This is the story of extraordinary events that happened in 1967 to US Air Force Strategic Air Command Missile Combat Officers and other enlisted personnel; Missileers assigned to operate, maintain, and protect the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile , an essential part of America's Cold War strategic nuclear deterrent.

This Web page presents an abbreviated version of the events of 16 March 1967.

... by Jim Klotz and Robert Salas - 27-Nov-1996

Updated - 15-May-2000 - *please note that in previous versions of this presentation, we stated that Robert Salas was on duty in the November-Flight LCC. Later research and witness testimony has revealed that it was actually Oscar-Flight.*

ECHO-FLIGHT

In central Montana, Thursday morning March 16 1967, Captain Eric Carlson and First Lieutenant. Walt Figel, the Echo-Flight Missile Combat Crew, were below ground in the E-Flight Launch Control Center (LCC) or capsule. The Echo Flight LCC was located between Winfred and Hilger, about fifteen miles north of Lewistown.

Missile maintenance crews and security teams were camped out at two of the Launch Facilities (LFs), having performed some work during the previous day and stayed there overnight. During the early morning hours, more than one report came in from the security patrols and maintenance crews that they had seen UFOs. A UFO was reported directly above one of the E-Flight (LF) or silos. It turned out that at least one security policeman was so affected by this encounter that he never again returned to missile security duty.

Around 8:30 a.m., Figel, the Deputy Crew Commander (DMCCC), was briefing the Carlson, the Crew Commander (MCCC), on the flight status when the alarm horn sounded. One of the Minuteman missiles they supervised had gone off alert (become inoperable) It was one of the two sites where maintenance crews had camped out on site. Upset, thinking that the maintenance personnel had failed to notify him as required by procedure when maintenance work is done on a missile, that the missile was going 'off-alert' status, Figel immediately called the missile site.

When Figel spoke with the on-site security guard, he reported that they had not yet performed any maintenance that morning. He also stated that a UFO had been hovering over the site. Figel recalls thinking the guard must have been drinking something. However, now other missiles started to go off alert in rapid succession! Within seconds, the entire flight of ten ICBMs was down! All of their missiles reported a "No-Go" condition. One by one across the board, each missile had became inoperable. When the checklist procedure had been completed for each missile site, it was discovered that each of the missiles had gone off alert status due to a Guidance and Control (G&C) System fault. Power had not been lost to the sites; the missiles simply were not operational because, for some unexplainable reason, each of their guidance and control systems had malfunctioned.

Two Security Alert Teams (SAT, "strike teams") were dispatched from Echo to those sites where the maintenance crews were present. Figel had not informed the strike teams that one of the on- site guards had reported a UFO. On arrival at the LF’s, the SAT reported back to that UFOs had been seen hovering over each of the two sites by all of the maintenance and security personnel present at each site.

Captain Don Crawford's crew relieved the Echo Flight crew later that morning. Crawford recalls that both Carlson and Figel were still visibly shaken by what had occurred. Crawford also recalled that the maintenance crews worked on the missiles the entire day and late into the night during his shift to bring them all back on alert. Not only had missiles been lost to our deterrent forces, but had remained out of service for an entire day!

Because of this unique incident, as an ex-Missileer describes it: "All Hell broke loose!" Among the many calls to and from the E-Flight LCC one was to the MCCC of Oscar-Flight which links to the equally dramatic story of what happened in another LCC that same morning.

OSCAR-FLIGHT

The Oscar Flight LCC was located a mile or two south of the town of Roy, about 20 miles southeast of the Echo-Flight LCC.

The following is as told by Robert Salas who was the DMCCC in O-Flight that morning:

My recollection is that I was on duty as a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander below ground in the LCC, during the morning hours of 16 March 1967.

Outside, above the subterranean LCC capsule, it was a typical clear, cold Montana night sky; there were a few inches of snow on the ground. Where we were, there were no city lights to detract from the spectacular array of stars, and it was not uncommon to see shooting stars. Montana isn’t called “Big Sky Country” for no reason, and Airmen on duty topside probably spent some of their time outside looking up at the stars. It was one of those airmen who first saw what at first appeared to be a star begin to zig-zag across the sky. Then he saw another light do the same thing, and this time it was larger and closer. He asked his Flight Security Controller, (FSC, the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) in charge of Launch Control Center site security), to come and take a look. They both stood there watching the lights streak directly above them, stop, change directions at high speed and return overhead. The NCO ran into the building and phoned me at my station in the underground capsule. He reported to me that they had been seeing lights making strange maneuvers over the facility, and that they weren't aircraft. I replied: "Great. You just keep watching them and let me know if they get any closer."

I did not take this report seriously and directed him to report back if anything more significant happened. At the time, I believed this first call to be a joke. Still, that sort of behavior was definitely out of character for air security policemen whose communications with us were usually very professional.

A few minutes later, the security NCO called again. This time he was clearly frightened and was shouting his words:

"Sir, there's one hovering outside the front gate!"

"One what?"

"A UFO! It's just sitting there. We're all just looking at it. What do you want us to do?"

