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Oct. 11, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:54
Edition 177 - Robert Salas

Did Aliens disable some of America's nuclear missiles? Ex USAF man Robert Salas tells a verycompelling story...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
One of my listeners recently asked me, why do you always say my name is Howard Hughes rather than my name is Howard Hughes?
And the simple reason for that is that many of my American listeners, and I know it's a bizarre name that I have, simply don't believe that my name really is Howard Hughes.
Well, I was christened Howard Hughes.
I have said that before.
And I'm kind of proud of the name, too.
Howard Hughes, the millionaire, I think he was actually an eccentric billionaire, was a man of many, many talents.
He was a great golfer and filmmaker and many other things, apart from being enormously accomplished in business.
So even though he was eccentric, especially in his later years and died in secrecy as a recluse, the man was pretty special.
Read about him.
I've spent a lot of my life reading about this man whose name I share.
So yes, I am Howard Hughes.
I hope life is finding you well.
It's pretty much autumn now here in the northern hemisphere, and spring is dawning in the southern hemisphere, so the world is continuing to turn.
But of course, these are tense times with the action in Iraq against the group calling itself ISIL, ISIS, whatever it happens to be calling itself this week, and the West's efforts to defeat them.
There are many conspiracy theories about this, and at the moment, I'm not going to get into any of that stuff because nothing is clear yet.
But we'll watch this situation.
Thank you very much for your recent emails.
Had lots of them coming in.
Please keep them coming.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv.
That's the website.
And there's a link there that you can follow and then send me an email with maybe a guest suggestion or some thoughts about the show.
Plenty of thoughts about David Paul Lidis and his update on missing 4-11.
Very, very fascinating stuff.
Most of you thought.
And most of you very, very impressed with David Paul Leidis.
One of two of you pointing out what you say are inaccuracies in the book and in the discussion.
I had an email from a couple of people in Australia about the Gary Twedle case.
I'm going to talk with Dave Paulitis a little more about that.
But one from a barrister in Australia talking about some details of the coronial inquest out there.
So I need to talk with David Paulitis about that and get some thoughts back from him when I can.
Very busy times for me at work, one way or another, and it's like doing a show like this.
The part that I love is this part.
The sitting down and speaking with you.
The recording.
That's the easy bit.
And I really enjoy doing the interviews.
Of course I do.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this.
The difficult part is the logistics of it, the booking of guests, the coordinating of times and time zones and all the rest of it.
So if ever I dreamed of having a bit of backup for this, I guess it's around those times when I'm trying to set up guests.
So what I might do at some point in the future is maybe miss a show, although I try and do approximately one show per week.
We've gone up from three shows a month to four shows during this last year or so.
I might take a bit of time out just to go through all of the guest requests and follow them up and make sure that we have a good stream of guests.
I know we've had a lot of shows about UFOs and space over this year, and we're about to do another.
But I do promise to get other topics on here as well.
But the guest that I'm going to talk with now is somebody I really couldn't miss at this time.
His name is Robert Salas.
More about him coming soon.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot at Liverpool for his hard work on the website.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
Martin, you told me a long time ago you were thinking about doing an update of the theme tune.
Well, I'd be grateful to hear an update if you have one.
That would be great.
But most importantly, I hope everything's all right with you.
If you would like to make a donation to this show, thank you very much if you have recently.
It's all gratefully received and it's all gristed to this particular mill.
Remember, we are independent media and that in this day and age is a very special thing, my belief.
And that's what you're telling me, that the future of communication is in shows like this.
Because, well, because of a couple of things, actually.
Because of the way that you consume content.
This has surprised me.
I've always felt a bit second class because I can't at the moment do these shows live.
But you're telling me, no, that's not the case.
We want material that we can take with us and digest at our leisure, like a book or a newspaper.
So we're in control.
If we want to go back over something that's been said, we can do it.
If we want to listen to half now and half next week, we can do that.
If we want to go back over your back catalog, we can do that too.
So that, for me, has been a wake-up call.
But also, I think there's the feeling in me and many other people who get in touch with me that the mainstream media simply is not keeping you up to speed as it should be and tends to be singing mostly from the same hymn sheet.
That is where we come in in the independent media because we talk about stuff that they don't, won't, or can't.
And that is why I think we're important.
Now, the man we're going to talk with on this edition of The Unexplained is, like I say, Robert Salas.
He was a man who was in the U.S. Air Force.
He was at the U.S. Air Force Academy and worked at missile facilities.
Now, over the years, we've had various ufological guests on here, if that's the right term, and they've talked about occasions where UFOs have been over official missile silos and somehow interrupted their operation.
Well, Robert Salas claims that he was part of all of this and has some evidence in his new book.
He's done a lot of writing about this and actually has a very interesting take on all of this.
So we'll get to him very soon.
Just to say thank you very much for your involvement with The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for supporting me through all of the difficult times.
You know, we may never meet each other, but you've been tremendously kind to me.
And by the way, although I'm not doing shout-outs this time, Vic, you sent me a very long email about monetary developments for this show or monetizing this show in some way, getting some extra funds to do it.
I found your email tremendously interesting and great food for thought.
