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Echo Flight UFO incident, March 1967


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James Carlson: In this manuscript I debunk completely the Echo Flight UFO Incident of March 16, 1967, and prove that the myth of UFO interference with the nuclear weapons systems at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967 is a nothing but a poorly executed lie propogated by Robert Salas, James Klotz, Robert Hastings, Brad Sparks, CUFON, and NICAP -- a lie that has no basis in fact and lacks even the most liberal standards of proof. I've utilized newly discovered documents, in addition to the same documents, interviews, and published statements originally used and badly interpreted to support the belief in UFO interference with the Malmstrom missile systems, in order to destroy in minute, step-by-step detail, every aspect of the claims originally made by Robert Salas and James Klotz in their book "Faded Giant". Fully documented and footnoted, I examine in some detail all sides of this surprisingly well-documented event, reaching the only possible conclusion that UFOs had nothing at all to do with any of the events at Malmstrom in March, 1967 and nothing whatsoever to do with the missile failures that occurred. If you haven't read this book in its entirety, then you do not understand the events that occurred at Echo Flight and elsewhere that March.

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Regarding the Malmstrom AFB Echo Flight UFO incident of March 16, 1967--involving the full-flight, 10-missile shutdown that occurred just prior to UFOs being reported to the deputy missile commander on duty, now-retired Col. Walter Figel, by a maintenance team member and a security police team member--some highly relevant facts have been omitted by James Carlson in his recent posts on various websites.

To illustrate the problem, on another blog, http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread537468/pg10, Carlson wrote: Walt Figel and my father were the only people in the room, and Figel has repeatedly stated that he had the impression the guys who said "This UFO must have brought the missiles down" were joking around. In every single interview with him, he has said the same thing: "I thought it was a joke, that these guys were yanking my chain"...

What Col. Walt Figel (USAF Ret.) *actually* told me in an audiotaped interview was quite different, something James already knew when he wrote the passage above, because I had earlier posted large excerpts from the interview on the same blog.

James' selective editing of Figel's wordsregarding the report he got from the Security Alert Team member of a UFO hovering directly over one of Echos missile siloswas intended to alter their meaning, to create the spin he requires to make his factually-inaccurate debunking of the Echo Flight UFO incident hold together.

VERBATIM EXCERPT FROM MY 10/20/08 INTERVIEW WITH COL. FIGEL:

RH: What was the demeanor of the guard you were talking to?

WF: Um, you know, I wouldnt say panicked, or anything [like that]. I was thinking he was yanking my chain more than anything else.

RH: But he seemed to be serious to you?

WF: He seemed to be serious and I wasnt taking him seriously.

RH: Alright. If it was a large object, did he describe the shape of the object?

WF: He just said a large round object.

RH: Directly over the LF (Launch Facility)?

WF: Directly over the site.

END OF EXCERPT

After speaking with Figel, in October 2008, I urged James Carlson to call him, to hear all of this from the colonels own mouth. James has steadfastly refused to do so, nearly a year-and-a-half later, something one may verify by going to the link above and reviewing his posts on that thread. Carlson says he doesn't need to speak with the other person in the capsule that day because he knows that his "father would never lie to" him.

In short, anyone who reads James Carlsons take on things, including what he says former Minuteman missile launch officer Bob Salas (or Col. Figel or I) supposedly said, and then checks his comments against the original source material, will quickly learn how reckless and selective James is with the facts.

A larger excerpt of my telephone conversation with Col. Walter Figel follows here:

WF: [At the time of the Echo Flight shutdown] what was unusual was that several of the missiles were open...for some routine maintenance. I dont remember why. But, uh, at least two of them were running on diesel power so they were not connected to the power grid. I dont remember if it was three open or four open [but] it was just routine maintenance. Nothing had happened [to the missiles]. It was just the time of the year for routine maintenance. Um, and the day before, there were maintenance teams out there. They had stayed overnight

RH: Do you know how many maintenance teams were out overnight?

WF: You know, I think it was four. It was the two sites that had diesels running and two others. And when maintenance stays overnight they...stay in a camper...When you have maintenance on the site and theyre going to stay overnight, you have a security team on the site.

RH: Right.

(Break. Figel goes into detail about security procedures.)

WF: [When] the missiles dropped off alert, I started calling the maintenance people out there on the radio to talk to them. I had the security guard authenticate so I know Im talking to a security guard and, you know, Whats going on? Is maintenance trying to get into the silo? [The guard said,] No, theyre still in the camper. [so, I said,] Get em up, I want to talk to them. Then I tried to tell them what I had was a Channel 9 No-Go.

RH: Uh huh.

WF: Uh, we did that with the sites that were there, that [had maintenance teams and their guards on site] and I sent Strike Teams to two other sites. Theres no sense sending them where I [already] have a guard and a gun and an authenticate.

RH: Right.

WF: Uh

RH: So far in this narrative, you havent mentioned UFOs.

WF: [Laughs] Thats correct. Um, somewhere along the way, um, one of the maintenance peoplecause he didnt know what was going on any place else either, they have no capability of talking to each other [at different launch sites], in other words, they can talk to the [launch] capsule but they cant talk to each other

RH: Right

WF: unless they were on the radio and no one was using the radio except the security police. And the guy says, We got a Channel 9 No-Go. It must be a UFO hovering over the site. I think I see one here. Yeah, right, whatever. What were you drinking? And he tried to convince me of something and I said, well, I basically, you know, didnt believe him. [Laughs] I said, you know, we have to get somebody to look at this [No-Go]. [A short time later] one of the Strike Teams that went out, one of the two, claimed that they saw something over the site.

RH: How did they describe that?

WF: Oh, on radio, [they said,] Theres this large object hovering over the site! Ive always been a non-believer [in UFOs] so I said, Right, sure you do. [They responded,] Yeah! Yeah, we do! So, Theres two of you there, saying so, so write it down in your report. [The Strike Team leader] said, What do you want us to do? Follow your checklist. Go to the site, open it up, and call me.

RH: What was the demeanor of the guard you were talking to?

WF: Um, you know, I wouldnt say panicked, or anything [like that]. I was thinking he was yanking my chain more than anything else.

RH: But he seemed to be serious to you?

WF: He seemed to be serious and I wasnt taking him seriously.

RH: Alright. If it was a large object, did he describe the shape of the object?

WF: He just said a large round object.

RH: Directly over the LF?

WF: Directly over the site.

(BREAK. Figel describes hearing from the maintenance man about his opening up the silo, going down into it, and reporting that even though the missile was offline, nothing was visually damaged or otherwise amiss at the site.)

RH: Did he describe the object leaving the scene?

WF: No. He never said anything about it again.

(BREAK. Figel describes telling all the maintenance teams to stay at their sites until relieved, and not to attempt repairs until told to do so, since the missile silos were in effect crime scenes.)

RH: When you got the first call, well, when the missiles went down, you didnt have an inkling of an alleged UFO-involvement until you got the report back from the first Strike Team member?

WF: Thats correct. (RH: Actually, upon reviewing the taped conversation with Figel, I realized that the missile maintenance man had apparently mentioned seeing the UFO first.)

RH: Okay, uh, and only one of the two teams reported seeing an object?

WF: Right.

RH: Uh, did you discuss the report with Mr. Carlsonthat you were being told that there was a UFO at one of the sites?

WF: Um, he could hear it, uh, I mean he was sitting right there, two feet away from me

RH: So

WF: Whatever I said, he would have heard.

(Break. Figel describes going back to Malmstrom with Carlson and being debriefed by everybody and his brother.)

RH: Did any of the conversations back at squadron headquarters, uh, was there any mention of UFOs?

WF: I told them everything everyone told me. No one made any comments or inquiries

RH: So you did mention the report that you got from the Strike Team?

WF: Yes.

RH: And no one asked any questions about UFOs per se?

WF: No.

RH: Did they act skeptically or negatively when you mentioned [the Strike Teams UFO report]?

WF: They just wrote things down.

RH: [Laughs] That sounds right. Poker-faced and

WF: [Laughs] Poker-faced and wrote things down. They just said, Thank you very much. Dont talk about it. I didnt sign anything, I can tell you that.

(Break. Hastings describes similar testimony from other missileers who were debriefed at Malmstrom and other Strategic Air Command bases, following UFO-related incidents in the missile fields.)

WF: What did Eric [Carlson] have to say [about the shutdown incident]? (RH had interviewed Carlson two weeks earlier, on 10/6/08)

RH: Uh, he said that he couldnt recall any UFO-involvement in the incident. He couldnt remember if you had mentioned UFOs, one way or another. His son [James] has now [posted] on a blog, a web log, a couple of lengthy statements in which he defamed Salas, said Salas was a liar, [and said] there was nothing involving UFOs at Echo...

WF: Did Eric say anything else that was a discontinuity [relative to what Ive said]?

RH: ...Well, I [told Eric] that you had [heard from] a guard or a maintenance person that there was an object above the site, which youve confirmed today

WF: Yes.

RH: And I asked Eric if he remembered any of that, and he said that he did not. And, um, I asked him why his son would have written this scathing, very negative summary, which I will send [to] you, about the event

WF: That will be interesting.

RH: calling Salas a liar, and so on and so forth.

WF: Well, I didnt do that.

RH: Well, I know, but his son, you know, for whatever reason, his son, James Carlson, has got a bug up his nose and said that nothing happened, there were no reports of UFOs, which you told me is incorrect because you got one.

WF: I did!

RH: Well, according to James, it was all bull and Salas was basically pulling it out of the air. [Eric] Carlson just, he didnt really want to talk about it, frankly, but he did answer my questions. He just was kind of circumspect. I cant say that hes not being truthful when he says he doesnt remember talking to you about UFOs, but thats what he told me.

WF: Im sure we had a long conversation

. I mean, I reported everything to him that I heard or was told. I mean, we were together, you know? [Laughs]

RH: Well, it has been 40 years, so we have to take that into account. [That is, the possibility of faded memories.]

END OF TELEPHONE TRANSCRIPT

So, folks, James Carlson has it all wrong, according to his fathers deputy missile commander that day at Echo Flight, now retired Col. Walter Figel. Actually, James, the presence of a UFO at one of Echos missiles was *seriously* reported to Figel, by both a missile maintenance technician and a Security Alert Team member. It was described as a large, round object, hovering directly over the launch facility.

Moreover, James, Figel insists that your father was fully aware of the situation, given that he was sitting two feet away from Figel during his phone calls with the on-site maintenance man and the responding missile security policeman. As to why your father can not, or will not, confirm Figels story, I wont speculate.

Now, there is independent confirmation of airmen at Echo Flight reporting UFOs at the time of the shutdowns. Robert Kaminski, the Boeing Corporation engineer responsible for investigating the Minuteman missile shutdowns at Echo Flight, wrote to researcher James Klotz on February 1, 1997, and told Klotz what actually happened after his team began their inquiry.

EXCERPTS FROM KAMINSKIS LETTER TO JAMES KLOTZ

Hi James,

I received your package of information on Tuesday January 28, 1997. After reviewing the information it sure revived memories concerning the Malmstrom AFB E-Flight investigation of which I was the Boeing in-house project engineer for the field team investigation. Per your request I have documented

my direct involvement as I recall the event and give names and other information not previously covered in my book, "Lying Wonders."

As I previously mentioned to Bob Salas and others, I never submitted a final report from Boeing to the Air Force. A final report was generated but not submitted. This will become clear as you will see in my recollection noted below...

