Minot Air Force Base UFO incident

Minot Air Force Base UFO incident

Type	Case (radar-visual, nuclear base)
Date	About 2:30–5:30 a.m., 24 October 1968
Place	Minot Air Force Base and its Minuteman missile field, North Dakota
Witnesses	16 ground observers; crew of B-52H 60-012 (Cagle, Runyon, Richey, McCaslin, Goduto, Judd) and Maj. James Partin
Evidence	14 radarscope photographs; RAPCON radio transcripts; logs; Werlich overlay map
Blue Book verdict	Plasma "similar to ball lightning"; ground sightings Sirius and the B-52 (13 November 1968)
Later research	Thomas Tulien and the Sign Oral History Project; analyses by Martin Shough and Claude Poher
Also known as	Minot AFB UFO incident, Minot B-52 UFO incident

The Minot Air Force Base UFO incident took place in the early hours of 24 October 1968 around Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, home of a wing of B-52 nuclear bombers and a wing of Minuteman nuclear missiles. Missile security and maintenance personnel at several sites reported a large, bright, colour-changing object; the crew of a B-52H bomber tracked a radar target that appeared to jump toward their aircraft and pace it for some twenty miles while their radios failed; and the pilots then flew over a large glowing object on or near the ground. Shortly afterwards, alarms went off at a missile site whose gate was found unlocked.^[1][2]

Project Blue Book attributed the radar contact and radio failure to "a plasma similar to ball lightning", and the ground sightings to the star Sirius and the B-52 itself. Researchers who found the case's 145 pages of documents and radarscope photographs decades later, and interviewed the crew, argue that these explanations do not fit the evidence; skeptics say the radar contact proves nothing.^[1][2][3]

The base

In 1968 Strategic Air Command was the Air Force's nuclear strike arm, and Minot, in northwestern North Dakota, was one of its principal dual-wing bases. The 5th Bombardment Wing flew 15 B-52H Stratofortress bombers, and the 91st Strategic Missile Wing, made up of the 740th, 741st and 742nd Strategic Missile Squadrons, was responsible for 150 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground launch facilities spread over more than 8,500 square miles. Each launch control facility controlled ten launch facilities, which were unmanned sites with a 20-ton launcher closure over the missile, a personnel access hatch, and a support building.^[1]

Ground sightings

Early that morning Staff Sergeant William Smith, the Oscar Flight security controller, received a report from a "camper" security team guarding a target alignment team at launch facility Oscar-6, who saw a large glowing object that "went down by some trees not far away". At 2:30 a.m. a missile maintenance team, Airmen First Class Robert O'Connor and Lloyd Isley, driving to launch facility November-7, reported an unusual light in the east that seemed to pace their vehicle, growing brighter; by the time they reached the site it was circling to the south. The Base Operations dispatcher connected them with the controllers at Radar Approach Control (RAPCON), opened a reporting line and kept a log of the activity for the next two hours.^[1]

Flight security controllers at the launch control facilities soon reported sightings through the missile wing's security network, and in all sixteen ground observers at different locations reported the object. They described a very large, brightly lit object that alternated from brilliant white to amber and green, could hover, accelerate rapidly and abruptly change direction. Security staff at three facilities similarly described the object separating into two parts that went in opposite directions, then returned and passed under each other. One controller said an object "which looked to him as the sun" came close to the hardened antenna inside his site's fence; his two-man security alert team followed it to within half a mile of where it seemed to land, at which point its light dimmed and went out.^[1]

The B-52 radar encounter

At about 3 a.m. a B-52H, returning from a routine ten-hour training mission, was practising instrument approaches and requested clearance to fly out to the TACAN initial approach fix ("WT fix"), 35 nautical miles northwest of the base, at 20,000 feet. RAPCON asked the crew to "look out toward your 1:00 position for the next 15 or 16 miles and see if you see any orange glows out there. Somebody is seeing flying saucers again." The navigator, Captain Patrick McCaslin, later recalled one of the pilots asking whether the missile crews were "seeing things again". The crew saw nothing on the way out.^[1][3]

At 3:52, as the bomber began a wide 180-degree turn at the fix, controllers said the object was being picked up "by the weathers radar also" at the crew's one o'clock position, three miles away. McCaslin switched the B-52's radar to a narrow "station keep" mode and found a target at their own altitude, faint on the first sweep and very strong on the next. Through the roughly six-mile-wide turn it kept a constant three miles away, ending up to the bomber's left. As the B-52 left the fix to descend, the target suddenly jumped, within a single radar sweep of less than three seconds, to about one mile away, and then matched the bomber's speed and descent off its left wing for nearly 20 miles. "I don't know of anything that could go laterally in three seconds, two miles, and just stop," McCaslin said; he later calculated the closing speed at about 3,000 mph. At the same moment both of the bomber's UHF radios stopped transmitting on all frequencies — the crew could hear RAPCON but RAPCON could not hear them. Near the end of the descent the target appeared to spiral around behind the aircraft and disappeared, and the radios worked again.^[1][3]

The radarscope photographs

McCaslin filmed the radarscope during the encounter. Later that morning Staff Sergeant Richard Clark, a 5th Bombardment Wing intelligence specialist, examined the film and printed fourteen frames, successive three-second exposures covering less than 40 seconds, showing the echo moving from the front right of the B-52 around to a position off its left wing. One frame, timed at 4:06:17 local time, shows the target about 1.05 nautical miles behind the right wing. Clark kept a second set, which eventually reached researchers through his brother-in-law, the UFO researcher William McNeff.^[1][3]