So even though I'm not doing shout-outs, I'd like to thank you, Vic.
Okay, let's get to Robert Salas now in the U.S. And we're going to talk about UFOs and military missiles and the interaction of the two and the secrecy around the whole phenomenon.
Robert Salas, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Thank you, Howard.
I really appreciate the opportunity.
And Robert, I've got to admit to something in front of my listeners here who've known me through close on 200 shows that I've done online and a lot of broadcasting work.
I'm not one for making mistakes about the arrangements for interviews, but I messed up the time zones, Robert, and we should have been recording this an hour ago.
And I'd just like to apologize to you now on record here.
Apology accepted, Howard.
No problem.
It's been one of those weeks.
But good to have you on now.
I want to talk first of all, if I may, about you.
I know that you live currently in California, but your background from your latest book, The Biography that I've got, and the forward and various other bits of detail about you, you are straight military, USAF, yeah, through and through.
Well, I was.
I went to the Air Force Academy, spent four years there, of course, like you're Cranwell, and then seven years active duty.
And I considered myself a career officer up until the Vietnam War got a little bit too much to accept for me.
So I resigned in 1971.
I read that.
You were on course for a pretty good career.
I mean, you did have an experience that we will talk about, and that involved UFOs, ETs, whatever you want to call them.
But the thing that made you rethink it wasn't the secrecy surrounding that or anything like that, because I think you regarded that as part of the military life.
The thing that made you rethink your military career was people coming back from Vietnam.
Certainly, as I've been reading your book, the detail tells me that and telling you this is a worthless war.
Well, yeah, that was the beginning of it.
That was in 1965.
I was getting feedback about Vietnam.
And then, of course, as the war dragged on and it looked like we weren't making the right kind of moves to win that war, that I got pretty discouraged with the military at that point.
Right.
But before that, you went to the USAF Academy.
Now, you said it was like crying well here in the UK for people in other countries other than the UK or US.
This is the creme de la creme, isn't it?
Well, we thought so.
We had to compete to enter, and it was very competitive even to graduate just to keep up with the rigorous military training and the academics.
Presumably, as a young man doing this, you wouldn't have entered into a career like that without having a strong commitment to the United States and its goals and its aims and its international policy and a belief in the military's place in all of that.
Presumably, you were very much a man who towed the line, who adhered to the accepted norms of the day.
All right.
Yeah, I considered myself a career officer while I was in the Air Force.
I, you know, tried to do everything I could to promote my career and, yeah, do as best I could in the duties that were assigned.
And did you have any interest in space, apart from the kind of things that we all read as books, you know, the annuals and books that we read about space travel and time travel and all the rest of it, which just seemed fantastic to us as young people.
Any other interest beyond that at that time?
Well, before and after I entered the military, I was interested in engineering or getting an engineering degree.
And yeah, in the aerospace program.
One of the options and one of the attractions to getting into the missile program was I could get my master's degree in engineering.
So that's one of the reasons I volunteered for that program.
But finally getting a placement at a base and having an important position at an air base where there were missiles, that was very much down to happenstance and chance, wasn't it?
Because you could have gone and you'd been aiming to go and do your service in Vietnam.
You decided that wasn't a good thing.
So you'd got an offer to go and be at this missile base.
And that is how you got involved with what happened there.
Yep.
Right.
Well, I did volunteer for Vietnam.
I felt it was my duty, of course.
And it just so happened when I volunteered, they didn't have an assignment for me.
And in the meantime, they asked me if I wanted to go into the missile program and get my master's degree.
And I agreed.
And then within a week after that acceptance, they said they also had a job for me in Vietnam.
But of course, by that time, I had gotten a lot of feedback from my classmates that things weren't going well at all.
And they didn't think the war was really worth fighting, some of them.
So I decided to go into the missiles at that point.
And tell me about the deployment that you got then.
Tell me about the role that you were given.
Yes, I was assigned and trained as a missile launch officer, which meant we would be working with nuclear weapons and nuclear missiles.
And so I went through about a year's training program and then finally was assigned to Melstrom Air Force Base, Montana, in the Minuteman 1 missile program.
So I started out as a deputy missile crew commander.
There were a crew of two and then we'll work my way up to a full commander.
I was there for about three years.
In the first year, I was assigned with Fred Meiwald, who later became a full colonel in the Air Force.
And we were assigned as a two-man crew at Oscar Flight, which was about 100 miles east of Great Falls, Montana, a Little town called Roy, Montana.
It was a facility that looked like a farmhouse in the middle of a wheat field, but it was a military facility where underground we had an underground capsule, hardened capsule, in control of 10 nuclear missiles, which were located in a ring about a mile or two away from the launch control center.
So you were underground in a bunker, and you described that in the book.
In fact, when events unfolded there and when something strange and odd appeared, that's why you had to come out of the bunker and go above ground to see all of this.
That explains that for me.
Ten of these Minuteman missiles, now I think the UK had them as well.
This was the greatest destructive force on Earth at the time, wasn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
We had warheads that had the power of 800 kilotons, each warhead.
Just to put that in perspective, the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 15 to 20 kilotons.
