By Sean Casteel and John Weigle
Robert Salas (Credit: Sean Casteel)
The time Robert Salas spent in the United States Air Force taught him many things about the UFO phenomenon. In a lecture he delivered at the September 14, 2013, meeting of the Close Encounter Research Organization International, held in Thousand Oaks, California, a city just north of Los Angeles, Salas explained just what he has learned in no uncertain terms.
Salas’ lecture was entitled “The Complexity of Human Interactions with the UFO Phenomenon,” and he began by flatly declaring that craft controlled by extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) are visiting us, are here for specific purposes, have been here for a long period of time, and have had complex interactions with humanity. In spite of the existence of a UFO Cabal that is hiding secrets about what’s happening to our planet and society, we are still in the process of becoming part of the “Cosmic Family.”
As part of his PowerPoint presentation, Salas displayed a slide that read:
- “They (the UFO occupants) can interact/interfere with our most technologically advanced equipment.
- “They have devices/craft that can perform in phenomenal ways that we cannot duplicate with our current state of technology.
- “They are able to communicate and interact with humans in phenomenal ways that we cannot explain.
- “They understand the workings of human physiology and psychology intricately well.
- “They have been able to master ‘highly advanced’ physical concepts.
- “They have messages for us.”
Yvonne Smith, founder of the Close Encounter Research Organization International (CERO), and Robert Salas. (Credit: Sean Casteel)
Aliens Interest in Nukes
Like everyone who serves in the Air Force in classified duties and missions, Salas signed confidentiality oaths that were legally binding. His decision to talk about a 1967 incident involving a UFO and nuclear weapons (about which more later) was prompted by an experience he had in a bookstore in 1994.
Salas found a copy of “Above Top Secret” by UFO researcher Timothy Good that contained a brief mention of UFOs being sighted at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Salas thought Good was referring to Salas’ own experience and decided it must be OK to discuss the case since Good had already made it public. Salas contacted James Klotz (who would later co-write a book with Salas called “Faded Giant”) and suggested that he file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about the event. It turned out that the incident in Good’s book was not the one Salas had been part of but was instead a separate event that had occurred a week earlier.
Salas would eventually learn that there had been three similar incidents at Malmstrom clustered closely together at two Montana launch facilities. Salas described where he worked, the Oscar Launch Control Facility, as being contained within a capsule built below ground. The men who ran the operations there worked in 24-hour shifts and were in charge of ten nuclear-armed missiles. The Oscar and Echo facilities were close to each other at Malmstrom, which remains one of the three U.S. bases that still house nuclear missiles.
In February 1967, Lt. Don Crawford received a report that a UFO was hovering over the Echo launch facility. He authorized the immediate use of firearms, but the guard above replied that he didn’t think it would do any good.
On March 16, 1967, ten Minuteman I nuclear missiles at Echo shut down as a UFO hovered overhead. Capt. Eric Carlson, a missile control crew commander, confirmed the incident, as did others.
On March 24, 1967, Salas himself was on duty as deputy commander at the Oscar Launch Control Facility when the incident he was privy to happened. At that point in his CERO lecture, he played a recording of a phone conversation between him and Col. Frederick Miewald, the crew commander, as they discussed the incident years later. Salas said he and Miewald had differing memories about certain parts of the incident, which had taken place some 27 years prior to their conversation.
“In that time,” Salas told his audience, “the best thing to do is to try and forget if you’re not supposed to talk about something that is classified. So I made an effort just to forget the details. A lot of these details – like exactly where I was located at the time, how many missiles went down – were pretty hazy. But in time, though, all this became clear.”
Just as had happened in the Echo incident about a week before, ten missiles spontaneously shut down. A security light went on that indicated an intrusion. Guards went to check and saw a UFO hovering over the area. It was a “very frightening thing for them,” Salas said. He believes the command post had gotten to the guards very quickly because they refused to discuss the incident in the aftermath. He and the rest of the crew were summoned to the commander’s office, given a nondisclosure agreement to sign and told not to talk about what happened.
“One of the airmen called me the next day,” Salas recalled, “and just begged, literally begged, me to come and see him. This was a very daunting, frightening experience and they wanted some kind of an explanation from me. And I had to turn them down.”
More information and insider testimony from various sources would eventually come to light, according to Salas.
