Responding to Robert Salas' claims about March 16, 1967 UFO incident

My father, Captain Eric Carlson, and Walt Figel, the Echo-Flight Missile Combat Crew, were below ground in the E-Flight Launch Control Center (LCC) or capsule during the incident at Echo-Flight. Salas contends that UFO was supposedly reported directly above one of the E-Flight launch facilities. These sightings supposedly occurred at the same time the missiles went into "off-alert" status. In other words, the UFOs were supposedly the cause of the entire flight of ten ICBMs going offline. All of their missiles reported a "No-Go" condition – i.e., they became inoperable, apparently due to a Guidance and Control (G&C) System fault. Although declassified documents support the assertion that there was a missile line failure throughout the E-Flight complex, no documentation supports the story told here of UFOs having anything whatsoever to do with the failure. True believers see this as “proof” that the government is hiding the actual facts of the March 16, 1967 incident. It’s apparently far more reasonable to believe that the government is lying about UFOs, than to believe that Jim Klotz and Robert Salas – who actually made some money off of this smelly butt – might have lied about UFOs being involved in a national security incident 30 years earlier. Since the publication of the above article, the motivation to maintain this series of half-truths and lies has escalated: Salas and Klotz have now published a book on the incident titled Faded Giant. Contrary to accepted probabilities, the book is being sold as "non-fiction".

Amazon.com describes the book thusly:

Does the public have a right to be informed about the possible existence of UFOs and the suspicious events that coincide with their supposed presence? How would access to such knowledge affect our society? What responsibility does the government have in learning about UFOs in an effort to protect society? These are the types of questions that authors Robert Salas and James Klotz attempt to answer in Faded Giant. They explore this incidence of unidentified aerial phenomena and its proximity to the Malmstrom Air Force Base (AFB), which is near Great Falls, Montana, and the unexplainable shutdown of nearly twenty nuclear missiles that occurred. Their mission is to provide the public with accurate information surrounding the events that took place at Malmstrom Air Force Base (AFB), which have been concealed by the government for over 37 years!

There’s a standard of the ridiculous that originates here.

My father is the Captain Eric Carlson referred to in the above article, and I can assure you that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened that Thursday morning, March 16, 1967 in the E-Flight Launch Control Center. There was a computer malfunction, but given the quality of computers used in 1967 – even state of the art computers -- this was hardly a rare occurrence. There was an investigation, but this was standard operating procedure, and again was nothing new. Everything else is totally false, from the UFOs on down.

There was a security breach, one that actually explains Don Crawford’s tale in which he tells a security guard that ‘“We no longer record those kinds of reports,” indicating he didn’t want to hear about the UFO.’ Security called in to report that a bear had been seen, no a UFO, and it was scratching itself on an alarmed fence. The security crew was told to shoot at it, to get it go away, since nobody wanted the alarms going off all night but this wasn’t given as permission, as Crawford asserts, since the security guards didn’t need permission to fire their weapons. There wouldn’t be much point giving security guards weapons if they had to get permission every time they needed to use them.

Crawford’s story notwithstanding, security breaches were rare. Computer failures, however, were not. And when the computers failed, the missiles tended to go offline. That's why mobile crews were always part of the watch structure.

Security Alert Teams were often dispatched from Echo in those days, because they provided tier one security for the missiles. There were, however, no UFOs seen by anybody concerned, and had Figel received such a report from one of the mobile security crews and not informed the strike teams – or my father, who was in charge during the watch – as all the above article asserts, he would have been arrested. That didn't happen, however, and my father, being the watch Captain, is absolutely certain that no such report was ever made. Searches were made, but no record or log entry was ever uncovered This wasn’t due to a conspiracy. Nothing was found because nothing was there.

Captain Don Crawford's crew relieved the Echo Flight crew later that morning, and his statement many years later that both Carlson and Figel were "still visibly shaken by what had occurred" is also a lie, one that he has since routinely told whenever he can get the ear of the press. The fact that "missiles had been lost to our deterrent forces," and had remained out of service “for an entire day" is irrelevant – as I said, silo, computer, and power losses were common; they were also cause for investigation, but investigations were also common. Declassified documents support this, and in act the command history states that a "walk-thru inspection of the HF Hardened Antennas at Malmstrom was conducted during February by Boeing and SATAF personnel. The antennas were already equipped in the LFs but were not in working order. The walk-thru inspection had an average of 40 discrepencies per site." This was only one month before the supposed UFO incident that Klotz and Salas discuss above.

