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Between 1973 and 2010, I interviewed 167
former/retired US military personnel regarding their nuclear
weapons-related UFO encounters. More than a hundred of those accounts
were presented in the second edition of my book,
UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons
Sites.
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Since 2010, I’ve more or less ceased investigating the topic, primarily due to advancing age. Recently, however, another military veteran contacted me after reading a post by Joe Murgia on X (@TheUfoJoe) regarding my work. I was of course interested in what he had to say. |
The UFO Chronicles 7-8-2025 |
I asked Lingo to provide me with his DD214 document, which is a Department of Defense record of his military service. It confirmed that he had been stationed at Malmstrom beginning in February 1995, and had been a Security Police/Security Forces member assigned to the 12th Missile Squadron.
Once his bona fides had been established, I called Lingo. He told me,
At the time, I was an Airman, a trainee, preparing to become a full-fledged member of an Alert Response Team (ART). The person supervising my training was an Airman 1st Class named Brent Mullings. Our particular group of ARTs would rapidly respond to alarms at any of the Fox Flight missile sites, to determine whether or not there was a real security threat.
On the day of my sighting, we had six alarms at one LF! That was a record, at least for me, during the years that I worked there. The site was Launch Facility Fox-2, located on Pishkun Road, just west of the town of Choteau, Montana.
The first Outer Zone alarm came in around 6:00 p.m. We quickly proceeded out there to investigate. Our alarms were triggered by the sensors on the IMPSS pole at each site. That’s the Improved Minuteman Physical Security System, which is basically a motion-detection system. Almost all of the time, an alarm was set-off by a wild animal or something like that.
That evening, we discovered a rabbit inside the fence. I tried to scare it away by throwing rocks at it, but it kept hiding inside a culvert. Eventually we left but, over the next several hours, we had to return five more times to reset the alarms.
I asked Lingo why they didn’t just shoot the rabbit. He responded, “The only way we had to kill it was with our duty weapons—M-16 A2 rifles—and that wasn't an option. Had we returned to base after our [shift] and turned-in our weapons to the armory with missing rounds, it would have been a big deal. Also, I personally wouldn't have felt good about killing a rabbit over an alarm.”
He continued,
My orb sighting took place during our last visit, at roughly 4:00 a.m. I had gotten out of the truck and was standing on the site access road. As I was facing west towards the Rockies, in my peripheral vision I saw a small reddish glow in the sky. For a moment, I thought that it might be the Northern Lights.
I turned my head to the right and immediately saw that it was actually a small, glowing object, just hovering there. I couldn’t tell how far away it was. As I was trying to figure out what I was looking at, another object just like it, but blue in color, suddenly appeared. It was to the left of the red one. They were very close together, from my perspective, and at the same altitude. Both seemed to shimmer as if they were energized somehow.
I was stunned! I had no idea what I was looking at. After a few seconds, the red object blinked-out. Gone, just like that. A second or two later, the blue object shot straight up into the sky and instantly disappeared. There was no noise.
During this final alarm of the night, Brent felt sorry for me because I had already conducted the five previous searches, so he decided to run the final one himself. So I just stood there on the LF access road, covering him and giving status-updates to our Flight Security Controller on the two-way radio.
During the time-frame when I noticed the orbs, Brent was doing his detailed search on the LF. His focus would have been on searching the ground within the fence with his flashlight. I’m sure that he didn’t see them.
I was the new guy, the trainee, so I quickly decided that I wouldn’t mention what I saw to Brent, or anyone else. I was afraid that they would think I was crazy. I was worried about losing my PRP.
(RH: Anyone assigned to work with or around nuclear weapons is subject to a
Department of Defense directive known as the Personnel Reliability Program, or
PRP. An individual whose conduct, on or off-the-job, is judged by his or her
superiors to be suspect and, therefore, a potential threat to the weapons, may
be ordered to undergo psychological evaluation and risks being relieved of
duty. In short, if one wishes to continue working with nuclear weapons while
serving in the U.S. Air Force, reporting a UAP is definitely not a good career
move. Unfortunately, this situation has undoubtedly resulted in a great many
sightings at ICBM sites going unrecorded over the years, something arguably
detrimental to US national security.)
Lingo continued,
So, that’s where I left things. I never talked about the incident, but I sure wondered about what I had seen! I don't believe that any other members of my squadron ever mentioned seeing anything strange in the sky. Even if someone had seen something out of the ordinary, there's a high probability that they would never have reported it out of fear of ridicule.
The only other sighting that I'd heard rumors about happened on the east side of Malmstrom, which would have been the 10th Missile Squadron or the 490th Missile Squadron. I was told that sometime during the years prior to 1995, a couple of Security Policemen were at a launch facility when some sort of triangular craft started hovering above them. I don't have any information on how long the encounter lasted or what the fallout was.
Lingo may have been referring to an incident at Alpha Flight, as described to me in 2003 by former Security Policeman Joseph M. Brown. One spring night in 1992, his two-man team, and a second team located a few miles away, observed a bright object erratically racing around the sky for several minutes. At some point, the men became unnerved by what they were seeing and began anxiously discussing the sighting with each other over the radio, whereupon the Alpha Flight Security Controller, who had been listening-in on the tense exchange, broke into the conversation and asked about the situation.
Finally, the aerial object instantly stopped in mid-air and remained stationary. As the sun rose, the craft’s triangular shape could be seen through binoculars. Then it disappeared. When the two teams returned to base, they were debriefed by their commander and pointedly told that any further mention of the UFO would jeopardize their PRP status. This incident is covered at length in my book. [ad]
Lingo said that after leaving the Air Force he had consulted the state-by-state UAP-sighting database at The National UFO Reporting Center website, to learn whether any sighting report in Montana in 1995 might have matched his own.
He told me, “On 9/25/1995 there were two sightings in the towns of Ronan and Polson. One of them states that there were red and blue strobing lights observed. The other just says that the witness saw lights. Both reports stated that the objects were in the eastern sky. Both towns are many miles west of Choteau, at roughly the same latitude, just on the opposite side of the Rocky Mountains. I had been just west of Choteau myself, so what those witnesses reported could have been what I saw. I’ve often wondered whether those sightings related to my incident.”
.jpg "UFO Sighting Over Nuclear Missile Silo Still Resonates")
.jpg "UFOs Spotted at Nuclear Bases and Missile Sites - By Bob Pratt (National Enquirer 12-13-1977)")
But was there anything more to it than the bright confusion of a late afternoon, compounded by youth and susceptibility? Such unanswerable questions lie at the heart of 
