What Happened at Malmstrom Air Force Base?

Term: Minuteman: a U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile kept in underground silos in launch groups called flights.

Term: Echo Flight: a group of ten Minuteman missiles and their launch control center at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.

Term: No-Go: an Air Force status showing that a missile is not ready to launch.

What Happened at Malmstrom Air Force Base?

On March 16, 1967, all ten Minuteman missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana lost alert status within seconds of each other. Air Force records confirm the shutdown. Former missile officer Robert Salas later said UFOs were involved. The Air Force history says rumors of UFOs were disproven, and a 2025 report attributed the reports to a classified electromagnetic pulse test, which critics dispute.

What the records show

A command history of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing says that at 8:45 a.m. on March 16, 1967, all sites in Echo Flight shut down with No-Go indications. All the launch facilities lost strategic alert nearly simultaneously. No other flight at Malmstrom lost alert at that time. Maintenance crews restored the missiles within about a day.

The same history says that rumors of unidentified flying objects near Echo Flight during the fault were disproven. It says a team that had checked the neighboring November Flight that morning reported no unusual activity or sightings.

Robert Salas’s account

Robert Salas was a 26-year-old Air Force lieutenant on duty in an underground launch control center at Malmstrom in March 1967. In 1996 he told the Great Falls Tribune that a security guard called to report flying objects in the distance. Later the guard reported a glowing red object hovering above the front gate. Minutes later, he said, ten missiles went offline.

Salas said in that interview that he was not a UFO enthusiast and did not claim extraterrestrial involvement. Over the years his account grew. He wrote a book, Faded Giant, in 2005, and in 2008 author Robert Hastings featured the case in UFOs and Nukes. On September 27, 2010, Salas and other former Air Force personnel spoke about UFOs and nuclear weapons at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Salas and others say that a Boeing engineer sent to inspect the missiles found no cause for the shutdown. That claim comes from witness accounts, and I could not find it in published Air Force records.

Problems with the story

Salas’s own timeline shifted. Skeptics and Salas himself later concluded that he had been on duty at Oscar Flight, not Echo Flight, and that the UFO reports he remembered came about a week after the Echo shutdown. That would separate the two events. Skeptic Robert Sheaffer argues the object seen near Oscar Flight was probably the planet Mars, and that missiles went offline at Echo because of an electronic fault unrelated to any UFO.

Others who were there disagree with Salas. James Carlson, whose father was a maintenance officer at Echo Flight, says his father and retired Colonel Walt Figel denied seeing any UFOs. Critic Brian Dunning says wing records show that nobody reported anything unusual on the night Salas describes, and that Echo’s missiles were restarted after a common commercial power failure.

The 2025 electromagnetic pulse claim

In June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pentagon investigators had found a terrestrial explanation for Malmstrom: an unannounced test of an electromagnetic pulse device that caused both the UFO reports and the missile shutdown. Critics dispute this. One published analysis says the documents cited date the proposal for the relevant system to 1971, four years after the event. It also argues that no one would test a device like that against an active missile facility at the height of the Cold War.

I have not seen the underlying documents, so I do not treat the EMP explanation as settled. It is a reported explanation, and it is contested.

What is solid and what is not

The shutdown is solid. Air Force records show ten missiles at Echo Flight lost alert together on March 16, 1967, and that the fault needed a day of repair. The link to UFOs is not solid. It rests on Salas’s recollection, which changed in important details, on other witnesses who deny it, and on an Air Force history that says the rumors were disproven. The cause of the shutdown may be ordinary, or it may be a test the public did not know about. No one has shown that a UFO caused it.

The case still matters because it involves nuclear weapons and trained officers. My book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials describes Malmstrom as one of the most discussed cases in the UFO record. I present it as a documented shutdown with a disputed link, and I do not present it as proof. Disclosure is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.

Sources

Command History of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing (Echo Flight, March 16, 1967). Great Falls Tribune, August 13, 1996. Robert Salas and James Klotz, Faded Giant (2005). Robert Hastings, UFOs and Nukes (2008). Robert Sheaffer, Bad UFOs. Brian Dunning, Skeptoid. Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025. The Hill, opinion, July 3, 2025.