big deal). SAC Headquarters telexes the same information."
CAPT Eric Carlson is my father and he never confirmed anything regarding the UFO sighting referred to above (it was in 1967, by the way). You should know also that Robert Salas is a liar, confirmed as such many times in the past.
Salas' account states that my father and First Lieutenant Walt Figel, the Echo-Flight Missile Combat Crew, were below ground in the E-Flight Launch Control Center (LCC) or capsule during the incident, and that during the early morning hours, more than one report came in from security patrols and maintenance crews that UFOs were in the area. A UFO was supposedly reported directly above one of the E-Flight launch facilities. These sightings supposedly occurred at the same time the missiles went into "off-alert" status. In other words, the UFOs were supposedly the cause of the entire flight of ten ICBMs going offline. All of their missiles reported a "No-Go" condition – i.e., they became inoperable, apparently due to a Guidance and Control (G&C) System fault. Although declassified documents support the assertion that there was a missile line failure throughout the E-Flight complex, no documentation supports the story told here of UFOs having anything whatsoever to do with the failure. True believers see this as “proof” that the government is hiding the actual facts of the March 16, 1967 incident. It’s apparently far more reasonable to believe that the government is lying about UFOs, than to believe that Jim Klotz and Robert Salas – who actually made some money off of this smelly butt – might have lied about UFOs being involved in a national security incident 30 years earlier. Since the publication of their article, the motivation to maintain this series of half-truths and lies has escalated: Salas and Klotz have now published a book on the incident titled Faded Giant. Contrary to accepted probabilities, the book is being sold as "non-fiction".
I can assure you that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened that Thursday morning, March 16, 1967 in the E-Flight Launch Control Center. There was a computer malfunction, but given the quality of computers used in 1967 – even state of the art computers -- this was hardly a rare occurrence. There was an investigation, but this was standard operating procedure, and again was nothing new. Everything else is totally false, from the UFOs on down.
There was a security breach, one that actually explains Don Crawford’s tale in which he tells a security guard that ‘“We no longer record those kinds of reports,” indicating he didn’t want to hear about the UFO.’ Security called in to report that a bear had been seen, not a UFO, and it was scratching itself on an alarmed fence. The security crew was told to shoot at it, to get it go away, since nobody wanted the alarms going off all night but this wasn’t given as permission, as Crawford asserts, since the security guards didn’t need permission to fire their weapons. There wouldn’t be much point giving security guards weapons if they had to get permission every time they needed to use them.
Crawford’s story notwithstanding, security breaches were rare. Computer failures, however, were not. And when the computers failed, the missiles tended to go offline. That's why mobile crews were always part of the watch structure.
Security Alert Teams were often dispatched from Echo in those days, because they provided tier one security for the missiles. There were, however, no UFOs seen by anybody concerned, and had Figel received such a report from one of the mobile security crews and not informed the strike teams – or my father, who was in charge during the watch – as all the above article asserts, he would have been arrested. That didn't happen, however, and my father, being the watch Captain, is absolutely certain that no such report was ever made. Searches were made, but no record or log entry was ever uncovered This wasn’t due to a conspiracy. Nothing was found because nothing was there.
Captain Don Crawford's crew relieved the Echo Flight crew later that morning, and his statement many years later that both Carlson and Figel were "still visibly shaken by what had occurred" is also a lie, one that he has since routinely told whenever he can get the ear of the press. The fact that "missiles had been lost to our deterrent forces," and had remained out of service “for an entire day" is irrelevant – as I said, silo, computer, and power losses were common; they were also cause for investigation, but investigations were also common. Declassified documents support this, and in act the command history states that a "walk-thru inspection of the HF Hardened Antennas at Malmstrom was conducted during February by Boeing and SATAF personnel. The antennas were already equipped in the LFs but were not in working order. The walk-thru inspection had an average of 40 discrepencies per site." This was only one month before the supposed UFO incident that Klotz and Salas discuss above.
The men and women who gave so much of their time and ability to protect America from any and all imaginable threats were under a lot of pressure to develop a state of the art defense system, and were in the unenviable position of having to deploy such systems before they were perfected, or in many cases, even completed. In 1967, upgrading of live, operable systems was the norm. Failure of operational systems was common, and to blame such failure on the presence of a UFO is absolutely ridiculous. It is a good way to get attention, though, and there are a lot of people out there who like to get attention. These people tend to start reckless rumors; such rumors were even mentioned in the unclassified command history: "Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of fault were disproven. A Mobile Strike Team, which had checked all November Flight's LFs on the morning of 16 March 67, were questioned and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed.” Please note that originally, Salas told everyone that he was on duty March 16, 1967 in the November Flight Launch Control Center (LCC), not Oscar-Flight as he now admits. November was closest to Echo Flight, where the missile failures occurred, and it was at November Flight – as indicated in the above noted history – where UFO rumors centered. Oscar-Flight, being 20 miles away, wasn’t even mentioned. UFO reports were never logged and no investigation of UFO sightings by Air Force or civil personnel was ever conducted.