"What? What does it look like?"

"I can't really describe it. It's glowing red. What are we supposed to do?"

"Make sure the site is secure and I'll phone the Command Post."

"Sir, I have to go now, one of the guys just got injured."

Before I could ask about the injury, he was off the line. I immediately went over to my commander, Lt. Fred Meiwald, who was on a scheduled sleep period . I woke him and began to brief him about the phone calls and what was going on topside. In the middle of this conversation, we both heard the first alarm klaxon resound through the confined space of the capsule, and both immediately looked over at the panel of annunciator lights at the Commander's station. A 'No-Go' light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of our missile sites. Fred jumped up to query the system to determine the cause of the problem. Before he could do so, another alarm went off at another site, then another and another simultaneously. Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a 'No-Go' (inoperable) condition.

After reporting this incident to the Command Post, I phoned my security guard. He said that the man who had approached the UFO had not been injured seriously but was being evacuated by helicopter to the base. Once topside, I spoke directly with the security guard about the UFOs. He added that the UFO had a red glow and appeared to be saucer shaped. He repeated that it had been immediately outside the front gate, hovering silently.

We sent a security patrol to check our LFs after the shutdown, and they reported sighting another UFO during that patrol. They also lost radio contact with our site immediately after reporting the UFO.

When we were relieved by our scheduled replacement crew later that morning. The missiles had still not been brought on line by on-site maintenance teams.

Again, UFOs had been sighted by security personnel at or about the time Minuteman Strategic missiles shutdown.

THE INVESTIGATION

An in-depth post incident investigation of the E-Flight incident was undertaken. Full scale on-site and laboratory tests at the Boeing

Company's Seattle plant were conducted.

Declassified Strategic Missile Wing documents and interviews with ex-Boeing engineers who conducted tests following the E-Flight Incident investigation confirm that no cause for the missile shutdowns was ever found. Robert Kaminski was the Boeing Company engineering team leader for this investigation. Kaminski stated that after all tests were done, : “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert,” and “…there was no technical explanation that could explain the event.”

The most that could be done was to reproduce the effects by introducing a 10 volt pulse onto a data line. Another Boeing Company engineer on the team, Robert Rigert, came up with this pulse that repeated the shutdown effects 80% of the time, but only when directly injected at the logic coupler. No explanation could be found for a source of such a pulse or "noise" occurring in the field and getting inside the shielded missile system equipment.

Others on the engineering team checked other possibilities. Lightning and problems in the commercial power system were acquitted as the source of the problem. William Dutton, another Boeing Company engineer, checked commercial power interruptions and transients, and stated: “No anomalies were found in this area.”

Several military activities and other engineering firms participated in the investigation, but no positive cause for the shutdowns was ever found, despite extensive and concentrated effort. One conclusion was that the only way a pulse or noise could be sent in from outside the shielded system was through an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from an unknown source. The technology of the day made generating an EMP of sufficient magnitude to enter the shielded system a very difficult proposition, requiring large, heavy, bulky equipment. The source of the actual pulse that caused the missile shutdowns remains a mystery z.z
religioon

.................confusing . did not seem to fit current eeevangelical theological and anthropological textbooks."

The team from Haggard's church was a forerunner in a missionary wave that has washed over the world since the early 1990s, bringing what Holvast calls a ‘new paradigm.'

René Holvast has theological training, but his perplexed reaction was similar to that of Alix Spiegel, a radio journalist who went to Ted Haggard's New Life Church in 1997 to do a story for This American Life. Spiegel encountered something so alluring, even overwhelming, that the secular, urban Jew was almost pulled in. (After several days at Ted Haggard's church, Spiegel called This American Life's Ira Glass who -- as if he were a deprogrammer weaning her from a cult -- had to convince Alix Spiegel that she really belonged back in her secular realm of origin, Chicago.)

From its early days, New Life Church's members worked to map out all the territorial demon spirits inhabiting Colorado Springs. At some point in the process, they fed the mapping information into a computer database. Methodically -- street by street, block by block -- they used prayer-warfare to expel the demons from their city. And they maintained a 24/7 prayer shield over Colorado Springs to prevent demon re-infestations. As with inner-city cockroaches, the price of demon-free living was constant vigilance.

Alix Spiegel called some of the practices she saw at Haggard's church "medieval," while René Holvast described this new way as incommensurable with modern Christianity:

Conversations and discussions with some missionary colleagues did not seem to lead to mutual understanding. The usual evangelical ways of reasoning fell mute. It seemed to be not just a different way of understanding, but a different way of reasoning altogether.

In fact, at the very time Holvast and Spiegel encountered it, the ‘new paradigm' had just been invented. In the period of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping' and ‘spiritual warfare' onto a peculiar and radical theological substrate emerging from the Latter Rain and healing revivals that burst out in Canada and North America during the late 1940s.

They molded their hybridized new Christianity into a standardized package of ideas and practices such that, by the late 1990s, they began exporting the product from Colorado Springs to both the domestic American market and internationally at an astonishing rate.