At the time of the incident, I was an engineer in the MIP/CNP (Material Improvement Project/Controlled Numbered Problem) group. This was a Logistics Engineering group. The group was contracted by the Air Force so that Boeing could respond to specific Air Force Minuteman Missiles problems that occurred in the field. The assignments came from the OOAMA Air Material Command. Our group was made up of a small unit of engineers that were knowledgeable of, and had worked on the Minuteman Missile program...

We were usually notified by our OOAMA Boeing contact (located at Hill AFB) when a request was coming in from the Air Force. Don Peterson, was our Boeing OOAMA contact...

I was handed the E-Flight CNP assignment when it arrived by the group supervisor. As the internal Boeing project engineer I arranged meetings necessary with management and technical personnel required to determine a course of action to be taken, in exploring why 10 missiles had suddenly fallen from alert status, green to red, with no explanation for it. This was an unusual request and we had no prior similar incident or experience to this kind of anomaly. At the time of the request, no mention was made of an UFO involvement...

Since this was a field site peculiar incident, a determination was made to send out an investigation team to survey the LCF and the LFs to determine what failures or related incidents could be found to explain the cause...there were about 5 persons in all that were sent out. After a week

in the field the team returned and pooled their data.

At the outset the team quickly noticed a lack of anything that would come close to explain why the event occurred. There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert. This indeed turned out to be a rare event and not encountered

before. The use of backup power systems and other technical system circuit operational redundancy strongly suggests that this kind of event is virtually impossible once the system was up and running and on line with other LCF's and LF's interconnectivity.

The only thing that even came close to a failure was that a transformer on a commercial power pole down the road from one of the sites was in the process of failing. It exhibited a intermittent transient type of failure that could have generated noise spikes on the power line. This in itself could not have caused the problem at E-Flight. The problem was reported to the local power company who took action to replace the transformer.

The team met with me to report their findings and it was decided that the final report would have nothing significant in it to explain what happened at E-Flight. In other words there was no technical explanation that could explain the event. The team went off to do the report. Meanwhile I was

contacted by our representative at OOAMA (Don Peterson) and told by him that the incident was reported as being a UFO event--That a UFO was seen by some Airmen over the LCF at the

time E-Flight went down.

Subsequently, we were notified a few days later that a stop work order was on the way from OOAMA to stop any further effort on this project. We stopped. We were also told that we were not to submit the final engineering report. This was most unusual since all of our work required review by the customer and the submittal of a final Engineering report to OOAMA.

Days later, I asked our Boeing OOAMA rep what was going on. His reply to me--off the record---was that the LCF capsule jockeys were suspected of causing the problem somehow by something they did to one of the digital racks in the LCF. The Air Force capsule officers apparently were quietly removed from their job as LCF officers. This part of the story can not be verified by me, as it was hearsay...

Sincerely Yours,

[Robert Kaminski]

END OF LETTER TO KLOTZ

In summary, the Air Force eventually lied about the reasons for the Echo Flight shutdown by telling Boeing rep Don Peterson that the launch officers (James father and Walt Figel) had screwed up and had been relieved of their positions. We now know that was a cover story. Kaminski had earlier learned the truthabout airmen reporting UFOs at E Flightfrom Peterson.

In short, while James Carlsons ongoing misrepresentations about the shutdown incident Echo Flight may fool a few uninformed persons, the facts are available for anyone who wishes to pursue them.

--Robert Hastings

http://www.ufohastings.com

Edited by Robert Hastings
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Mr.Hastings that was very informative to say the least, I had discredited Mr.Carlsons story before you even posted all of the above, What I find appauling is these people lie to to the masses and try to sweep it under the rug so to speak and they know damn well they lie thru their teeth, It just is a thing that some people are capable of and it is disgusting to say the very best about them, While most of us will never know the truth of what happened at Malmstrom it is obvious that something very significant did happen there,

Mr Carlsons lies only makes the ufo hypothisis even more credible due to many many other times the airforce has been caught up in lies and make up fictional storys to keep the masses uninformed and unprepared, I dont mean any disrespect to Mr.Carlson but it is very obvious that he is a decieving person in which the world already is overpopulated with, Hey I call it as I see it,

Regards;

TFF

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(woah)

And, about what was written in the OP and the response by Mr. Hastings-

Days later, I asked our Boeing OOAMA rep what was going on. His reply to me--off the record---was that the LCF capsule jockeys were suspected of causing the problem somehow by something they did to one of the digital racks in the LCF. The Air Force capsule officers apparently were quietly removed from their job as LCF officers. This part of the story can not be verified by me, as it was hearsay...

Sincerely Yours,

[Robert Kaminski]

I think most rational thinking persons would first draw the conclusion that it was a technical issue with the equipment and the operators.

Adfixing a UFO cover story may have been due to some prior policy of using that excuse for cover purposes, or perhaps this was a on-the-spot fix to a security issue.

BTW, people might be interested to learn more about Mr. Kaminski. I think he is a somewhat provocative person, yet I would not simply discount him or his beliefs.

Because I don't know all the answers.

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Mr.Hastings that was very informative to say the least, I had discredited Mr.Carlsons story before you even posted all of the above, What I find appauling is these people lie to to the masses and try to sweep it under the rug so to speak and they know damn well they lie thru their teeth, It just is a thing that some people are capable of and it is disgusting to say the very best about them, While most of us will never know the truth of what happened at Malmstrom it is obvious that something very significant did happen there,

Mr Carlsons lies only makes the ufo hypothisis even more credible due to many many other times the airforce has been caught up in lies and make up fictional storys to keep the masses uninformed and unprepared, I dont mean any disrespect to Mr.Carlson but it is very obvious that he is a decieving person in which the world already is overpopulated with, Hey I call it as I see it,

Regards;

TFF

Gentlemen, and Ladies,

Once again it seems I have to defend myself from attacks by people who refuse to acknowledge what I have repeatedly written. I haven't mislead anybody, and I take into account everything Hastings has repeatedly used to bolster a ridiculous UFO myth that could not have happened as these people repeatedly claim, because the USAF does not now and did not then deal with matters of this importance in the reckless, undocumented method Hastings insists upon. As a result of any normal analysis of these events, the only possible conclusion is that a couple of men are dishonest and their supporters are naive. I have discussed all of this in great detail in my narrative, and anyone who wants to read it can do so -- I'm giving it away for free for that very purpose.

As for Hastings "proof", please note the following:

Walt Figel, contrary to the conrinuous stream of nonsense coming from the pen of Robert Hastings, doesn't confirm anything, and certainly doesn't indicate that anything very strange occurred. Everything that Hastings posits as "evidence" is no more than his own insistence -- even to Figel -- that the UFO was actually a real object, and not just an example of witless banter. And, in fact, everything that Figel asserts is more evidence that NOTHING was actually seen by anybody. Let's just look at this event in some detail, shall we? This is something that Salas and Hastings have both repeatedly refused to even contemplate, preferring instead to attack the problems that I've noted in their tales with little more than personal attacks directed at me, not my argument, which I've put down in some detail in my narrative. Now the following interpretation depends to a great extent upon the input I've received from various members of the missileer community. Since most of the readers of this forum are, I believe, capable of making judgments based on genuine evidence, I'd like to ask you in particular to note this exchange and tell me whether or not my interpretation is the more likely, or did a UFO take out the missiles at Echo Flight? Most missileers tend to believe that Robert Hastings is a blowhard who has very little actual fact to back up his silly claims.

On March 16, 1967, while on watch with Walt Figel at Echo Flight, shortly after he awoke from his sleep period, and during the time Figel was debriefing him on the mundane events of the previous night, my father, CAPT Eric D. Carlson, the MCCC at Echo Flight that morning, noticed that the missiles started going offline, because he happened to be the one facing the monitors. He didn't remember who specifically checked, or if it was the two of them together, but the VRSA indications showed that a specific series of errors -- channel 9 and 12 faults according to the command histories -- had taken down all of the missiles in the flight within ten seconds or so. To his knowledge, that had never happened before. In the command histories that were drafted every three months, and in the message traffic used as sources for those histories, are indications that these same errors -- contrary to what Kaminski told Salas some thirty years later -- had occurred once before, at Alpha Flight on December 19, 1966, taking down three of the ten missiles. It was due to this that the Boeing contractors had a fairly good idea what the cause was, or at least where they should start looking. These records were ignored by Salas and Hastings, and were purposely left out of the list of documents they have published on the CUFON website, even though they published other pages from the very same quarterly history in support of their version of these events.

Also contrary to what Salas has written in his various articles, and as the Top Secret Norforn ICBM histories that were only declassified a few short years ago, all assert quite plainly and with complete and unconfusing rhetoric, equipment failures, especially in the guidance and control units, that resulted in the failures of missiles in their silos, happened all the time between 1965 and 1969, when the contractors finally got everything under control. From what Figel states and as the command histories affirm, there were a number of maintenance crews that had gone out the night before, spending the night in the field. It was one of these crews that Figel asserts -- again plainly and with no confusion -- first mentioned a UFO; and it is this conversation that Hastings claims to be an actual UFO report. My father told me that there was no UFO, that the crew on the ground was just screwing around. But let's take a look at what transpired, because I believe the events make very plain what happened -- events that have been detailed by Walt Figel to Hastings, and that I believe Hastings has poorly interpreted due to his own insistence that a UFO was involved.

From what I gather and from what I've read in the documents I've examined (all of which I've made available in my narrative to whomever wants to examine them in turn), there were three teams out who spent the night in the field, not four. That's what the command histories assert. When the missiles went offline it became necessary to determine the status of as many of those missiles as possible and as quickly as possible -- the VRSA indications read channels 9 and 12 No-Go from the LCC, but they needed to find out what errors were noted at the LFs as well, because if they're different they can indicate what kind of problem is registering; so the missile status has to be checked. There's no need to send out a team to check the three silos that already have teams present, so they determined to call those outcamping teams and have them check the actual status of the missiles at the LFs, since they were already there. Keep in mind that the missiles went offline at 0845 -- not terribly late in the day, but definitely after the work day has begun, and about two hours after the sun went up.

Each maintenance team was accompanied by a Security Escort Team who were there to provide protection, if necessary, and more importantly, to provide continuous communications via the 2-way radios that only the security personnel carried. Figel confirms all of this. So a little after 0845, Figel contacted security on the 2-way, established open comms and asked if the maintenance team was up yet; security said no, so he told security to get the maintenance guys up and have them check the missile status. Keep in mind that according to Hastings, a UFO has already shut down the missiles, doing so at 0845. Security was awake, but they saw and reported nothing. Maintenance was still asleep. Nobody has even said "UFO" yet, and the missiles are all offline.

In order to check the missile status, the maintainer has to go into the launcher equipment room which is 6-10 feet underground and can only be accessed from above by using the personnel access hatch -- this is very heavy and has to be unlocked and cranked open with a manual screwjack, which can take from 10 to 15 mins, in order to open it; but it can't be cranked open until a circuit lock adjacent to the access hatch has been removed first -- and that means a huge lock pin that's set inside the circuit lock has to be manually cranked up and removed, and that also adds another 5 minutes or so to the process, at least. The security personnel normally remove the lock pin, but that doesn't make the process go any faster, because you can't even start cranking open the access hatch until the lock pin has been removed. And before cranking open the the access hatch, which weighs almost a ton (although at the siloworld.com website, it says the access hatches at Ellsworth were 8 tons), a little cage of "barrier poles" also has to be set up, which looks kind of like the safety barrier that city workers put up surrounding a manhole whenever work is done underneath a road in the city. Now if it's cold outside, everything's frozen up, and this can add another few minutes to the process. And sometimes there's corrosion or rust -- it all depends on the last time the hatch was opened. Once it's open, the maintenance personnelman sets up the access ladder, and then he can climb down into the upper level of the launch equipment room. Once he's in the launch equipment room, only then can he check on the status of the missile in the silo, because everything that's necessary to do so is underground.