So this is enough to take out close on, what, five, half a dozen cities?
Well, it would take out a very large city, like Los Angeles or London.
But I just want to correct you a little bit.
We were not allowed to leave the capsule underground.
So I had no option but to stay in the capsule locked in.
I could not go up topside to observe this object.
So I didn't see the object myself.
Okay.
Now thank you for clarifying that, because I thought from reading the book, you were able to get yourself to some kind of observation point, and you couldn't.
So you were relying on third-party reports.
Yes.
On visuals, anyway.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, I never saw the object, neither me or my commander, but certainly the object was up there.
It was reported by not only the topside guard, but the other guards that we sent out later on because we had security violation indications.
We had a panel that showed the status of the actual location of the missiles themselves was, like I said, about a mile away.
And we had sensors that would tell us if there was an attempt to go into those areas.
So we had those indications.
We sent crews out there also, and they saw the UFOs again.
Okay, I want to unpick this part by part because this story is the core of everything that you've written in this book.
It's literally the launch pad for it.
But I want to talk about you and your position at that time.
People randomly are not given positions of responsibility.
You were a launch operative there, so that's a very important job.
What kind of scrutiny, what kind of vetting did you have to go through to get that job?
Well, I can't tell.
I don't know what kind of vetting they put me through, except that I know we were vetted and we were selected individually to participate in this program.
I guess based on our background and our whatever rationale they used.
But they did vet us.
And of course, we had a rigorous training program to go through before we finally got the authority to be in control of missiles.
At that time, I must say, at that time, we had the ability to launch those missiles.
Just the two of us, the two crew members underground, could have launched the 10 nuclear missiles.
So I guess it was quite a responsibility.
Well, my God, it certainly sounds like it.
If you had the destructive power there to take out, what, 10 missiles equals 10 cities, I presume?
And that's for two of you, is the idea that the other person is a backstop and a check on you?
Yes, we were on each other, of course.
So, yeah, one of us couldn't have launched the missiles separately.
We had to do it in concert.
Actually, we turned keys together.
And in those days, what would the sequence be?
Presumably, you had a bat phone, a hot phone, a big red phone in there that would go, and they would give you some kind of code that had been predetermined.
And at that point, you go through the key sequence.
Yeah, well, I can't talk about that.
I won't talk about what kind of code or system, but we did have a security system that we had to follow, very strict procedures.
But, you know, physically, I just wanted to emphasize that physically we could have turned keys together and launched missiles with or without that code.
Right.
Assuming you got the order one day, because this was the Cold War when you were there, and there was enormous tension between us and, for one, the Russians, also the Chinese, but the Russians were the big problem, you wouldn't have had any problems on receipt of the order actually doing that, knowing that it would kill people.
Well, again, we were professionals.
We were trained to do this.
And so, yes, I'm convinced if I'd been given the order, we would have launched missiles.
So this was at a time when, like you said, we were in the middle of the Cold War.
We were in the middle of the Vietnam War.
It hadn't been that long since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
And so there was some international tension there.
I think a lot of the younger listeners, and that's a lot of people now who listen to my show around the world, maybe in countries not in Europe and not around the United States, but maybe further afield, maybe they won't appreciate exactly what that was like then.
Now, I was a little boy at that time, and I know exactly from watching television reports and just reading and listening to what my father was saying to me.
This was an incredibly tense time.
This was a time when the United States had 24 hours of planes In the sky, monitoring for missile attacks against us, the Chrome Dome.
So, this was a time where everybody had that finger just a couple of centimeters away from the trigger, yeah?
Yes, that's correct.
That's correct.
We had airborne, you know, like you say, we had B-52s airborne ready to go on target.
I don't know if any of your listeners have ever seen the movie Fail Safe or Doctor Strangelove, but it's very, very accurate on what the situation was.
So there you are, a young man with an incredibly responsible job.
You know what you'd have to do, and you were prepared to do it should that eventuality arise.
Everything changed for you, though, on one nice right slap bang in the middle of the 1960s, the era of flower power, psychedelia, and the Cold War, because you got notification, as you started to tell me before, of an intruder.
Talk me through it.
Okay, first, well, I was on alert status.
My commander was taking a rest break.
We were down there for 24 hours, and one of us had to be fairly alert.
So first thing I get a call sometime in the evening or early morning, it was dark out there, so I can't tell which.
But first call was reporting of strange lights in the sky.
The guard says that they've been seeing very fast lights flying, stopping on a dime, reversing course, turning 90 degree angles.
Very unusual.
They weren't aircraft.
They didn't make a sound.
And so they wanted to report this.
I didn't know what to think of this report, although, you know, all the reports I usually got from those guards were very professional.
It wasn't a matter of joking around.
And so I kind of dismissed it, hung up.
And then about a minute or five later, he calls back.
This time he's screaming into the phone.
You can tell he's very frightened by his voice.
And like you said, these are very, very responsible, very cool, very mature guys.
And people like that don't scream.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, I never had anything like that before.
This guy was completely frightened.
He said he had all the guards out with their weapons drawn and looking out to the front gate, seeing this glowing red object hovering above the front gate of the facility.
He wanted me to tell him what to do next.