Some years ago, my father was asked to appear on a television show with Mr. Robert Salas, and those who requested this intimated that some money could be made out of the situation. I'm proud to say that my father has a lot more integrity than some of the other parties involved and didn't even consider appearing. Mr. Robert Salas was the Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander at the Oscar Flight during the morning hours of 16 March 1967. He contends that a security NCO at the front gate called him to report a UFO maneuvering above the silos, although there are no records of this. He's also responsible for a lot of the dissemination of this abortion of an "eyewitness" account, and contends that the reported electrical problems at the Echo Flight LCC – where my father was on watch – were somehow linked to the UFO maneuvering above the silos of the Oscar Flight LCC twenty miles away. It’s almost as if someone in an area of classified authority and legal trust was looking about for an incident of some sort that was reported with which to link an outlandish tale of UFO interference with national defense interests. Ideally, such a tale would have been far more effective had this hypothetical manipulator been able to convince my father to play along. But a statement from Captain Don Crawford that the Echo Flight crew was "still visibly shaken by what had occurred," as well as a description from him of an undated, unreferenced UFO sighting by security personnel that was never entered into a watch log or investigated by any military or civil authority would also tend to lessen any impact from the absence of corroborating data.
Retired Air Force colonel Bill Coleman – the Air Force's chief public relations officer during the early 1970s – has stated that in his opinion, upon reviewing the case, the absence of any records whatsoever supporting Robert Salas’ contention is probably due to the fact that Salas was rattled by a routine SAC shakedown. "SAC was famous for running all kinds of tests to challenge security systems – they did it all the time," adding that it "could easily have been a test created by the SAC commander to neutralize the weapons site to gauge the response measures. These are the kinds of things SAC does routinely. This captain should've known it was a test. Either that, or he's lying about it."
Mr. Robert Salas states that although the Air Force conducted a thorough investigation of these supposed UFO sightings and the defense shutdowns, no cause could be determined, although he does theorize that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of the kind created by an atomic weapon's blast may be the culprit. His account, however, isn't exactly thorough. To be accurate, no cause for the outages could be determined by the investigators at a "field" level – in other words, they couldn't find an exact cause through the testing of live, operational equipment without bringing all of the systems down for a complete check. They couldn't do this while still retaining 24-7 defense capabilities for reasons I've already stated: any work, even component upgrading, for the most part had to be completed on live, operable systems. This tends to limit conclusions during trouble-shooting trials. The initial investigation report, in fact, states that "Further studies of this problem will be accomplished at the contractors [sic] facility since a full engineering investigation is not feasible at this level."
The investigators did, however, eventually complete a "full engineering investigation" at the contractor's facility. My father recalls a technical publication of many hundreds of pages detailing this and other computer failures. It was a requirement that such a publication be written to prevent such failures happening in the future. He told me that his recollections are that the failure that night was due to a power surge in the guidance and control system – a common enough incident even today. In fact, the civil and military investigating teams determined that by introducing a 10 volt pulse onto a data line leading into the logic coupler, they were able repeat the shutdown effects 80% of the time. To say, therefore, that no explanation could be found for the failures is arrogant and foolish, when anyone who takes the time to look into the matter can easily figure out the truth of what actually went on. Salas says that such a pulse or "noise" occurring in the field and getting inside the shielded missile system equipment was impossible, but that too is technically incorrect, since the computers running everything to do with the missiles naturally had a power source that could be traced and studied easily enough to inject a 10 volt pulse into the logic coupler as the investigating team did. Such voltage spikes in the electric potential in a given circuit are typically caused by lightning strikes, power outages, tripped circuit breakers, short circuits, and power transitions in other large equipment on the same power line. In this case, the emergency generators kept tripping on and off, which is indicative of power losses within the system.
So, what do we call it when a ten-volt pulse is introduced into a data system? We call it a power surge; surge protectors of the kind we can now pick up for $30.00 at Walmart hadn't yet been introduced into the U.S. economical system, and surges happened a lot, even in shielded systems. Even today, shielding is never 100% efficient, as any electrical engineer can tell you. In fact, computers in general circa 1967 weren't exactly as sophisticated as they are today. The processing capability I have in my living room is more than NASA used to put a man on the moon, so when these screwballs use the technical reports to indicate that the missile failures were the result of a UFO contact, they're more insulting than they are convincing.