What I don't know about the process, and what nobody else has mentioned to me, is whether or not the crews that were camping out at the launch facility needed to be uthenticated to get access to LER-1, the upper level of the launch equipment room. When they were camping out, were they inside or outside the fence of the LF? As I understand it, if they were camping outside the fence, they need to be authenticated in order to be allowed access to the LER. Now if they need to be authenticated, this adds more time to the process, although in this case it could probably have been done almost immediately -- but I'm not certain, and that's why I mention it. Figel mentions authenticating security, but he doesn't mention authenticating maintenance, nor how long it took if it was done, and it might be significant. If the maintenance crew doesn't need to be authenticated, we're still looking at about 20-30 minutes average just to get down into LER-1 to check on the status of the missile, unless the access hatch was opened the night before and left open throughout the night. That doesn't seem very likely to me for security and weathering reasons, but if I'm wrong, someone please tell me -- I don't think I am wrong, because I know how the military usually works, and that's by checklist (which Figel also refers to), and I don't believe anybody would put "open the access hatch, and leave it open all night while you're sleeping" on a checklist. I also don't know whether or not the team member going below into the underground LER-1 still has to "safe" the site before checking the missile status -- and that's kind of important, since below ground in the silo is a "No-Lone-Zone", and whoever goes below can't be alone with the equipment, except for a very, very brief time, because by doing so, he's breaking visual contact with the security crew or other maintenance crew members above ground. If he's still required to safe the site, then he's got to click in a digital safety switch in order to disarm all of the explosive devices on site, at which point he has to reestablish immediately visual contact with another member of his maintenance team or security. I don't know whether it was done or not, but I can't think of any good reason why 2 men wouldn't have gone below, so this might be entirely irrelevant to the actual process. However this is done, though, the security team still remains on the surface with the 2-way radio.

Once the status has been checked underground, the only way that maintenance can report to the LCC is by using the SIN telephone that's underground with all the equipment, since the security personnel stay on the surface, and they're the only guys with the 2-way radios. This is also confirmed by Figel in his "interview" with Hastings. This whole process is the major reason why I don't believe that the mention of UFOs to anybody on the SIN telephone was a valid report. And that's why I remain convinced that they were just screwing around. Security wakes them up, they throw on their clothes unless they slept rugged, and then they take about 20 minutes plus to open up the access hatch, climb down into LER-1 and check the status of the missile. Maintenance then calls the LCC on the SIN telephone below ground, and says something to the effect of, "yeah, we've got indication of a channel 9 No-Go -- I guess the UFO that's up there must have shut down the missile." And he says this while the security crew is still on the surface with the 2-way radio on which they've already established comms with the LCC. And yet, the first mention of a UFO comes from maintenance on the SIN telephone underground, and not by the security team on the surface with the supposed UFO and communications already established and open via the 2-way. Once the guy underground has said this, it's overheard by the team leader of one of the other security teams who are with another maintenance group at another silo, because they're also required to monitor the 2-ways -- that means they can overhear everything that's being said at the LCC -- he pops in with "yeah, there's one out here too!" and all of a sudden it's a regular holiday crowd of UFOs on the comms side, but no actual UFOs on site. Had there been a real UFO present, security would have notified either the command post or the LCC immediately, to determine whether Figel still wants them to go below, wait for a strike team or what. However the event occurred, though, it would never have been reported first by the maintenance crew underground -- I believe Figel and my father would have heard about it immediately from security on the surface, because that's their job -- they aren't checking the status of the missile -- they're looking after the maintenance team. So during the 20 plus minutes it takes to open the access hatch, go into the LER to check the status, and call the LCC on the SIN telephone, either nobody else saw the UFO except the guy preparing and then opening the access hatch, descending into the LER, and then calling the LCC, or nobody on the security team thought a UFO on site was important enough to call in via already established comms with the LCC, or there was no UFO. Common sense should tell you that there was no UFO, only a half-assed attempt to be amusing by a guy who was still asleep at 0845 when the missiles actually went offline. This is not a difficult scenario to follow through, unless you're just so convinced that UFOs were involved that you no longer consider the most obvious explanations for anything in relation to the event.

Everything that Figel has said to Hastings in every interview he's done, including the one Hastings repeatedly discusses above, as if it's some holy recognition of demonic possession or something equally and controversially important, sounds EXACTLY like this to me -- just a couple of guys screwing around, which according to some guys I've met at different missileer websites, used to happen a lot. Just a week or so ago, I got an email from a guy who was somewhat familiar with a hoax story out of 490th SMS in 1970-71, and he was told (by a drunken team member at a local watering hole, so you decide how accurate the story is) about a hoax that even ended up being reported in a UFO magazine -- which were also extremely plentiful at the time, more so than now, because UFOs were a lot more culturally relevant then; you couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about UFOs, watching a show about UFOs, or listening to people talk about UFOs. Anything for a laugh, y'know?

When I first asked my father about Echo Flight, he told me basically the same thing. He also told me that in the late 1960s he used to hear UFO "reports" all the time, at both Malmstrom AFB and in New Mexico, and this escalated the more that UFOs were in the news and discussed on television. He also said that to his knowledge not one UFO ever "reported" to him turned out to be anything to be concerned with, and that most of time it was just lights in the sky that the kids who were on watch would imagine to be more mysterious than they actually were. He said a point was reached when it happened so often that he was certain folks were reporting UFOs when there was nothing to report -- just to be funny or amusing -- and that a lot of this was due to television. I got interested in that portion of it, because like any other kid who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV, so just for kicks I looked up what was on TV for March 1967, and was surprised to notice that there was a lot of mention of UFOs in the Sci-Fi shows like Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, and The Invaders, crime shows like the Green Hornet, and comedies like Green Acres -- and this was just between March 9 and March 15, 1967; all of them dealt with flying saucers, either as real Sci-Fi threats or as hoaxes. I was particularly amused to find out that on March 15, 1967, the day before the Echo Flight Incident, Green Acres aired an episode called "The Saucer Season" about a UFO hoax investigated by an Air Force Lt. played by Robert Hastings, who was also a regular at that time on McHale's Navy. Deja Vu? Coincidence? Synchronicity? Irony? Or just stupid-weird? You decide...

And so, in both the short and the long run, we end up with an Echo Flight Incident having more in common with a repeat of the Green Acres episode "The Saucer Season" just a few hours after it had originally aired the day before than with an actual report of a UFO. This isn't even rocket science anymore -- it's just a pathetic manipulation of already established facts by some guy with a tape recorder and a pen looking for anything at all that might show how Robert Salas' ridiculous little fiction about UFOs and missiles may have actually occurred. But anybody with an open mind who looks close enough can't help but notice that there is NOTHING there.

Look, go out and ask the actual missileers -- they've got lifetimes of experience with this very thing that neither I nor Hastings will ever possess. Ask these guys for their opinion, their viewpoint. Does this sound like a valid UFO event to you? I've told you what I believe, based on what I've read from every statement available, what my father has told me, what I've discussed with other missileers elsewhere, and what I've read and uncovered through my own research. I've detailed everything, given you the sources, and in most cases told you exactly where you can look up the documents yourselves on the internet, so you can judge the matter and its context for yourself at your leisure. In my opinion, it would seem overly hasty for anyone to judge that Figel's version of these events describes an actual UFO sighting, but these guys -- Salas, Klotz, Hastings, CUFON, et al -- are very used to doing exactly that; all of the confirmations Robert Salas has gathered to "prove" his story are, for the most part, nonsense. He claims confirmation by my father, which is bunk -- my father doesn't even believe in UFOs, and he's said this on numerous occassions. I communicated very shortly with Salas' watch commander -- Mr. Frederick Meiwald -- and although he didn't want to go into any details for personal reasons having nothing to do with the story itself (a health related issue), he did tell me that, like my father, he doesn't believe in UFOs either. What kind of confirmations are these?

Instead of the above litany of questions regarding my claims and my father's memories, Hastings should be asking questions like: how much time elapsed between Figel's instructions to check the status of the missile and when that status was actually reported? Did Figel at any time for however many years believe that a UFO had actually shut down the missiles at Echo Flight? Did Figel believe that what he heard on the 2-way and the SIN telephone correlated with an actual report of a UFO, and did he respond by doing anything different from what he would normally have done? Are there any errors in the scenario I've outlined above? Other than to clear UFOs as having anything at all to do with the missile failures, did the investigators or anybody else spend a lot of time discussing the mention of UFOs? Did the Malmstrom UFO officer, Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase, question Figel or anybody else regarding UFOs, or did he investigate any UFOs at all in relation to Echo Flight? Did anybody at all seem concerned about a UFO having somehow caused a flight of missiles to drop into a No-Go state? When everybody concerned was debriefed later, did anybody tell them not to discuss the matter of UFOs, or just not to discuss anything having to do with the Echo Flight missiles going offline? Was anybody ever debriefed by anybody specifically regarding UFOs, or was everything focused on Echo Flight equipment and the electrical environment? Was there any serious response from anybody at all resulting from what seems to be an offhanded mention of UFOs?

Please believe me, I have no intentions of disputing with anybody the existence of UFOs or even whether UFOs are overly fascinated with nuclear facilities. Frankly, I'm not much interested in UFOs, and what I know about them is almost entirely the result of research stemming from this one incident. I don't know whether Figel believes in UFOs, and I'm not even sure whether that's relevant. But I do believe that his past statements have been grievously misinterpreted by people who are more concerned with finding UFOs than they are with finding out what really happened. Because of this, I think they're blinded to what he's been telling them from day one -- of course, the same might be said of me, and if that's the case, I'll apologize -- I have no desire to win an argument by trying to hide actual facts and events, or by lying about something, and I'll concede the field entirely if I'm that far off. I would still believe what my father claims, but I would absolutely quit saying that Figel has been misinterpreted, and I would go out publically and state that my suppositions regarding his version of events was in error. And that would require an apology to Mr. Hastings that I would otherwise absolutely dread, because I detest the man -- but I would still aplogize and try to put things right. I'm not a dishonest person, and I don't intend to give others reason to make such a claim. I know words and phrases like "personal honor" aren't particularly popular these days, but some people do take character seriously, and I like to think that I'm one of those people, and that my actions show this. If I need to make amends, than I'll make amends -- I promise you that. But I don't believe it will ever come to that, because the "evidence" these guys have presented in full knowledge of the facts of this case is absolutely pathetic -- and the fact that they've continuously ignored or distorted the record of this very well-documented event suggests to me that their conclusions are studiously forced into a box with a UFO, making any examination without that UFO impossible.