Oh, boy.
Well, since it was not something in his experience and not something in your experience, what on earth could you have said?
Exactly.
I was flabbergasted at first.
It seemed like we were under some sort of attack on the facility.
So I told him, make sure nothing enters the front gate.
Use whatever force you have to keep anybody out.
So he hung up at that point.
I turned to go to tell my commander about these phone calls.
And as I was waking him, we got a lot of bells and whistles going off, claxons and lights on the panel.
Missiles went no-go, which means they were disabled.
All of them.
All of them.
All ten.
And we could tell by the lights on the board.
It turned from red to green.
And so we went through our procedures to check each missile.
We had what's called a voice activated system that would tell us in general what was going on with the missiles.
And we're getting readings of guidance and control system failure on each of them, the same reading.
Now, these missiles are, while we could connect them and launch them in Salvo, they were not connected electronically as far as their status goes.
In other words, if one missile went down, it didn't affect any other missile.
So this was a kind of multiple redundancy.
They weren't connected.
They weren't dependent on the same system.
So if you couldn't launch missile one, you'd definitely be able to launch missile two.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We could select them individually.
But the point is, whatever this object was, it would have, and I'm convinced that the object was responsible for the missile shutdown, it would have to have sent a separate signal to each of the 10 missiles.
And by that, I mean it would have to penetrate 60 feet of earthen concrete and then penetrate the triply shielded cabling system that we had.
Was there any evidence that those things have been in any way tampered with?
No, I mean, there was a thorough investigation done later, and the investigative team could not find any tampering of any sort.
But the point I wanted to make is each one of the missiles failed for the same reason, which was guidance and control system failure.
And it was what's called the logic coupler, which couples the guidance system, the computerized guidance system with the command and control system.
So it was a mechanical, basically a signal that caused a mechanical upset of the navigation system.
So this was starting to look like something electromagnetic, but of course, crucial systems like this have all kinds of protections built in.
Yes.
Like I said, the shielding on the cabling was triply redundant.
And nobody could explain, even after a thorough investigation by the Air Force, nobody could explain how this could have happened.
In fact, one of the documents we got from the Air Force stated that it was highly improbable for this to happen.
Were you at any point in the middle of all of this panic?
And by the sounds of it, it was near panic, scared.
I can't say I was frightened, although I was concerned about the crew upstairs because for a while there, for some minutes there, I thought we were under attack.
I thought somebody was trying to enter our facility and possibly try to take over our facility and have the access to the missiles.
Well, we had a famous case over here that you will know about Rendlesham Forest in 1980, which was a U.S. military base.
There were personnel outside then, and all right, it was different because it didn't disable nuclear missiles, but there were some pretty serious military facilities there.
And from what I hear, and I've heard some recordings from that night of radio traffic, the people outside, dealing with whatever it was, were incredibly scared, and they sounded it.
Yes.
I mean, this is something that, you know, you can't explain.
You know, nothing in our history or our experience can explain what these objects seemingly are able to do.
Those people outside, you couldn't see it.
They were telling you about it.
What were their descriptions like?
What were they saying about the nature of this thing hovering?
Well, what happened was after we were relieved by another crew that morning, I immediately went upstairs and talked to the primary guard there and interrogated him very sternly or seriously about what had happened.
And all he could say was it was a very bright orange-red light, oval-shaped.
I asked him if there was some kind of a structure in the light, and he said, yeah, it seemed to be a structure again, but it was hard to see what it was other than it was elongated, oval-shaped, about 40 or 50 feet long, and just hovering there silently.
50 feet.
Something like that, yes.
Now, popular culture plays into some of our perceptions, and the reason I say this is that there had been reports in the media about the Betty and Barney Hill case, the abduction case on television, the great drama series.
I remember this one.
They kept repeating it for decades afterwards.
The Invaders, starring a man called Roy Thinnis.
That featured experiences a little bit like this.
So were any of you at that point, the point I'm coming to, were any of you at that point thinking E.T. Well, that was starting to enter our consciousness, yeah, that this was not planet Earth because, of course, we're talking about experienced Air Force personnel here.
I told you that I had spent four years in the Air Force Academy, and then this was a couple of years after.
I knew my aircraft.
I knew what kind of aircraft we had in the Air Force.
And what this thing was able to do was just beyond belief.
So, and the same thing with the airmen there.
None of them could believe it.
In fact, they begged me to come and spend some time with them and talk about this.
But we were ordered back to the base.
We were ordered to sign a non-disclosure statement, which we both did.
And that included never talking about this again to anybody.
We couldn't even talk to anybody within the Air Force about it.
So when they called the next day, begging me to come out and spend some time talking about this, I had to turn them down.
And yet they were reaching out to you, it sounds to me, because they were, by the sounds of it, traumatized by it, Robert.
They were very traumatized.
They were.
Like I said, they were literally begging me to come and talk to them.
It was very frightening, very frightening.
And I've heard this from other reports of other incidents, same kind of thing.
And what would make it more frightening if it was me involved in this, you tell me, is being asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement on pain of whatever sanctions they might impose upon you for breaking it.
That almost puts the icing on the cake.
