But then one missile technician at Walker had an encounter with a UFO that was so up close and personal, it was hard to ignore.
This man was working deep inside one of the missile silos one night when a guard up top reported that strange lights had appeared outside the silo’s perimeter. The technician emerged from the underground facility to see that what he later described as a “noiseless, brilliant and seemingly dimensionless object” had landed on the ground close to the missile silo.
Flashlights in hand, the technician and the guard slowly approached the strange object, only to have it suddenly disappear, then reappear briefly 30 feet away before vanishing for good.
The technician later told his story to a member of the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, the somewhat shadowy OSI. But the man was never told whether a formal report was ever filed or not.
So many strange things had happened at Walker Air Force Base during 1963–64 that one worker finally contacted NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. In a letter written in December 1964, the worker said the UFO sightings at the base had become so numerous, many guards were too frightened to go on duty. Yet the air force insisted that everything related to the sightings should be considered “top secret.”
Even more disturbing, at least for some hard-core true believers, is that this worker also told NICAP that one missile site at Walker in particular had endured many recurring UFO sightings.
That site was Site 8, located just south of Roswell, New Mexico. In fact, before it was renamed for Kenneth Walker, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, Walker AFB was known by another name: Roswell Army Airfield.
Warren Air Force Base, located about three miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, is one of the oldest military bases in America, having started life as a frontier fort in 1867. It is also one of the largest nuclear missile bases in the world.
In 1965, multiple UFO sightings were reported at the base. On the night of August 1 alone, there were eleven reports about strange objects flying over the huge missile facility; one of these reports was made by the base commander himself. Some witnesses that night saw single objects; others saw up to nine UFOs. Many of these sightings were corroborated by different people seeing the same things at the same time, just from different vantage points.
On another occasion, one of the base’s security policemen saw eight brilliant lights hovering over an isolated missile silo. The lights were grouped in pairs and were motionless, at least at first. Then one of the lights began to move among the others, apparently going from pair to pair. The policeman watched this bizarre activity for several minutes before reporting it to his commander.
The policeman was told that NORAD (the all-seeing North American Aerospace Defense Command, located near Colorado Springs, Colorado) had notified the base that its radars had been tracking the eight unknowns as well, but before anything else could happen, the UFOs disappeared.
A week later, another strange incident was reported at the same missile silo. In this case, the site’s security team was sitting in a camper-type vehicle parked near the silo. Without warning, the vehicle began to shake violently. The security men looked out of the window and saw a bright white light hovering directly overhead. The shaking lasted until the light above disappeared.
The rash of sightings at Warren Air Force Base continued for almost a month. During that time, ranchers in that part of Wyoming also reported seeing UFOs, and some even claimed that they had cattle missing. An airman testified that one night, when the base police tried to preserve a suspected UFO landing site, they were ordered by base higher-ups not to do so.
From all reports, the U.S. Air Force brass at Warren simply ignored the incidents.
Whiteman Air Force Base is located about 70 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri. Formerly a glider training base, today it is the home of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. In the late 1990s, B-2s from Whiteman flew nonstop round-trip bombing runs to Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis. They did the same thing a few years later in support of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
During the 1960s, though, Whiteman housed a vast ICBM complex, containing up to 150 missiles. It was there that one of the scariest, most inexplicable UFO incursions occurred.
According to a report given to NUFORC, it started around 9 P.M. on the night of June 16, 1966, when the base’s control tower personnel detected a saucer-shaped object flying over the southernmost part of the missile complex. The object’s flight path eventually took it over one of the base’s ICBM launch silos. When it passed over this site, the missile inside the silo lost all electrical power. This very serious condition is known as “going off alert status.”
The electricity returned to the missile silo as soon as the UFO left the immediate area. But then the same thing happened to the next silo the object came to. The power went out, coming back on as soon as the UFO had passed over. Then it happened to the next silo, and the next — and the next.
Incredibly, the UFO flew around the Whiteman complex for the following two hours, killing power in all 150 missiles controlled by the base, all while these missiles were armed. Finally, the object flew off to the north and disappeared again.
Ellsworth Air Force Base is located close to Rapid City, South Dakota, in the southwest corner of the state.
Once a training site for B-17 Flying Fortresses, these days Ellsworth is home to a wing of B-1B Lancer bombers. But in the 1960s, the sprawling facility was an ICBM base, and it was there, not two weeks after the bizarre happenings at Whiteman, that another incredibly strange UFO incursion took place.
As Hastings reports in UFOs and Nukes, on the night of June 25, 1966, two technicians were sent to one of the base’s missile silos, code-named Juliet-3. All electrical power to the silo’s ICBM had mysteriously failed. The technicians corrected the problem and completed the missile’s automatic restart procedure. Returning aboveground, though, the technicians heard via their radio that a security alarm had gone off at another silo nearby. Code-named Juliet-5, its missile had lost all power, too.
As they continued to monitor the radio transmission, the two technicians soon heard the excited voices of the security team sent to investigate the Juliet-5 alarm. They were shouting that a strange object was resting on the ground inside the silo’s security fence. The security team leader described the object as a metal sphere supported by a tripod-style landing gear.
It sounded crazy, but from their location at Juliet-3, the two technicians and a security guard who’d accompanied them could see an intense glow coming from Juliet-5, four miles away.
As the astonishing radio transmission continued, the technicians heard the Juilet-5 team leader twice refuse orders to approach the mysterious object, instead asking the base’s top security officer for permission to fire at it. Clearly under stress — the ICBM inside the Juliet-5 silo was armed and targeted at the Soviet Union — this officer ordered the security team not to use their weapons until the situation had been clarified. He then reassured the security team that a helicopter was on its way to the Juliet-5 site.