Malmstrom Romeo-29 incident (1974)

Malmstrom Romeo-29 incident (1974)

Date	Between January and June 1974, probably March; about 8–10 p.m.
Location	Launch Facility Romeo-29, Romeo Flight, 564th Strategic Missile Squadron, Malmstrom AFB, Montana
Missile	Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile
Source	An anonymous former Air Force captain and deputy launch-crew commander, interviewed by Robert Hastings (made public November 2014)
Claim	A bright object hovered over the silo while the crew's console twice showed launch indications, ending in a false "Missile Away"
Corroboration	None published; no named witnesses, logs or radar records
Critiques	Former launch officer Tim Hebert and MUFON photo analyst Marc D'Antonio suggest equipment faults
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Military encounters (topic)
People	Robert Hastings
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 78
Year	1974 in UFO history
Timeline	1974 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

The Romeo-29 incident is a story told anonymously by a former Minuteman missile launch officer to the UFO researcher Robert Hastings. According to the officer, a glowing object hovered over a missile silo at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, one night in 1974. Meanwhile the launch crew below ground watched their console show the missile going through its launch sequence, twice.^[1][2] Hastings made the story public in late 2014. A former launch officer who analysed it judged the launch indications technically possible but most likely false readings from a fault, and the UFO part unsupported. No record of the event has been published.^[1][2]

The source

• Who he was. Hastings describes his source as a former Air Force captain who wished to stay anonymous "for now". Hastings says he holds the man's DD214 service record, which confirms that he was a nuclear missile launch officer at Malmstrom in 1974.^[1]
• Hastings's sourcing. Hastings notes that he has interviewed more than 150 veterans about UFOs at nuclear sites. He says 98% of them are named in his book UFOs and Nukes, which makes this anonymous case an exception.^[1]
• Dating the event. The source dated the event to between 1 January and 30 June 1974, most likely March, from the period when he was crewed with a particular commander.^[1]
• Going public. Hastings first revealed the case on the radio programme Coast to Coast AM on 30 November 2014.^[1]

The account

The source said he was a young deputy crew commander in the 564th Strategic Missile Squadron, on alert at the Romeo Flight launch control centre. The event came during the first shift of a 40-hour alert, roughly between 8 and 10 p.m. There was no missile maintenance under way, and the episode lasted more than 30 minutes but probably under 90.^[1][2]

• Alarms. Romeo-29 set off both its "outer" alarm, meaning the security fence had been breached, and its "inner" alarm, meaning the silo itself had been disturbed. A Security Alert Team was sent out.^[1]
• The object. On arrival the team reported a large, self-luminous object hovering over the launch facility, so bright that its shape could not be made out.^[1]
• First launch sequence. In the capsule, the console showed "Launch Enable", meaning the missile was preparing to launch. The source flipped the Inhibit switch, and the site dropped into a "No-Go" shutdown as it should. He later learned what the missile was aimed at, which he called "a major target", but declined to say what it was.^[1]
• Restart. The security team reported that the object was still overhead. The site then restarted on its own, which the source said should not have been possible after a No-Go shutdown.^[1]
• Second launch sequence. A second "Launch Enable" followed. This time the inhibit command failed. The readouts went on through "Launch Commanded" and "Launch in Process" to "Missile Away", and the crew, in the source's words, began to panic.^[1][2]
• Still in the silo. The commander radioed the security team, who said the missile had not left. A final No-Go shutdown followed.^[1]
• Departure. The team then reported that the object had left, rising straight up at high speed with no noise. They said they saw an F-106 interceptor in the area trying, without success, to intercept it.^[1]
• Radar. The source said he later learned that controllers at the 24th NORAD Region SAGE Center at Malmstrom had seen both the object and the F-106 on radar.^[1]
• Damage. All the ground electronics at the launch facility were found "fried", as if by a massive electrical surge. The missile's guidance system was undamaged.^[1][2]

The source added that a couple of years later he was posted, unwillingly, as a public information officer at NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs. There, he said, he was in the approval loop for a Freedom of Information Act request about the incident. The material being released included his own crew log with his handwritten notes, much of it redacted. He took this to mean that paperwork on the event had gone to NORAD.^[1]

Hastings's framing

Hastings presents the case as one of several reported missile "activations" linked to UFOs:

• similar incidents at Minot AFB, North Dakota, in the late 1960s, described to him by former launch officers David Schuur and Larry Manross;
• Soviet documents, obtained by the television reporter George Knapp, describing a temporary missile activation at an ICBM base in Soviet Ukraine on 4 October 1982;
• the better-known missile shutdowns at Malmstrom's Echo and Oscar Flights in March 1967.^[1]

D'Antonio's questions and the source's replies

Marc D'Antonio, MUFON's chief photo and video analyst, raised several skeptical questions, which Hastings put to his source:^[1]