That confirms to you that this is something really serious and something outside the normal.
Yes, it certainly did confirm that this was not any kind of an exercise.
In fact, I asked that question to my commander, who was an old World War II B-17 pilot.
And I said, was this an exercise?
He said, no, it was not any kind of an Air Force exercise.
So he would have been in the know on that.
And did anybody tell you, because you were quite a senior guy there, did anybody tell you on a need-to-know basis anything that would have confirmed what we believe this was?
In other words, did anybody say to you, look, Robert, don't say anything to anybody, but this was E.T.?
No.
No.
After I left that office, nobody said anything to me about it.
So you're in a situation where there is a quiet understanding of what it was amongst a group of people who somehow have to live their rest of their lives knowing that.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Wow.
I was there for another two years, and every time we went on an alert, went on duty, we were given a briefing as to what activities were going on in the field, whether it was inspections or new mods, modifications to the equipment.
And this subject was never brought Up in any of those.
These were classified briefings.
The subject was never brought up.
From what you understood or what you believed, would that have been the first time that anything like that had happened?
At the time, I thought so.
I thought it was a unique case.
But I'll tell you, after my commander reported our incident to the command post, he turned to me and said the same thing happened at another flight.
Now, at that time, I thought it was that evening, but as it turns out, it was about a week earlier.
And that was the second incident that occurred within eight days.
In other words, what we call the ECHO flight, which was some 30 miles to the northwest of Oscar flight.
Similar situation, only it happened on March 16th, 1967.
Two of the missile sites had guards and maintenance personnel overnight working, had been working on the missiles.
And on that morning, the missiles started shutting down again, 10 missiles.
This was another facility, another man.
And they lost all 10 while UFOs were overhead.
These people reported UFOs overhead while the missiles were shut down.
So in this case, they were talking multiple UFOs.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, a couple.
And yet the particular attack, surgical operation on the guidance systems of these missiles, very, very precise.
I'm wondering, were any other systems affected?
Any of your other electronic gear, your communication systems, radios, watches, telemetry, anything like that?
No, except the radio.
When we set the...
We always had electrical power.
This was simply an upset of the guidance system on each of the missiles separately.
The radio interference did occur when those guards went out to two of the launch facilities to check on them.
They were out there with their UHF radios and VHF and they had problems.
They had radio problems while they were observing these objects there.
Now, after this happened at the base that you were at, and also, if you know, at the other base a week or so before, were there any signs left behind that something out of the ordinary had been there?
Were there any scorch marks, fences perhaps distorted, any outward signs that something amiss had happened?
Well, of course, I wasn't privy to that.
But I think in this book, I do report, well, I know I've got reports of incidents where things like the launch cover was removed from the launch facility.
And that weighs 20 tons.
20 ton launch cover was removed.
What kind of force would you need to do that?
Exactly, exactly.
And of course, this launch cover is very, got to be very secure.
But that happened in 1968, and there's a good report on that.
It was part of a Blue Book investigation.
And we've got witness testimony and video and audio witness testimony that that was indeed reported.
And there are also other reports where the fencing around launch facilities was uplifted.
And of course, this fencing is set in concrete posts, and that was just ripped out.
And that stuff was put in to keep the Reds out, wasn't it?
I mean, that was serious defense.
Well, it was meant to keep people out.
And of course, like I said, we had sensors on all these so we could tell and send people out there if we needed to.
When you went through what you went through, Robert, you say in the book anyway, it changed your life.
How did it change your life?
How did you feel?
Well, a couple of things.
First, I started thinking more about the possibility of alien visitation or, you know, because this, like I said, I couldn't get out of my mind that these things were not from this planet, not from Earth, because we didn't have any equipment like this.
And then as the years go by, you know, it's been many, many years now, we still don't have any kind of aircraft that could do anything like that.
Well, that we know about, of course.
But even if we did have secret aircraft or secret designs, by now, you know, there would have been some sort of exposure.
I'll tell you what impression I get from the point where you describe in the book about you had that experience.
It seemed to light the blue touchpaper under your feet.
And even if part of you rationally wanted to put it behind you, you couldn't.
You had to worry at this thing and you needed to find out more.
Absolutely.
And it was always on my mind, but I couldn't speak about it.
Then in 1994, I was out of the Air Force.
I'd gotten out in 71.
But I was in a bookstore and picked up a book by one of your fellow Brits there, a man by the name of Timothy Goode.
Hi, Tim.
I know Tim very well, yes.
And he wrote a book called Above Top Secret.
If you turn to page 301 of that book, you'll see a short paragraph that says UFOs were responsible for the shutdown of missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967.
So I got kind of excited about that when I read that and thought the Air Force had declassified the incident, and that's when I started this process of submitting Freedom of Information Act requests for information.
I said nothing about UFOs, but I asked for any information on the shutdown of this missile system.
They wrote back, said the incident was still classified.
However, since it had been so long, they were going to declassify it.
Really?
Did they do that for you?
Actually, they did it at our request.
Okay, well, that's a real, I think in anybody's book, that's a result.
Yeah.
Now, of course, this was done at a lower level.
I'm sure the headquarters didn't realize that this was a UFO event because I didn't say anything about UFOs.
