SAC’s main headquarters was located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. (SAC’s replacement, the U.S. Strategic Command, is headquartered there still.) Then or now, there is probably no other U.S. military facility as crucial to America’s national security as Offutt.
That’s why what happened there in September 1958 was both baffling and frightening — and a harbinger of some very unsettling things to come.
It was September 8, just after sunset, and the sky above Offutt was clear.
Several people noticed what at first appeared to be a harmless vapor trail high above the base. But as the witnesses studied it further, the vapor trail began displaying characteristics not found in leftover contrails. It became extremely bright, like a magnesium flare, in one person’s description. As the light grew in intensity, more people on the ground became aware something strange was happening.
One witness called the base’s control tower. As he talked to the ATC personnel, the light high above them began changing color. Suddenly it was reddish orange. And what had previously been of undefined vaporous appearance now took on the distinct form of a cigar-shaped object standing on its head. The witnesses below, many of them veteran pilots of World War II and Korea, were stunned.
But the sighting only got stranger. From the bottom end of the object came a mass of small black flecks, like a swarm of bugs, a description used at least once during a World War II foo fighter episode. These things poured out of the object for more than a minute, flying off in every direction before they all disappeared.
Then the object itself began moving. First, it changed its attitude, swinging around 45 degrees to strictly horizontal. Then it began slowly drifting west. The witnesses watched this transformation for about five minutes before the object changed attitude again, returning almost but not quite to its previous upright position.
Then the object simply faded away.
Again, those watching on the ground were just bewildered. One officer gave a detailed report of the incident to higher brass and was told that he’d be hearing from ATIC, as in Project Blue Book, within forty-eight hours.
But that call never came.
For the most part, the missiles in America’s top secret ICBM bases in the 1960s were known as Minutemen. Each was capable of carrying 1.2 megatons of nuclear explosive, meaning just one Minuteman contained fifty times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Minuteman missiles were primarily deployed to bases throughout the geographical center of America, and to a degree, they were concentrated in Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. Each base commanded between 150 and 200 missiles, all of them housed in separate silos built deep in the ground and constructed of heavily reinforced concrete.
Each missile silo was connected to a launch control facility. These underground control rooms were staffed twenty-four hours a day. They had their own guards as well as mobile security teams.
To increase survivability, the missile silos were spread out over vast open areas, each silo usually located many miles from any other. For example, missiles controlled by Warren Air Force Base, headquartered near Cheyenne, Wyoming, were deployed over 9,600 square miles; some of them spilled over into western Nebraska and northern Colorado in addition to those in eastern Wyoming.
This was the makeup of America’s massive long-range nuclear weapon delivery system. Situated mostly on isolated flatlands and prairies, well away from population centers, each missile was aimed at a Soviet (or Soviet-allied) target, a thirty-minute transpolar flight away from igniting Armageddon.
There were almost a dozen major ICBM bases in all — and by early 1967, every one of them had reported UFO incidents.
Unlike most of the sightings of foo fighters during World War II, the incidents at America’s ICBM bases were reported by people on the ground, not by the crews of aircraft in flight. So, what these witnesses described could not have been the result of the distortion that can occur when two objects are in motion relative to each other, or engine exhausts from another aircraft, or meteorological-induced electrical discharges, or flak, or some enemy’s secret wonder weapon or any other kind of misleading aerial phenomena.
This was something else.
That UFOs would start appearing over America’s nuclear facilities probably shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to the U.S. military.
No less than four times between 1945 and 1952, UFOs were reported hovering over the Hanford Engineering Works, in Hanford, Washington, the site of America’s first nuclear reactor. One report in 1945 said the interloping UFO was the size of three aircraft carriers put together. UFOs had been reported over other U.S. nuclear facilities as well, such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
But these particular UFO incidents occurred at reactors. The UFO haunting of America’s ICBM bases was a different case because these places housed nuclear weapons.
With thanks to Robert Hastings, author of the definitive UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, the National UFO Reporting Center (www.nuforc.org) and NICAP, what follows are some of the most unusual and frightening accounts of what happened to a large part of America’s ground-based nuclear arsenal in the 1960s and ’70s.
Something almost inconceivably strange.
Something that’s never been explained.
Like the foo fighters of World War II, the ghost fliers of 1933–34 and other unusual UFO episodes, this one began with a single odd incident.
Hastings tells us it happened in the summer of 1962. A worker at a yet-to-be-completed ICBM base near Oracle, Arizona, spotted a very bright light hovering over a half-built missile silo. The silo was empty at the time, but nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base was contacted anyway. Two jet interceptors were sent to the scene, but the light disappeared as soon as they arrived. Yet no sooner had the jets departed than the light reappeared.
It was seen hovering over the unfinished silo for a short while longer before leaving for good.
Located in southeast New Mexico, Walker Air Force Base received its first ICBM in early 1962. Within a year, personnel assigned to the vast facility were reporting UFOs either hovering or moving very fast over their missile sites.
According to Hastings, one officer assigned to Walker at the time recalled up to nine occasions when guards reported seeing UFOs shining bright lights down onto missile silos. Though these incidents were reported to higher authorities, the air force brass did nothing about them.
In fact, right from the beginning of the odd goings-on at Walker, the air force seemed either uninterested, reluctant or under orders not to investigate anything having to do with UFO sightings.
This baffling lack of interest was confirmed by another officer assigned to Walker, who said in the fall of 1964, security personnel reported seeing an extremely bright light repeatedly hovering over one particular missile site, then racing away, returning, and hovering again. Many people witnessed this inexplicable behavior, yet the air force never debriefed any of them.
Still another airman at Walker contacted his superiors when he saw two starlike objects moving over his launch facility. As it turned out, the objects were already being tracked on Walker’s radar, and two jet fighters from a nearby air base had been scrambled to intercept them. Witnesses even saw the jets streak toward the mysterious objects only to see the UFOs accelerate to an incredible speed and disappear from sight. But later reports said that Walker’s commanders not only denied that anyone saw UFOs that night, they even denied they’d requested any fighters to intercept them.