I guess one of the more annoying characteristics of modern man is that he tends to believe everything he reads, and that's a definite problem for anybody who prefers to limit disinformation before it creates a hot-air windstorm through the social synapses of our national counter-culture. f***ers like these need public humiliation, but instead our TV time in 30 minute increments puts them on the air, and pays them to repeat their irrelevant loads of gibberish, until suddenly there are new stars in America.
I just wish they'd keep my family out of it.
Regards,
James Carlson
Dear Mr. Carlson,
ReplyDeleteHere is the response from Mr. Hastings:
Earlier this week I gave Frank Warren permission to post my interview with former Minuteman missile launch officer David Schuur, who told me that a UFO had temporarily activated several of his missiles at Minot AFB one night in the mid-1960s.
[David Schuur was talking about an incident at MINOT AFB's Echo Flight, not Malmstrom AFB's Echo Flight.]
Mr. Schuur is only one of several dozen former or retired USAF "missileers" and missile security police who have confirmed ongoing UFO activity at ICBM sites. In fact, nearly 100 Air Force veterans have described their own experiences for me, most of which are published in my book, UFOs and Nukes, which will be available at my website, ufohastings.com after July 18th. Two of those veterans--both missile officers--will appear with me on the Larry King show on that date.
Regarding Mr. Carlson's claims that UFOs were not involved in the Echo Flight shutdowns on March 16, 1967, two individuals who were directly involved in the missile restarts say otherwise.
Henry "Hank" Barlow was part of an Electro-Mechanical Team (EMT) who told me in part,
"I arrived at Malmstrom in October 1966 and left in November 1967. I was on Electro-Mechanical Team 24 at the time [the Echo Flight shutdown] happened. We had to go out to Mike-1 for about four or five days. We had to stay out there and cover the sites. The day we were supposed to return [to base,] my team chief called Job Control to see if we could come in because it was really starting to snow. It was really miserable out, windy and all. Job Control said, ‘Yeah, come on in, there’s nothing going on, everything seems okay.’ So we packed up and started back to the base.
Then Job Control called us on the radio and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem here, part of Echo Flight has shut down, so we want you to go to the nearest site.’ I think that was Echo-6, but I’m not sure. Anyway, somewhere around that area. We checked VRSA and there was nothing on it. [That] was a unit in each launch facility, with something like 19 or 20 channels on it. [Actually, VRSA or Voice Reporting Signal Assembly had 23 channels, one for each problem area.] If the missile went down for any reason, or if there was some other problem, Job Control back at Malmstrom would know about it, know what is was, from the kind of signal it sent. But when we got to the site, there was nothing on [VRSA] to indicate the reason for the missile shutting down. That in itself was unusual. I had never seen that before.
So Job Control said, do a start-up, which takes about four hours. After you initiate the startup, you can back out of there and leave because its automatic after a certain point. Usually, if there was nothing else going on, we would stay at the site to make sure everything was working fine. But that night, Job Control said go to the next site, whatever that was. So we did that, and [restarted] three or four missiles before going back to [Echo-1]. Of all ten missiles that went down, only one wouldn’t come back up, but that was due to something that was going to [fail] anyway, like a Logic Coupler Drawer, or something like that. But none of the missiles had anything on VRSA.
[When we got back to Echo-1] we heard what happened. At Echo-2, there was a team in there earlier that afternoon that could not get the security [telemetry] to set-up, through the parabolic antenna or the soft support building or something like that. So, they put an Air Police team out there, in a camper, two guys. Anyway, one of the guys went out to take a leak, and he noticed that it wasn’t snowing over top of his head. The perimeter lights were on and he could see the snow coming down all around him so he looked up and saw a ring of lights right over top of him. He was scared stiff, so he went back to the camper and woke up his team partner.
When this other guy came out, he had a camera with him, which they weren’t suppose to have, but guys would do stuff like that. By then this thing had moved off the perimeter fence and he took pictures of it. [When the security team was debriefed back at the base,] the Air Force confiscated the camera and film. I was told all of this back at Echo-1. We had passed our ‘timelines’ because we had worked 16 hours, or something like that, and could not go back to the base so we had to go back to Echo. [During that era, maintenance teams were left out in the field for four to five days, working a maximum of 16 hours per day—the timeline. If a team got close to reaching that limit, it was sent to the nearest Launch Control Facility for Remain Over Night, or RON status.] When we got back there, there was brass all over the place. They were from Offutt AFB—SAC Headquarters—they had brought them in. There were just a lot of high-ranking officers there."
