In a startling revelation, a former U.S. Air Force launch officer has come forward with claims that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) once incapacitated a series of nuclear missiles at a Montana base where he was stationed many years ago. The incident is said to have taken place at Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967, according to Robert Salas, the now 85-year-old veteran who shared his story on the Danny Jones Podcast.
During the tense period of the Cold War, Salas was responsible for overseeing and potentially launching nuclear missiles if ordered. On the night of March 24, while on duty underground with a fellow officer, Salas received a frantic call from guards stationed above ground. The guards reported witnessing unusual lights in the sky, flying directly over their position.
Salas recounted the call from the main guard, who stated, “Sir, we’ve been seeing some strange lights in the sky, flying directly overhead.” This prompted immediate concern, especially given the strategic importance of the Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missiles housed at the base.
Initially, Salas was skeptical, suspecting the guards were playing a prank. However, the guards were adamant that these were not Soviet aircraft, describing strange lights that moved erratically before coming to a halt above the missile silos.
His skepticism was short-lived. Just minutes after the initial call, Salas received another communication from the guards, this time with a voice “screaming into the phone,” signaling the gravity of the situation as the UFOs seemingly exerted control over the nuclear arsenal.
He initially brushed off the report, thinking it was a prank — but five minutes later, the guard called back, “screaming into the phone.”
“He’s yelling. He’s babbling. He’s frightened,” Salas recalled.
After calming down, the guard told Salas his men had their weapons pointed at the crafts hovering above the base’s front gate, emitting a “pulsating reddish light.”
Salas said the panicked guard asked what to do next, and he told him, “Do whatever you have to do.”
The guard then said one of his men had just “got injured” before hanging up.
Salas said he then went to wake his partner, who was resting, when “all of a sudden” a loud horn sounded at the controls, signaling something was wrong with the missiles.
“We looked at the board, and sure enough, one of them went from green to red. No ability to launch,” Salas said. “Then, very quickly thereafter, bing bing bing bing, all 10 of them went down. They all went red.”
They jumped up and ran through their checklist, then realized two launch facilities miles away were showing that “someone or something” may have breached the fenced missile area.
Salas said he immediately sent guards out to the missile silos, and when they were about a mile away, they saw the lights hovering above the launch areas.
“They were scared to death,” he said. “They didn’t want to go any further. They were so frightened of these things.”
Salas said he later heard the injured guard may have hurt his hand while clearing a jam in his rifle or cut it on barbed wire during the encounter.
He also learned guards claimed to have seen the crafts in the area in the days before the encounter, with movements that could reverse direction, snap into sharp 90-degree turns and fly in total silence.
The former nuclear missile officer said a Boeing-led investigation could not determine what shut down the warheads, adding the systems were designed to prevent jamming.
“They had no idea how this signal could have been injected into each of the missiles,” he said. “The cabling system that we had was triply shielded against electromagnetic interference from the outside.”
Salas said he’s convinced that intelligent non-human civilizations visited Earth to prevent a nuclear war.
“It’s another civilization out there that is visiting us and are concerned about us destroying this planet through nuclear war, for many reasons, probably some we don’t even understand,” he said.
Air Force investigators forced Salas and his commander to sign strict gag orders following the encounter, warning they could face prison time if they ever spoke about it.
He ultimately went public decades later after reading about a similar incident in a UFO book and concluding the information had already been exposed.
