SUBJECT: INTERESTING READING ON JUMPING TO CONCLUSION FILE: UFO842 This is a brief account of an incident that occurred while I was in the Air Force. I think it provides a slightly different view of an encounter and shows how these things can get blown out of proportion. My job in the Air Force was that of a missile launch officer assigned to the 44th Strategic Missile Wing in Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota. During one alert an interesting series of events took place, the most interesting and telling part of the story was the reaction. It was something like a Tuesday afternoon. The relief crew was going to be late because the deputy's wife had just had a baby. Both of us were up by the front of the capsule talking when the following events occurred: 1. The Outer Zone security alarm went off on one of our sites. This is a very common occurrence but it still requires a security team check it out. 2. Twenty seconds later the Inner Zone Security alarm went off for the same site. Inner Zone alarms are rare but they do happen. The security situation in this case is much more serious because with both the outer and inner zones activated someone might be attempting to penetrate the site. 3. Two minutes later the site in question showed Status Out, meaning that the ground support equipment was no longer responding. This is also a very serious security situation because we can no longer monitor the missile from the command center. 4. We reacted according to our technical orders and declared the appropriate security situations and the necessary groups were informed including the SAC command post. This is completely normal, SAC takes its nuclear responsibility very seriously and it is required to inform the SAC command post of any events remotely concerning a weapon. I believe that the major purpose is to allow the controllers on duty to determine if there is a general pattern that could threaten the missile force. 5. In due time our Security Alert Team arrived on the site and proceeded to investigate. They detected some holes in the ground. A maintenance team that arrived on the scene later determined that there was a failure in the ground support equipment. No breach of security was ever detected in this case. The one strange thing was that the SAT teams truck experienced difficulty when it approached the site. Communications was lost for a brief period and the truck stalled out. The relief crew finally arrived and the duty crew, myself and another officer went upstairs to eat and get some sleep before our next shift. I talked to the security team just before we went back down for our next shift. They told me that the holes turned out to be rabbit holes. The truck problems had been plaguing us all for a couple of days, the truck radio was also known to be flakey. When we went downstairs the crew commander of the other crew was just getting off the telephone with the wing commander. The story running around the base was that the rabbit holes were burn marks and the trucks battery had mysteriously been drained as it approached the site. He wanted to know what was up with his missile. The crew commander assured him that nothing was wrong and went through the whole story. After he hung up, he explained that the phone calls had been coming in for several hours. I read the crew logs and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I am telling this story to make several points: 1. In this particular case, nothing mysterious happened. The reactions were all by the book. Every event is totally explainable. Outer Zones go off all the time. The detectors are very sensitive and it is not unusual for snow, tumbleweeds, rabbits and even a very strong wind setting them off. Inner Zones are fairly rare because of the relatively sheltered location of the sensors but they do happen. Status Outs are also rare but they also happen. The equipment failure could also explain the Inner Zone Alarm. The problems with the SAT truck were already known because we had been briefed on them a day before when we first got there. As I said before the radio had been intermittent for a while and that particular site is in an area where radio communications are a little shakey. (The security of the missile force is not compromised by the bad SAT trucks but it is a problem. The skycops always seem to get short changed on getting adequate new equipment and these things take a lot of punishment because of the environment they have to operate in. The motor pool does its best but occasional problems happen.) Absolutely nothing unexplainable happened. There were a few coincidences but nothing that strange. 2. The UFO version of the story sort of grew in a few hours. It started with the report of holes (communications was lost for a couple of minutes right after the report. The SAT team leader called us on the sites telephone to explain the problem.) People being people like to tell a good story. This was unusual enough to warrant a mention and it gradually got embellished. I think that the mute issue was a hot topic at the time. One of my SAT teams had encountered a couple of ranchers that accused the Air Force of the mute cases. I also thing that a UFO incident in Florida or Georgia was in the news at the time. 3. The wing commander was curious enough to call from home for a personal report. If anything or anyone strange was running around his base checking up on these things, I can assure you he would know what was happening. He is responsible for a whole flock of missiles. SAC commanders are not kept in the dark on anything that concerns their birds, not by anybody, anytime, he is the boss man. If there was a standard procedure for this he would have followed it. (There are standard procedures for security situations and they were all followed. There genuinely seemed to be no procedure for potential UFO's.) 4. Nobody strange showed up at anytime to interview the people involved. I definitely would have known about this because I continued to work at that site for several more months on and off and stories travel fast in the military. Nobody got reassigned because of this little incident either. In fact there was no evidence of a standard procedure for UFO reports involving missile sites. (I know of one other such incident that happened a couple of years before this, a SAT team reported seeing strange lights. During that incident the 15th Air Force controller called the crew. [Not a big deal, the crew was in the alternate command post and they have a direct line.] The controller asked in all seriousness if the crew had seen anything. The crew is underground (quite a bit underground) and has no way of seeing anything like this. He was just curious. You would think if these things were standard there would be a little more decorum about them.) [Also you can see a lot of lights out there, I saw a couple and it took a second or two to realize that they were trucks in the extreme distance. There is a lot of space out there and if you are not careful you can be fooled by it.] 5. If anybody tried to FOIA this incident now (14 or 15 years later) they would discover that the crew logs and probably all logs associated with the event have been destroyed. Before you jump to conclusions realize that the destruction of the logs was then and I assume is now standard operation procedure. The logs stay in the capsule for about a month, they then come back to the squadron for several more months after which they are destroyed (if they contain nothing but routine material). It is a storage problem not an attempt to hide information. (I would be much more skeptical of the existence of missile crew logs after this time than if the logs were reported destroyed.) The bottom line of all of this is that sometimes things happen that might look funny. (You could read into this affair a UFO attacking a missile site if you pressed really hard and ignored most of the background material.) Most of these things are just coincidences. The reaction of the people back on the base did not seem to indicate that there was any standard procedure for UFO incidents. If security was that important why would the wing commander call. (I believe that it was just an excuse to talk at a couple of crew types on alert. The commander is busy but he appreciates his crews and this was an excuse for a little stroking.) Since I was the one who initially called the situation, I would have expected to be involved in any serious investigation, nobody approached me on this ever. Except a friend in the wing command post, who had heard the story and wanted to know what happened. A couple of books and articles that I've read recently would have made a big deal about this case. There is no case, that I firmly believe 14 years later. I do not know what is going on. I do not pretend to. I believe in life elsewhere in the universe but I'm sort of on the fence about little green (or grey) men. It is fun to speculate and investigate but you got to be careful. Dig up the facts behind the story and evaluate them honestly before you make any conclusions. ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************