Cold War UFO sightings

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montypython
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Cold War UFO sightings

Post by montypython »

Although years of reading the rantings of UFO conspiracies leaves a bit of wondering about the level of intelligence of certain people, this article seemed strangely curious:

Former Air Force Officers: UFOs Tampered With Nuclear Missiles
(Sept. 25) -- Former U.S. Air Force officers and a former enlisted man are about to break many years of silence about an alarming series of UFO encounters at nuclear weapons sites -- incidents officially kept secret for decades.

When the group appears at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Monday, it will offer testimony about events so chilling, it will seem like a day at a science fiction movie festival.

To put you in the mood for the stories that will soon unfold, we're presenting one here, involving former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, one of the hosts of the Washington event.

Salas, co-author of "Faded Giant" (BookSurge Publishing), was a first lieutenant in 1967, serving as a missile-launch officer while stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

On March 16, 1967, Salas was 60 feet below ground working a 24-hour shift monitoring a launch-control center outfitted with 10 nuclear Minuteman missiles.

"I got a call from the topside guard, telling me they were watching some strange lights flying around in the sky, making odd maneuvers. They didn't think they were airplanes because they were going very fast, turning on a dime and not making a bit of noise," Salas told AOL News.

"A few minutes later, he called back, this time screaming into the phone, scared to death, and he said, 'Sir, I'm looking out my front window and there is a glowing red oval-shaped object hovering right above the front gate, and I've got all the guards out here with their weapons drawn.' "

The guard told Salas the UFO was approximately 30 to 40 feet in diameter with a very bright, pulsating light.

When the guard asked what they should do next, Salas' immediate response was that they had to do whatever was necessary to protect the nuclear missile area, "so basically, I was giving them permission to use whatever force they needed to use to keep anything out."

As Salas started to inform his duty partner and commander about what was going on 60 feet above them, something chilling happened.

"All of a sudden, we started getting bells and whistles going off. As we looked at the display board in front of us, sure enough, the missiles began going into an unlaunchable, or no-go, mode. They couldn't be launched -- it went from green to red.

"We also had a couple of security violations, meaning there were lights indicating some kind of intrusion at the missile sites, where the missiles were actually located, about a mile or two away from the launch control facility."

Salas said they immediately performed a system checklist to see what was wrong and to determine how it was possible that 10 nuclear missiles could suddenly be deactivated.

"We were getting mostly guidance and control systems failure, and when I called the guard again, he told me the UFO just left and took off at high speed. So I ordered the guards to go out to the missile sites, and while they were out there, they saw the object again at one of the launch facilities.

"It scared them to death again, and they actually lost radio contact while they were near the object and then they returned to the base. I later learned they never returned to security guard duty."

Salas said it was extraordinary that they lost so many missiles at the same time. Isolated mishaps had made a single missile go "unlaunchable," but never 10 at once. And never 10 at once during a UFO sighting.

As a result of the incident, the missiles had to be fixed to get them all back into launch mode.

Interesting aftermath to the story: Salas returned to the base and was ordered to report to his squadron commander where he also met with a member of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, or AFOSI. Salas first asked if what they had just been through was some sort of Air Force exercise, and says he was told "absolutely not."

"After we told them our recollection of the incident, the AFOSI captain wanted us to sign papers, saying we'd never talk about this and swear we wouldn't even talk to our wives or any of the other airmen on the base -- nobody.

"I felt a little weird about this because all of us who were launch officers had above top-secret clearance, and I asked, 'If this is classified, what's it classified as?' And he said, 'Secret,' and I said, 'Well, we've got above top secret -- why do we have to sign anymore papers?' "

But further information was denied Salas and his men.

And what does he think would've happened to him had he gone to the press with the story?

"If I went public with this while still in the service, I would've been in Leavenworth [maximum security federal prison], breaking stones into little pebbles."

In 1969, the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, its official program that investigated UFOs. And in 1985, the following information was included in a fact sheet distributed by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and this remains the official attitude about UFOs:

(1) No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; (2) There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and (3) There has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.

That being said, Salas and his colleagues maintain that if enough military eyewitnesses come forward, it can be proved that there's more to UFOs than officials have led the public to believe.

After the extraordinary events at Malmstrom Air Force base where it appears a UFO may have been responsible for shutting down 10 nuclear missiles, Salas wonders if the military has any legal authority to command its subordinates not to talk about something this significant -- something that he maintains represents a technology not known today.

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The UFO "had to somehow send a signal to penetrate 60 feet of earth and concrete and also to penetrate the cable system, which is triply shielded cables, and inject some kind of a signal into the system. That's fantastic."

So, why, after so many years of keeping quiet, are former military personnel coming forward to talk about their experiences, as Salas and his Air Force colleagues are doing on Monday? He says the people who will talk in Washington are "just the tip of the iceberg."

