F.E. Warren missile site sightings (1965)

F.E. Warren missile site sightings (1965)

Dates	31 July – 2 August 1965, with further reports later that August
Place	F.E. Warren AFB, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and its Minuteman missile field; also the Sioux Army Depot, Sidney, Nebraska
Count	148 objects reported by 143 personnel (90th Strategic Missile Wing report to the Foreign Technology Division)
Descriptions	Mostly round lights, some oval, cigar- or pencil-shaped; formations; flashing red and green; silent
Official explanations	Stars and planets (Jupiter); later reports: aircraft on jet routes, a weather balloon; others "insufficient data"
Context	The Midwest UFO "flap" of summer 1965
Date	31 July 1965-2 August 1965
Topics	Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Robert Hastings
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 67
Year	1965 in UFO history
Timeline	1965 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	12

Over three nights from 31 July to 2 August 1965, Air Force personnel at F.E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and at its surrounding Minuteman missile sites reported large numbers of unidentified lights and objects.^[1][3] A report from the base's 90th Strategic Missile Wing logged 148 objects reported by 143 personnel.^[1] The episode was part of a wider wave of sightings across the Midwest that summer. The Air Force publicly blamed stars and planets, an explanation that astronomers disputed.^[3]

The sightings

The wing's report to the Air Force Foreign Technology Division, written under the Air Force UFO regulation 200-2, describes how the episode began. On the night of 31 July, Cheyenne residents phoned local radio stations about objects with flashing red and green lights. The reports were relayed to the Warren command post, and all missile sites were alerted to watch for them.^[1] Over the next three nights:^[1]

• 31 July. 75 objects observed by 70 personnel.
• 1 August. 29 objects observed by 27 personnel.
• 2 August. 44 objects observed by 46 personnel.

The report's description of the objects:^[1]

• Shape and size. Most were round, some oval or cigar-shaped, pencil-shaped, or just a light source. To the naked eye they ranged from a pinhead to a nickel in apparent size, and through binoculars from a pea to a half-dollar.
• Formations. Groups flew in V, echelon, cross, box and "tail" formations.
• Lights. Coloured lights flashed every one to two seconds, sometimes brightening and dimming. A few seemed to have tails.
• Sound. None was reported.
• A daytime report. On 1 August a civilian in Cheyenne saw an oblong object tumble through the sky, become two objects in the distance, and vanish in separate directions.

The Blue Book file, labelled "Bunkie, Louisiana" and running to more than 300 pages, preserves command-post entries:^[3]

• The orange "blob". One recorded "a blob approximately 20 feet in diameter orange in color. No sound. About as tall as one-story building. Descending", observed for two minutes by a staff sergeant.
• Golf-1. Another, from two airmen at the Golf-1 missile site at 6 a.m., described an "extremely bright" object moving very fast at 10,000–20,000 feet, with "no sound or propulsion", taking about 30 minutes to cross the sky.
• "Jupiter". Duty officers had pencilled "Jupiter" next to some entries.

The launch officers

The researcher Robert Hastings interviewed the former launch officer Jay Earnshaw, who was on duty in an underground launch control capsule during the episode.^[12] Earnshaw, a crew commander mainly at Echo Flight, said:^[12]

• What the guards reported. Security guards above reported silent aerial lights, "oblong or, from the correct perspective, disc-like". They were usually reddish or orange, and would "stack on top of one another and then just disappear".
• No landings. None came inside the fence or touched down.
• Pressure. He heard that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was debriefing people, and that higher command discouraged such calls.
• His own view. He had not seen the objects himself. He thought "someone might have been interested in what we were doing at our [nuclear missile] sites".

Hastings says a Project Blue Book memo published by J. Allen Hynek described as many as six objects "stacked vertically" above missile sites on 1 August.^[1]

Nebraska and the wider wave

Similar reports came from the Army ammunition depot at Sidney, Nebraska. Together the two installations "burned up the communication lines" to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, NORAD and elsewhere.^[3] In the same week, from 31 July to 4 August, hundreds of sightings of lights in formation were reported across Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas, a period known as the "Midwest Flap".^[3]

Later Blue Book records show more reports around the missile field, from the base's 809th Combat Support Group. They were compiled by the intelligence officer Major Elva D. Brown, and an addendum of 20 September 1965 covers sightings on 26 and 31 August:^[2][4][7]

• The witnesses. A civilian guard at the Sioux Army Depot, nine personnel at the Hotel launch facility, a staff sergeant and his neighbours, and eight young stargazers with a telescope.
• The theodolite sighting. A Geodetic Survey team saw a single point of light that a theodolite resolved into three white objects. The report noted that the alignment and survey teams were "fairly well trained in astronomy".
• 31 August. A witness watched a round, barrel-sized object with a sharply outlined ring of red, white, blue and green light for 15 minutes.
• The verdicts. Most sightings were attributed to aircraft on regular jet routes, one to Jupiter and one to a weather balloon. The 31 August case was rated "insufficient data for evaluation".
• Publicity. The report asked whether the information could be released to the public.

Official explanation

On 2 August 1965 newspapers carried an Air Force statement attributing many sightings to named stars and planets.^[3] What followed:^[3]

• The planetariums. Astronomers at two public planetariums objected that the stars and planets named were not visible at the times reported.
• Blue Book's revision. The next day a Project Blue Book spokesman told an Oklahoma newspaper that the statement had been meant to explain sightings in Wyoming, not Oklahoma.
• Hudson's check. The researcher Marilyn Hudson pointed out that the same sky is visible from both states. Her check of a historical star chart found the named bodies were not visible at the relevant hours.

Later accounts

Hastings published the wing's report. Its page images, once hosted on his site, are no longer online.^{[1][8][9][10][11]} He also collected accounts of other incidents at Warren:^[1]

• Fall 1973. In a 2002 letter, the former launch officer Walter Billings described hearing over the radio how a security team saw a bright UFO hovering over a silo after its alarms were tripped. He later heard rumours that the warheads' target tapes had been erased.
• Late 1973. A maintenance crew watched a UFO for five minutes. Billings heard this second-hand.
• Spring 1974. Guards told him a UFO had landed near Charlie launch control centre.
• 1976. Captain Bruce Fenstermacher described an incident at Hastings's 2010 press conference.

Billings himself said he only "heard that these things had occurred".^[1] In September 2010 Hastings presented six veterans at a Washington press conference on UFOs and nuclear sites.^[6] His 2008 book UFOs and Nukes became a 2016 documentary. He said in 2020 that he had been abducted by aliens.^[5]

Assessment

The 1965 reports are documented in Air Force records. They show that many personnel reported lights, mostly small, distant and silent, at a time when sightings were sweeping the region.^[1][3] The Air Force's blanket astronomical explanation was weak and quickly qualified.^[3] But its own follow-up reports identified some objects as aircraft, Jupiter or balloons, and left others as insufficient data.^[2][7] The later accounts of the 1970s are second-hand or uncorroborated.^[1][5]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• F.E. Warren Air Force Base — A Wyoming Minuteman missile base linked to UFO reports.
• Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.
• Robert Hastings — Researcher who has collected accounts of UFOs at nuclear weapons sites, author of UFOs and Nukes.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.

On the Timeline

• Martin Marietta engineer's papers (1965) (17 May 1965) — Jacques Vallée says a Martin Marietta engineer was upset when his papers were seen.
• Lockbourne AFB object and Kecksburg (10 December 1965) — An Air Force guard says he watched over an object brought from Pennsylvania before it went to Wright-Patterson.

See every 1965 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “UFO reports and atomic sites”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.