It was as newfangled as Henry Ford's Model T had been and, like Ford's car, it quickly became established, even ubiquitous, on every continent but Antarctica.

In 2009, one can now watch YouTube video footage of Christians from all over the earth practicing the same, very new form of the faith that features the blowing of shofars and the "Davidic dance" -- using very distinctive, recently minted, theological terms. There was a common origin. For practical purposes, Colorado Springs was the Dearborn, Michigan of the next Christianity.

A New Reformation?

This development has not gone wholly unnoticed. Here's how an Atlantic Monthly editor portentously introduced historian Philip Jenkins' October 2002 article, "The Next Christianity":

We stand at a historical turning point, the author argues -- one that is as epochal for the Christian world as the original Reformation. Around the globe Christianity is growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see. Tumultuous conflicts within Christianity will leave a mark deeper than Islam's on the century ahead.

Jenkins accurately depicted the radical nature of the ‘religious revolution' underway which, he wrote, "one might equate with the Counter-Reformation." He also pegged its goal: restoring a global Christian church "filled with spiritual power and able to exorcise the demonic forces that cause sickness and poverty."

But Philip Jenkins' "The Next Christianity" argued that the new "counter-reformation" is being driven largely by indigenized forms of Christianity, erupting from the Global South, that view the Christianity of the developed North as spiritually enervated and morally corrupt.

The reality of the North-South dynamic is far more complex -- there is cross-pollination these days between Christian traditions in the Global South and in the developed world, with African evangelicals aggressively moving to develop their own missions in Texas, Ukraine, Moscow, and elsewhere.

The original Counter-Reformation did not originate in Europe's developing colonial holdings but, rather, in the European Catholic Church. In similar fashion, most of the leaders and ideas driving the second (counter) reformation have come out of the developed North, from the pool of conservative Christians bitterly opposed to the liberal Christianity of the North. These Christians have resorted to radical methods to turn back the clock, to the pre-Enlightenment age if not before. It is a counter-reformation, then, but more than that too -- while it embodies the sentiments of a traditionalist backlash, it is also creatively moving forward, a second Reformation.

According to Ted Haggard, "Peter Wagner regularly writes and speaks about the New Apostolic Reformation. He has accurately recognized the changes as so dramatic that they are creating an actual reformation within the body of Christ." That's from page 44 of Ted Haggard's book The Life Giving Church (Gospel Light Publications, 1998). On page 35, Haggard describes a 1992 meeting in Upland, California, that was the genesis of his close partnership with Peter Wagner:

When I arrived, I met Luis Bush, Dick Eastman, Peter and Doris Wagner and several other recognized leaders. From that meeting, New Life Church formed its mission for the 1990s -- to support Luis Bush generally and Peter and Doris Wagner specifically... a calling that led to the creation of the World Prayer Center and much more. We as a team coordinated the Prayer Through the Window series that had 22,500,000 participants in 1993; 36,700,000 participants in 1995; over 40,000,000 in 1997.

By Haggard's account, he and C. Peter Wagner had constructed a global communications net that by 1997 could reach tens of millions of Christians in the prayer movement. In 2005, during the Global Day of Prayer, an estimated 200 million Christians in stadiums and arenas around the world joined in synchronous prayer.

Haggard's New Life Church and the adjacent World Prayer Center that was dedicated in 1998 were, for roughly a decade, the epicenter of an ongoing, radical redefinition of Christianity. One of its early board members became known to the secular world during the 2008 presidential campaign as an enigmatic Kenyan evangelist who, in 2005, had blessed Sarah Palin against witchcraft.

Spiritual Mapping

In the introduction to his dissertation, "Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Missionary Paradigm," written for the University of Utrecht and published in 2005, René Holvast described the arrival of the ‘new paradigm' in Mali, where he and his wife had been engaged in missions work:

Something new happened in 1996. At CMA missionary conferences, US visitors were flown in to teach the missionaries about ‘a new cutting-edge paradigm' for mission...

The new paradigm entailed that missionaries had to ‘identify' and ‘bind territorial spirits' and ‘unleash' divine power. Evangelism was to be preceded by ‘prayer walks,' and prayer was considered best if done geographically ‘on-site,' within a ‘target area.' Prayer became the identification of and confrontation with demons... All of this was categorized as ‘Spiritual Mapping'...

A team flown in from the New Life Church in Colorado Springs secretively anointed traditional fetish huts and whole villages.

A year later in 1997, Alix Spiegel described Ted Haggard's New Life Church members methodically ‘prayer walking' the streets, trying to drive away territorial demon spirits from Colorado Springs.

Two years later, in 1999, the new paradigm came to the Wasilla Assembly of God via a video that was described in the Christian Science Monitor article "Targeting cities with ‘spiritual mapping,' prayer."

In the opening sentences of her story, Jane Lampman asked, "Can the ‘spiritual DNA' of a community be altered? That's the question posed in a Christian video called ‘Transformations.'" Lampman continued:

Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee is convinced that it can be. In 1988, he and his wife, Margaret, were ‘called by God to Kiambu,' a notorious, violence-ridden suburb of Nairobi and a ