The F. E. Warren Missile Blackout

The technicians described something like a Zeppelin with no gondola and no markings, hanging over the missile field. They said the squadron commander warned crews not to discuss the things they may or may not have seen. That account comes from the researcher Robert Hastings and his confidential sources. The event it attaches to is not in doubt. On 23 October 2010 fifty Minuteman III missiles of the 319th Missile Squadron at F. E. Warren went down. They lost communication with their five launch control centres.

What is on the record

The outage is documented. The Air Force confirmed it, put its length at under an hour and briefed President Obama. It gave the cause as a replacement circuit card in a launch-control computer that sat about an eighth of an inch short of fully seated and jammed communications. National press reported all of this at the time.

The craft is a different kind of claim. It rests on Hastings and two unnamed technicians, and no independent source confirms it. The archive holds three videos from one channel and resolves two claimants, listed as John Mills' sources and key personnel. Neither is a named person, and the published account of the sightings is Hastings's. The one document linked to the case is a journalism piece about his work, which counts as reporting rather than corroboration.

The archive's tellings also go further than the record. They call the object a Tic Tac, one of them a grey mothership the size of an aircraft carrier, and say the blackout lasted twenty-six hours. Hastings's sources describe a cigar and say intermittent problems lasted several hours. The twenty-six hours is not found in any source checked. This page follows the published account.

Why it sits where it does

Two claimant entries put the case at L3, and both are anonymous sources reached through one researcher. The outage itself is a matter of public record with an official mechanical cause. Whether anything was over the field that day is not resolved here.