{"it":{"id":"UFO-MAL1967","name":"Malmstrom / Echo Flight missile shutdown","kind":"ufo","sub":"Historical sighting","place":"Echo Flight, between Hilger and Winifred, Montana, USA","lat":47.2,"lon":-109.5,"date":"1967-03","rep":"A former missile officer later said UFOs disabled them.","off":"Official reports: equipment fault, EMP-related.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Malmstrom UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident"},{"t":"Wikipedia: Robert Salas","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Salas"}],"tags":["Sightings"],"sum":"At 08:45 on 16 March 1967, Echo Flight's missiles in Montana dropped offline with 'No-Go' indications, says the Air Force's own report.","nsrc":2,"new":1,"qs":["Nuclear missiles went 'No-Go' in 1967, and the Pentagon's EMP explanation came in 2025. Why does a nuclear incident take 58 years to explain?","Salas adopted the UFO story after reading a book in 1994. Does that undercut him, or did the book just give him words for what he remembered?","If something really can switch off nuclear weapons, should that frighten us or reassure us? Who should get to know?"],"yt":"Is there any contemporary record of a UFO at Echo?","rel":["REC-HRG2023"],"hook":"At 0845 on 16 March 1967, all 10 Echo Flight missile sites in Montana dropped off alert at once.","why":"A nuclear missile flight that went dark at once, with the Air Force's own engineering answer on file."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"UFO-MAL1967","sum":"At 0845 on 16 March 1967, every launch facility in Echo Flight at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, shut down with \"No-Go\" indications. The 341st Strategic Missile Wing's own history, later released to the public, says all 10 lost strategic alert \"nearly simultaneously.\"\n\nInvestigators found no easy answer. Weather was ruled out. A fault in the logic couplers was possible only if all 10 had failed \"within a few seconds of each other,\" which they judged very remote. The team at Malmstrom was \"unable to determine a logical cause.\"\n\nThe history also deals with the story that still clings to this morning. \"Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of fault were disproven,\" it says. A mobile strike team that had checked the sites that morning reported nothing unusual.\n\nThen came the tests. At Boeing, engineers put a single pulse on one line into a coupler, and in seven out of 10 tries the system shut down. Electromagnetic pulse testing showed that the network linking the sites was open to that kind of noise. A similar shutdown had hit Alpha Flight on 19 December 1966.\n\nSo the Air Force had a likely mechanism within months, and wrote that the rumours were disproven. Why does the morning still read like a mystery?","qs":["Why does the morning still read like a mystery?","What made the missile network open to a single pulse?","Why did the rumours outlive the report that disproved them?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Minuteman_III_Launch_Control.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minuteman_III_Launch_Control.JPG","title":"Minuteman III Launch Control.JPG","lic":"Public domain","by":"Chitrapa","alt":"Malmstrom / Echo Flight missile shutdown: Minuteman III Launch Control"}],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Malmstrom UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident"},{"t":"Wikipedia: Robert Salas","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Salas"},{"id":"VUFO-MAL1967-3","t":"The Black Vault: Malmstrom AFB UFO documents (PDF)","u":"https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/ufos/malmstromufo.pdf"}],"pts":[{"p":"Robert Salas first told the story in the Great Falls Tribune, 13 Aug 1996.","g":"VERIFIED","b":"V","t":"Wikipedia: Malmstrom UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident"},{"p":"Echo Flight lay between Hilger and Winifred, Montana.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Malmstrom UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident"},{"p":"A 2025 Pentagon report attributed the shutdowns to an EMP test.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Malmstrom UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident"},{"p":"Echo Flight sites shut down with No-Go indications on 16 Mar 1967 at 0845 (AF report).","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Malmstrom UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/UFO-MAL1967.webp","w":1280,"h":1035,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Minuteman_III_Launch_Control.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original"}}