SO, MR. CARLSON, ARE YOU GOING TO CALL MR. BARLOW A "LIAR" TOO?
Regarding the second individual to confirm UFO involvement in the Echo Flight shutdowns, another researcher, Jim Klotz, has interviewed Henry Psolka, who was on a Combat Targeting Team at Malmstrom AFB in 1967. A partial transcript of Klotz' conversation with Psolka follows:
HP: ...We were in the barracks one day, I think it was on a weekend or so, and it was like in March, I remember snow outside, and somebody came and said, “Hey! A UFO just strafed the flight line!’ We all went outside to see and there was nothing there, you know so, but maybe a day went by and we were scheduled for a dispatch and all of a sudden we got called for the Section. Now Major Ingold was in charge of the Targeting Section
JK: OK, Major Ingold?
HP: I-n-g-o-l-d, Major Ingold, OK?
JK: Yep.
HP: He was a real nice guy...anyway, we got called to the Section and Captain Harrison briefed us and he said, 'We have to go out to Echo Flight,' he said, 'there’s been a shutdown and they think the UFOs shut it down.' 'Wow,' we said, 'the UFOs!'...
Psolka then describes going out to an Echo missile site and reports what he learned from the VRSA trouble-shooting system, which IDs the type of error causing the shutdown:
HP: OK, so we read this out: ‘Due to overvoltage.’ Now this is what we figured happened because we hit three sites that day, well, two sites one day, we RONed [remained overnight] at Echo Zero [he means Echo-1, the LCF] and the next morning, we went out again to do another site. We figured as these UFOs flew over, they induced a voltage in the underground cables and the computer saw this and it didn’t know what it was seeing because it saw probably a massive amount of voltage not current now, voltage, static electricity, voltage and it went into G&C No-Go and shut itself down so it wouldn’t launch, it wouldn’t have any problems. So, that’s what we got when we ran that maintenance tape, then we had to run the targeting tape because the targeting was all gone out of all of them. It was like they lost their memory on the targeting."
SO, MR. CARLSON, ARE YOU GOING TO CALL MR. PSOLKA A "LIAR" TOO?
I have forwarded your posted comments to Mr. Salas, whom you earlier called a liar, and he will undoubtedly respond to your statements about him at some point.
--Robert Hastings
David Schuur's account does sound like a SAC shakedown / aptitude test. Throw some random craziness at the Launch Control Capsule crews, and see how they react. Judging by the fact that Schuur admits the "incident occurred toward the end of my duty in the [missile] field", and that he still believes it was real, I submit that it was one test he failed rather badly.
ReplyDeleteDear Mr. Hastings,
ReplyDeleteYou've asked me via this forum whether I would call these "witnesses" you've dug up liars.
Yes. I would. Definitely.
If you check the historical records, you'll find that it did not snow on March 16 through March 22, and had not snowed for at least a week prior
to these "eyewitness" reports you seem to place so much stock in. Mr. Barlow states that it was beginning to snow badly. How? So, yeah -- he's
a liar; I suppose it's possible that he simply remembered wrong, but if that's the case, why would anybody trust anything he says? Lying or
senile? You choose.
As for Mr. Psolka, who gives a damn what he says? He never actually SAW any UFOs, by his own admission. He does state that he supposes "these
UFOs flew over, they induced a voltage in the underground cables" which shut the missiles down. As I've already explained (see above) "the civil
and military investigating teams determined that by introducing a 10 volt pulse onto a data line leading into the logic coupler, they were able
repeat the shutdown effects 80% of the time." So you can believe UFOs "induced a voltage in the underground cables" or you can believe that
there was simply a common little power surge. As for me, I think it's a lot more likely that they had a power surge -- one that Mr. Psolka
confirms nicely.
I would think that simply for the sake of accuracy, you would have checked into their stories before believing that everything they said was
gospel. But apparently you'd rather believe that flying saucers regularly induce power surges, while ignoring the fact that most power surges --
even today -- are caused by a thousand far more common electrical events.
You guys believe without questioning anything, a quality that is more typical of fools than researchers. It's no wonder people question your
conclusions -- they're ridiculous, sloppy, and misinformed.
Most sincerely,
James Carlson
P.S. -- I still haven't heard from Mr. Salas. Maybe you can send him an update, hmmm?