Salas said that a Capt. Robert Jamison, a targeting officer assigned to the 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron, confirmed that ten missiles shut down. He was called in to restart the Oscar missiles after the shutdown. Because of the number of reported shutdowns, he and his team were given instructions on what to do if a UFO was sighted. For two weeks after the incidents, they received special UFO briefings and instructions, including “self defense” measures.
Meanwhile, a telex from the Strategic Air Command headquarters said, “The fact that no apparent reason for the loss of ten missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters. We must have an in-depth analysis to determine cause and corrective action and we must know as quickly as possible what the impact to the fleet, if any.”
The Air Force’s Project Blue Book files contain a report of a landing near Belt, Montana, at the time of the incidents. But a kind of “glossing-over” seems to have become part of the official record. An Air Force publication called “Wing History” for the period of January through March of 1967 states that “Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of the fault were disproved. A Mobile Strike Team (MST), which had checked all November Flight’s LFs on the morning of 16 March 1967, were questioned and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed.” David Gamble, the wing historian who had prepared the history, said in a letter to Salas and co-author Klotz that, “There were two times when I recall where sections of the history were scrutinized and changes beyond editorial were made. One of these [times] was the UFO aspect of the missile shutdown incident. . .”
Robert Kaminski, a project team leader for civilian contractor Boeing, said he was charged with assembling a team whose objective would be to try to find out why the missiles had suddenly fallen from alert status with no explanation. When the team met with him to report their findings, it was decided that “the final report would have nothing significant in it to explain what happened.” The team went off to make their report. Meanwhile, Kaminski was contacted by another Boeing representative who told him that the incident “was reported as being a UFO event.” A few days later, Kaminski and his people were instructed to stop any further effort on the project and not to submit a final engineering report. “This was most unusual,” he said, “since all of our work required review by our customer (USAF).”
Malmstrom Air Force Base missile maintenance team removes the upper section of an ICBM at a Montana missile site. (Credit: U.S. Air Force/ John Parie)
Further confirmation came from a source called “Tex,” who prefers to remain anonymous since he is currently the vice president of a prominent aerospace company. Tex said that he was working through a checklist to bring an Echo Flight missile back online when a guard called him to the surface to see a UFO hovering over the site. He returned to his work and started to bring the missile back up.
“He gets to a certain point in the checklist,” Salas said, “and the missile shuts down again. This object is still up there. In fact, he can feel the electrical energy coming down the tube right where he is. He said he felt almost like he was immersed in static electricity. But he tried this many, many times, he said, trying to bring the missile back up on alert using his checklist. When he got to this particular point on the checklist, he said, the missile shut down again.”
To Tex, whatever it was knew exactly how the missile system worked and knew it in great detail.
Having established the sequence of events of the missile shutdowns and the official investigations – or non-investigations – that followed, Salas moved on to describe what he believes are the origins and workings of the cover-up process.
He began by recounting the history of Edward Condon, who was chosen to head the University of Colorado study of UFOs. Condon had previously worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs, but resigned because of a security dispute. He was appointed head of the National Bureau of Standards in 1946, and in that same year J. Edgar Hoover accused Condon of being a Soviet spy. Condon lost his security clearance in 1951, but in 1966 he was offered reinstatement of his security clearance if he would take on the UFO study.
Lt. Col. Lewis Chase, a member of Condon’s team, was the operations officer and UFO officer at Malmstrom. Chase had a UFO experience in August 1957, and evidence was taken at the time by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. The incident was classified and placed in a secret Blue Book file. While working with the Condon committee, Chase asked to see the report on his incident and Blue Book replied that it had no information. After the Condon Report was published, the committee’s chief investigator, Roy Craig, was informed by the Air Force that they had located the report of Chase’s incident, but that it remained classified. The Air Force also admitted that they had withheld other classified Blue Book files from the Condon committee.
UFO investigator Raymond Fowler also played a part in the story of the missile shutdowns. Fowler was then working for the Sylvania Corporation and was involved with the electrical systems of the Minute Man Missile System. He was an early warning advisor to Condon and told Craig about the missile incidents. Some years after the Condon report, considered an outrageously obvious whitewash by most UFO believers, was issued, Fowler risked his job by giving an interview to “The Christian Science Monitor” in 1973 about the missile shutdowns. Fowler also belonged to NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and was outspoken on many issues related to UFOs.