But anyway, they declassified the ECHO flight incident, which was so similar to mine, I thought it was my incident when I requested this.
And when I started receiving documents from the Air Force, I went public because the Air Force had declassified the ECHO shutdown.
And I thought that was where I was at the time because so much time had gone by, I didn't remember exactly where I had been.
Let's just be very clear on this.
Up to that point, did you know that there had been a second incident?
You did, didn't you?
You'd known years before that there'd been another one 10 days before, seven days before.
Well, you got to remember, in 1967, I was told never to talk about this.
And so the best thing you can do when you have classified information like that, you're ordered not to talk about it, is to try and forget it, try and forget the details.
And I did.
Subconsciously, I forgot a lot of the details.
So I had forgotten that my commander had turned to me and said the same thing happened in another flight until later.
It wasn't until later that I remembered that statement.
But at this time in 1994, no, I didn't know there was another incident.
I thought mine was the only one.
And so anyway, I started talking publicly about this as a UFO event.
In fact, very soon thereafter, I went on radio shows.
And one of the fellows that had been out there at Maelstrom with me contacted me.
We actually did a TV show, a sightings program.
I don't know if you remember the show Sightings.
I remember it well, yeah.
But we did a program on there talking about the Echo Flight shutdown.
Now, you to me do not sound in any way somebody who's prone to fantasy or somebody who loves publicity.
So I have to ask you this question.
What is it that compelled you to go public then?
What was it that made you all those decades afterwards when presumably life was pretty good and you didn't have to do it?
What made you?
Well, it's going to sound very idealistic, but I'm very much for the truth of the matter.
Like you said, I knew there was a cover-up going on, and I knew that for 30 or so years, that the Air Force was covering up something that was very important.
And I felt the public had a right to know.
And that's still the thing that motivates me.
Enormously brave, though.
I think a lot of people will say that what you've done is very brave, because even this far down the track, you don't know what the consequences might be.
No, technically, I'm still in violation of my security oath that I signed.
Exactly.
Yes.
One thing, tell me if I got this right.
In 69, you were transferred from there.
So you were trying to put this thing behind you because they told you to and you were doing your duty.
But the place they transferred you to was Wright-Patterson.
Now, those who talk about modern ufology and ETs are starting to claim that Wright-Pat is the real Area 51, aren't they?
Well, Wright-Patterson, as the story goes, is the place where the remains of the Roswell crash were sent.
And in fact, there's indications that some of those pieces of the crash were sent to trying to think the laboratories nearby, the civilian labs there in Ohio.
But I seem to remember hearing something about the base commander at Wright Pat indicating to somebody, now I might have this completely wrong, that there was more to that place than met the eye.
Maybe I've got that entirely wrong, but that's where you ended up.
And they kind of made you remember the incident that you've been through because they wanted you to see a psychiatrist.
What was all that about?
That was very strange.
First of all, I didn't have to go to Wright-Pat to finish my master's degree, and that's what they told me.
They said, you have to go to Wright-Patterson, complete your master's degree.
Really, so they wanted you there.
They wanted me there.
And I told him, I said, I could have finished there in Montana and continued on in Missile Crudinity.
But no, they ordered me to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
A little while after I arrived, I get, first of all, I meet this classmate of mine from the Air Force Academy.
And he said, great to see you.
By the way, when you're finished with your studies, we've got a job for you.
I said, what kind of job?
And he said, well, we'll let you know later.
And so a week or so after that, I get a call from the base psychiatrist's office at the hospital at Wright Pat.
And I said, you're supposed to come in and see the base psychiatrist.
I said, what?
I have not complained about any mental problems or anything like that.
But it was a direct order.
So I showed up at the base psychiatrist's office.
And I was sitting there and asking the orderly what this was all about.
And he said, well, the psychiatrist will explain it to you.
And he comes out a little later and said, well, the psychiatrist Will see you now.
And I said, no, I'm not going to go back there.
I haven't asked to see a psychiatrist.
I have no problems mentally that I know of.
It takes a big man to say no.
Doesn't it?
But I refused.
I refused to go back and see that psychiatrist.
And they didn't give you a problem about that.
I was getting suspicious by this time.
And so he comes back later and says, well, you can go now, sir.
And I said, well, what about the psychiatrist?
And he said, well, you can go now, sir.
So I left.
But I'm suspicious again after doing some research.
For example, the Condon investigation, which was the Air Force investigation on UFOs, they gave a contract to the University of Colorado under Edward Condon to study the UFO question.
And their focus was on trying to discredit witnesses, basically.
It was not really a scientific investigation, as I go into in my book.
Their focus was really to discredit witnesses.
And so they had three psychiatrists on their staff that would go along with the investigator whenever they were investigating a UFO event and have the psychiatrist basically explain away why the witness was saying what he was.
So do you feel now in the light of that that you dodged a bullet there because the aim of that perhaps was to discredit your recollections of what you thought you had seen there at your previous posting?
Well, I think the aim was twofold.
Excuse me.
One was to discredit me personally.
If they had gotten me to talk about my UFO incident, of course they would have put that on the record and I would have been discredited and possibly prosecuted.