"I believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and I think, in this instance, these objects were not constructed on planet Earth."
Having heard similar stories in the past, is there any way to verify the veracity of such stories wrt hardware malfunctions? (this was one of the nuclear arms questions I had wondered about as a kid)
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by PainRack »

Shouldn't it be possible to FOIA some of these incidents now?

Who can forget the UFO causes USAF airplane crash in UK during the nineties, only for BUFORA to use the Freedom of Information Act a decade later to uncover that the UFO was the aircraft actively dumping fuel that got ignited in the sky...... over a school.(said witnesses to UFO)
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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PainRack wrote:Who can forget the UFO causes USAF airplane crash in UK during the nineties, only for BUFORA to use the Freedom of Information Act a decade later to uncover that the UFO was the aircraft actively dumping fuel that got ignited in the sky...... over a school.(said witnesses to UFO)
Shouldn't it be possible to FOIA some of these incidents now?

Who can forget the UFO causes USAF airplane crash in UK during the nineties, only for BUFORA to use the Freedom of Information Act a decade later to uncover that the UFO was the aircraft actively dumping fuel that got ignited in the sky...... over a school.(said witnesses to UFO)
Holy shit, that's really responsible.
The fuckers might as well be from outer space :evil:
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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I can't seem to find any online description of this atm, but going from memory, the plane was a USAF F-111 serving in the UK.

During the said crash, a pair of said planes were flying at low altitude and one suffered engine problems. To get back to base, said plane decided to glide it out and then ejected. He was flying near houses and had to dump jet fuel so as to make his plane lighter...

While said burning jet fuel is shocking, one shouldn't ignore the bravery of the pilot who hung on in his cockpit longer than prudent so that he could fly the plane away from said school and other buildings.

And I think I made a "small" mistake. The FOIA act was used in the late nineties, the crash actually occured a decade earlier in the eighties.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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I'm waiting for the incredible revelations and their substantial, verifiable evidence with my breath held.

I'm sure this revelation will dwarf the truth about the Apollo landings and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There can be no doubt that this will be the most important press conference of the century.
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JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
- NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11

Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.

MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by Kamakazie Sith »

Cykeisme wrote:
PainRack wrote:Who can forget the UFO causes USAF airplane crash in UK during the nineties, only for BUFORA to use the Freedom of Information Act a decade later to uncover that the UFO was the aircraft actively dumping fuel that got ignited in the sky...... over a school.(said witnesses to UFO)
Shouldn't it be possible to FOIA some of these incidents now?

Who can forget the UFO causes USAF airplane crash in UK during the nineties, only for BUFORA to use the Freedom of Information Act a decade later to uncover that the UFO was the aircraft actively dumping fuel that got ignited in the sky...... over a school.(said witnesses to UFO)
Holy shit, that's really responsible.
The fuckers might as well be from outer space :evil:
I'm pretty sure dumping your fuel is standard procedure if you're crashing that way if you should crash into a residential neighborhood the only damage is what your plane hits and not from the resulting explosion and fire due to split jet fuel.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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PeZook wrote:I'm waiting for the incredible revelations and their substantial, verifiable evidence with my breath held.
Me too. I've had enough of insane gibberish, and while the story looks cool I demand some little more proof of it. Something more than simple eyewitnesses.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by TithonusSyndrome »

On another note, it's amusing to contemplate how precisely an alien visitor would locate nuclear weapons if they're trying to do a Gary Seven thing. It's not like a heap of plutonium in a W-62 or whatever is going to be putting out many detectable gammas from 60 feet underground - did they just perform some very exhaustive hi-res orbital recon, cross-reference the images against images of their own missile bases from their nuclear warfare period, and conclude that Malmstrom had missiles?
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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TithonusSyndrome wrote:On another note, it's amusing to contemplate how precisely an alien visitor would locate nuclear weapons if they're trying to do a Gary Seven thing. It's not like a heap of plutonium in a W-62 or whatever is going to be putting out many detectable gammas from 60 feet underground - did they just perform some very exhaustive hi-res orbital recon, cross-reference the images against images of their own missile bases from their nuclear warfare period, and conclude that Malmstrom had missiles?
Missile silos are really obvious from space. It’s a repeating pattern of concrete and steel structures each with a security fence and each with an obvious large moving door. They are also located in proximity to large support bases with lots of missile support buildings, transporters and rail loading. If someone arrived in earth orbit and decided to look for key military facilities they'd be sure to notice ICBM fields. All the more so since in the 1960s we are still building the things, so the aliens can directly see what is going on.

