Blue Book’s infinite onionskin

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Blue Book’s infinite onionskin
October 23, 2009
by Billy Cox
HeraldTribune.com

There’s a tendency to want to believe that after you’ve come clean on a secret you’ve harbored for decades — as Robert Salas did in 2005 with the publication of “Faded Giant” — you can just close the book and move on.

But four years after unburdening himself about the shattering events of spring 1967, the retired Air Force captain continues to confront new dimensions in the magnitude of the UFO scandal known as Project Blue Book. Lacking an MSM audience to hear him out, Salas posted his latest revelations online earlier this month.
Blue Book investigator ignored eyewitnesses claiming UFOs pulled the plug on U.S. nukes/CREDIT: atlantawand.org

Blue Book investigator ignored eyewitnesses claiming UFOs pulled the plug on U.S. nukes/CREDIT: atlantawand.org

De Void has skimmed the surface of Salas’ story before, so just a brief recap first. On March 24, 1967, Salas was the deputy missile combat crew commander of a fully loaded Minuteman nuclear silo known as Oscar Flight at Malmstrom AFB in Montana. On that date, with security helpless to respond, UFOs pierced restricted air space and shut down six to eight nukes in the 341st Strategic Missile Wing arsenal. But just eight days earlier, at another ICBM field 160 miles away called Echo Flight, UFOs pulled the power plug on all 10 nuclear warheads.

What’s new is this: Earlier this year, Salas acquired the personal notes of Dr. Roy Craig, a University of Colorado investigator for the so-called Condon Committee, contracted by the Air Force in 1966 to debunk the phenomenon.

Using the Committee’s conclusion that UFOs represented no national security threat, the USAF shuttered its public investigation 40 years ago this December. In a 1995 retrospective on his service to the Committee — “UFOs: An Insider’s View of the Official Quest for Evidence” — Craig wrote he’d made a trip to Malmstrom to address a “rumor” about the 3/16/67 Echo incident. His liaison, Col. Lewis Chase, satisfied Craig with an assurance that UFOs had nothing to do with the shutdown.

However, Craig’s notes, stored at Texas A&M University, indicate he’d been given the names of civilian contractors with Boeing and Sylvania who witnessed the UFO event. Craig never bothered to interview any of them. Or any military personnel. In the margins of one his papers is a note from fellow Committee member Robert Low, making reference to a face-saving explanation from a Pentagon officer: “Roy, I called Hippler and he said he would try to get this, but he suspects it’s going to be classified too high for us to look at it. Says he thinks interference by pulses from nuclear explosions is probably involved.”

Considering how the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty outlawed atmospheric tests in 1963 and that Department of Energy records list no nuclear weapons experiments of any kind from March 10-April 4, 1967, Craig’s Big Gulp-sized swig of USAF Kool Aid blows another valve in Blue Book’s professed integrity.

But what really steams Salas isn’t the fact that his 3/24/67 Oscar Flight incident never came up for discussion during Craig’s chat with Chase. What yanks his bobber under is Chase’s response to Wright Patterson AFB’s Foreign Technology Division, which pressed him for an explanation about events at Malmstrom:

“This office has no knowledge of equipment malfunctions and abnormalities in equipment during the period of reported UFO sightings. No validity can be established to the statement that a classified government experiment was in progress or that military and civilian personnel were requested not to discuss what they had seen.”

Salas insists he had to sign a security oath about what happened at Oscar Flight. As did others. You can get a better feel for the lockdown by reading Robert Hastings’ “UFOs and Nukes,” which names names and explores the fiasco in great length.

“You know, I didn’t realize we had a UFO base officer,” says Salas from his home in Ojai, Calif., in reference to Chase. “Not only that, but here comes this big engineering investigator to check it out, and we were never told he was there.”

Try as he might, at age 69, Salas finds it hard to let it go.

“Oh, I’ve tried to quit this stuff many times,” he says with a chuckle. “But I think this is an abuse of power, and I feel strongly that I’ve got to talk about it.”