BY ROBERT HASTINGS
On October 23, 2010, F.E. Warren Air Force Base, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, temporarily lost the ability to communicate with 50 of its Minuteman III nuclear missiles. The five Missile Alert Facilities responsible for launching those ICBMs in time of war, the 319th Missile Squadron, would have been unable to do so during the disruption.
This dramatic story was leaked to Mark Ambinder, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, which published it three days later. The Air Force then quickly acknowledged the problem, saying that a back-up system could have launched the missiles and that the breakdown had lasted a mere 59 minutes. However, the latter statement was untrue, according to two missile technicians stationed at F.E. Warren, who say the communications problem, while intermittent, lasted several hours.
Significantly, these same indi-viduals report multiple sightings by “numerous [Air Force] teams” of an enormous cigar-shaped craft maneuvering high above the missile field on the day of the disruption, and the following day. The huge UFO was described as appearing similar to a World War I German Zeppelin, but had no passenger gondola or advertising on its hull, as would a commercial blimp.
The confidential Air Force sources further report that the commander of the squadron sternly warned its members not to talk to journalists or researchers about “the things they may or may not have seen” in the sky near the missiles in recent months and threatened severe penalties for violating security. Consequently, these persons must remain anonymous at this time.
The disquieting information was provided to me last December, via a retired missile maintenance technician with contacts at F.E. Warren. Two other retired USAF sources have verified receiving reports from their contacts of further UFO activity within the base’s 9,600-square-mile missile field in the fall of 2010.
These revelations were not surprising. Over the past seven months I have received several independent reports from law enforcement personnel and civilians relating to UFO incidents in the region between September 2010 and April 2011.
If the mysterious cigar-shaped object repeatedly sighted on October 23-24 was somehow involved with the 50-missile launch system disruption, it wouldn’t be the first time that a UFO interfered with nuclear missiles, according to several U.S. Air Force veterans who have courageously gone public with their own, still-classified close encounters at various ICBM bases.
On September 27, 2010, less than a month before the incident at F.E. Warren, six of those individuals participated in a UFO-Nukes Connection press conference in Washington D.C. and described UFO activity at F.E. Warren’s missile sites-and those located near Malmstrom AFB, Montana, and Walker AFB, New Mexico, in the 1960s and ’70s. Another participant, a former deputy base commander, discussed his own 1980 sighting of a disc-shaped object that hovered near a nuclear bomb storage depot and apparently directed beams of light down onto it.
The press conference received tremendous media coverage resul-ting in thousands of online and print articles and broadcast news stories worldwide. CNN streamed the event live and a video of it can be viewed.
That high-profile gathering of credible sources, co-sponsored by former USAF nuclear missile launch officer Robert Salas, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1960s and early ’70s, was the result of decades of research. Over the past 38 years, I have interviewed more than 120 former or retired U.S. military personnel who report ongoing UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites including missile launch facilities, strategic bomber bases, weapons storage areas, and bomb test ranges in Nevada and the Pacific during the Cold War era.
A Brief History
Reports of UFO activity at nuclear weapons facilities is old news for those who know the facts. Captain Edward Ruppelt, the first chief of the Air Force’s UFO investi-gations group, Project Blue Book, spoke about such cases during a June 1952 interview with Look magazine. A fuller examination of the “ominous correlation” between UFO sightings and nukes-related sites appeared in Ruppelt’s 1956 book, The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects, published after he had resigned from the Air Force. Ruppelt wrote, “UFOs were seen more frequently around areas vital to the defense of the United States. The Los Alamos-Albuquerque area, Oak Ridge, and White Sands Proving Ground rated high.”
Each of these locations was directly or indirectly involved in America’s nuclear weapons program. Various declassified FBI and Air Force memoranda, and other reliable reports, note no fewer than 14 separate UFO sightings at Oak Ridge during the period from October 12 to December 20, 1950. The tally was based on reports provided by governmental security officers at the installation, military pilots and radar personnel.
At the third UFO sighting hot-spot mentioned by Ruppelt, White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico, the military was engaged in ongoing tests of the captured Nazi V-2 rockets that would eventually evolve into intercontin-ental delivery systems for U.S. nuclear warheads (and as the boosters NASA used to launch into space).
Elsewhere in the book, Ruppelt discussed UFO incursions at two other plutonium-production facilities, the Hanford site in Washington State and the Savannah River plant in South Carolina.
Declassified Documents
When ICBMs began to be deploy-ed in the early 1960s, UFO sightings began to occur at related sites and warhead storage facilities. Declassi-fied Air Force documents discuss some of those incidents at Minot AFB, North Dakota, in 1966, and Malmstrom AFB, Montana, in 1975.
F.E. Warren AFB itself experi-enced an hours-long incident on August 1, 1965, involving as many as six objects “stacked vertically” above various missile sites, according to a Project Blue Book memorandum published by the group’s scientific consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
I have interviewed two former ICBM launch officers, Jay Earnshaw and Richard Tashner, who were on duty during that event, at underground Launch Control Capsules, who confirm the sightings. Earnshaw said that the aerial objects were “oblong or, from the correct perspective, disc-like.” He added, “We got reports from our security people that there were objects in the sky stacked up, one on top of the other, just hovering there. The Russians sure didn’t have the capability to do that…I am one who believes that we are not the only ones in the universe and, well, I think someone might have been interested in what we were doing at our [nuclear missile] sites. I wasn’t one of the witnesses to these events, because I was underground in the capsule, but my second-hand information from the security people up above was that the objects were really there.”
The October 2010 Event
Upon learning of the October 23, 2010 incident at F.E. Warren, I wondered if the official Air Force explanation—of a computer glitch—were actually true. Given my research relating to similar large-scale missile malfunctions at other USAF bases, the thought that something more esoteric had been involved was unavoidable. But I did not want to jump to conclusions. However, although a definitive, documented link with the communications disruption remains elusive, it can now be said that a UFO presence was indeed observed by several persons working in the F.E. Warren missile field on that date and the following day.
Civilian Sightings
In addition to the military reports I have received, there is also persuasive testimony from a number of civilian witnesses relating to ongoing UFO activity within F.E. Warren’s huge missile field that sprawls across the tri-state convergence of southeast Wyoming, southwest Nebraska and northeast Colorado. Between late September 2010 and early April 2011, there were credible reports of cigar, cylinder, spherical and triangular-shaped objects maneuvering near and hovering low over various missile silos in Banner, Kimball, Cheyenne and Morrill Counties in Nebraska. Other sightings occurred in Laramie County, Wyo., north and east of Cheyenne.
Some of those accounts were forwarded to me by law enforcement personnel who I had first contacted in early November; others resulted from media coverage of my four-day visit to the region a month later, during which I gave interviews to two local newspapers and one radio station, asking sighting witnesses to contact me at my email address, ufohastings@aol.com.
During those interviews, I deliberately did not mention some of the specifics in the reports already in my possession so as to minimize the potential for false leads from hoaxers, who might try to weave already-published details into their own fictional tales to make them conform to earlier testimony.
In any case, among the reports that came in over a several-week period are the following. Witness A, who lives on the east side of Sidney, Nebraska, emailed me on December 16th and wrote:
…It was late September or early October. It was a little chilly out. I had taken a blanket and gone out and sat on my patio…a partly cloudy evening and there was a full moon. That was why I had gone out, because the moon was so big and yellow and very bright in the eastern sky. I sat outside…I dozed off for a few minutes. When I opened my eyes, I looked above me and there was an object…