The missile warhead radiation emissions are certainly detectable, at least at a distance of kilometers. So an alien stealth UAV launched from the mothership could do it at the least. Logical craft for them to carry, and it would explain many of those OTHER UFO sightings!!!! The reason this is possible is because depth of the missile warheads, which can be considerable, is not as relevant as the thickness of the silo lid. In the case of a Minuteman silo it’s roughly 7 inches of steel, reportedly two 3.5in thick armor plates, and several feet of reinforced concrete. You can see this minimal (compared to silo depth!) thickness in plenty of videos.

That will block a lot of radiation but not enough to shield it from all modern remote sensing, let alone what aliens might have. The US went to a great deal of trouble trying to design fool proof radiation and emissions shielding for missile transporters as part of the MX basing programs and never really felt it succeeded. This left MX without ever having had a real basing strategy.

Also according to some Air Force Histories online, it'd take me a minute to find them if you'd like the links, the the early Minuteman silos didn’t have scramblers on the communications lines, leaving them highly vulnerable to someone directly tapping into the wire, and the whole Minuteman weapons system had incomplete and faulty EMP shielding. So external interference to some degree is certainly plausible from a technical standpoint.

Now of course, I don’t believe aliens did any such thing’s, but I would believe that more or less events like this occurred as part of a secret USAF program to test to reactions of guard crews. Back then unmanned silo ICBMs were still a new thing and presented some huge new security hazards that had to be explored. I really wouldn’t put full scale ‘fuck with the crew’ trials like this past SAC. But that’s not to say I have any evidence or specific reason to believe anything. Still it doesn't seem unlikey that after the external tap threat was realized the air force decided at least once to send out a couple men by cover of night to dig a hole down to the cable, with some balloon decoy burns or some other crap distraction like that, and then the cable team hacks the missile controls and orders a shutdown. Ordering a shutdown is a nice 'safe' way of running the exercise, since fucking with the system any other way might risk an accidental launch of the entire silo farm.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by TithonusSyndrome »

Sea Skimmer wrote:The missile warhead radiation emissions are certainly detectable, at least at a distance of kilometers. So an alien stealth UAV launched from the mothership could do it at the least. Logical craft for them to carry, and it would explain many of those OTHER UFO sightings!!!! The reason this is possible is because depth of the missile warheads, which can be considerable, is not as relevant as the thickness of the silo lid. In the case of a Minuteman silo it’s roughly 7 inches of steel, reportedly two 3.5in thick armor plates, and several feet of reinforced concrete. You can see this minimal (compared to silo depth!) thickness in plenty of videos.
Oh fuck me, for some reason I brainfarted and read "60 feet underground" as "under 60 feet of earth/concrete/etc". I get what I deserve there.
Also according to some Air Force Histories online, it'd take me a minute to find them if you'd like the links, the the early Minuteman silos didn’t have scramblers on the communications lines, leaving them highly vulnerable to someone directly tapping into the wire, and the whole Minuteman weapons system had incomplete and faulty EMP shielding. So external interference to some degree is certainly plausible from a technical standpoint.
If they're inclined to land and fiddle with the wire, I guess. Seems like a lot of risk and effort for lofty alien types, but I guess it's a possibility in this scenario.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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Unless they're galactic-level pranksters, it makes absolutely no sense to fly around disabling missiles and then do fuck all while the USAF repairs them back to full working condition.
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JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
- NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11

Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.

MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by Sea Skimmer »

TithonusSyndrome wrote:
If they're inclined to land and fiddle with the wire, I guess. Seems like a lot of risk and effort for lofty alien types, but I guess it's a possibility in this scenario.
The aliens might do it because they want to test our human reactions when confronted with an unclear threat to the most sensitive of military sites, a strategic weapons base. All the other UFO stuff is other aliens doing other tests to build up a picture of human reactions and emotions in common situations like being confronted with mutilated cattle. The aliens would insist on hands on research because they know human TV and radio broadcasts are a bunch of unrealistic bullcrap in general and studying them alone won't work.

See its easy to make plausible answers up if you just shoot yourself in the head and accept that advanced extraterrestrial alien UFOs are real.

Anyway as for technical plausibility, Minuteman cables are buried at 4-6 feet, so given good enough technology which we more or less have today, like ground penetrating radar which can sense the cable, the aliens would only need to force down a metal rod carrying a hack wire. It wouldn’t be that hard to shove a metal rod down 6 feet and depending on soil conditions it shouldn’t be that hard to do accurately.

Hacking in like this would also leave little evidence and be easily removed afterwards. If the aliens observed a silo under construction, they would clearly see the wiring trenches. A large portion of the entire cost of the Minuteman silo system was putting in all that shielded cabling. A SAC sabotage test team would already know the locations of course.