The research that I've done all points to exactly one cause of the missile failures -- an electronic noise pulse that was probably generated internally either in the microcircuitry adjacent to the logic coupler or in the logic coupler itself. But it could have happened anywhere -- and if Kaminsky was an actual electrical engineer in 1967, he should have known this -- it was, after all, a very common problem in the early use of integrated circuitry. I have also documented and detailed all of this in my narrative, and it is a well-known character of technological history that Kaminsky either ignores or refuses to consider. The fact that documents from 1967-1969 all assert very plainly and in a very detailed manner EXACTLY what transpired makes it very unlikely that Kaminsky was giving a factual record of the events. I'll give Salas the benefit of the doubt here that the letter was genuinely written by Kaminsky, but there are a number of points to that letter that are quite simply WRONG, and cannot be supported by anything. For instance, he states that "Meanwhile I was contacted by our representative at OOAMA (Don Peterson) and told by him that the incident was reported as being a UFO event--That a UFO was seen by some Airmen over the LCF at the time E-Flight went down." We know for a fact that didn't happen, because if it had, Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase would have investigated it per standing orders that went into effect in 1966; he continuously affirmed before his death that Echo Flight had nothing to do with UFOs, and he did not investigate any UFO sightings at all by anybody until March 24-25, 1967. I also show in my narrative that while there were rumors of UFOs in relation to Echo Flight, these rumors were very likely the result of discussions between Raymond Fowler, a NICAP investigator employed by Sylvania Corporation, and Roy Craig, an investigator with the Condon committe tasked by the Air Force with studying UFO phenomena, such rumors stemming from the fact that Raymond Fowler didn't know as much about Echo Flight as he thought, including the date on which it occurred. All of this has been documented since 1995, as I discuss in my narrative, and can be examined by anybody at any time; in most cases my sources can be downloaded or otherwise accessed on the internet. I didn't make up anything, my conclusions are valid and far more likely than the one espoused by Hastings and Salas, and my sources are very well regarded by both scholars and historians.

All of the logic couplers used by Autonetics throughout both the Minuteman I and the Minuteman II systems were highly susceptible to noise pulse, and when such an EMP was injected into the logic coupler, 7 out of 10 times the result was the same series of errors noted at Echo Flight, and then everything goes offline. A transformer had apparently blown around the time as the actual incident, so a lot of testing was conducted in an attempt to determine whether or not the transformer voltage could have coupled with the shielding in use on the LF cabling, but all the testing was negative. This indicated that the transient voltage spike affecting the logic coupler had to have originated somewhere adjacent to the LCC. Since no such testing could really be done to prove where the noise came from without taking down an LCC -- and even then it was doubtful that they'd find anything positive for the money they'd have to spend -- it was decided to correct the problem at the logic coupler by removing it's susceptibility to EMP noise -- a fix which, thankfully, was already scheduled system wide as part of the Minuteman II Force Modernization; the Air Force had been testing EMP affects on the electrical grid and LCC to LF cable systems at Hill AFB, Warren AFB, and contractor facilities since 1965 as part of their plans to upgrade the EMP defenses, and had made suggestions that would shield the logic couplers from electromagnetic interference of all kinds. They were also certain this would prevent electromagnetic noise from entering the logic couplers of the Minuteman I systems. So the Air Force simply ordered the fix to Minuteman I as well, as part of the new Force Mods. By July 1968, all the changes had been made, and the problem never occurred again. All of the command histories indicate that this is what happened, and the Top Secret Noforn ICBM Histories that the Air Force declassified a couple of years ago all say the same thing. The ICBM histories don't even mention UFOs in relation to any equipment problems at Malmstrom AFB (they might mention them elsewhere, but I only looked at the late 1960s at Malmstrom AFB -- but they're all online now at Georgetown University, so maybe I'll check someday, just for fun).

Now from the outside, that's what it looks like to me. Maybe I got some details wrong, but I don't see the USAF spending so much money to conduct all of those tests if they knew a UFO had actually shut down the missiles, particularly since they were in the middle of very well-documented budget crisis at the same time. And from what I see, Walt Figel's version of these events is pretty much the same. I believe Mr. Hastings is neglecting a more common sense explanation in favor of something he desperately wants to believe in. If I'm wrong, please tell me -- I'll apologize for the things I've said to Robert Hastings and to Robert Salas for my insistence that they have misinterpreted what Figel told them if anybody can establish any errors in my argument. I have no wish for that argument to prevail on the basis of my own stubborn adherence to an explanation that can't be otherwise supported -- that position on the field has already been co-opted by others. So if I'm wrong, tell me. I have to tell you, I don't think anybody can, particularly not Robert Hastings or Salas, because they are both very much aware that the already well-established facts of this case disrupt entirely their silly little discussion of UFOs. But, go ahead and look into it yourselves -- I assume most readers of this forum aren't all idiots and can probably judge the value of evidence as well as anybody else; when you get right into it, NONE of the actual witnesses to this event -- including Walt Figel -- can produce any sort of argument that remains convincing at the end of the day. So, if you think I'm wrong, then show me exactly where I've erred, because the only evidence I've found necessary to produce is the same evidence Hastings uses to an opposite purpose.

But if you think I'm right ... please tell everybody else. Determine for yourself what's more likely. That's why I'm giving the book away to whomever wants to examine the evidence. You can download it for free at

http://www.scribd.com/doc/26641522/Americans-Credulous-by-James-Carlson

Most sincerely,

James Carlson

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Mr.Hastings that was very informative to say the least, I had discredited Mr.Carlsons story before you even posted all of the above, What I find appauling is these people lie to to the masses and try to sweep it under the rug so to speak and they know damn well they lie thru their teeth, It just is a thing that some people are capable of and it is disgusting to say the very best about them, While most of us will never know the truth of what happened at Malmstrom it is obvious that something very significant did happen there,

Mr Carlsons lies only makes the ufo hypothisis even more credible due to many many other times the airforce has been caught up in lies and make up fictional storys to keep the masses uninformed and unprepared, I dont mean any disrespect to Mr.Carlson but it is very obvious that he is a decieving person in which the world already is overpopulated with, Hey I call it as I see it,

Regards;

TFF

Just for a change, it might be nice if you actually pointed out where it is that I have "lied" about anything. Everything that I have written, I can prove -- it's documented, and it's accepted as fact. You say that my lies "makes the ufo hypothisis even more credible" without once indicating what those supposed lies are; you talk about how credible the UFO hypothesis is without once offering any evidence that a UFO was ever actually seen by anybody at Echo Flight. Nobody has ever come forward with any statements anywhere at any time to say they saw a UFO; those individuals that Hastings continues to offer as "proof" that UFOs were reported all agree that they did not consider the comments made to be actual reports of real UFOs, and even Robert Salas now admits that he has no idea what happened at Echo Flight because he was not there and only heard about it second-hand from some guy he refuses to name a week-and-a-half after the event. My father -- who was there at the time -- and Mr. Walt Figel -- who was also there -- both deny that UFOs were involved in the missile shutdowns, since UFOs were never even mentioned until well after the missiles were taken offline, while the only evidence people like you, who know nothing of the case, are completely unaware of the public record, can't discuss with any knowledge whatsoever the investigation that followed, or the history of missile failures taking place at the very same time system-wide are willing to put forth in explanation or offer as evidence are some imaginary "lies" you insist I have told while refusing to affirm what exactly those "lies" are; this represents the most ignorant, irresponsible, and entirely baseless pattern of argument possible.

I know more than a little bit about the law, and I know as well that everything I have written is supportable and proven documentary evidence. If *snip* like you is going to come right out and publish that I "lie thru" my teeth, and that what I have written and published is not credible because of a bunch of equally imaginary "lies" that you refuse to detail at all, than I demand that you either come forward and publically assert what those "lies" are, as I have done with both Robert Hastings and Robert Salas, or you admit that you're just talking ****, and really have nothing important to add to this discussion. *snip* -- you screw around with a person's reputation for no good reason except to make your entirely baseless and ridiculous argument sound more valid than it actually is. Nobody is "lying to the masses" here except you, by making an idiotic claim that I'm lying, when I can, in fact, prove everything that I've written. And if I'm "sweeping it under the rug", as you so recklessly assert, then why the hell did I spend the past four months writing a 357 page book on the subject that I am willing to give away for free to anybody who wants to read it? You're a petulant crap artist who should learn how to present a substantive argument before making baseless and irresponsible public claims that tarnish another man's reputation that you obviously have no way of supporting.

The only honest statement you made above is that "most of us will never know the truth of what happened at Malmstrom", but I at least have spoken to the people who do know what happened, and who were there, while you accept as fact only the rambling mutterings of an ignorant old fool, a buffoon who refuses to answer even the simplest questions that could help to support his version of these events. You, however, haven't even considered these before claiming that I've "lied" and that you have "discredited" what I've written. How can you have discredited anything that I've put forth, when most of the evidence I've used is made up of direct quotes from what Hastings, Klotz, Salas, NICAP, and CUFON have already published? If -- as you assert -- you have "discredited" me, than you must have "discredited" them as well. I've published nothing that hasn't already been proven. You, on the other hand, make slanderous claims you are unable to support in order to affirm an event you very obviously know nothing about. In light of this, who exactly is telling "fictional storys to keep the masses uninformed and unprepared"? You say that you "dont mean any disrespect to Mr.Carlson", and yet you follow this up by claiming that I'm "a decieving person in which the world already is overpopulated with", while giving absolutely no reason why you feel this way, no discussion at all on what I've supposedly "lied" about, and no substantive argument at all as to why the sources I've used are less valid than those you might use. I doubt you have even read my book -- you offer nothing that would indicate the source of your extreme views, simply asserting that I "lie", the last refuge of witless morons worldwide. You mean no disrespect? Everything you've written shows disrespectful intent! You should put up or shut up -- and if you can't do that much, than you should be muzzled like any other brainless, witless attack dog Hastings and Salas may decide to use to support a tale they can't otherwise support using the tools of civilized debate and procedure. Here's a recommendation for you: byte me.

Very sincerely,

James Carlson

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Gentlemen, and Ladies,

Robert Hastings has made much of the fact that I have refused to interview his witness, Col. (Ret.) Walter Figel, Jr., regarding his recollections of the Echo Flight Incident on March 16, 1967. To be precise, he has written "I note first that James Carlson still refuses to call retired Col. Walt Figel, to hear from his own lips, as I did in October 2008, that while on alert as the DMCCC at Malmstrom's Echo Flight, in March 1967, he spoke with two individuals via the phone in the capsule--a missile maintenance team member and an arriving SAT team member--about a "large round object" that was hovering over one of the flight's LFs. James' father, Eric Carlson, lied to him some time ago--telling him that no UFOs were present when all 10 missiles dropped-off alert status--and so James has been slandering and libeling everyone who disputes that version of events ever since, Including one former MIMS tech whom I interviewed a few years ago." He stated as well: "So, James Carlson, rant on. If you ever find the courage to call Col. Figel please let me know. I will provide his phone number, as I first offered to do a year-and-a-half ago."

Frankly, I've never needed his assitance to contact Col. Figel -- I've managed to do so quite easily on my own. The fact that I have been reticent to discuss the matter in more detail has very little to do with cowardice. I have, in fact, contacted Col. Figel, but didn't feel that it would be very ethical to discuss in detail the event he recalls without securing first his complete cooperation, authority, and permission to do so. Having secured that this very evening, I am now prepared to discuss the matter in full. I can also add, very strongly, that my father never lied to me about anything, as Hastings claims, and that his recollections match exactly those of Col. Figel's. I've "slandered and libeled" nobody, and I can say with complete confidence today that both Robert Hastings and Robert Salas have knowingly mislead their entire audience into believing a lie they were well aware of in order to sell their books.

To begin with, Col. Figel does not believe in UFOs and does not believe that they were even remotely associated with the Echo Flight Incident, or any other equipment failures at Malmstrom AFB in 1967 (or any other year, for that matter). In one of his emails to me, he stated conclusively that "I am not a fan of Salas, Hastings, or the whole UFO crowd. I have never seen one and flatly don't believe they exist at all. I just want you to be clear of my position on UFOs. They make good science fiction - nothing more." In a discussion of Robert Salas and James Klotz's book "Faded Giant" and Robert Hastings' book "UFOs and Nukes", Col. Figel states unequivocably that "I have read both of their books. There are many inaccurate statements and events in the books. I have told them both that." Apparently, both authors ignored what Figel told them. In addition, he states that "Oscar Flight NEVER had any problems and Salas was NEVER involved in any of them at all." Now that's a pretty definitive statement to make in light of the categorical importance both authors have previously invested the testimony of Col. Figel with.