The men and women who gave so much of their time and ability to protect America from any and all imaginable threats were under a lot of pressure to develop a state of the art defense system, and were in the unenviable position of having to deploy such systems before they were perfected, or in many cases, even completed. In 1967, upgrading of live, operable systems was the norm. Failure of operational systems was common, and to blame such failure on the presence of a UFO is absolutely ridiculous. It is a good way to get attention, though, and there are a lot of people out there who like to get attention. These people tend to start reckless rumors; such rumors were even mentioned in the unclassified command history: "Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of fault were disproven. A Mobile Strike Team, which had checked all November Flight's LFs on the morning of 16 March 67, were questioned and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed.” Please note that originally, Salas told everyone that he was on duty March 16, 1967 in the November Flight Launch Control Center (LCC), not Oscar-Flight as he now admits. November was closest to Echo Flight, where the missile failures occurred, and it was at November Flight – as indicated in the above noted history – where UFO rumors centered. Oscar-Flight, being 20 miles away, wasn’t even mentioned. UFO reports were never logged and no investigation of UFO sightings by Air Force or civil personnel was ever conducted.

Some years ago, my father was asked to appear on a television show with Mr. Robert Salas, and those who requested this intimated that some money could be made out of the situation. I'm proud to say that my father has a lot more integrity than some of the other parties involved and didn't even consider appearing. Mr. Robert Salas was the Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander at the Oscar Flight during the morning hours of 16 March 1967. He contends that a security NCO at the front gate called him to report a UFO maneuvering above the silos, although there are no records of this. He's also responsible for a lot of the dissemination of this abortion of an "eyewitness" account, and contends that the reported electrical problems at the Echo Flight LCC – where my father was on watch – were somehow linked to the UFO maneuvering above the silos of the Oscar Flight LCC twenty miles away. It’s almost as if someone in an area of classified authority and legal trust was looking about for an incident of some sort that was reported with which to link an outlandish tale of UFO interference with national defense interests. Ideally, such a tale would have been far more effective had this hypothetical manipulator been able to convince my father to play along. But a statement from Captain Don Crawford that the Echo Flight crew was "still visibly shaken by what had occurred," as well as a description from him of an undated, unreferenced UFO sighting by security personnel that was never entered into a watch log or investigated by any military or civil authority would also tend to lessen any impact from the absence of corroborating data.

Retired Air Force colonel Bill Coleman – the Air Force's chief public relations officer during the early 1970s – has stated that in his opinion, upon reviewing the case, the absence of any records whatsoever supporting Robert Salas’ contention is probably due to the fact that Salas was rattled by a routine SAC shakedown. "SAC was famous for running all kinds of tests to challenge security systems – they did it all the time," adding that it "could easily have been a test created by the SAC commander to neutralize the weapons site to gauge the response measures. These are the kinds of things SAC does routinely. This captain should've known it was a test. Either that, or he's lying about it."

Mr. Robert Salas states that although the Air Force conducted a thorough investigation of these supposed UFO sightings and the defense shutdowns, no cause could be determined, although he does theorize that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of the kind created by an atomic weapon's blast may be the culprit. His account, however, isn't exactly thorough. To be accurate, no cause for the outages could be determined by the investigators at a "field" level – in other words, they couldn't find an exact cause through the testing of live, operational equipment without bringing all of the systems down for a complete check. They couldn't do this while still retaining 24-7 defense capabilities for reasons I've already stated: any work, even component upgrading, for the most part had to be completed on live, operable systems. This tends to limit conclusions during trouble-shooting trials. The initial investigation report, in fact, states that "Further studies of this problem will be accomplished at the contractors [sic] facility since a full engineering investigation is not feasible at this level."

