Robert Salas

Robert Salas was a US Air Force first lieutenant serving as deputy missile combat crew commander at Oscar Flight, Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. He has said that on 24 March 1967 security guards above ground reported a glowing red object hovering at the gate, and that within minutes most of the flight's ten Minuteman missiles dropped off alert with guidance-and-control faults. He first spoke publicly in the 1990s and has since testified at the 2001 Disclosure Project press conference and the 2010 National Press Club event on UFOs and nuclear weapons.

A documented shutdown of ten missiles at Echo Flight on 16 March 1967 appears in the 341st Strategic Missile Wing's unit history, which attributes it to an electronic noise pulse and does not mention any object. The Oscar Flight event Salas describes is not in that record, and the date has moved in his own telling; a former Echo Flight commander, Walter Figel, has confirmed a shutdown while disputing the UFO connection. Robert Hastings, who has interviewed Salas at length, treats the two flights as separate incidents.

The corpus gives Salas one interview, presented under the claim that a UFO shut down ten nuclear missiles, and cites him through Hastings elsewhere. The knowledge base records the Echo Flight shutdown as documented, Salas's account of Oscar Flight as testimony, and the causal link to an object as contested.