The Conrad Missile Silo Light

A round object about fifty feet across stopped above an open Minuteman missile silo and shone a white light down into it for twenty to thirty seconds. Then it shot away. The archive's telling sets this on a night in September 1966 at a launch facility near Conrad in Montana, one of the sites run from Malmstrom Air Force Base. The same telling says the Montana Highway Patrol logged more than twenty UFO reports that night and that the crew rolled their truck as they fled.

The witness on record is Airman First Class Patrick McDonough. He was working on an astro-azimuth survey at the site at about half past one in the morning. In his account the disc was thirty to fifty feet across and outlined with dim lights. It stopped about three hundred feet overhead and left silently towards the east.

What is on the record

Three claimants are resolved: Patrick McDonough, Al Kramer and Charlie Coates, whom the transcript spells Coats. The published record names only McDonough, and the archive's count overstates what can be shown.

The trail beyond the archive is short. The chronology entry for this case cites a single source, the account in Hastings's book UFOs and Nukes. The story was told again at a public event in 2010. No Air Force record has been released. The Highway Patrol log is part of the account and has not been verified. The overturned truck does not appear in the catalogue entry at all and should be read as a detail of the archive's telling only. No explanation has been offered.

This is a separate event from the 1967 Malmstrom incidents, which the archive files on their own page.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on the archive's count of three claimants. On the public record it is a single airman's recollection of a light over a nuclear launch site. What stood above the silo near Conrad is not resolved here.