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I recently watched the first episode of Declassified Secrets with David Duchovny, now airing on the History Channel on Friday nights. As the name indicates, it’s the former The X Files star’s latest series. One segment dealt with the once-hidden but now-famous UFO-related ICBM-shutdown incident at Malmstrom AFB, Montana in 1967, first exposed in 1996 by one of the Minuteman missile launch officers who was on duty when it occurred, former USAF Captain Robert Salas. Given Hollywood’s checkered track record on |
By Robert Hastings |
was not optimistic that the Duchovny show would get all of the facts straight.
But I certainly never expected that its treatment of Salas’ incident would be so
thoroughly error-filled and basically incompetent.
In my book,
UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, I discuss the intriguing event at length. Actually, there were at least
two UFO-related mass-missile shutdowns at Malmstrom, on March 16th and
24th 1967, and I was responsible for getting a number of former USAF personnel
with knowledge of the highly-dramatic, still-classified incidents to go on the
record for the first time.
The book’s entire chapter regarding those events is available
here.
While some readers may conclude that I am overreacting to the Duchovny show’s
treatment of the ten missile-shutdown on March 24th, and that my criticisms
mostly concern trivialities, I will disagree. The importance of the reality of
UFOs repeatedly interfering with our nuclear missiles at several Air Force
bases over the years—as confirmed by scores of USAF veterans who I’ve
interviewed—is self-evident. Any public discussion of the situation should
strive to be accurately presented.
So, whenever I read or watch an attempted review of those developments that is
deeply flawed—due to skeptical ignorance, inept research efforts, or
disinformational spin—I just have to respond.
Tellingly, despite the series title,
Declassified Secrets with David Duchovny, the Oscar Flight incident
remains classified to this day! Given that the show’s producers missed
that fact, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised at the very
faulty summary of it that they foisted on all of us. While I counted more than
a dozen factual misstatements in the carelessly constructed six-minute
segment, I’ll only address three here:
First, it claims, “Salas [was] in his command headquarters and suddenly he
[got] a call from the gate personnel at the entrance to Malmstrom, about some
sort of strange light that is flying, moving in a strange pattern over the
base itself.” In reality, Salas—and his missile commander Captain Frederick
Meiwald, who was with him but is never even mentioned in the program
segment—were some 125 road-miles east of Malmstrom in their underground Launch
Control Center at Oscar Flight, a group of ten Minuteman-I missiles located
near Roy, Montana.
Only later in the segment is there an acknowledgement of Salas’ presence in a
Launch Control Capsule far from the base, thereby contradicting earlier
statements that the incident occurred on Malmstrom itself.
Following this confusion, the segment then says that the head Security
Policeman on-site, who had notified Salas about the mysterious aerial light,
then called a second time and, screaming into the phone, said that a glowing,
orange-colored “orb” was now silently hovering directly over the gate of the
fence surrounding the above-ground Oscar Launch Control Facility building.
Actually, as Salas has repeatedly stated in various interviews, the hovering
object was reported by the Security Policemen confronting it to be disc-shaped
and at least 40-feet in diameter—it was not a small, spherical orb.
More importantly, the segment claims that following the incident the Air Force
sent “a team from an ongoing secret investigation, known as Project Blue Book,
[to investigate it.]” In reality, although Salas and Meiwald were forcefully
interrogated about the incident and told to sign national security
non-disclosure statements, Blue Book never investigated the alarming
incursion and, significantly, the Air Force continues to officially deny that
there has ever been UFO interference with any of our nuclear missiles’
functionality, at any base, over the past seven decades!
Nevertheless, despite the false claim of Blue Book’s involvement in the Oscar
Flight case, the segment stubbornly doubles-down and has journalist and
wannabe-UFO expert Garrett Graff saying on camera, “Investigators from Project
Blue Book look into this incident at Malstrom [sic], and they don’t think that
it’s an alien spacecraft but they also can’t find any other logical
explanation.” This is simply untrue. No such Blue Book report ever existed.
Later in the segment, Graff opines, “I think the US government knows more
about some of these UFO sightings than it lets on, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean that they’re alien spacecraft. A mystery is in some ways just
as challenging as an actual secret. Still today, the government is just as
likely to classify its ignorance as it is its knowledge.”
While this last sentiment—regarding government ignorance often being
unacknowledged—is undoubtedly true, the exhaustive research conducted by
myself and other researchers conclusively establishes that the Air Force knows
tremendously more about UFOs—and the nuclear weapons-related cases in
particular—than Graff’s vague, arguably apologist statement suggests. His
empty platitude completely ignores the wealth of specific, detailed,
formerly-classified material about UAP now in the public domain. It appears
that he is either uninformed or too negatively biased to understand its
importance.
Indeed, in various skeptical public statements he has made, Graff has doubted
the existence of Non-Human Intelligence on Earth, saying, “UFOs could be weird
physics [we don’t yet understand] rather than aliens from Alpha Centauri
buzzing the USS Nimitz.” He has also endorsed the long-ago discredited CIA
claim that “half” of all UFO sightings in the US during the 1950s were due to
flights of the still-secret U-2 spy plane.
After noting several of those off-base and generally dismissive
claims by Graff
during several interviews, I decided that I wouldn’t waste my time reading his
500-page book, UFO: The inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien
Life Here—and Out There.
However, one person who did read the book
reviewed
it at Amazon, saying,
… There is no “inside story” to be found anywhere in the book. Instead, we
find many of the familiar stories that include Roswell, Foo Fighters, projects
Sign, Grudge, Blue Book, Capt. Mantel, the fraud George Adamski and his blond
friend “Orthon” from Venus, the Robertson Panel, the Socorro Incident, swamp
gas, ball lightning, the Condon Report, Tehran F-4s, MJ-12, crop circles,
cattle mutilations, Phoenix Lights, Skinwalker Ranch, Tic Tac UFO, etc., etc.,
etc.[…]
… And yet, many more relevant or intriguing UFO tales are completely
missing. Where are Dr. Robert Sarbacher, Admiral Wilson’s near-sacking,
Wilbert Smith’s famous quote, Gulf Breeze, Bentwaters, the Trent photos, the
Zimbabwe school children, UFO and nuclear ICBM interactions, Illinois police
triangles, and many more? Not there!
So, in his 518-page book claiming to be
“the inside story” of the US government’s response to UFOs, Garrett Graff
apparently fails to even mention UFO activity at nuclear missile sites, let
alone discuss it at length—and yet this was the guy chosen by Duchovny’s
producers to hold forth on the tremendously important incident at Malmstrom’s
Oscar Flight in March 1967.
As for Duchovny himself, despite his UFO-sleuth role on The X Files,
the actor is a well-known skeptic on The Phenomenon. Indeed, during the 1990s,
when the show was a runaway hit, Duchovny gave several interviews in which he
disappointed fans by pooh-poohing UFOs and the notion of a government cover-up
of them. “It’s just a show!” he repeatedly exclaimed. I have tried to
find examples of those interviews—which I clearly remember—to link to here,
but have so far been unsuccessful. (And, candidly, I’m not going to waste any
more time trying to locate them online.)
In any case, the producers of Duchovny’s new show need to do much better
research for their UAP-related segments in the future, and begin utilizing
better informed, less biased talking-heads.
Source: www.theufochronicles.com