Former USAF Officer Robert Salas Responds

Heroes are not always as obvious as the dedicated cop on the beat or the firefighter saving lives, and too often we forget that all men and women who willingly enter the military automatically join the ranks of heroics simply by protecting the country and risking their very lives. I've had the rare pleasure of meeting an occasional hero, one of whom I mentioned briefly in my most recent Air Force blog entry (see link list).

For me, probably because I'm getting older and more impatient with my own species, my other heroes are increasingly those who speak out logically about controversial issues with which they are somehow associated. About things that we, the people, deserve to know. What follows in today's blog entry might involve heroism, but I'll let you be the judge.

My previous entry about Dr. Edward Condon and the Colorado UFO study brought a highly intriguing response from former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, a name very familiar in the credible archives of UFO research. My readers probably understand by now that I don't spend a lot of time on details offered in great depth elsewhere, so before I continue I'll strongly suggest that you visit nicap.org, one of my favorite UFO reference sites, click on the search engine and type in "Robert Salas." Several articles will become instantly available so that Mr. Salas' fascinating account as a military officer involved with a UFO event can be fully appreciated.

In brief here, however, Capt. Salas was an officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, in 1967 when UFOs began overflying the base in the evening -- and ultimately one hovered over a battery of Minutemen missiles, where it apparently knocked out both primary and back-up power, rendering the missiles useless. While Salas didn't actually see the UFOs, he was in communication with several security and operational personnel who did, and they kept him fully apprised of the UFO maneuvers. One member of the team sustained a still unspecified injury and left by ambulance. The affected missiles (up to 20, depending upon areas where additional UFO activity was witnessed) could not be made operational again until at least the next day, and evidently authorities had no idea how they were knocked out of commission. You may recall, per the book Clear Intent (mentioned in a previous blog entry), that Malmstrom and other U.S. and foreign bases experienced another encounter with UFOs likely causing peculiar instrumentation problems in 1975. As we should expect by now, the government characteristically snaked its way around that situation until its public position dictated that there was no UFO involvement.

Mr. Salas has testified publicly about his base's UFO incident and also wrote a book detailing the incident with co-author James Klotz (forward by Raymond E. Fowler) entitled Faded Giant, a term generally referencing a nuclear situation. The authors spent considerable time looking up original witnesses and documentation relating to the 1967 incident, and the resulting book may be ordered through amazon.com and other outlets.

This extremely important witness to the tense 1967 military incident, a ranking officer with crucial military responsibilities at that time, now offers for us additional information about the absurdities of the Colorado UFO study. With his permission, I am quoting below the full text of his response this week:


"Thanks for your info about your letter from Ed Condon regarding the 1964 Socorro incident. Here's more evidence that Condon whitewashed the UFO issue for the Air Force.

"I have written a book, "Faded Giant" which talks about the /Echo/ and/Oscar/ flight missile shutdowns (Malmstrom AFB, MT) during UFO encounters in March 1967. Sometime, soon after the date of the Echo
shutdowns (March 16, 1967) one of Condon's committee members, Dr. Roy Craig received information that the Echo shutdown may have involved UFO activity and he flew to Malmstrom to 'investigate.' Upon his arrival, he
was told by Lt. Col. Lewis Chase (an experiencer -- ref. RB 47 case) that there was nothing to the 'rumor' of UFOs but that he could speak with Mr. Low, another Condon co-conspirator, about it after their
investigation was completed.

"Apparently Craig bought into that and did not investigate further. Neither the Echo or Oscar (one week later)
shutdowns were ever reported to Blue Book or investigated by Condon, even though the Air Force Unit History Report dated Jan - Mar 1967 stated specifically, 'Rumors of UFOs was disproven!!!' Obviously the
Air Force and Condon did not want to have to investigate the possibility that this very significant event (the disabling of 20 nuclear missiles during UFO sightings) may have occurred."


One wonders, as more anecdotal information of this nature comes to light about the Colorado study, what still-unknown forces simmered behind the scenes in Dr. Condon's UFO kitchen. The late (and often hilariously in error) UFO debunker Phil Klass tried to make project members Edward Condon and Robert Low "victims" of UFO proponents such as Dr. James McDonald, but it's quite obvious that the downfall of key project participants centered heavily upon scientists performing negligible science -- or no science at all.

