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stationed there as part of a team in charge of the missile sites and responsible for deploying the nuclear-tipped warhead missiles in the event of a war. Salas immediately went to wake up the crew commander, First Lieutenant Fred Meiwald, who was napping on his break. Then, within one minute of the phone call, the missiles started shutting down, one by one. "They went into no-go while the UFO was overhead," Salas says. "This means they were disabled, not launchable." There were ten missiles at Oscar Flight, and Salas remembers losing all of them. The missiles were located five to ten miles from the control center where the UFO hovered, and were about a mile apart from one another with independent backup power sources. A week earlier, on the morning of March 16, 1967, about thirty-five miles away from Oscar Flight, UFOs had visited the Echo Flight facility as well, and all of its missiles went down, too. In total, twenty missiles were disabled within the span of a week. A formerly classified Air Force telex states that "all ten missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom lost strat alert [strategic alert] within ten seconds of each other.... The fact that no apparent reason for the loss often missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters." [7] Salas learned from Boeing engineers years later that technicians checked every possible cause for the missile failures, but were not able to find any definitive explanation for what happened. At the time, it was suggested that the most likely cause would have been some kind of electromagnetic pulse directly injected into the equipment. [8] Whatever force was involved had to penetrate sixty feet underground to do its 1 damage. In 1995, when Lieutenant Salas attempted to access government files about the incident, the Air Force sent him its reissue of its 1969 public statement—today's "fact sheet"—that no UFO has ever given any indication of threat to our national security, with a letter stating that this statement still held true. Given his experience, and subsequent confirmation by other witnesses about the 1967 Malmstrom incident, Salas clearly disagrees with this national security assessment. "It is simply incorrect," he says. "If you consider the fact that this UFO incident resulted in the loss of twenty missiles during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, this was a national security threat. The Air Force is not telling us the truth." Salas is not the only former Air Force officer to take this position. Others—missile personnel, security police, radar operators, and pilots—have come forward with similar reports. [9] We can conclude that the Air Force statement justifying the close of Project Blue Book was based on falsehoods about issues of great importance to the American people at the time. The denial of the real picture on UFOs was in itself dangerous. And it doesn't make sense. Could the U.S. military really have decided to turn its back on UFOs in 1969, when when sightings impacting air bases were occurring? It seems inconceivable. This would have been highly irresponsible, a breach of air bases It were seems