I’m sure we can dream up a small alien UAV landed ground robot that could shove a hack rod down and then escape. In fact it may not only have escaped but buried itself in the ground with a little mechanized shovel and is currently awaiting the alien invasion to spring out and attack! I love making this shit up… it’s so obvious why so many UFO rumors circulate.

Minuteman cables BTW are that shallow because basically, if you want a deeper trench you’d going to have to start bracing the sides so it doesn’t cave in and kill the workers, and that’d vastly increase the cost of building and maintaining the system.
PeZook wrote:Unless they're galactic-level pranksters, it makes absolutely no sense to fly around disabling missiles and then do fuck all while the USAF repairs them back to full working condition.


How do you know the alien invasion of 1968 wasn’t canceled at the last minute due to budget cuts to fund SPACE AIDS research in a bill that contained riders approving funding for new resort houses for the alien elites around Alfa Centauri? This could have been a prematurely launched operation as well caused by a typing error on the orders, or a computer bug that caused accidental deployment of the Mark X remote alien special operations mission ground vehicle.

Anyway all and all, fucking with a ICBM system makes way more sense then cow mutilation or anal probing or the prolific random UFO sitings in general.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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I'm not sure if burying a drone near the cables would work ; I'd imagine they are routinely inspected with georadar and such. It just seems like a sensible thing to do, since they're such an obvious vulnerability.

They could've buried an entire swarm, though, just waiting to unleash a terrible bioweapon on us.
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JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
- NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11

Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.

MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by Sea Skimmer »

PeZook wrote:I'm not sure if burying a drone near the cables would work ; I'd imagine they are routinely inspected with georadar and such. It just seems like a sensible thing to do, since they're such an obvious vulnerability.

They could've buried an entire swarm, though, just waiting to unleash a terrible bioweapon on us.
I don't think they had any kind of portable radar that would be suitable for high resolution surveys like that in 1967. The main defense was just ground and air patrols, and line scramblers and PAL codes were eventually backfitted to everything. But the early Minuteman system was pretty bare bones in terms of security and well technology in general. For example you could only fire all 50 missiles together as a group originally. It took an upgrade to let you single fire missiles. This was all because the USAF wanted the silos to be as cheap as they could be in hopes it would be allowed to deploy 10,000 Minuteman.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

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Sea Skimmer wrote: I don't think they had any kind of portable radar that would be suitable for high resolution surveys like that in 1967.
In 1967 no, but since the aliens did fuck all since then, we now have georadars used by everyone from police to geodesic survey teams.
Sea Skimmer wrote:The main defense was just ground and air patrols, and line scramblers and PAL codes were eventually backfitted to everything. But the early Minuteman system was pretty bare bones in terms of security and well technology in general. For example you could only fire all 50 missiles together as a group originally. It took an upgrade to let you single fire missiles. This was all because the USAF wanted the silos to be as cheap as they could be in hopes it would be allowed to deploy 10,000 Minuteman.
Now that's a grand plan...it totals, what, 200 silo farms or so?
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JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
- NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11

Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.

MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by Sea Skimmer »

PeZook wrote: In 1967 no, but since the aliens did fuck all since then, we now have georadars used by everyone from police to geodesic survey teams.
Well they've also just changed nearly everything in terms of silo command and control hardware and operating methods several times over. But part of those changes involved adding more radio command systems, so we've still got that risk of alien remote hacking. 'Network Invasion' is a big buzzword these days for a reason. A lot of modifications to the Minuteman system started being made as soon as the first silos were finished.
Now that's a grand plan...it totals, what, 200 silo farms or so?
Each Minuteman Wing has three 50 missile squadrons today, though in the 1960s some had four squadrons. So about 200 farms; though the squadron deployment areas are grouped together in an arc around a common support base so it wouldn’t actually be 200 separate deployment areas. More like one giant mass. Also the early Minuteman plans did call for some missiles to be based five apiece on trains, but that idea died out because it would have delayed deployment. Mobile systems needed more advanced command systems then silos which would have taken longer to design and test.
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by PainRack »

Another problem would be conflabulation of incident, wouldn't it? Incidents keep blowing up as people mix up details, add to it or just forget contradictary information
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Re: Cold War UFO sightings

Post by PeZook »

Yeah, after forty years, people's memories tend to mutate into something utterly unlike the actual event: two guys who witnessed the same thing can remember utterly contradictory circumstances, etc.

Remembering exact dialogue from forty years ago is virtually guaranteed to be a false memory. Of course, it was a fairly unusual and exciting event, and these tend to be remembered more vividly.

But, of course, it should be trivial to produce maintenance logs or work orders or other documentation for repairs done to an entire silo farm to corroborate the story...they should be declassified by now, right? If they even were classified in the first place, I wouldn't know.
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JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
- NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11

Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.

MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
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