The investigators did, however, eventually complete a "full engineering investigation" at the contractor's facility. My father recalls a technical publication of many hundreds of pages detailing this and other computer failures. It was a requirement that such a publication be written to prevent such failures happening in the future. He told me that his recollections are that the failure that night was due to a power surge in the guidance and control system – a common enough incident even today. In fact, the civil and military investigating teams determined that by introducing a 10 volt pulse onto a data line leading into the logic coupler, they were able repeat the shutdown effects 80% of the time. To say, therefore, that no explanation could be found for the failures is arrogant and foolish, when anyone who takes the time to look into the matter can easily figure out the truth of what actually went on. Salas says that such a pulse or "noise" occurring in the field and getting inside the shielded missile system equipment was impossible, but that too is technically incorrect, since the computers running everything to do with the missiles naturally had a power source that could be traced and studied easily enough to inject a 10 volt pulse into the logic coupler as the investigating team did. Such voltage spikes in the electric potential in a given circuit are typically caused by lightning strikes, power outages, tripped circuit breakers, short circuits, and power transitions in other large equipment on the same power line. In this case, the emergency generators kept tripping on and off, which is indicative of power losses within the system.

So, what do we call it when a ten-volt pulse is introduced into a data system? We call it a power surge; surge protectors of the kind we can now pick up for $30.00 at Walmart hadn't yet been introduced into the U.S. economical system, and surges happened a lot, even in shielded systems. Even today, shielding is never 100% efficient, as any electrical engineer can tell you. In fact, computers in general circa 1967 weren't exactly as sophisticated as they are today. The processing capability I have in my living room is more than NASA used to put a man on the moon, so when these screwballs use the technical reports to indicate that the missile failures were the result of a UFO contact, they're more insulting than they are convincing.

I guess one of the more annoying characteristics of modern man is that he tends to believe everything he reads, and that's a definite problem for anybody who prefers to limit disinformation before it creates a hot-air windstorm through the social synapses of our national counter-culture.

When Robert Salas first wrote up his little story for publication, he said that he worked at November Flight LLC -- you'll note that isn't anywhere near Echo Flight where my Dad worked, and where the missile systems were shut down due to that 10 volt pulse we've already mentioned. There were rumors of UFO activity for that period at November Flight, and that's probably why Salas wanted people to think he had worked there, not realizing that someone might actually remember that he never worked at November Flight. Salas worked at Oscar Flight -- and you'll note that nothing ever happened at Oscar-Flight whatsoever.

To me, it sounds like he wanted to push a UFO agenda in concert with America's nuclear missile capabilities of the time. He wrote up his report saying he was there -- "I saw it all" type of thing -- until somebody checked and figured out he was never at November Flight, he was at Oscar Flight. I can't possibly believe that he doesn't remember what missile launch system he worked at, so I conclude that he purposefully lied about in order to make his story sound more like eyewitness testimony, which it isn't. He was at Oscar Flight, and there is testimony to support that fact.

Now at Echo Flight, where the missiles went offline and where my father had the watch that night as Crew Commander, there were no UFO reports. Salas wants us to believe that the Deputy Crew Commander spoke with security, and security told him there was a UFO. We know that's a lie, because the Deputy Crew Commander never mentioned anything like that to my Dad, the Crew Commander, which he would have since he was required to, and also because everybody on the surface was interviewed the next day due to the missiles going offline, and all of them said the same thing: that nothing strange had happened.

There were "rumors," mentioned in the command history, of UFO sightings at November Flight, but these were discounted because the mobile security teams, upon being interviewed, were positive nothing odd had happened there either. Now Salas comes around 25 years later, thinking nobody will remember him from the original crews, and writes up some story saying "hey, guys, those UFO's at November Flight were real -- I saw them when I worked there that night the missiles went offline ay Echo Flight!" Someone who reads this comes back and says, "you weren't there -- you never worked November Flight -- you were at Oscar Flight. And nothing ever happened at Oscar Flight."

Well Salas looks like a liar now, so he needs to get some verification. Around this time, some guys came nosing around to interview my Dad regarding that night, and he tells them that nothing had happened, no UFOs, and the missiles going offline were fully investigated -- no big deal, right? Then Salas contacts Don Crawford, the Captain who relieved my father the next day -- well AFTER anything that may have happened. Well, he spices the account up a bit by saying my Dad and the Deputy Crew Commander were "still visibly shaken," and that the missiles were inoperable for the entire following day (not surprising, given that an investigation was still in progress, but he makes it sound like the UFOs knocked our missiles out for the full day; they didn't -- we kept them off for an investigation; there's little doubt that they could have been brought back up without incident after a system reboot).