Quick little addendum, here: The discussion I wrote above was originally published a year or so ago -- a fact that was established at the beginning by "Great Galactic Ghoul", who states "I'm reposting this from a website forum (http://unexplainedmysteries.com) where I debated several posters on this issue and then the following was posted for clarification." I'm very pleased he forwarded this discussion to you -- any intelligent review of the facts is always welcome. I just want Mr. Hastings to know that the next time he queries such a discussion, he should remember to let those directly involved in the discussion (in this case, me) know that such questions are being asked. He'll get a response much sooner, I assure you. Unfortunately, people like Hastings often tend to ask open ended questions to the "luminescent aether", and when these questions are not answered by the "luminescent aether", their arrogance leads them to claim that "I asked, and they refused to answer. What's with that?" Now I do not know how Mr. Hastings reacted to my apparent silence, but I feel that some response from me is nonetheless necessary: Please understand, Mr. Hastings, that I'll answer your questions any day of the week if I know you've asked them. There isn't a whole lot I can do, however, if you hide your light under a bushel.
ReplyDeleteSincerely,
James Carlson
Dear Mr. Hastings,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to have taken exceptional offense at my calling Robert Salas a liar, even to the extent of notifying him of my opinions. In any case, I thought I should tell you why I am convinced that the man is a liar -- a bad liar.
(1) Mr. Robert Salas states that although the Air Force conducted a thorough investigation of these supposed UFO sightings and the defense shutdowns, no cause could be determined, although he does theorize that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of the kind created by an atomic weapon's blast may be the culprit.
Wrong. The investigators completed a "full engineering investigation" at the contractor's facility. It was a requirement that such an investigation be made in order to prevent such failures happening in the future. In this particular case, both civil and military investigating teams determined that by introducing a 10 volt pulse onto a data line leading into the logic coupler, they were able repeat the shutdown effects 80% of the time. To say, therefore, that no explanation could be found for the failures is arrogant and foolish, when anyone who takes the time to look into the matter can easily figure out the truth of what actually went on.
(2) Salas says that such a pulse or "noise" occurring in the field and getting inside the shielded missile system equipment was impossible.
Wrong. The computers running everything to do with the missiles naturally had a power source that could be traced and studied easily enough to inject a 10 volt pulse into the logic coupler as the investigating team did. Such voltage spikes in the electric potential in a given circuit are typically caused by lightning strikes, power outages, tripped circuit breakers, short circuits, and power transitions in other large equipment on the same power line. In this case, the emergency generators kept tripping on and off, which is indicative of power losses within the system.
(3) In the late 1960's, there were published rumors of UFO activity at November Flight, and when Robert Salas first wrote up his little story for publication, he said that he worked at November Flight LLC. Please note that this is nowhere near Echo Flight where my Dad worked, and where the missile systems were shut down due to that 10 volt pulse we've already mentioned.
The rumors of UFO activity at November Flight were even published in the Command History. Interviews conducted at the time show, however, that even these rumors had no basis whatsoever in fact. The existence of these rumors concerning November Flight LLC may be why Salas wanted people to think he had worked there, not realizing that someone might actually remember that he had never worked at November Flight. Salas worked at Oscar Flight -- and you'll note that nothing ever happened at Oscar Flight whatsoever.
I find it hard to believe that he doesn't remember what missile launch system he worked at, so I conclude that he purposefully lied about in order to make his story sound more like eyewitness testimony, which it isn't. He was at Oscar Flight, and there is testimony to support that fact.
Salas comes around 25 years later, possibly thinking nobody will remember him from the original crews, and writes up some story saying "hey, guys, those UFO's at November Flight were real -- I saw them when I worked there that night the missiles went offline at Echo Flight!" Someone who reads this comes back and says, "you weren't there -- you never worked November Flight -- you were at Oscar Flight. And nothing ever happened at Oscar Flight."
(4) Now Salas has nothing, because he was caught in a lie. He was actually at Oscar Flight -- 20 miles away from Echo Flight, so the missiles going offline can't be attested to, and nowhere near November Flight, so he can't even attest to the UFO rumors there. And keep in mind that those rumors were immediately discounted by eyewitnesses who said nothing happened there either. So what does Salas do to try and maintain his UFO agenda and rescue the shredded remnants of his credibility? He gets inventive. The following is directly quoted from Salas' write-up of the incident some twenty-five years later:
Outside, above the subterranean LCC capsule, it was a typical clear, cold Montana night sky; there were a few inches of snow on the ground. Where we were, there were no city lights to detract from the spectacular array of stars, and it was not uncommon to see shooting stars. Montana isn’t called “Big Sky Country” for no reason, and Airmen on duty topside probably spent some of their time outside looking up at the stars.