More specifically, Col. Walt Figel has definitively agreed with the scenario of events that I have outlined on numerous internet forums, including this one, a scenario that shows exactly how laughable it is to believe that the "report" of a UFO received by Figel and my father could be anything other than a badly wrought joke made by junior enlisted military members in the course of establishing the status of the missiles at the silos they were encamped at. He states that NOBODY ever believed that UFOs were involved in this incident until Robert Salas came forward with his ridiculous and silly science fiction tale of interference from beyond the stars, and that he has told in no uncertain terms this very assessment to both Hastings and Salas. He is also as disgusted as I am and as every other citizen of this country should be at the systematic trashing of reputations these men have engaged in to no purpose whatsoever except to increase the sales of their inaccurate and fictional books -- destroying the reputations and decent memories of men like my father, MAJ (Ret.) Eric D. Carlson, the UFO Officer at Malmstrom AFB -- Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase -- the Condon Committee UFO investigator Roy Craig, and everybody who was ever involved with the investigation of this singular event in USAF history.

Let me be very clear, especially as Robert Hastings in particular has been saying the most sickening things -- things that cannot be supported in any way whatsoever by anybody: the Echo Flight Incident did not involve UFOs. It was a comparatively mediocre electronic incident that Robert Hastings and Robert Salas have manufactured in order to sell books. Col. Walt Figel concurs in this estimation, and admits as well that he has told both individuals that their versions of this incident are not only inaccurate, but are simply works of fiction. In light of these revelations from Col. Figel, and as well as in anticipation of future contacts with ex-missileers more involved in the actual investigation of the Echo Flight Incident that he has very kindly given me, I will be updating the book that I have written "Americans, Credulous - or - The Arrogance of Congenital Liars & Other Character Defects - Establishing the Truth Behind the Echo Flight UFO Incident of March 16, 1967". As always, it can be read or downloaded for free at http://www.scribd.com/doc/26641522/Americans-Credulous-by-James-Carlson -- please tell your friends. Investigating the unknown is always an appreciated undertaking and always should be, but lying about your findings, destroying the reputations of those who can no longer defend themselves, and proposing as fact easily provable fictions and deceits for no other reason than the sale of your books is and ought to continue to be looked upon as unethical, dishonest, and criminally stupid, regardless of the source.

Since I am very much aware of the strategies undertaken by Robert Hastings in particular regarding matters like this that question his veracity, honesty, motivations and ethics, I would like to assure the members of this forum that I have no intentions whatsoever of conducting any sort of debate regarding these matters on this forum. Robert Hastings is welcome to respond to me privately at any time, but if he wishes to conduct a campaign of disinformation and deceit, he must do so within the confines of another forum entirely. Frankly, most people are absolutely sick of his dishonest arguments and intellect, as well as his habit of countering facts with a continuous helter-skelter of nonsense and trivia. I will not respond to Hastings at all on any forum that is not willing to put up with his crap, but I did think that these revelations were substantive enough to interest many members of this community. The fact of the matter is, every member of the crew that was on duty when the Echo Flight missiles were taken offline by an electronic noise pulse on March 16, 1967 are adamant that no UFOs were involved, no actual UFOs were ever reported to them, and they have repeatedly said the same to both Robert Hastings and Robert Salas. A poor joke was made at the time, as I've delineated recently in this forum, and Col. Figel confirms that it was understood by everyone at the time as just a joke. Nobody reported UFOs. There was no investigation of UFOs at Echo Flight. The only instructions they received from anybody at anytime was a reminder not to discuss the event or the ongoing investigation; they were never told not to discuss the UFOs, because the subject of UFOs never came up except during a very short interview in which the "joke" was offhandedly mentioned; NOBODY ever mentioned UFOs in relation to Echo Flight or any other equipment failures again, and Col. Figel has in the past explained all of this to both Hastings and Salas.

Only "rumors" of UFOs were ever discussed by anybody, just as the command histories all assert, and these -- as I've repeatedly affirmed -- were caused by a combination of this single, poorly executed joke, and the already confirmed fact that Raymond Fowler, a NICAP investigator who worked with Sylvania Corporation, was made aware -- due to his employment -- that the Echo Flight Incident had occurred. He didn't know any details regarding this event, because Sylvania wasn't involved even remotely with the investigation, so the information he had was based entirely on rumors -- he wasn't cleared for any details whatsoever. Unfortunately, Fowler told what little he knew to Roy Craig, an investigator with the Condon committee tasked by the Air Force with studying UFO phenomena, and told Craig as well that he suspected UFOs may have been involved. They weren't. The fact of the matter is that Fowler did not know the exact date of the incident, and told Craig that he suspected it had occurred coincident to a UFO reported on March 24-25, and subsequently investigated by Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase for Project Blue Book and Malmstrom AFB. These "rumors" referred to in the command histories, therefore, stemmed from the fact that Raymond Fowler didn't know as much about Echo Flight as he thought, including the date on which it occurred. All of this has been documented since 1995, as I have also discussed in my narrative, and can be examined or downloaded by anybody at any time at http://www.scribd.com/doc/26641522/Americans-Credulous-by-James-Carlson completely without charge.

Thank you, and please feel free to contact me at any time at jtcarl@yahoo.com if you have any comments regarding this matter. Please note as well that I have no intention of responding to Hastings on this forum -- although I'm equally sure he'll respond to this with more layered objections that are essentially meaningless. If he wishes to respond in any way, he can do so under the concerned but honest moderation at Reality Uncovered. They won't put up with his nonsense.

Most sincerely,

James Carlson

Albuquerque, NM

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In response to James Carlson's claims of no UFO involvement in the shutdown of nuclear missiles at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967, I offer the following verbatim excerpt from the testimony of retired USAF Lt. Col. Dwynne Arneson. The full statement may be found at:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/discl ... sure07.htm

EXCERPT:

My name is Dwynne Arneson. I was born in Rochester, Minnesota back in 1937, and went to Rochester High School. From there I graduated and went on to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota where I got my degree in physics and math. Upon graduation, I competed for Officer’s Training School in the Air Force and then was selected to get a commission, went to Officer’s Training School, and was commissioned back in 1962. I went on to spend twenty-six years in the U.S. Air Force as a communication-electronics officer and retired in 1986.

I held a top-secret SCI-TK clearance. That means Special Compartmented Tango Kilo information, which is above top secret, if you will. It takes a special investigation to get that sort of a clearance. Upon getting out of the Air Force, and retiring as a colonel in 1986, I applied for work at Boeing, and I came to work for Boeing as a computer systems analyst, and I’ve been working since 1987 in that capacity with Boeing. I retired in 1986 as Director of Logistics at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

...The next thing that comes to mind is one that took place in 1967. I was in charge of the Communication Center, the Twentieth Air Division at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. I was again the top-secret control officer there. I dispatched all the nuclear launch authentications to the SAC missile crews, so I had a very good top-secret background. One day, I happened to see a message that came through my communications center. There again, I cannot quote the date, where it came from, where it was going to, but I do recall reading it and seeing it. It said, basically, that "A UFO was seen near missile silos" and it was hovering. It said that the crew going on duty and the crew coming off duty all saw the UFO just hovering in mid-air. It was a metallic circular object and from what I understand, the missiles were all shut down...What I mean by "missiles going down," is that they went dead. And something turned those missiles off, and so they could not be put in a mode for launching.

END OF EXCERPT

James Carlson always claims that those who disagree with his take on things are lying. He will no doubt do the same with Lt. Col. Arneson.

Robert Hastings

www.ufohastings.com

Edited by Robert Hastings
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From my book UFOs and Nukes:

Regarding the full-flight missile shutdown at Echo Flight, on March 16, 1967, N. Henry “Hank” Barlow told me,

"I arrived at Malmstrom in October 1966 and left in November 1967. I was on Electro-Mechanical Team 24 at the time [the Echo Flight shutdown] happened. We had to go out to Mike-1 for about four or five days. We had to stay out there and cover the sites. The day we were supposed to return [to base,] my team chief called Job Control to see if we could come in because it was really starting to snow. It was really miserable out, windy and all. Job Control said, ‘Yeah, come on in, there’s nothing going on, everything seems okay.’ So we packed up and started back to the base.

Then Job Control called us on the radio and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem here, part of Echo Flight has shut down, so we want you to go to the nearest site.’ I think that was Echo-6, but I’m not sure. Anyway, somewhere around that area. We checked VRSA and there was nothing on it. [That] was a unit in each launch facility, with something like 19 or 20 channels on it. [Actually, VRSA or Voice Reporting Signal Assembly had 23 channels, one for each problem area.] If the missile went down for any reason, or if there was some other problem, Job Control back at Malmstrom would know about it, know what is was, from the kind of signal it sent. But when we got to the site, there was nothing on [VRSA] to indicate the reason for the missile shutting down. That in itself was unusual. I had never seen that before.

So Job Control said, do a start-up, which takes about four hours. After you initiate the startup, you can back out of there and leave because its automatic after a certain point. Usually, if there was nothing else going on, we would stay at the site to make sure everything was working fine. But that night, Job Control said go to the next site, whatever that was. So we did that, and [restarted] three or four missiles before going back to [Echo-1]. Of all ten missiles that went down, only one wouldn’t come back up, but that was due to something that was going to [fail] anyway, like a Logic Coupler Drawer, or something like that. But none of the missiles had anything on VRSA.

[When we got back to Echo-1] we heard what happened. At Echo-2, there was a team in there earlier that afternoon that could not get the security [telemetry] to set-up, through the parabolic antenna or the soft support building or something like that. So, they put an Air Police team out there, in a camper, two guys. Anyway, one of the guys went out to take a leak, and he noticed that it wasn’t snowing over top of his head. The perimeter lights were on and he could see the snow coming down all around him so he looked up and saw a ring of lights right over top of him. He was scared stiff, so he went back to the camper and woke up his team partner.

When this other guy came out, he had a camera with him, which they weren’t suppose to have, but guys would do stuff like that. By then this thing had moved off the perimeter fence and he took pictures of it. [When the security team was debriefed back at the base,] the Air Force confiscated the camera and film. I was told all of this back at Echo-1. We had passed our ‘timelines’ because we had worked 16 hours, or something like that, and could not go back to the base so we had to go back to Echo. [During that era, maintenance teams were left out in the field for four to five days, working a maximum of 16 hours per day—the timeline. If a team got close to reaching that limit, it was sent to the nearest Launch Control Facility for Remain Over Night, or RON status.] When we got back there, there was brass all over the place. They were from Offutt AFB—SAC Headquarters—they had brought them in. There were just a lot of high-ranking officers there."

I asked Barlow who had told him about the incident involving the Camper Alert Team. He responded, “I don’t remember. I don’t know if it was one of the security guys or someone else. I was so tired when we got back to Echo 1. We had worked long hours, we had been out almost a week by that time and we were just pooped. All I remember is that there were lots of people there and there was no place to lie down. But we were told that it was a UFO shutdown—that UFOs had been responsible—and that’s why all those guys were there.”

I asked Barlow if he had been surprised or shocked or skeptical when he was informed that UFOs had shutdown the missiles. He replied,

"Oh no! On many other occasions, we were out at the sites when Job Control called and told us that, you know, there are reports of UFOs in the area, so keep your eyes open. That happened many, many times. And I saw them! I would see a light in the sky and it would make a right-angle turn. Or it would make two different right-angle turns, one after the other. I saw that more than once. They were much faster than a helicopter and we certainly knew that aircraft [couldn’t] do that.