Now Salas has nothing, because he was caught in a lie. He was actually at Oscar Flight -- 20 miles away from Echo Flight, so the missiles going offline can't be attested to, and nowhere near November Flight, so he can't even attest to the UFO rumors there. And keep in mind that those rumors were immediately discounted by eyewitnesses who said nothing happened there either. So what does Salas do to try and maintain his UFO agenda and rescue the shredded remnants of his credibility? He gets inventive:

[This following is directly quoted - it should come up in color blue]

[color=#3333FF]Outside, above the subterranean LCC capsule, it was a typical clear, cold Montana night sky; there were a few inches of snow on the ground. Where we were, there were no city lights to detract from the spectacular array of stars, and it was not uncommon to see shooting stars. Montana isn’t called “Big Sky Country” for no reason, and Airmen on duty topside probably spent some of their time outside looking up at the stars. It was one of those airmen who first saw what at first appeared to be a star begin to zig-zag across the sky. Then he saw another light do the same thing, and this time it was larger and closer. He asked his Flight Security Controller, (FSC, the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) in charge of Launch Control Center site security), to come and take a look. They both stood there watching the lights streak directly above them, stop, change directions at high speed and return overhead. The NCO ran into the building and phoned me at my station in the underground capsule. He reported to me that they had been seeing lights making strange maneuvers over the facility, and that they weren't aircraft. I replied: "Great. You just keep watching them and let me know if they get any closer."

I did not take this report seriously and directed him to report back if anything more significant happened. At the time, I believed this first call to be a joke. Still, that sort of behavior was definitely out of character for air security policemen whose communications with us were usually very professional.

A few minutes later, the security NCO called again. This time he was clearly frightened and was shouting his words:

"Sir, there's one hovering outside the front gate!"

"One what?"

"A UFO! It's just sitting there. We're all just looking at it. What do you want us to do?"

"What? What does it look like?"

"I can't really describe it. It's glowing red. What are we supposed to do?"

"Make sure the site is secure and I'll phone the Command Post."

"Sir, I have to go now, one of the guys just got injured."

Before I could ask about the injury, he was off the line. I immediately went over to my commander, Lt. Fred Meiwald, who was on a scheduled sleep period . I woke him and began to brief him about the phone calls and what was going on topside. In the middle of this conversation, we both heard the first alarm klaxon resound through the confined space of the capsule, and both immediately looked over at the panel of annunciator lights at the Commander's station. A 'No-Go' light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of our missile sites. Fred jumped up to query the system to determine the cause of the problem. Before he could do so, another alarm went off at another site, then another and another simultaneously. Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a 'No-Go' (inoperable) condition.

After reporting this incident to the Command Post, I phoned my security guard. He said that the man who had approached the UFO had not been injured seriously but was being evacuated by helicopter to the base. Once topside, I spoke directly with the security guard about the UFOs. He added that the UFO had a red glow and appeared to be saucer shaped. He repeated that it had been immediately outside the front gate, hovering silently.

We sent a security patrol to check our LFs after the shutdown, and they reported sighting another UFO during that patrol. They also lost radio contact with our site immediately after reporting the UFO.

When we were relieved by our scheduled replacement crew later that morning. The missiles had still not been brought on line by on-site maintenance teams.

Again, UFOs had been sighted by security personnel at or about the time Minuteman Strategic missiles shutdown. [/color]

The only problem is there are no log entries, investigation reports, medical records, secuirty logs, watch command logs, eyewitness reports, or even newspaper articles to support ANYTHING in the above statement. There aren't any witness names that can be checked, or investigation records. There are lots of records available to reference the Echo Flight missiles going down, and there are even records to attest to UFO rumors at November Flight, where Salas first claimed to work, but absolutely NOTHING supporting events of any type at Oscar Flight, where he actually worked. Nothing...

