By this time the men could hear the sirens of the base security teams rushing to the scene. Being in a restricted area, where they had no right to be, the men turned their truck around and hurried back to the flight line. The police ignored them, though. They had more important things to worry about: namely, the strange object over the weapons area. As soon as their searchlights raked the area, the UFO took off.
As on the previous night, radar tracked the UFO as it headed toward New Brunswick.
Again, the base higher-ups sent priority messages about the intrusion to higher commands. They also braced themselves for further incidents.
They were wise to do so. On Halloween night, a UFO was spotted four miles northwest of the base. Anticipating just such an event, a base helicopter was immediately launched to intercept the object but had no success. The object disappeared. Two hours later the base radar center detected another unidentified object moving slowly within the base perimeter. The helicopter took off again, but as before, the crew found nothing.
Now the Loring detachment of the OSI sent a message to higher authority. The message described another “unidentified ‘helicopter’ ” sighted at low level over Loring AFB over the past two nights (October 31–November 1). It also referred to the intruder as an “unknown entity.”
What makes all this even stranger is that Loring wasn’t the only SAC base being probed by UFOs during this time. On the night of October 30, personnel at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan spotted what they thought was a helicopter flying around their perimeter. The object, which seemed to have one white light shining downward and two red lights at the rear, did not maintain a consistent altitude. Instead it was seen bobbing up and down.
A few minutes later, Wurtsmith’s security police reported a second unidentified “helicopter” inside the perimeter. Like the UFO at Loring, this craft hovered low over the nuclear weapons storage area. Base radar confirmed that there were two objects flying over the base at low altitudes.
Further confirmation came from the crew of a KC-135 that was airborne at the time. They caught glimpses of the two UFOs, but their plane could never get close enough to distinguish any details.
Once again, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana was the site of an ominous UFO incursion.
On November 7, 1975, an alarm sounded across the base, indicating that security at one of the base’s missile silos had been violated. The two officers inside the particular launch facility had no way of seeing what was happening above them. Following standard procedures, they requested a security team to investigate.
As this team approached the silo, they reported seeing an enormous orange disk hovering low over the area. By one description it was at least 300 feet across. On hearing this, the officers down in the launch facility ordered the security team to continue to the site — but the security men refused to get any closer to the terrifying object.
The air force scrambled two F-106 jet interceptors from nearby Great Falls, but the disk took off before they arrived, roaring to a height of some 75,000 feet and quickly disappearing.
The base immediately sent technicians to the silo in question to check out the missile. To their horror, they discovered that the targeting info stored in the warhead’s guidance system had been changed. The technicians were ordered to remove the reentry vehicle, which contained multiple nuclear warheads, from the missile. These warheads were then painstakingly checked at the base. But nobody could understand how the targeting info had been altered.
In the end, the entire missile was replaced.
One of the eeriest stories Hastings tells in UFOs and Nukes took place in January 1979. It begins with a technical team working inside an ICBM launch silo at Ellsworth Air Force Base.
The team was performing a targeting alignment procedure on the missile, which is a painstaking process. Suddenly the site guard, who was patrolling up on ground level, started banging on the ladder that led underground. He told the techs to come up top immediately.
The team chief and one of his techs climbed out of the silo into the cold South Dakota night and were instantly deafened by a loud, low-frequency hum, a noise with no evident source. The vibration was so powerful it was shaking the access hatch and a truck parked next to it.
The frightened guard informed them that the noise had started five minutes before and that he had already reported it to the base command post.
But then the guard, even more terrified, told the men to look up into the sky. What they saw was incomprehensible. Right above them everything was black — featureless black. Yet when they looked off in any other direction they could see the starry night sky. Something was hovering right above them.
One technician later described what he saw as “a straightedge in space” blocking off the stars. But the three men could make out no details of the object over their heads. They opened the gate on the north side of the silo and walked out, trying to follow on the ground what seemed to be the “boundary” of whatever was floating above them. Strangely, as soon as they stepped outside the security gate, the earsplitting hum stopped.
They decided to walk the outline of the object above them. Turning three right angles before getting get back to their starting point, they later estimated that the sides of the object were 80 to 100 feet long and that it was shaped like a parallelogram.
As soon as the trio reentered the site, the loud hum engulfed them again. At that point, the technicians decided to go back down into the silo. But suddenly, everything at the site lost power, from the lights above- and belowground to the truck engine. Most troubling, the guard’s radio had gone dead.
The technicians climbed back down into the silo anyway. They did the best they could to get the lights working again but failed. Since they could accomplish nothing useful inside the pitch-black silo, they returned to ground level again, worried now that they would be blamed for the power outage.
Much to their relief, everything was now quiet up top — but they could still see the UFO above them, blotting out the sky. Then, suddenly, the power returned. The lights snapped on; the entire sky was visible again. The object had disappeared.
But then it was discovered that the guidance system for the silo’s missile was inoperative. The men had immediately begun the procedures needed to restart it when they got an angry call from the command facility. Indeed, the higher-ups thought the techs had caused the power outage at the site. The technicians assured the control facility they were as much in the dark as everyone else about what was going on. They were working to restore the guidance system and would finish the interrupted alignment procedure.
Like so many of the other witnesses to unexplained phenomena, the technicians knew what happened to people who reported UFOs. So, they agreed they would say nothing about the strange object in the sky. On leaving the site, they told the guard to stay quiet about what happened, too.
When the techs returned to base, though, they heard that crews working at two other silos had exactly the same experience as they had. They’d spotted an object overhead, the lights died and their missiles went off alert status.
All of the base leadership seemed to be at the hangar when the technicians dropped off their gear. This was odd enough. But then each man was put in a room by himself and told to fill out a detailed report about what had happened. Sticking to their agreement, the two technicians said nothing about a UFO.