The other thing was they may have wanted to recruit me to come in, let's say I call them the secret group and work with them on the cover-up, which is ongoing, still ongoing, on this phenomenon.
And that's because you'd shown yourself to be a straight-up guy.
You were doing your duty.
You were forgetting about the incident.
You were continuing with your military career.
So there was nothing to indicate to them that you were going to spill the beans or break ranks in any way.
Right, right.
And because, again, this other academy grad had probably recommended me.
I'm convinced some of my classmates are part of this cover-up, of course, because, well, you know, we're supposed to be the top, like you say, creme de la creme in the Air Force.
But none of them ever spoke to you about this.
Well, not exactly, but I can tell you a little story.
This was in the 70s.
I already gotten out of the Air Force, but I ran into one of my classmates, actually gone through four years with him.
He was in my squadron on an aircraft.
I was heading somewhere in California, I think.
Anyway, I met him in the aisleway of the aircraft, commercial flight.
And glad to see you.
And he said to me, you'll never guess what I'm flying.
Now, he kind of whispered that to me.
I said, what, a UFO?
I was just kidding.
You know, I was just kidding.
Oh, boy.
And he turned white as a sheet, grabbed me by the neck, and whispered in my ear, MIG, M-I-G, MIG.
Well, MIG was used as a kind of a code for UFO within the Blue Book community, because originally Blue Book was under the office that studied foreign technology.
And they had captured MIG aircraft.
And so I'm suspicious because after that, he never talked to me again.
We got off the airplane.
We never saw each other again.
Because Wright-Patterson was where the exotic technology, the stuff from, you know, not only the stuff that was captured from foreign air forces, but the stuff from beyond this planet, if you believe the stories, all of that was processed there.
They claim.
Right, right, exactly.
But beyond that, you never saw any evidence of that.
That was the only indication you had while you were there.
Evidence of what?
Well, evidence of exotic alien technology being looked at, processed, flown.
I was never given privy to the office there that had the classified material on UFOs, no.
At the top end of the 70s, a man who was building a military career, IEU, decided to leave.
Why was that?
Well, I had heard so many reports from people that had been in Vietnam, you know, my classmates and others, that things were going horribly there.
People were getting slaughtered for no reason.
And it was obvious by 1971 that we were never going to win that war.
And so the only way I had of protesting the war really was to resign.
So I resigned my commission.
And by that stage, I can remember being a little boy, and my parents took me on holiday, and we went to the middle of the countryside in the English Midlands.
And there was an American family there, just the same as myself and my sister and my mom and dad.
Two kids they had, and they talked with us, and it was around that time.
And I can remember, even though I was little, we were up very late.
And they were telling us about their very real and genuine fears that their kids would be drafted into Vietnam for nothing.
What was the point of that war?
And I remember my father and this guy, whoever he was now, talking well into the night about all of this.
So this is forgotten now, but that was the way people were feeling then.
Yes, absolutely.
It was very depressing.
We could all want it out of the Vietnam War.
And finally, we did.
We were actually booted out, weren't we?
So there followed for you a career in industry?
Yes.
I went to work for Mark Marietta first on space shuttle design of the remote manipulator arm.
That's what we called it, I guess.
That little arm, not little, but the arm that comes out of the bay of the space shuttle.
It's like that cherry picker thing, isn't it?
Yeah.
I worked a little bit on that, and then the same at Rockwell in Los Angeles.
And then in 1974, I was able to get a job with the Federal Aviation Administration as an aircraft certification engineer.
And I worked for them for some 22 years until about 95, I guess.
And that's when I resigned from the FAA.
But all that time, this interest in what happened to you all those years before, as you told me, was burning away.
Absolutely.
You know, though the memory had never gone away, it faded.
I mean, the details started to fade after a while because, again, I couldn't talk about it and I didn't want it to slip out.
So, you know, you just lose the details after a while.
What I like about your book, this latest one, Robert, is that I have many friends who are peripherally interested in UFOs, ufology, ETs, and all the rest of it.
And up till now, I couldn't have thought of a primer book to give them to explain everything.
Your book actually does that because you do a lot of philosophy in there and an awful lot of tying together strands.
You clearly think deeply about these things.
Towards the back end of the book, you talk about the idea that there is a cabal, a group of people, a group of nations who know about all of this stuff, who've done cooperative deals with ETs, and that's how it works.
But you also talk about the rightness of disclosure and the reasons for disclosure and why we should do it.
Yeah?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, we don't need a secret organization working within governments.
Now, I don't think our presidents, our prime ministers may not be aware of the depth of this phenomenon or even believe that it exists.
But certainly within, I believe, intelligence agencies, within governments, there are people that are very well aware and actually working hard to collect data, use that data in various ways, and possibly use it in commercial applications or use it as bargaining chips within intelligence groups throughout the world.
So that's going on, and the public as a whole is told that there's nothing really to this phenomenon, which is incorrect.
It's absolutely false.
Well, you tell one story about a Peruvian Air Force guy who told you or somebody that you know that the Americans had told his government that they needed to feed back to the U.S. any evidence of ETs that they came across.