The visual sighting

After a practice missed approach, as the B-52 came in to land, a general officer radioed a request that it go around instead and fly over the object and photograph it if possible. RAPCON vectored the bomber toward a stationary object on or near the ground about 16 miles north-northwest of the base. Turning onto the downwind leg, both pilots saw a bright light more than ten miles ahead. Major James Partin, a non-crew pilot aboard, compared it to "a miniature sun placed on the ground below the aircraft"; his sketch suggests it appeared about 1.7 degrees across, implying an object roughly 150–300 feet in diameter at the one to two miles he passed it. McCaslin, at his station below, declined an invitation to unstrap and come up to look.^[1][3]

As the B-52 banked left around it at about 1,500 feet above the ground, the co-pilot, Captain Bradford Runyon, saw through the pilot's window a huge egg-shaped object whose surface glowed a dull red like molten steel, with a smooth metallic tube extending from one end to the middle of a curved, crescent-shaped part, like a bumper, that glowed greenish-yellow from inside. He cautiously estimated it at 200 feet long, 100 feet wide and 50 feet high. Again the radios would not transmit during the closest approach. McCaslin recalled the pilots saying it then rose quickly into the sky and disappeared. The B-52 landed at 4:40 a.m.^[1][3]

The Oscar-7 alarm

At 4:49 a.m. the outer and inner security alarms sounded at launch facility Oscar-7, and Sergeant Smith sent his security alert team. They found the front gate unpadlocked and an access hatch open, but no other sign of intruders. November security personnel continued to report a light west of November-7 until it faded at about 5:30. William McNeff later claimed that details were left out of the official record, including that two airmen passed out after a close approach and that a silo lid was found off and lying on the grass.^[1][3]

Blue Book's evaluation

Strategic Air Command opened investigations, and that afternoon the base's investigating officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Werlich, informed Project Blue Book. Six ground observers filled in Air Force sighting questionnaires, and Major Partin did so the following week, but Blue Book investigators never interviewed the rest of the B-52 crew. Werlich sent Blue Book logs, a transcript of the radio exchanges, the radarscope photographs and an overlay map plotting the bomber's track and the target's positions.^[1][2]

Blue Book's chief, Lieutenant Colonel Hector Quintanilla, at first told SAC he was "pretty sure" the radar target was a malfunction or an anomalous echo from an inversion. On 1 November, after consulting a Mr. Goff, an airborne-radar specialist at the Foreign Technology Division, he wrote that the object seen on radar and from the air was "most probably a plasma of the ball-lightning class", which could appear on radar and affect electronics, and that ground observers had probably seen bright stars "greatly magnified by the inversion layer and haze"; he did not consider the broken lock related to UFOs. With SAC's commander and staff "extremely interested", he issued his final report on 13 November 1968: the ground sightings appeared to be the star Sirius and the B-52, the radar contact and radio loss "could be attributed to a plasma similar to ball lightning", and the pilots' sighting "could be the star Vega which was on the horizon at the time, or it could be a light on the ground, or possibly a plasma". Blue Book's statistics listed the case as identified by radar analysis as plasma.^[2]

Criticism of the explanation

The researchers who later studied the case argued that ball lightning — typically the size of an orange, lasting seconds, floating near the ground during thunderstorms — could not match a very large object that paced a bomber for about ten minutes from 20,000 to 9,000 feet at up to 280 knots, on a cool night with no storms and 25-mile visibility. They noted that the overcast above 9,000 feet would have hidden many stars, that sixteen observers were unlikely all to mistake a B-52 or Sirius, and that Vega was about two degrees below the horizon and to the right of the bomber, while the pilots flew directly toward an object beneath them. The radar analyst Martin Shough's review of the weather balloon data found no inversion strong enough to support Blue Book's reasoning. McCaslin, a trained star navigator, called the Vega explanation "hogwash": "How could it be a star if you're looking at the ground?"^[2][3]

Later research

Bound by their clearances, the B-52 crew did not speak publicly about the incident for more than 30 years. Around 2000 Runyon, still lacking an explanation, contacted the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies and filed a sighting report. The researcher Thomas Tulien and the Sign Oral History Project, with Jan Aldrich, interviewed Runyon in May 2000 and went on to find 145 pages of primary documents in Blue Book's declassified files, including 14 photographs of the radar screen and Werlich's overlay map. With James Klotz, they interviewed more than 30 witnesses, including the whole crew — aircraft commander Captain Don Cagle, Runyon, radar navigator Major Chuck Richey, McCaslin, electronic warfare officer Captain Thomas Goduto and gunner Technical Sergeant Arlie Judd — as well as Clark, the 810th Strategic Aerospace Division commander Brigadier General Ralph Holland, and the missile wing commander Colonel B. H. Davidson; in every case they were the witnesses' first public contact about it. Werlich had died, but his daughters remembered the urgent night-time phone call. The findings were published online in 2011.^[1][2]

Martin Shough analysed the radarscope photographs and found none of the conventional explanations convincing. Claude Poher, a scientist with the French space agency CNES, contributed a photometric study speculating about the object's energy, suggesting that a zone of highly ionised air around it could have absorbed the bomber's 270 MHz radio transmissions while its higher-frequency transponder kept working, and that if the inferred accelerations could be sustained, interstellar travel would be possible.^[1][2]

Others are unconvinced. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, told a newspaper in 2008 that the radar contact was interesting but proved nothing, asking: "How do you know it just wasn't one branch of the military not telling the other branch of the military what they're doing?" He attributed the leap to aliens to "patternicity", the tendency to find patterns in random noise. McCaslin, by then a retired science teacher in Texas, said he believed what he saw but that it would be "a leap in logic" to say it came from outer space: "It could have come from anywhere." The case was featured in ABC News's 2005 special Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing.^[1][3]

References