“Needless to say, the Air Force was very angry about this and denied it all,” Salas said.
After briefly citing other witnesses and testimonies, Salas took up the subject of why the shutdowns may have happened in the first place. UFOs have been watching our wars, he said, beginning with the foo fighters in World War II. Next came sightings at various nuclear installations and reactors, as well as UFOs appearing in Vietnam and over other war zones, to include the appearance of a triangular-shaped object over Camp Slayer in Iraq that “just basically obliterated the sky above them.”
Historically, the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombs were comparatively small but caused tremendous damage. Currently, the U.S. is believed to have some 10,000 nuclear weapons with up to 1.5 megatons of destructive power. Iran and North Korea can achieve nuclear capability now. Salas said that if the U.S. bombed Syria, it would make it easier later to bomb Iran over its nuclear programs. He also cautioned that the U.S. is risking the progress made in the New Start Treaty as well as running the risk that U.S. intervention will motivate the further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the area.
But nuclear weapons aren’t the only source of radiation problems. Salas warned that we are also “exporting” radiation out there in the universe by way of the radioisotope thermal generators in our satellites and spacecraft. Other troublesome sources include the Fukushima disaster, a fire near the Los Alamos Nuclear Facility, flooding near a Nebraska reactor, and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. In the latter incident, the Russian newspaper “Pravda” reported that UFOs were seen in the area before and after the event.
Salas believes the UFO occupants are sending a clear message: “You are not alone. We also live here. Eliminate your nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.”
It is worth noting that this same message was often given by the “Space Brothers” to George Adamski and many others among the earliest flying saucer contactees of the 1950s. While the credibility of the contactee movement remains very much in doubt, the continuity of the idea over the past 60 years is perhaps a testimony to its enduring relevance.
The UFO Cabal
Salas used the term “International UFO Cabal” to describe the organization behind the worldwide cover-up, whose rationale goes like this: Since UFOs and their occupants are capable of phenomenal feats that we cannot control nor defend against, we are therefore unable to protect our citizens from the phenomenon, which would result in a loss of confidence in government and our national security, thereby promoting a citizens’ panic and unwanted major changes in the established order. Therefore, there is no practical reason to verify the existence of UFOs. It would instead be in our best interest to evaluate these objects in secrecy in order to obtain and analyze their advanced technology for our own purposes.
Salas said that such an organization would require a variety of functions, such as financial, facilities/equipment, artifact retrieval operations, foreign operations/liaisons, analyses, evaluation, security operations, interpretation, integration and industry liaison. The cabal has access to the real facts, operates under a safe umbrella of extreme government secrecy, and its efforts to promote public ridicule of the phenomenon and the spread of disinformation have been effective.
But those fighting for disclosure have made some gains, Salas continued. There have been significant UFO incidents, supported by multiple witnesses and other evidence, which have captured public interest. More credible witnesses are speaking out, to include press conferences held sporadically in Washington, D.C., throughout the years since 2001.
And what is the logic that dictates that disclosure would be a good thing for humanity? Salas displayed a slide which read:
- “The advanced science that the UFO phenomenon brings impacts our lives and our future.
- “ET has specific objectives regarding humanity, therefore it is the people’s business to deal with the ET presence.
- “Extreme secrecy in government is progressively corruptive and has a significant impact on our democracy.”
He went on to list things that are counterproductive and productive to disclosure. On the counterproductive side of the table are things like the focus or promotion of lights in the sky, photographs, unverifiable rumor, innuendo and conjecture, and falling into the disinformation trap. It would be much more productive, Salas said, to focus on and promote credible cases and witnesses, while also requiring an accountability for witnesses and their statements, more and better collaboration, accurately informing the public through various media, encouraging more witnesses to come forward, formulating cohesive hypotheses from credible testimonies, and engaging the public, media and elected officials in the discussion of this reality.
Salas’ Abduction Encounter
Robert Salas with his wife, Marilyn Salas, and Dr. Roger Leir. (Credit: Sean Casteel)
After making his case for the cover-up and possible future disclosure, Salas told the story of another personal encounter with the UFO occupants. In 1985, when he lived with his wife Marilyn and their two children in Manhattan Beach, California, he saw a blue light emanating from the living room as he lay in bed. It was an unusual shade of blue and was glowing. He woke up his wife and she also saw the blue light. Salas tried to get up to investigate but suddenly realized he was unable to move.
“I remember fighting very hard to get my mobility back,” he recounted. “I couldn’t move anything. I couldn’t move my arms, my legs. I fought and fought. I fought because I had two small kids in the house and, of course, my wife.”
He tried to get Marilyn to help him but she was now unconscious. He saw someone in the doorway that appeared to be wearing a hood and had no discernible face. He next floated off the bed toward the locked bedroom window, which he felt certain they would be unable to unlock. Nevertheless, he went through the window in an upright position and was taken onboard a craft. He was shown a needle, eight to twelve inches in length, which was inserted into one of his testicles in order to collect semen. The pain was excruciating, and when Salas complained to his abductors, the pain suddenly ceased. This was followed by a physical checkup in which his back seemed to be of primary interest. He next remembers moving through a curved hallway and seeing a bright light before suddenly finding himself back in his bed.
Salas at first had no conscious recall of most of what happened that night. He was able to piece together the experience after working with three different hypnotherapists. A couple of weeks after his abduction, while it was still submerged in his memory, he recalls working in his yard and thinking to himself, I’ve been in space.
There are other elements in the aftermath of the experience that feel more like a dream or a vision to Salas. He recalls a large, black, oval, glassy eye with a rim around it; Marilyn in a large room being trained and “working” on a large metal box; a large tabletop screen with some sort of plan for Earth, activities and locations; and a doctor dressed in black who looks into a box containing instruments.
The experience continues to be very real for Salas and he does not doubt that it actually happened. He said he was speaking about it publicly because he thinks it is important to take alien abduction seriously.
Citing cases like that of abductee Betty Andreasson Luca and her visit to see an apparently high-ranking alien called “The One,” an experience also reported by a representative of a UFO group in Peru, Salas said, “We cannot simply exclude or limit the extent of what we call paranormal. We can’t exclude anything in this area. It’s a very complex area. I mean, the whole UFO phenomenon is very complex.”
Before concluding his lecture at the September CERO meeting, Salas had some final stories that could imply his own possible contacts with the UFO Cabal.
In 1969, when Salas was working on his bachelor’s degree in engineering at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (which he said he could have easily done at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, expressing puzzlement as to why he was sent to Wright-Patterson to begin with), he was ordered to visit the base psychiatrist’s office. Wright-Patterson was the headquarters for Project Blue Book and is rumored to house the bodies of dead aliens and the debris from the Roswell crash.
In any case, Salas reported as ordered, but refused to go into the office unless the psychiatrist would come out and explain to him why he had been summoned. He was never informed of the reason for the required visit, but was finally told he did not have to submit to an interview. He now feels it may have been an attempt to get a psychiatric visit on his military records because of his prior experiences with UFOs, or it may have been part of the process for recruiting him into the UFO Cabal.
While on a commercial flight in 1972, after he had left the Air Force, Salas met a former Air Force classmate who said, “You’ll never guess what I’ve been flying.”
“And I told him,” Salas recalled, “just joking, I said, ‘UFOs?’ He turned white as a sheet and whispered in my ear and said, ‘MiGs.’”
Salas explained that the Air Technical Intelligence Center was organized at the end of World War II to study MiG technology, the Russian aircraft. But MiG was also a code word for UFOs used in Blue Book. Salas never saw or heard from his former classmate again, but he believes their “chance meeting” was indicative of the fact that the Air Force was experimenting with UFO-related technology and may have been another attempt by the Cabal to reach out to him.
But however massive and deeply entrenched the UFO Cabal is, we must fight against it, Salas urged.
“I believe that the truth cannot be suppressed indefinitely,” he said.
Robert Salas is the author of “Faded Giant,” with James Klotz, and “Unidentified: The UFO Phenomenon.” Some of the details in “Faded Giant” turned out to be incorrect and are clarified in “Unidentified,” but the basic story remains the same.
Sean Casteel and John Weigle are the co-authors, along with Timothy Beckley, of the book “Disclosure! Breaking Through The Barrier Of Global UFO Secrecy.” To read more by Sean Casteel, visit his website at www.seancasteel.com.
Read more about Retired USAF Officer Talks About Aliens And Nukes, the UFO cabal, and his abduction experience
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