What Salas had was a bunch of lies, and Don Crawford, since he couldn't get my Dad to sign on with this ridiculous load of crap. You'd think Don Crawford wouldn't add much, since he wasn't even on duty when everything supposedly happened. He got background; Don Crawford says that [and this should be in blue, too]:

[color=#333FFF]It was during this same period, according to Col. Don Crawford (USAF ret.), that a two person SAT, assigned to Echo Flight, was performing a routine check of the missile launch facilities a few miles north of Lewistown, Montana. As they approached one of the launch facilities, an astonishing sight caused the driver to slam on his brakes. Stunned in amazement, they watched as, about 300 feet ahead, a very large glowing object hovered silently directly over the launch facility. One of them picked up his VHF hand microphone and called then Captain Don Crawford who was the DMCCC on duty that evening

“Sir, you wouldn’t believe what I’m looking at,” he said.

He described what they were seeing. Crawford didn’t believe him at first but the young airman insisted he was telling the truth, his voice revealing his emotional state. Eventually Crawford took him seriously enough to call the Command Post to report it. The officer on duty at the Command Post refused to accept the report and simply stated, “We no longer record those kinds of reports,” indicating he didn’t want to hear about the UFO. Crawford unsure of what to tell his shaken security guard, decided to give the guard his permission to fire his weapon at the object if it seemed hostile.

“Thanks, sir, but I really don’t think it would do any good,”

A few seconds later the object silently flew away.

There were sightings in the area before and after the missile shutdown incidents by military personnel and civilians.[/color]

No dates, no names, no verification -- NOTHING. But it's this ridiculous bit of testimony that puts UFOs at Echo Flight -- nothing else.

And that's why I say that "It’s almost as if someone in an area of classified authority and legal trust was looking about for an incident of some sort that was reported with which to link an outlandish tale of UFO interference with national defense interests." That's what Robert Salas and Don Crawford did. They took a past incident that was at one time highly classified, and linked it to an asinine UFO story in order to create a new paradigm with an agenda they could profit off of. And they have profited -- TV appearances, radio interviews, Salas has co-authored a book on the topic, and there are those video tape sales to bring in a paycheck as well. It's obvious that Salas was at one time in a position of "classified authority and legal trust," otherwise he wouldn't have know how best to capitalize on these incidents for his own personal gain (and yet, he still managed to screw it up, and come off sounding like a loon or a liar). He picked up a copy of UFO magazine, and probably figured, "y'know, these clowns are idiots -- I bet I can exploit that, using my highly classified, military background. Heck, maybe I'll get laid in the process..."

The day I found out that Salas had originally claimed to be at November Flight is the day I absolutely KNEW he had lied about the whole thing -- because there actually were rumors of UFOs being sighted around November Flight during that period of time. It was only after this example of "poor memory" was made public that his fully fictionalized account of the events at Oscar Flight came out. He couldn't fall back on his November Flight lie, and he wasn't at Echo Flight -- which was the only fully investigated missile outage. If it wasn't for the fact that this fully documented investigation had made very plain who was on duty when and where, I'm certain he would have first claimed to work at Echo Flight. But he couldn't, and that's why he claimed to work at November Flight first -- he didn't think he'd get called on it, and he needed something to back up his story. Well, he was called on it, and that's why he was forced to bring out Don Crawford and the whole Oscar Flight fiction.

And now, the whole thing is part of the Disclosure Project, and people actually believe our government is hiding the true events of what went on March 16, 1967. Well, our government may be hiding something, but not that -- for the most part, our government has declassified the whole incident, an incident that was highly classified at one time.

What bugs me is this Disclosure Project video that's out -- it says that my father has confirmed all the reports, and that's a flat out lie -- he never confirmed anything, and that's why Salas has to create these stories about Oscar Flight UFOs. The whole lot of these self-serving losers are liars, and I'm thinking a lawsuit may be necessary to prevent this garbage scattering class of profiteers from using my family to support the rubbish they publish. I'm thinking that maybe a lawsuit can also stop the idiots on the internet from reprinting whole hog the many lies and distortions that they print, making it look like my father is hiding something, while they turn a profit from their many lies off of books, videos, and internet advertising. You might want to consider that before you continue supporting Salas' claims (yeah, you Jim Klotz...).

One more short comment before I close up -- CUFON and Salas have made much of the fact that the original SAC command message states that the loss of the 10 Echo Flight missiles "is cause for grave concern to this headquarters." That really shouldn't be interpreted so wildly. Whenever "grave concern" is used in a message, all that means is that the message is classified Secret, and since it's stamped Secret at the top of this now-declassified message, it really shouldn't be considered as an exceptional sign of a concern that goes beyond the classification.