Ten Missiles Went Dark: What Really Happened at Malmstrom in March 1967?

At 8:45 on the morning of March 16, 1967, somewhere on the frozen plains of central Montana, the indicators in an underground launch control capsule went bad.

One after another, and nearly at once, all ten Minuteman I nuclear missiles of Echo Flight, part of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base, dropped off strategic alert with "No-Go" indications. Ten nuclear warheads' worth of deterrent, offline in a matter of seconds.

That part isn't a UFO story. It's in the Air Force's own records.

The UFO story came later. And it's still being fought over today, nearly sixty years on, including in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

What the Air Force wrote down

The core facts come from two documents quoted in a detailed critique by researcher James Carlson, written after 2010,, whose father, Capt. Eric D. Carlson, commanded Echo Flight that morning.

The first is the 341st Strategic Missile Wing and Combat Support Group Command History. It states that "all sites in Echo (E) Flight, Malmstrom AFB, shutdown with No-Go indications of Channel 9 and 12," and that all launch facilities "lost strategic alert nearly simultaneously."

The second is a 1969 Top Secret history, Bernard C. Nalty's USAF Ballistic Missile Programs 1967–1968. Nalty wrote that extensive tests at Malmstrom, at the Ogden Air Materiel Area and at Boeing in Seattle "revealed that an electronic noise pulse had shut down the flight." He added that the surge "was similar to the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear explosions," and that the most vulnerable part was the logic coupler in the missiles' guidance and control system.

In other words: the Air Force found the mechanism. What it never publicly said was where that pulse came from.

The sentence that started a mystery

Buried in that same unit history is a line that, depending on how you read it, either kills the UFO angle or gives it life.

"Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of fault were disproven."

The history goes on to say that a Mobile Strike Team that had checked another flight's launch facilities that morning was questioned and reported "no unusual activity or sightings."

Read it like a skeptic: someone floated a UFO rumor, the Air Force checked, and it was nothing. Read it like a believer: why would a routine maintenance write-up about a guidance glitch need to address UFOs at all?

Robert Salas and the second flight

Robert Salas was a 26-year-old Air Force lieutenant and missile launch officer at Malmstrom in 1967. He went public in the mid-1990s, telling the Great Falls Tribune in 1996 that guards had reported strange objects and a glowing red object over the front gate, and that the missiles went offline minutes later, according to Wikipedia's summary of that coverage.

In a 1997 MUFON UFO Journal article quoted by Carlson, Salas described a call from his security NCO topside, reporting lights maneuvering near the launch control facility. A few minutes later, he wrote, the NCO called back, agitated, and said "there was a UFO hovering just outside the front gate!" Then, Salas wrote: "Within seconds, our missiles began shutting down from 'Alert' status to 'No-Go' status."

Salas has since placed this event at a different flight, Oscar Flight, on March 24, 1967, about a week after Echo, according to The Debrief. He has told his story at public events, including at the National Press Club in 2010.

Another former officer, Robert Jamison, a nuclear missile targeting officer, has said he was sent to restore missiles at Oscar after several lost alert status and that he was told a sheriff in Roy, Montana, had reported a UFO around the same time, The Debrief reported in 2021.

The case against Salas

Carlson's critique, titled "Echo Flights of Fantasy," is harsh, and it's worth knowing who wrote it. Carlson says his father, the Echo commander, confirmed every detail he relays about that morning.

His main points:

• Salas wasn't at Echo. Salas originally believed he'd been in the Echo capsule. He later said he was with the 490th Missile Squadron, which wasn't responsible for Echo, and moved his account to another flight. Carlson treats that shift as fatal.
• The date moved. Salas's early FOIA requests asked about missile failures "on or about 25 March 1967," which Carlson ties to newspaper reports of UFO sightings near Belt, Montana, that week.
• No paper trail for the second shutdown. Carlson says there is no record of a full flight going down at Oscar, and no record of the injured guard and helicopter evacuation Salas described.
• Echo was daytime and calm. The shutdown happened about two hours after sunrise, and Carlson says the documents attribute it to an internal fault, not anything in the sky.

Skeptic Brian Dunning has made similar arguments, according to Wikipedia, saying Echo's records show nothing unusual and that the nearest UFO report came eight days later, about 50 kilometers away. Michael Shermer said he thought Salas was probably not lying but may have misremembered events.

Then the Pentagon changed the subject

In June 2025, the Wall Street Journal published "The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology." Among its claims: the Malmstrom shutdowns were caused by a secret Air Force test of an electromagnetic pulse generator.

According to excerpts of the article posted by researchers, the Journal described a device "placed on a portable platform 60 feet above the facility" that "would gather power until it glowed, sometimes with a blinding orange light." The Journal reported that witnesses "were kept in the dark," because any leak would have told Moscow that American missiles could be disabled.

If that's right, it's a remarkable twist: the "glowing object" was real, it was ours, and the secret held for half a century.

It also lines up neatly with Nalty's 1969 finding that a pulse "similar to the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear explosions" took out Echo.

Why the EMP answer didn't end the argument

Almost nobody on either side was fully satisfied.

UFO advocates argued the Journal's account rested on what officials told the Pentagon's UAP office rather than released test records, and that no eyewitness, Salas included, ever mentioned evidence of an EMP test. Attorney Danny Sheehan called the account unsupported in a column reposted in June 2025.

Skeptics on the forum Metabunk raised a different problem: the published documentation they could find for the Air Force's large portable EMP simulators dates their testing to the early 1970s, after 1967.

We could not find a released Air Force test record that places a specific EMP test at Echo or Oscar Flight in March 1967. Until one surfaces, the EMP explanation is a reported claim, not a documented one.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• All ten Minuteman I missiles at Echo Flight dropped off alert at about 8:45 a.m. on March 16, 1967, according to the wing's history.
• A 1969 classified Air Force history blamed an electronic noise pulse that resembled a nuclear EMP.
• The wing's history specifically said UFO rumors around Echo were "disproven."

What we don't

• What generated the noise pulse at Echo.
• Whether a second flight went down around March 24, 1967, as Salas and others describe.
• Whether the 2025 EMP-test account is supported by records that haven't been made public.

The question nobody has closed

Here's what makes Malmstrom special. Usually the official explanation is "nothing happened." At Echo, something absolutely happened, to nuclear weapons, and the record says so. The fight is only over the cause.

You've got a classified history saying a mystery pulse knocked out the missiles, a unit history that felt the need to rule out UFOs, a launch officer whose story moved, and a 2025 report saying the glow was a secret American test. Which piece do you think is the weak link? Tell us in the comments.

Sources

• Echo Flights of Fantasy: Anatomy of a UFO Hoax, by James Carlson (quotes the 341st SMW command history and Nalty's 1969 history) — James Carlson, via Metabunk
• Malmstrom UFO incident — Wikipedia (summary of Great Falls Tribune, Dunning and Shermer coverage)
• UFOs Disabled Weapons at Nuclear Facilities, According to These Former USAF Officers — The Debrief, Micah Hanks, 2021
• The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology — The Wall Street Journal, 2025
• Malmstrom & Eagle Flight: Was this an EMP Test? (WSJ excerpts and document discussion) — Metabunk, 2025
• The Pentagon's Latest Disinformation, by Danny Sheehan — reposted by Dick Russell, 2025