I once saw a light come straight down, hover at maybe 1000-feet, and then shoot straight off [horizontally] and out of sight. It was crazy! Job Control always called us first, before we saw anything. They would call and say, you know, heads-up. Then, most of the time, we would see something a little while later. So, they were getting reports from somewhere, and maybe they had [the UFOs] on radar, but I don’t know for sure. Sometimes, when the call came in, we were down in the missile [silo] and we would talk to the guard topside about what he was seeing. I remember one time, the guard was just a nervous wreck. Job Control had called and said UFOs were sighted in the area. Then, I’m not sure, but I think he saw some lights himself. But anyway, he was just scared out of his wits. He wanted to come down in the silo with us. But the guards weren’t allowed to do that.

One time, [probably during the summer of 1967,] we were at one of the Bravo sites when we got a call from Job Control saying that there were UFO sightings in our area. Then, a short time later, we saw a green light come straight down out of the sky and land on this hill. Then two lights separated from it, straight out to each side. We were sitting in the pick up truck, eating our box lunches, when we saw this, along with another team we were training, plus the guard. We reported it to Job Control. They told us to close up the site and go check that out. We told them that we didn’t think we were qualified to do that! [Laughs] This was around 4 a.m. When it got light, we were amazed how far away the hill was, where this thing had landed. It was far, far away. We thought it was much closer, so the light was really bright.

I asked Barlow if he had later been debriefed about the incident at Echo Flight. He said, “No, never! It was almost kind of a joke, we would all laugh about it. Now, it wasn’t a joke [with all the missiles down] but it was a joke because nobody would believe it if you told them about it.”

I asked Barlow if he had heard about the Oscar Flight missiles shutting down around the same time as the Echo Flight shutdowns. He said “No, I never knew about that...I wasn’t qualified to work there.”

As noted earlier in this thread, retired Boeing engineer Robert Kaminski has confirmed in writing that UFOs had been reported by unspecified "airmen" at Echo Flight during the incident, and that his team had been ordered to suspend its investigation--an unprecidented development--because the full-flight shutdown was being catagorized as a "UFO event."

END OF BOOK EXCERPT

So, James Carlson, rant on. I suppose that Barlow is lying too, right?

--Robert Hastings

http://www.ufohastings.com

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From my book UFOs and Nukes:

Generally corroborating statements made by Electro-Mechanical Team member Hank Barlow, Jamison provides unambiguous testimony to the effect that commanders at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron had been fully aware of UFO-involvement in the missile shutdowns—at the time they occurred—and had taken active measures to enhance the safety of the Combat Targeting Teams dispatched to re-start the stricken ICBMs. This disclosure completely contradicts the official position of the U.S. Air Force, which continues to deny the existence of any credible information regarding UFO-involvement in the missile malfunctions at the base.

Nevertheless, late one evening in March 1967, Jamison was relaxing at home when he received an urgent telephone call from the missile maintenance hanger. In two separate interviews, combined here, Jamison told me, “One of my jobs as a missile targeting officer was to go out and re-start [missile] sites that had shut down for various reasons. We were called that particular night because a lot of sites were shut down. The Job Control office called me at home at, uh, probably 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night. It might have been even later than that. Oscar was the flight that went down. That’s the one our team responded to.” Jamison added that he had been on scheduled alert stand-by and, after receiving the call to report, got down to the MIMS Operations Center—the hangar—probably within ten minutes.

Upon arriving there, but even before reporting to the Job Control office, Jamison overheard other targeting team personnel discussing rumors of a UFO connection with the problem at hand. Supposedly, the ten missiles comprising Oscar Flight had gone off alert status—malfunctioned—just after a UFO had been reported in the vicinity of their Launch Control Facility. Once Jamison arrived at Job Control, a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) confirmed those reports, telling Jamison that Air Police guards at the stricken flight had indeed reported a UFO just prior to the missiles malfunctioning.

Startled by these disclosures—which were still unofficial—Jamison expected to be ordered to the missile field immediately. He was surprised to learn that all of the targeting teams had been directed to remain at the hanger, as a precaution, until all UFO reports from the field had ceased. At that point, however, there was still no official confirmation of the reason for the delay. Jamison estimated that the teams waited 2-3 hours before being given the go-ahead to proceed to Oscar Flight.

While waiting, Jamison walked to a temporary command post which had been set up in the hanger. There he overheard another squadron member talking on a two-way radio about a second UFO which had apparently landed in a deep ravine, not far from the base. Later that night, as events unfolded, Jamison and his team traveled past the alleged landing site and, as they did so, he observed a small group of Air Force vehicles positioned just off the road, at the top of the ravine.

With this particular revelation, Jamison seems to be providing a new, behind-the-scenes perspective on the already well-documented UFO sighting at Belt, Montana, which occurred on March 24, 1967. If this is the case, it appears that Oscar Flight went down on that date, not eight days earlier, as previously believed.

Jamison said, after much delay, the assembled targeting teams finally received a rather remarkable briefing prior to departing the command post. At its conclusion, there was an official disclosure: “They then told us what was happening,” he recalled, “There had been some UFO activity that had been messing things up.”

This admission, as portrayed by Jamison, implies that the persons briefing the Combat Targeting Teams either knew, or at least strongly suspected, that one or more UFOs had been involved in the missile shutdowns. The importance of this revelation is obvious. It is one thing to hear unsubstantiated rumors about UFO-involvement in the missile shutdowns from one’s peers, as Jamison had upon arriving at the hanger, but to receive official verification of those rumors is quite another.

Moreover, according to Jamison, specific instructions had been given to the teams. “They briefed us on what to do,” he said, “If we saw a UFO while on the road, [we were to] report it. If we were at the site, [and saw a UFO] we were supposed to get into the silo and close the personnel hatch.”

In other words, those conducting the briefing were apparently convinced of a UFO-connection with the missile malfunctions, and had formulated a plan of action which would provide intelligence about any additional sightings and, furthermore, enhance the safety of the dispatched targeting teams as they worked to restore the missiles to operational status.

Jamison continued, “So we went out to the site, not only us, but the other teams were out there doing the same work. But I never saw [a UFO].” Jamison said that while it had been dark when he left the maintenance hangar, it was already getting light when he arrived at the missile field. His team worked on two or three of the missiles while the other teams restored the remainder of the flight. He said that 2-3 hours were required, per missile, to restart them. Therefore, it was mid-afternoon before his team finished its work, and late afternoon before it got back to Malmstrom.

Upon arriving at the hangar, all of the teams were debriefed. Despite the extraordinary nature of the event, Jamison doesn’t recall being told to keep quiet about it. As unusual as it may seem, UFOs were apparently not mentioned.

...Then Jamison returned to the subject of the UFO which had been sighted as it landed in a deep ravine near the base. “The night that the Oscar Flight went down, there was a report of a UFO dropping into a canyon not too far from Malmstrom. There were some [Air Force] personnel there watching it. The canyon was steep-sided. They wouldn’t send anyone down into it, and they wouldn’t send any choppers at night. They were going to wait until morning to send some personnel, and maybe some choppers down. But when daylight came, this UFO—or whatever it was—just took off. I heard all of this while I was in the command post. That’s what they were talking about. They were talking to the people at the site. The canyon was just off the main road out of Malmstrom, going east, where the road starts sloping down.”

In my view, everything about this recollection points to the well-documented Belt, Montana UFO incident of March 24/25, 1967. As mentioned earlier, the sighting had received quite a bit of coverage in the Great Falls media immediately afterward.

Later in this conversation, Jamison unexpectedly mentioned yet another UFO-related shutdown during that same period, remarking, “About two weeks later, on the other side of the base—I think it was India Flight—there were some more UFOs reported, and four or five missiles went down. I went to one of the sites and the other teams went to the other ones. As before, I didn’t see any [uFOs] myself.” He added that he recalled the incident had occurred during daylight hours.

END OF BOOK EXCERPT

--Robert Hastings

http://www.ufohastings.com

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Astute observers on other blogs have already noted and questioned James Carlson's selective and misleading presentation of the facts. For example, someone using the name "Xtraeme" posted the following message at:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=537468&page=14#pid8254590

EXCERPT:

reply to post by James Carlson (JC)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JC wrote: So are you so certain he's telling the truth because you've looked at all the evidence carefully, because you like the guy and figure he needs a break, or is it because you just want to believe that UFOs were involved?

Xtraeme: James I've gone through your book and attempted to maintain an objective POV looking at both sides of this. For the record I've debunked a number of UFO cases (to give an example), so believe me I'm looking for the truth, whatever that might be. As I look at your side of the story here's what bothers me:

Early on I mentioned several areas where you were clearly embellishing the details, both in your online dialogue and in your book as adumbrated here and here. You've also flip-flopped on certain issues, which I find a bit disconcerting, as pointed out by another member here...

Hastings has provided Figel's commentary in its original audio format, as well as the full exchanges, with signature, from Kaminski.

JC wrote: Frankly, I've never needed his assitance to contact Col. Figel -- I've managed to do so quite easily on my own. The fact that I have been reticent to discuss the matter in more detail has very little to do with cowardice. I have, in fact, contacted Col. Figel, but didn't feel that it would be very ethical to discuss in detail the event he recalls without securing first his complete cooperation, authority, and permission to do so. Having secured that this very evening, I am now prepared to discuss the matter in full.

Xtraeme: After having gone through your book, I admit, I'm a little concerned about the way you selectively pick and choose what to paraphrase from your sources (detailed here). So I'd much rather have the whole dialogue in its original format, rather than your interpretation of that conversation.

Posting the original audio transmission or email exchange, as a series of screenshots, with full internet header, would strengthen your case.

At least twice now on this forum you've massaged or misunderstood what people were saying, whether this was intentional, or more a strategy to reframe the debate, I don't know. But I find it odd that a person who's usually fairly precise in his thinking and wording would, on several occasions, distort peoples questions and statements...

To an outside observer it looks like you're trying to misdirect people...

END OF EXCERPT

As I have previously said, on this and other forums, if one compares James Carlson's summary of what I, or Bob Salas, or Walt Figel have supposedly said with the actual taped or written statement, one quickly learns how deceptive and dishonest Carlson really is.

--Robert Hastings

www.ufohastings.com

Edited by Robert Hastings
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From my book UFOs and Nukes:

Generally corroborating statements made by Electro-Mechanical Team member Hank Barlow, [former USAF 1st Lt. Bob] Jamison provides unambiguous testimony to the effect that commanders at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron had been fully aware of UFO-involvement in the missile shutdowns—at the time they occurred...Jamison told me, “One of my jobs as a missile targeting officer was to go out and re-start [missile] sites that had shut down for various reasons. We were called that particular night because a lot of sites were shut down...Oscar was the flight that went down. That’s the one our team responded to.

A clarification: Barlow was referring to the UFO-related events at Echo Flight, the one that James Carlson's father was at, which is why I wrote that Bob Jamison was "generally" cooroborating Barlow's statements about UFO-related missile shutdowns at Malmstrom AFB in 1967. As Jamison himself noted, he had responded to the subsequent shutdown event, eight days later, at Oscar Flight.

Edited by Robert Hastings
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  • 2 weeks later...
 