It was one of those airmen who first saw what at first appeared to be a star begin to zig-zag across the sky. Then he saw another light do the same thing, and this time it was larger and closer. He asked his Flight Security Controller, (FSC, the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) in charge of Launch Control Center site security), to come and take a look. They both stood there watching the lights streak directly above them, stop, change directions at high speed and return overhead. The NCO ran into the building and phoned me at my station in the underground capsule. He reported to me that they had been seeing lights making strange maneuvers over the facility, and that they weren't aircraft. I replied: "Great. You just keep watching them and let me know if they get any closer."
I did not take this report seriously and directed him to report back if anything more significant happened. At the time, I believed this first call to be a joke. Still, that sort of behavior was definitely out of character for air security policemen whose communications with us were usually very professional.
A few minutes later, the security NCO called again. This time he was clearly frightened and was shouting his words:
"Sir, there's one hovering outside the front gate!"
"One what?"
"A UFO! It's just sitting there. We're all just looking at it. What do you want us to do?"
"What? What does it look like?"
"I can't really describe it. It's glowing red. What are we supposed to do?"
"Make sure the site is secure and I'll phone the Command Post."
"Sir, I have to go now, one of the guys just got injured."
Before I could ask about the injury, he was off the line. I immediately went over to my commander, Lt. Fred Meiwald, who was on a scheduled sleep period . I woke him and began to brief him about the phone calls and what was going on topside. In the middle of this conversation, we both heard the first alarm klaxon resound through the confined space of the capsule, and both immediately looked over at the panel of annunciator lights at the Commander's station. A 'No-Go' light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of our missile sites. Fred jumped up to query the system to determine the cause of the problem. Before he could do so, another alarm went off at another site, then another and another simultaneously. Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a 'No-Go' (inoperable) condition.
After reporting this incident to the Command Post, I phoned my security guard. He said that the man who had approached the UFO had not been injured seriously but was being evacuated by helicopter to the base. Once topside, I spoke directly with the security guard about the UFOs. He added that 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.
We sent a security patrol to check our LFs after the shutdown, and they reported sighting another UFO during that patrol. They also lost radio contact with our site immediately after reporting the UFO.
When we were relieved by our scheduled replacement crew later that morning. The missiles had still not been brought on line by on-site maintenance teams.
Again, UFOs had been sighted by security personnel at or about the time Minuteman Strategic missiles shutdown.
The only problem with Salas' inventive little story is there are no log entries, investigation reports, medical records, security logs, watch command logs, eyewitness reports, or even newspaper articles to support ANYTHING in the above statement. There aren't any witness names that can be checked, or investigation records. There are lots of records available to reference the Echo Flight missiles going down, and there are even records to attest to UFO rumors at November Flight, where Salas first claimed to work, but absolutely NOTHING supporting events of any type at Oscar Flight, where he actually worked. Nothing...
(5) Around this time, some guys came nosing around to interview my Dad regarding March 16, 1967, and he tells them that nothing had happened, no UFOs, and the missiles going offline were fully investigated -- no big deal, right? Then Salas contacts Don Crawford, the Captain who relieved my father the next day -- well AFTER anything that may have happened -- and Crawford spices the account up a bit by saying my Dad and the Deputy Crew Commander were "still visibly shaken," and that the missiles were inoperable for the entire following day (not surprising, given that an investigation was still in progress, but he makes it sound like the UFOs knocked our missiles out for the full day; they didn't -- we kept them off for an investigation; there's little doubt that they could have been brought back up without incident after a system reboot).
Now at Echo Flight, where the missiles went offline and where my father had the watch that night as Crew Commander, there were no UFO reports and no rumors. My father isn't going along with this little folk tale, so Salas tells us that it was the Deputy Crew Commander who actually spoke with security, and that security told him there was a UFO screwing around over the missiles when they went offline.
I know that's a lie, because the Deputy Crew Commander never mentioned anything like that to my Dad, the Crew Commander, which he would have done since he was required to. In addition, everybody on the surface was interviewed for the original investigation the next day due to the missiles going offline, and all of them said the same thing: that nothing strange had happened. This was all recorded in logs at the time, and was also published at a later date upon declassification.
What Salas had was a bunch of lies, and Don Crawford, since he couldn't get my Dad to sign on with this ridiculous load of crap. You'd think Don Crawford wouldn't add much, since he wasn't even on duty when everything supposedly happened. This is what Crawford added to the mix:
It was during this same period, according to Col. Don Crawford (USAF ret.), that a two person SAT, assigned to Echo Flight, was performing a routine check of the missile launch facilities a few miles north of Lewistown, Montana. As they approached one of the launch facilities, an astonishing sight caused the driver to slam on his brakes. Stunned in amazement, they watched as, about 300 feet ahead, a very large glowing object hovered silently directly over the launch facility. One of them picked up his VHF hand microphone and called then Captain Don Crawford who was the DMCCC on duty that evening.