I've not re-posted visuals on this blog previously, but I am putting up my 1968 letter from Gerald Ford (see blog of June 11, 2007) again to drive home some nebulous point that deserves more clarity than I can manage here. Maybe I'm just tired of the official nonsense -- thousands of impressive UFO reports just from the U.S., plus former military personnel putting their reputations on the line by daring to go public, and so many in Congress just sitting like bumps on logs, refusing to do a damned thing to make their public testimony easier and not fraught with potential legal threats for coming forward. Sometimes, I feel that if I read one more official statement assuring us that UFOs represent no threat to our national security -- yet military personnel are forbidden under various regulations to go public with their dramatic UFO encounters because speaking out may violate national security -- I may well turn to stone.

Gerald Ford? Congressman, then President, Gerald Ford, the subject of so many entries on this blog, now departed, of course. Mr. Ford, I would suggest rhetorically, knew, knew the Colorado project turned into a farce. Why didn't he do something, anything? The "UFO baby" lingered restlessly in Ford's hands since the Michigan UFO sightings, when he spoke oh SO eloquently about the need for an investigation, the once-and-forever, tell-all-at-last, absolute final word and determination. What happened? What happens to those folks in Washington whenever important UFO evidence flies into their soup?

Robert Salas -- thank you for enlightening us, sir. The rest of us should always ask the question, who are the real patriots? What extraordinary measures sometimes constitute heroism? Who will offer and interpret the information we have been denied on a regular basis, and for so long, by the nameless and faceless who, though performing their duties expertly and covertly, nonetheless perform them in that sector of a free and open government intended to impart knowledge to all citizens? One needn't be a conspiracy theorist, or even a "bad" American, for gosh sakes, just to insist that our government tell the people the truth.

Condon's Last Stand

A letter from the man himself, Dr. Edward U. Condon, June of 1967. Forty years, how quickly they pass.

Whatever comments I've made about the Colorado University UFO study and Dr. Condon, there is no denying his brilliance as a physicist with a colorful background and an enviable career -- and he certainly wasn't one to be force-fed government nonsense, as his history of government encounters indicates. By all accounts, he should have been a perfect choice to lead the UFO project. But how wrong, how horribly wrong, everything went as the project's months passed..

Those "very fine relations" with the organizations NICAP and APRO proclaimed by Condon in his letter deteriorated quickly -- particularly from NICAP's point of view, because their personnel worked a long and grueling period to provide the best UFO evidence NICAP had to offer. As it turned out, NICAP's efforts were mostly ignored by the project.

The South Hill, VA, incident of April, 1967, mentioned in the letter, in which UFO "landing marks" were evident, was briefly mentioned in the Colorado project's final report, but what amazed me most in Condon's letter was his apparent disregard for the profoundly important Socorro, NM (Office Lonnie Zamora) UFO landing case of April, 1964. The Socorro incident, impressive enough to influence Air Force UFO consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek's opinion about UFOs, should have been a key component of any truly scientific investigation of Condon's era.

Several months before Condon's letter to me (in January, 1967, for one instance), the physicist was out on the lecture circuit making disparaging comments about the UFO phenomenon, obviously indicative of a scientist displaying a most unscientific attitude toward the subject he was charged to investigate. We, the public, expected more and deserved more, for nobody twisted Dr. Condon's arm to make him research the UFO issue with taxpayer funding.

After the Colorado study report's release, Condon continued attempts to convince fellow scientists not to take a positive stand on the UFO issue. Fortunately, a substantial number of his colleagues were familiar enough with the evidence to ignore him, but despite Colorado University's sloppy and overwhelming negatively inflated conclusions, damage to the public mind had been accomplished and the usual members of the press in large part swallowed everything spoon-fed to them by the government, which was more than pleased to trumpet the Colorado report -- this, the crowbar that finally succeeded in prying the UFO monkey off the Air Force's back. UFOs were no more. UFOs were nothing special. And, oh, by the way, what about the evidence? The evidence be damned. Who cares about the evidence? After all, Colorado said. . . Colorado said. . . Colorado said. . .