And you believe that there's an international effort to do that, to preserve evidence, to collect evidence and collate it.
Absolutely.
This witness, which will remain anonymous for now, told me that he attended a meeting where U.S. Air Force top brass were talking to Peruvian brass and basically ordering them to turn over any evidence of good UFO stories and they would process it and take it from there.
So to me, that shows collusion between military intelligence groups and foreign country intelligence groups working on this problem and this question.
So I have no doubt, and I've heard this from other sources also, so I have no doubt that this cabal does exist, even though it's hard for the public to fathom that it is operating, but I'm convinced it does exist.
I wrote this down from the book.
You say disclosure must happen to preserve our democracy.
How and why?
Well, the information that they've gleaned from this phenomenon has got to be pretty fantastic.
In other words, these things operate the way they operate, the propulsion systems they use, the energy sources that they utilize are far in advance of what we have here.
So like I said, this is very valuable, valuable information.
It can be used as bargaining chips in making deals without the public knowledge between nations.
And we've got too much of that.
We've got too much secrecy in government, which is another thing I talk about at great length, is excessive secrecy in governments.
And the public is being left out of all this.
This is not a democracy.
That's not a democratic approach to government.
A democratic approach is where the public is informed and is able to oppress their will on their government, which they were duly elected.
So I suppose you could sum it up if you wanted to.
And part of my job is to write headlines professionally that anti-gravity Seems to go hand in hand with anti-democracy.
Exactly.
That's good.
That's a good headline.
I must write that down, actually.
I just thought of that.
Boy, it's late in the day for me.
It's very concerning.
I wonder what, as ordinary Joes, though, who might or might not have an interest in all of this, and really, I think deep down, Robert, most people do have an interest in these things, even if it doesn't impinge on their day-to-day lives.
What on earth can we do about it?
Well, first of all, the public should, you know, those of your listeners should try to educate themselves on this phenomenon.
There's a lot of good books out there, some, but there's also some trash out there, as you well know.
Some people just like to tell stories without backing them up.
And some people just love to read other people's books and then rehash them as a vanity project.
And I get a lot of that stuff coming through my inbox.
So people like you are quite rare.
Exactly.
Well, yeah, thank you.
But, yeah, the public, there is good information out there.
There's some very good substantiated incidents, such as the Roswell incident.
The Reynolds from Forest incident is another good one.
Although there's questions about some of the witness testimony, but that has to do, I think, with the fact that a lot of those witnesses were tampered with.
Do you know a man called Larry Warren?
Yes, I do.
I know Larry very well.
Okay, well, I know Larry because he's in Liverpool, and when I was on the radio in Liverpool, he came into the radio station.
I was doing a talk show there, and we did quite a long interview together.
What a remarkable man, because he was there and he knows stuff.
Absolutely.
And he's one of those guys that have stuck with it through all the ridicule that he's experienced, but he's a real witness.
He's a valid witness.
And so those are the kinds of witnesses that we need to focus on.
Those incidents.
My incident, I think, is very, very well documented.
It is now, yeah.
Yeah, and others.
So the public should educate themselves.
If they are convinced, as I am, that this is a real phenomenon, then they should press for their governments to speak up about it.
Despite the fact that I was late for this interview and I'm still really embarrassed about that, I'd love to talk with you again.
Robert, just finally, if there are people hearing this, and I get emails from people all over the world in so many circumstances, and I'm talking about lawyers and engineers and people professionally connected and people even connected with local and national governments.
You know, you just never know who's hearing you.
If there are people who would like to add to your collection of information, would you be interested in hearing from them?
Oh, certainly.
Absolutely.
And I'd be interested in talking to any government official about this.
I'm more than willing to answer any questions about my incident or some of the research that I've done that's in that latest book.
Okay, two things then.
If people want to know about your work, where's a good place to go?
And if people want to contact you, presumably that's the same place they can go.
Well, they could.
They could go to my website, spiralgalaxy.org.
On there, I've got witness testimony in the form of audio tape and documents about my incident.
They can leave me, I've got a blog on there.
They can leave me a message on that blog, or they can contact me through Facebook.
I'm also on Facebook under my name, Robert Solace.
I ask everybody this, what's your next project?
Can you tell me?
Or is it secret?
It's okay if it is.
Well, I don't know if there's another book.
Probably is, another book in my head.
I just haven't formulated that yet.
But I'm going to keep on talking about this.
I've got more conferences to attend and I'll keep speaking out as long as I can.
Well, Robert Salas, I'm glad we were able to make this happen despite my error today.
And I thank you so much in Santa Barbara.
Thank you very much for coming on my show.
Thank you.
And by the way, people interested in buying my book can go to Amazon.com, even Amazon in the UK, and they can get it on there.
Just give us the title again.
Unidentified, the UFO Phenomenon is one.
And then the other one is Fated Giant.
Robert Salas, thank you.
Thank you, Howard.
I appreciate it.
Your thoughts welcomed on that.
Robert Salas here at The Unexplained.
If you want to tell me what you thought of that or suggest somebody else to be on this show or tell me what you think about the shows, just email me.
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And thank you very much for your support.
My name is Howard Hughes.
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