“Sir, you wouldn’t believe what I’m looking at,” he said.
He described what they were seeing. Crawford didn’t believe him at first but the young airman insisted he was telling the truth, his voice revealing his emotional state. Eventually Crawford took him seriously enough to call the Command Post to report it. The officer on duty at the Command Post refused to accept the report and simply stated, “We no longer record those kinds of reports,” indicating he didn’t want to hear about the UFO. Crawford, unsure of what to tell his shaken security guard, decided to give the guard his permission to fire his weapon at the object if it seemed hostile.
“Thanks, sir, but I really don’t think it would do any good.”
A few seconds later the object silently flew away.
There were sightings in the area before and after the missile shutdown incidents by military personnel and civilians.
Once again -- no dates, no names, no verification -- NOTHING. But it's this ridiculous bit of testimony that puts UFOs at Echo Flight -- nothing else.
It’s almost as if someone in an area of classified authority and legal trust was looking about for an incident of some sort that was reported with which to link an outlandish tale of UFO interference with national defense interests. That's what Robert Salas and Don Crawford did. They took a past incident that was at one time highly classified, and linked it to an asinine UFO story in order to create a new paradigm with an agenda they could profit off of. And they have profited -- TV appearances, radio interviews, Salas has co-authored a book on the topic, and there are those video tape sales to bring in a paycheck as well.
It's obvious that Salas was at one time in a position of "classified authority and legal trust," otherwise he wouldn't have known how best to capitalize on these incidents for his own personal gain (and yet, he still managed to screw it up, and come off sounding like a loon or a liar). He picked up a copy of UFO magazine, and probably figured, "y'know, these clowns are idiots -- I bet I can exploit that, using my highly classified, military background. Heck, maybe I'll get laid in the process..."
(6) The day I found out that Salas had originally claimed to be at November Flight is the day I absolutely KNEW he had lied about the whole thing -- because there actually were rumors of UFOs being sighted around November Flight during that period of time. It was only after this example of "poor memory" was made public that his fully fictionalized account of the events at Oscar Flight came out. He couldn't fall back on his November Flight lie, and he wasn't at Echo Flight -- which was the only fully investigated missile outage on March 16, 1967.
If it wasn't for the fact that this fully documented investigation had made very plain who was on duty when and where, I'm certain he would have first claimed to work at Echo Flight. But he couldn't, and that's why he claimed to work at November Flight first. He didn't think he'd get called on it, and he needed something to back up his story. Well, he was called on it, and that's why he was forced to bring out Don Crawford and the whole Oscar Flight fiction.
And now, the whole thing is part of the Disclosure Project, and people actually believe our government is hiding the true events of what went on March 16, 1967. Well, our government may be hiding something, but not that -- for the most part, our government has declassified the whole incident, an incident that was highly classified at one time.
What bugs me is this Disclosure Project video that's out -- it says that my father has confirmed all the reports, and that's a flat out lie -- he never confirmed anything, and that's why Salas has to create these stories about Oscar Flight UFOs. The whole lot of these self-serving losers are liars, and I'm thinking a lawsuit may be necessary to prevent this garbage scattering class of profiteers from using my family to support the rubbish they publish, making it look like my father is hiding something, while they turn a profit from their many lies off of books, videos, and internet advertising.
One more short comment here -- CUFON and Salas have made much of the fact that the original SAC command message states that the loss of the 10 Echo Flight missiles "is cause for grave concern to this headquarters." That really shouldn't be interpreted so wildly. Whenever "grave concern" is used in a message, all that means is that the message is classified Secret, and since it's stamped Secret at the top of this now-declassified message, it really shouldn't be considered as an exceptional sign of a concern that goes beyond the classification itself.
(7) More Salas stuff 'n' nonsense: he's pulled back from his November Flight commentary, because he wasn't there, and someone called him on it. Now his story is "I was at Oscar Flight, and all this stuff happened but it was never reported" So why should we believe him? Well, because the "same thing occurred at Echo Flight." At Echo Flight they "had UFOs that were hovering, not at the launch control facility but at the actual launch facilities where the missiles are located. They had some maintenance and security people out there at the time and they observed the UFOs at those sites. Now they lost all ten of their weapons' all ten."
According to official documentation issued from Hill AFB, that is the number of missiles affected but only Echo Flight's missiles were investigated. Standard fare, right? For years he maintained that UFOs shut down the missiles at Echo-Flight on March 16 1967. We now now that he was never there, he was never involved in the investigation, and everything he's ever said on the subject of Echo-Flight has been repeatedly disproven. It's interesting that everytime an incident that he's discussed is disproved, he changes his story. And Salas has done it again.