Gentlemen, and Ladies,

I noted with much pleasure the interest worldwide in my narrative about the Echo Flight Incident of March 1967, and I'd like to thank those who commented on its importance. I have very recently discussed new conclusions that I have not yet added to the text, and I thought you might be interested. They include the results of discussions I've lately had with Col.(Ret.) Walter Figel, Jr., who was the deputy commander with my father on March 16, 1967, and his complete confirmation of my version of these events. In addition, I am in the process of a complete discussion and examination of all of the "witnesses" that Robert Hastings has discussed here, in this forum. In the process, I have proven completely the carelessness and refusal to even attempt confirmation that is typical of Robert Hastings' sad yet nonetheless ridiculous assertions. He has no witnesses whatsoever who are capable of even suggesting that anything extraordinary may have occurred at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967, and I point out to interested readers through my analysis of such "testimony" exactly why this statement is true.

If anyone is interested, I am posting all new information at http://www.realityuncovered.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1688&p=25070#p25070 until I can get around to updating my narrative; the individuals operating that website have convinced me of their honesty and their willingness to pursue the truth, regardless of the conclusions that pursuit leads them to. They are neither convinced UFO proponents, nor confirmed skeptics -- they simply seek information that can be confirmed.

Many individuals have noted that my general tone in the narrative I've made available is a negative one; my language and emotion throughout is, I have been told, overly bitter and aggressive. Paul Kimball, the film maker behind the "Best Evidence" documentary that elevated the Echo Flight Incident to one of the top ten UFO incidents thought to be best supported by the most evidence, informed me that he wouldn't finish reading my narrative due to its negative tone and lack of objectivity, and asked me not to contact him again. He failed to note, however, that my narrative was never intended to be objective; many years of having to bear the insults, accusations, and outright lies about me and those I care for from those who have perpetrated this ridiculous hoax have made objectivity impossible, at least for me. The documents, history, and commentaries that I have used in support of the facts of this case are, however, completely factual and very well regarded by valid historians and researchers, contrary to what others may have said on other websites. I have very studiously footnoted my sources, and when possible included URL links so anyone with internet access can judge the worth and context of the materials for themselves. I hope other readers are able to separate my justifiable anger from the provable facts that I discuss, and reach thereby an informed opinion that the events other authors have chronicled for March 1967 at Malmstrom AFB very clearly did not occur. The fact that individuals and organizations like Paul Kimball, Robert Salas, James Klotz, Dale Goudie, CUFON, NICAP, and Robert Hastings continue to profit from their distortion of the truth, while I have made "Americans, Credulous" completely free of charge for anybody with the desire to read it should be noted as well.

In closing, I just wanted to offer my thanks to any and all individuals who have expressed their belief that my work is worthy of serious discussion, and to reassert that it expresses what I very firmly believe based on the facts uncovered and the first-person affirmations of those I trust implicitly. Please examine the additional supportive arguments and issues that I have posted at http://www.realityuncovered.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1688&p=25070#p25070 . Thanks again for taking the time to examine my work.

Very best regards,

James Carlson

jtcarl@yahoo.com

Albuquerque, NM

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Please note as well that I do intend to answer the charges made by Xtraeme in the above commentary posted by Robert Hastings. I don't consider this a particularly important matter, because it is transparently an attack without any basis or logic to anybody with any real knowledge of what I have written and what others have written. But I will eventually get to it, just to be thorough -- and when I do, it will be expressed only through the Reality Uncovered Forum. Frankly, it's just another poorly argued bit of nonsense from the Hastings camp that has been notably silent regarding my other charges, and the arguments I've raised regarding all of his non-witness witnesses.

James Carlson

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...The next thing that comes to mind is one that took place in 1967. I was in charge of the Communication Center, the Twentieth Air Division at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. I was again the top-secret control officer there. I dispatched all the nuclear launch authentications to the SAC missile crews, so I had a very good top-secret background. One day, I happened to see a message that came through my communications center. There again, I cannot quote the date, where it came from, where it was going to, but I do recall reading it and seeing it. It said, basically, that "A UFO was seen near missile silos" and it was hovering. It said that the crew going on duty and the crew coming off duty all saw the UFO just hovering in mid-air. It was a metallic circular object and from what I understand, the missiles were all shut down...What I mean by "missiles going down," is that they went dead. And something turned those missiles off, and so they could not be put in a mode for launching.

END OF EXCERPT

James Carlson always claims that those who disagree with his take on things are lying. He will no doubt do the same with Lt. Col. Arneson.

Robert Hastings

www.ufohastings.com

Hi Mr Hastings.

Re the quote from your post above. Why would anyone assert that Lt. Col. Arneson was lying?

Why do you conclude that what Lt. Col. Arneson says contradicts what Mr Carlson has just posted?

Mr Carlson stated that the Maintenance Team(s) and the Security Team(s) present at the incident did mention UFO's. However, Mr Carlson also stated the context of that conversation was "kidding around".

Nevertheless, UFO's were mentioned, and any monitoring of those conversations would also note and include this.

This does not mean the context was not what Mr Carlson stated it was.

Do you take the fact that a conversation was noted elsewhere to be evidence for the context of that conversation?

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Hi Mr Hastings.

Re the quote from your post above. Why would anyone assert that Lt. Col. Arneson was lying?

Why do you conclude that what Lt. Col. Arneson says contradicts what Mr Carlson has just posted?

Mr Carlson stated that the Maintenance Team(s) and the Security Team(s) present at the incident did mention UFO's. However, Mr Carlson also stated the context of that conversation was "kidding around".

Nevertheless, UFO's were mentioned, and any monitoring of those conversations would also note and include this.

This does not mean the context was not what Mr Carlson stated it was.

Do you take the fact that a conversation was noted elsewhere to be evidence for the context of that conversation?

Thank you, Leonardo. You might be interested in knowing as well that the 20th Air Division at Malmstrom AFB that Arneson claims to have been attached to does not now and has never in the past actually existed. The 20th AD was responsible for the air defense of parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and all of Illinois. It was primarily attached to Truax AFB, Wisconsin; in December 1967 the 20th AD was reassigned to Fort Lee AFS, Virginia. It has never, throughout its entire history, been attached to Malmstrom AFB. It's apparent that Robert Hastings has never even attempted to confirm at least one of the "accounts" he has presented. In addition, for a number of years, Hastings has paraded Col. Figel's testimony as "proof" of UFO interference with the missiles at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967. This fell apart instantly with a single phone call when Figel confirmed absolutely the entire scenario that I have previously advocated.

James Carlson

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Thank you, Leonardo. You might be interested in knowing as well that the 20th Air Division at Malmstrom AFB that Arneson claims to have been attached to does not now and has never in the past actually existed. The 20th AD was responsible for the air defense of parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and all of Illinois. It was primarily attached to Truax AFB, Wisconsin; in December 1967 the 20th AD was reassigned to Fort Lee AFS, Virginia. It has never, throughout its entire history, been attached to Malmstrom AFB. It's apparent that Robert Hastings has never even attempted to confirm at least one of the "accounts" he has presented. In addition, for a number of years, Hastings has paraded Col. Figel's testimony as "proof" of UFO interference with the missiles at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967. This fell apart instantly with a single phone call when Figel confirmed absolutely the entire scenario that I have previously advocated.

James Carlson

I appreciate your information, Mr Carlson.

I want to stress that I do not approach this topic with a view that any party is lying, or being intentionally deceitful. The inconsistency you note above could be due to a transcription error or a misunderstanding, rather than any deceit.

Unless there is a way to confirm that Lt. Col. Arneson does not exist, or did not state what Mr Hastings claims, then I cannot presume that Lt. Col. Arneson does not exist, or did not state what Mr Hastings claims. It might even be that this Lt. Col. Arneson is remembering things that happened at different times/locales (and the 'Malmstrom' recollection is incorrect) and concatenating them into one memory. This would not mean that Lt. Col. Arneson did not say what is claimed, but that his recollection of reading the report/message was placed in the wrong locale.

This does not mitigate that Mr Hastings may have read into what Lt. Col. Arneson said, something that was not stated or implied.

If there is no record of a Lt. Col. Arneson being in the US Air Force at the times in question, then that opens up Mr Hastings claim(s) as that he is either misrepresenting the truth, or has been duped himself.

Edited by Leonardo
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I would like to continue my analysis with your next post, Mr Hastings.

From my book UFOs and Nukes:

Regarding the full-flight missile shutdown at Echo Flight, on March 16, 1967, N. Henry “Hank” Barlow told me,

"I arrived at Malmstrom in October 1966 and left in November 1967. I was on Electro-Mechanical Team 24 at the time [the Echo Flight shutdown] happened. We had to go out to Mike-1 for about four or five days. We had to stay out there and cover the sites. The day we were supposed to return [to base,] my team chief called Job Control to see if we could come in because it was really starting to snow. It was really miserable out, windy and all. Job Control said, ‘Yeah, come on in, there’s nothing going on, everything seems okay.’ So we packed up and started back to the base.

Then Job Control called us on the radio and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem here, part of Echo Flight has shut down, so we want you to go to the nearest site.’ I think that was Echo-6, but I’m not sure. Anyway, somewhere around that area. We checked VRSA and there was nothing on it. [That] was a unit in each launch facility, with something like 19 or 20 channels on it. [Actually, VRSA or Voice Reporting Signal Assembly had 23 channels, one for each problem area.] If the missile went down for any reason, or if there was some other problem, Job Control back at Malmstrom would know about it, know what is was, from the kind of signal it sent. But when we got to the site, there was nothing on [VRSA] to indicate the reason for the missile shutting down. That in itself was unusual. I had never seen that before.

So Job Control said, do a start-up, which takes about four hours. After you initiate the startup, you can back out of there and leave because its automatic after a certain point. Usually, if there was nothing else going on, we would stay at the site to make sure everything was working fine. But that night, Job Control said go to the next site, whatever that was. So we did that, and [restarted] three or four missiles before going back to [Echo-1]. Of all ten missiles that went down, only one wouldn’t come back up, but that was due to something that was going to [fail] anyway, like a Logic Coupler Drawer, or something like that. But none of the missiles had anything on VRSA.

[When we got back to Echo-1] we heard what happened. At Echo-2, there was a team in there earlier that afternoon that could not get the security [telemetry] to set-up, through the parabolic antenna or the soft support building or something like that. So, they put an Air Police team out there, in a camper, two guys. Anyway, one of the guys went out to take a leak, and he noticed that it wasn’t snowing over top of his head. The perimeter lights were on and he could see the snow coming down all around him so he looked up and saw a ring of lights right over top of him. He was scared stiff, so he went back to the camper and woke up his team partner.

When this other guy came out, he had a camera with him, which they weren’t suppose to have, but guys would do stuff like that. By then this thing had moved off the perimeter fence and he took pictures of it. [When the security team was debriefed back at the base,] the Air Force confiscated the camera and film. I was told all of this back at Echo-1. We had passed our ‘timelines’ because we had worked 16 hours, or something like that, and could not go back to the base so we had to go back to Echo. [During that era, maintenance teams were left out in the field for four to five days, working a maximum of 16 hours per day—the timeline. If a team got close to reaching that limit, it was sent to the nearest Launch Control Facility for Remain Over Night, or RON status.] When we got back there, there was brass all over the place. They were from Offutt AFB—SAC Headquarters—they had brought them in. There were just a lot of high-ranking officers there."

I asked Barlow who had told him about the incident involving the Camper Alert Team. He responded, “I don’t remember. I don’t know if it was one of the security guys or someone else. I was so tired when we got back to Echo 1. We had worked long hours, we had been out almost a week by that time and we were just pooped. All I remember is that there were lots of people there and there was no place to lie down. But we were told that it was a UFO shutdown—that UFOs had been responsible—and that’s why all those guys were there.”