• Position. D'Antonio asked whether the object was really over the silo, or a distant light, perhaps the Moon through cloud, seen beyond it. He also asked whether false alarms might have primed the guards to "find" an intruder.
• The F-106. He asked whether the jet's exhaust lighting up clouds, and the "bolting" object, could have been the same thing.
• Cascading fault. He suggested that the fried electronics might have come first and set off all the alarms and launch indications as a cascading failure. In that case the UFO would be a mistaken identification and the only strange element.
• Witnesses. He asked where the F-106 pilot, the radar crew and the guards were now.^[1]

The source replied with several points:

• Radar. The object had been on the SAGE Center's radar, and controllers had directed the F-106 to it. The pilot saw it "bolting" straight up, so the guards could not have confused the jet with the object.
• A second-hand report. A SAGE controller who lived nearby told a friend of the source, who had been on alert at the neighbouring Quebec launch control centre, that the object behaved unlike any known aircraft.
• Two independent events. The launch crew never called NORAD; the fighter appeared on its own. The two sequences of events shared only the object over Romeo-29.
• Origin of the indications. The damaged ground electronics could explain the "Missile Away" display. All the other indications came from the undamaged missile guidance computer, which "runs" the launch facility.
• Accuracy. The timing and order of the indications were "spot-on" for a real launch of that missile against its target. A random failure, he argued, would not produce a perfectly accurate sequence.^[1]

Hastings answered the call for witnesses by saying that corroboration is hard to find in decades-old cases. He hoped the guards might come forward, but thought it unlikely.^[1]

Hebert's analysis

Tim Hebert, a former Minuteman launch officer who stood alert in the 1980s and writes about missile systems, analysed the story in December 2014. He split it into two parts: the launch-facility indications and the UFO report.^[2]

• The enable code. The enable code was loaded into the missile by a maintenance team. Using it required an Emergency War Order from SAC headquarters and unlock codes from a safe that both crew members had to open together.^[2]
• The launch code. A launch command needed both crew members to turn their keys at the same moment. At the missile, the launch code is split between the guidance computer and a separate "permutation plug" shaped like a hockey puck. Only when the halves are merged does terminal countdown begin.^[2]
• Two crews required. As a safeguard, one crew alone could not launch a Minuteman. It took two launch control centres, or one centre plus an airborne launch control crew.^[2]
• Possible cause. Hebert concludes that the indications must have been false, though they would have looked real and the crew acted by the book. A Sensitive Command Network test produces the same sequence of lights, ending in "Missile Away". A fault in the launch facility's Logic Coupler drawer could have affected that network and sent the false reports back.^[2]
• Unanswered questions. He asked whether the squadron's other four control centres, Romeo's backup centre or the squadron command post had been involved. He also asked whether Romeo-29 was on strategic alert, and what the weather was. In his own time on alert, thunder had set off the outer and inner alarms.^[2]

On the UFO side, Hebert noted these gaps:

• no named witnesses, and no first-hand accounts from the security team or Romeo's flight security controller, so the report may be second- or even third-hand;
• no security or command-post logs, and no documentation that NORAD tracked the object.

He called the fault sequence plausible, especially if the network had been affected, but said the UFO story "is left lacking". The anonymous source's crew log, he wrote, would be "invaluable".^[2]

Context

• Echo Flight, 1967. On 16 March 1967 all ten missiles of Echo Flight dropped off alert. An Air Force report at the time said rumours of UFOs had been "disproven". The case became famous in 1996 when former officer Robert Salas linked it to UFO sightings; skeptics attribute the UFO reports to misidentifications such as Mars. A 2025 Pentagon report attributed the shutdown to a classified electromagnetic-pulse test.^[3]
• November 1975. A declassified NORAD log, released through the Freedom of Information Act, records unidentified objects near Malmstrom's missile sites in November 1975. They were tracked on radar and pursued by F-106s.^[4][5]
• Radar reports. Hastings has also gathered accounts from FAA radar controllers at Malmstrom who said they tracked very fast unknown targets in the late 1960s and 1970s. Some said fighters were scrambled after them.^[5]
• Hastings. His father served at Malmstrom's SAGE building in 1966–67. Hastings's wider claims of a UFO–nuclear link have been criticised by the skeptic Benjamin Radford as "a rehashing of old, discredited reports".^[5][6]

People and topics

• Malmstrom Air Force Base — A Montana Minuteman missile base linked to UFO reports.
• Robert Hastings — Researcher who has collected accounts of UFOs at nuclear weapons sites, author of UFOs and Nukes.
• NORAD — The U.S.–Canadian air defence command.
• Malmstrom missile incidents — The 1967 shutdowns of Minuteman missiles at Malmstrom AFB linked to UFO reports.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.

On the Timeline

• Vallée meets Kit Green (1974) (11 February 1974) — Vallée meets Kit Green, who describes officials interested in UAP.
• Contractor guard breakdown claim (1974) (April 1974) — A defense contractor employee claims a guard broke down after seeing a non-human being.

See every 1974 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Malmstrom UFO incident”, “Robert Hastings (ufologist)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.