He now maintains that he had it all wrong -- UFOs had nothing to do with the shutdown at Echo-Flight on March 16, 1967. He says his memory of the events is faulty, but he still wrote a book on the subject! That doesn't sound like faulty memory -- if you've got faulty memory you don't write a book on he subject. You might do that, however, if you're a liar.
The final report of the shutdown at Echo-Flight is very well known; if missiles were also shutdown as Oscar-Flight, as Salas now contends, why was there no summary or final report of the investigation, like there was at Echo-Flight? Salas wants us to believe that the government didn't publish a final report because they wanted to cover up the incident, but you and I both know that the government doesn't cover up an incident by ignoring it -- they publish a report of an investigation that says the reason the missiles shut down was something very conventional, like a computer error. By ignoring it, especially when there are other witnesses, you're simply throwing extra wood on the fire, calling attention to the incident by your very silence on the matter.
Before believing him, I'd like to know why the Crew Commander -- his direct superior -- has never mentioned it to anybody; I'd like to know who these security personnel he continuously mentions were, why there aren't any debriefing statements available, even if just to deny any UFO observations.
In fact, Salas never changes his story until someone comes around and refutes his "evidence," so as far I'm concerned his credibility is crap. You can believe him if you want to, but I think you'd have to be pretty naive to do so. As for non-military reports of UFOs, I've got to tell you, that has no bearing at all on whether or not the missiles my father was in charge of were shut down by UFOs. There are no witnesses at all, civilian or military, that indicate UFOs were hovering around or landing at Echo-Flight. Security teams at both Echo-Flight and November-Flight were interviewed -- interviews that even Salas now agrees were accurate -- and they all said the same thing: nothing strange happened.
At Echo-Flight, the power grid dropped off line, the backup generators came on automatically as they was designed to, and the ten Echo-Flight missiles shut down. This was due to a power surge in the logic coupler of about ten volts. There were no reports of UFOs except those from Salas made many years later, reports that he now claims were incorrect. There were no civilian UFO reports made that night, and no military reports made that night either. The investigation even went into full radar and atmospheric characteristics, because they needed to know whether a lightning strike may have caused the power surge; all of the radar and atmospheric reports were also negative. There isn't a single piece of evidence supporting the claims Salas made regarding the Echo- and November-Flights -- nothing.
The man has simply been caught telling too many lies, and I think any honest person would have to discount everything he has ever said on the subject -- and this is the ONLY person who has ever claimed that UFOs "were hovering, not at the launch control facility but at the actual launch facilities where the missiles are located. They had some maintenance and security people out there at the time and they observed the UFOs at those sites. Now they lost all ten of their weapons' all ten."
The reports of the investigation, however, include interviews with all of the maintenance and security people, and not one of them support his claims. There's absolutely nothing that supports his story in any way whatsoever. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who have said there were no UFOs. You can believe his story about Oscar-Flight, if you like, but ask yourself, if a member of Congress was trying to substantiate some kind of an outrageous claim, and was forced to retract those claims on three separate occasions, changing his story each time to take into account each discrepancy, finally resting on a single tale that no one can challenge until the next eyewitness comes forward to note another fault in his tale, and if this Congressman then writes a book on the topic, much of which he ends up having to deny -- well, would you believe him? Would you still trust him? I just don't now why anybody would believe anything this man has to say.
I don't discount that UFOs may have showed up in other places from 1967 to now. Maybe they did buzz nuclear missiles sites in Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or other U.S. sites -- I just don't know. What I do know, however, is that UFOs were not involved in the shutdown of missiles at Echo-Flight on March 16, 1967, and that Robert Salas has repeatedly lied about the topic -- lies that have all been disputed so often and so definitively, that he has now been forced to change his entire tale. In my opinion, everything he has ever said on the subject should be most strenuously doubted. As for me, I believe my father, who was only the on-duty Crew Commander at Echo-Flight on March 16, 1967 when the ten missiles dropped offline due to what was later determined to be a power surge. Not only can he speak on the subject with a hell of a lot more authority than Robert Salas, he's also possessed with a hell of a lot more integrity.
Most sincerely,
James Carlson
Dear Mr Carlson et al,
ReplyDeleteA most thorough rejoinder by Mr Hastings to your charges can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/9prmyc
Cheers,
Frank
respected,
ReplyDeletesir
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aliens r not stupid ,, that we human r sending signal and they will be caught
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