I asked Barlow if he had been surprised or shocked or skeptical when he was informed that UFOs had shutdown the missiles. He replied,

"Oh no! On many other occasions, we were out at the sites when Job Control called and told us that, you know, there are reports of UFOs in the area, so keep your eyes open. That happened many, many times. And I saw them! I would see a light in the sky and it would make a right-angle turn. Or it would make two different right-angle turns, one after the other. I saw that more than once. They were much faster than a helicopter and we certainly knew that aircraft [couldn’t] do that.

I once saw a light come straight down, hover at maybe 1000-feet, and then shoot straight off [horizontally] and out of sight. It was crazy! Job Control always called us first, before we saw anything. They would call and say, you know, heads-up. Then, most of the time, we would see something a little while later. So, they were getting reports from somewhere, and maybe they had [the UFOs] on radar, but I don’t know for sure. Sometimes, when the call came in, we were down in the missile [silo] and we would talk to the guard topside about what he was seeing. I remember one time, the guard was just a nervous wreck. Job Control had called and said UFOs were sighted in the area. Then, I’m not sure, but I think he saw some lights himself. But anyway, he was just scared out of his wits. He wanted to come down in the silo with us. But the guards weren’t allowed to do that.

One time, [probably during the summer of 1967,] we were at one of the Bravo sites when we got a call from Job Control saying that there were UFO sightings in our area. Then, a short time later, we saw a green light come straight down out of the sky and land on this hill. Then two lights separated from it, straight out to each side. We were sitting in the pick up truck, eating our box lunches, when we saw this, along with another team we were training, plus the guard. We reported it to Job Control. They told us to close up the site and go check that out. We told them that we didn’t think we were qualified to do that! [Laughs] This was around 4 a.m. When it got light, we were amazed how far away the hill was, where this thing had landed. It was far, far away. We thought it was much closer, so the light was really bright.

I asked Barlow if he had later been debriefed about the incident at Echo Flight. He said, “No, never! It was almost kind of a joke, we would all laugh about it. Now, it wasn’t a joke [with all the missiles down] but it was a joke because nobody would believe it if you told them about it.”

I asked Barlow if he had heard about the Oscar Flight missiles shutting down around the same time as the Echo Flight shutdowns. He said “No, I never knew about that...I wasn’t qualified to work there.”

As noted earlier in this thread, retired Boeing engineer Robert Kaminski has confirmed in writing that UFOs had been reported by unspecified "airmen" at Echo Flight during the incident, and that his team had been ordered to suspend its investigation--an unprecidented development--because the full-flight shutdown was being catagorized as a "UFO event."

END OF BOOK EXCERPT

So, James Carlson, rant on. I suppose that Barlow is lying too, right?

--Robert Hastings

http://www.ufohastings.com

There is no reason to suppose in this that Mr Barlow is lying. But what did he actually witness at the site in question?

He was told about the UFO when he returned to Echo 1. So, it stands to reason he, personally, never witnessed anything. Mr Barlow seems earnest, and perhaps he was earnest as well as a young man during this incident.

So, I have to ask, was he simply the victim of some of the others pranking him?

He indicates he was a believer/witness of UFO's on other occasions. If what Mr Carlson says is correct, that the others were not UFO believers, then they may have taken this opportunity to play to Mr Barlow's belief. It would seem consistent with the behaviour explained as observed.

That he further claims "the whole thing [about the UFO(s)] was treated as a joke" seems to corroborate this line of reasoning. To the others it was a joke. To the earnest, and perhaps not so worldly-wise, young Mr Barlow, it was not.

Given this, but more importantly that Mr Barlow never actually witnessed anything, I cannot take this testimony as evidence that the report of a UFO was based on an actual sighting.

Edited by Leonardo
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I have now read and digested post #10, and would like to comment.

Generally corroborating statements made by Electro-Mechanical Team member Hank Barlow, Jamison provides unambiguous testimony to the effect that commanders at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron had been fully aware of UFO-involvement in the missile shutdowns...

Having read the post, I can say that this statement is untrue. I am not saying that Mr Hastings is lying, but the comments made by Mr Jamison in no way corroborates that anyone was "aware of UFO involvement in the missile shutdowns".

The statements do suggest that reports of UFO's had caused a state of high alert at various missile sites - perhaps throughout all of Missile Command and possibly a large part of the Air Force. However, apart from "overheard conversation" there are no direct eyewitness reports of any UFO activity in Mr Jamison's account at all. Therefore no-one was aware of any UFO involvement, they were only aware of reports of UFO involvement. An important distinction.

This suggests to me that the initial "joking around" at Echo 1 had been not recognised for what it was to those who reviewed the reports, and so the Air Force, quite rightly, moved to a higher state of alert because of "reports of UFO's at missile sites". Can it be corroborated whether the initial report from Echo 1 was verified as a false alarm, or was it treated as an actual UFO event (within the senior Air Force personnel reviewing the reports, that is)?

Upon arriving at the hangar, all of the teams were debriefed. Despite the extraordinary nature of the event, Jamison doesn’t recall being told to keep quiet about it. As unusual as it may seem, UFOs were apparently not mentioned.

At the risk of leaving myself open to accusations from the "conspiracy theorists", that there was no mention of UFO's in Mr Jamison's teams debriefing suggests what he had heard was rumor and perhaps people talking of the Echo 1 'incident' which Mr Jamison then took out of context.

As before, we have no eyewitness testimony, and a plausible scenario in which Mr Jamison could be telling the truth as he heard it, but was mistaken in how he put together what he heard. I find in this passage no evidence for there being any UFO activity involving Oscar flight, and no corroborating evidence that there was any UFO activity involving Echo 1.

I am not going to diverge into discussing the other UFO incident mentioned - that being Belt, Montana, March 1967 - as I wish to focus on the incidents involving missile sites.

I will conclude my analysis tomorrow with a review of Mr Hastings' post (#2) reporting the conversation with Col. Figel.

Edited by Leonardo
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Reading post #2, and the transcript of Mr Hastings discussion with Col. Figel, made me feel uneasy. This is because I either have to suggest the transcript is incorrect, or that Col. Figel was negligent in his duties as a United States military officer.

In this transcript Col. Figel notes that he was informed that a UFO was hovering over a US military missile site, and that this may have some connection with the off-lining of the missiles in that site. This would be considered a hostile action and he should have immediately informed the C.o.C. and instigated an assessment of that threat. Instead he sent the Security and Maintenance Teams to continue checking the launch facility itself - possibly exposing them to this unassessed threat.

I accept that Col. Figel states he initially thought the UFO report was 'kidding around', but the transcript then reads that the report was reiterated to Col. Figel as a factual observation. There is no indication in the transcript that Col. Figel continued to assess this report as a joke, and the context of the transcript in Mr Hastings account as evidence that a UFO was present implicates Col. Figel as being derelict in his duties. I would ask Mr Hastings if he pointed this out to Col. Figel, or if it can be reaffirmed to him, and give Col. Figel the opportunity to restate what Mr Hastings alleges he said?

If we take the fact that no further action was taken by Col. Figel, vis-a-vis reporting further along the C.o.C. the presence of a UFO over a sensitive US military facility, as being that he was actually assured the report of said UFO was, indeed, a joke, then I would ask Mr Hastings why this transcript is included in his evidence for there being a UFO incident at Echo flight?

Regarding the testimony by Mr Kaminski. I am bemused by his reporting no indicators which would suggest how these missiles were offlined. Even if this was done via external means from an alleged UFO, this interference with the missile systems would leave a trace on the recording mechanisms indicating what part of the missile/launch systems were affected.

This is not to say that any energy (or whatever is alleged to have been used by the alleged UFO to effect the shutdown) used by an alleged UFO would be detected, but that energy's effect on the missile systems surely would, therefore why the missiles shutdown should be evident. To be fair to Mr Kaminski, Mr Barlow also states they found no indicators of missile failure when checking on site.

I will state right now, I am not a missile technician, but I do have some passing knowledge of electronics and I know that an analysis of a failed electronic system will show where the failure occurred, and what prompted that failure. Also, Col. Figel stated in his testimony (reported by Mr Hastings) that he reported to the teams onsite that there was a "Channel 9 No-Go". What component of the missile subsystem corresponds with Channel 9 on the VRSA? Even if they found no fault on the subsystem itself, this should have been available to read on the VRSA indicators.

Mr Kaminski's ommission of any material indication of failure in the letter posted by Mr Hastings is not, in itself, evidence the missiles 'failed without cause', but it is cause for concern that his testimony is not complete. I would ask Mr Hastings if Mr Kaminski mentioned in his book the material cause (i.e. what components of the missile systems were affected by the alleged UFO) of the missile shutdowns?

Taking both these testimonies into account, it would seem there is no material evidence for any UFO activity at Echo flight and neither Col. Figel nor Mr Kaminski were eyewitnesses.

So, to conclude based on the three posts of Mr Hastings I have reviewed:

1) There is no eyewitness testimony of a UFO at Echo flight or Oscar flight. All accounts of these incidents are, at best, second-hand, and, imo, those pertaining to Echo flight of dubious nature that the accounts were not meant as a joke.

2) Apart from a heightened state of alert due to UFO reports (again, second-hand at best), the US Air Force doesn't appear to have instigated any special measures to protect missile sites from further intrusion.

3) After the circuitry of the Minuteman missile systems was upgraded following several failures in the late 1960's, no further mass shutdowns of these missiles was reported. This seems to corroborate Mr Carlson's claim that the failures were a result of faulty (or fragile) circuitry and not outside interference. The premise that the US military could 'harden' its missiles against an unknown force that did not leave any trace of its effect on these missiles cannot be entertained.

4) Some of Mr Hastings conclusions about various testimonies are inconsistent with the facts of those testimonies. This is not an indictment of Mr Hastings in that he may be intentional in his inconsistency.

5) We appear to have some controversy over a few material facts pertaining to the incident. Was the 20th Air Division (or part of it) stationed at Malmstrom AFB? Did Col. Figel report to the onsite teams at Echo flight there was a "Channel 9 No-Go" and, if so, why did Mr Barlow, who was on the Maintenance Team, not verify that? Why does Mr Kaminski not recognise the "Channel 9 No-Go" from the VRSA indicator reports?

6) In the testimony pertinent to the Oscar flight shutdown, why was Mr Jamison not questioned as to whether he found (or was appraised of) the cause of the shutdown? All we have in this testimony is a general discussion of UFO rumour.

Hopefully, more information (especially about the questions I ask in conclusions 5 and 6) will shed further light on these incidents, but my initial reading of the information is that there was no UFO sighting, and UFO's were not responsible for, or should be implicated in, the shutting down of missiles in Echo flight or Oscar flight.

Edited by Leonardo
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  • 3 weeks later...

I find it interesting that none of the pro-ufo crowd have contacted me for an interview regarding what happened at Echo Flight.

Eric D. Carlson

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  • 1 year later...

I thought I would bring this thread back to life as recent discussions have me very intruiged.

For anyone that followed the heated debate on the (now closed) cheyenne thread will be interested in reading through this thread also.

I personally find it hard to believe that a security team would 'joke' about UFO's at such a serious time, in addition I find the fact that they returned 'scared' and were relieved of duty quite interesting also.

I think this would be a good discussion to continue as long as we can avoid people accusing anyone else of lying and have a sensible debate to try and ascertain what really happened.

I would urge both R. Hastings and J.Carlson to join in the debate to try and settle matters in an amicable fashion.

I would also think it fair to say that whoever decides to make personal attacks and derail (or have thread closed)thread will be loooked upon as doing so on purpose and will raise much doubt on their 'version'.

I would also urge the likes of LS, McGuffin, Leonardo, Boon to get involved as their input and experience, I find is always very valuable in these discussions.

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