How to Allay My Fears

This is one of my favorites, another instance where a government official is fed up with my UFO inquiries in 1966, and probably all the more because a Congressional inquiry dictates that actual effort must be expended for a response. Well, if you're going to be dragged out and condemned, it may as well be by an officer of high rank, not just some second lieutenant. This time around, I get nailed by a full bird colonel.

Pardon me if I don't get into the AFR 200-2 vs. AFR 80-17 issue again. While the colonel is correct in his views on the surface, make no mistake: These regulations (like the Navy's JANAP 146 series of regulations) effectively muzzled military personnel who encountered UFOs. The road to public relations and telling "all" involved a lengthy bureaucratic journey, not to be completed until the UFO report could be distilled into something devoid of mystery or, at the very least, something postured as easily explainable if only more information were available.

The Colonel Bryan referenced was Col. J. Bryan (USAF, ret.), at that time a member of the board of governors of the National Investigations Committe on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP -- see link above), and, like Maj. Donald Keyhoe, convinced that UFOs were real, guided by intelligence and likely of extraterrestrial origin.

As he continued the official dismissal for my congressman's eyes, Col. Mims assures Rep. James Hanley that the Air Force's contract with Colorado University for a UFO study will provide the impartial examination needed. "This should allay any fears which he (Barrow) has," stated Mims, "about whether scientific data are being ignored."

Col. Mims, of course, wouldn't realize in 1966 how upside-down prophetic those words were because, as it turned out, ignoring scientific data is precisely what the Colorado project did in the end. If I entertained any "fears," about the UFO issue, I feared the Colorado fiasco (to use Look Magazine's and author John G. Fuller's word) would turn out exactly as it did after warnings emerged from the project's own innermost circles.

You Say 200-2, I Say 80-17, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

The title above, my play on a once popular song concerning the word, tomato, makes much ado about calling the same thing by different names, or, in this case, by different numbers. Air Force Regulation 80-17 appeared in 1966 as a replacement for AFR 200-2, that troublesome, oft-publicized (especially by NICAP) document advising military personnel about the reporting of unidentified aircraft and the like to authorities and, of more than passing interest to government officials, to the press and public. One may easily speculate that the new number varied widely from the original because officials wanted the public to forget the number 200-2, which had become known essentially as "that Air Force UFO regulation."

AFR 80-17 didn't really differ that much from 200-2, but I was energized enough about it to send off a three-page letter to Rep. Gerald Ford's office in October, 1966. I think, as a teenager with unreasonable expectations, that I anticipated a little more freedom for military personnel to report UFO sightings publicly with the release of the new Air Force reg, but that clearly was not to be. Ford's office quickly signed off on my comments with a standard response, and this time the signature appears different than on previous letters. This may also be my final communication with Ford's office, but should something additional turn up I'll include it.

The Good, The Bad and The Reported

My general policy is to contact web site personnel for permission before posting links to their pages, or to at least make them aware if I have. For whatever reasons, the gentlemen responsible for the links posted today did not respond to my requests, so I've taken the liberty of just adding them to the growing list in the margin. However, I'm always willing to delete a link promptly once notified by those who prefer their sites not appear.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) plays a valuable role in giving UFO witnesses a place to report experiences. NUFORC is often the source contacted or referenced by law enforcement personnel when they receive UFO reports. Peter Davenport keeps us current with his updates on UFO activity, and it must not be forgotten that he was really the "first contact" for information regarding the now famous Chicago O'Hare Airport UFO of 2006 (an incident legitimized in a lengthy study conducted by the scientific organization NARCAP).

UFO Watchdog is a fun and informative place where you can visit the "Hall of Shame" and "Hall of Fame," regarding the best and worst of people claiming an affiliation with the UFO subject. The names you know and some you don't may well be found at this site, so if you've ever wondered about the cads and scoundrels vs. the honest and hard-working of UFO research, do not fail to pay a mandatory visit to Royce Myers' UFO Watchdog.