The Romeo Flight Cigar

Afterwards senior officers warned him that it "didn't happen" but that it was "top secret". Bruce Fenstermacher was a combat crew commander with the 400th Strategic Missile Squadron. That night he was on duty at the Romeo Flight launch control facility in the missile field near Cheyenne. In the archive's tellings a huge white pulsating cigar with red and blue lights moved silently between the flight's launch facilities for about an hour and a half. The security alert teams refused to approach it. Fenstermacher says he rang the command post again and again to demand that it be logged, and the command post was reluctant to do so. A second flight, Quebec, reported the object too.

What is on the record

This is Fenstermacher's account. The archive lists three claimants: Fenstermacher, his deputy (named only as Sam) and a flight security controller. The last two reach the archive through his own telling. They are people he says were present, not people who have given accounts of their own.

One of the archive's two tellings has the Quebec crew reporting the object first. In the public account the story is told from Romeo Flight, and Quebec is the second flight that saw it. The exact date has never been made public.

Fenstermacher told the story at a National Press Club event on UFOs and nuclear weapons in 2010, and it appears in Robert Hastings's work. Those are two venues for the same testimony, and no one else's account stands beside it. No Air Force record of the night has been released and no explanation has been offered.

Why it sits where it does

On paper the case grades L3, the tier for several independent claimants describing one event. The count is generous. The three claimants are one witness and two people he names, and both tellings come from one channel. It is a single-teller case from a man whose job put him in a position to know. What hovered over Romeo Flight is not resolved here.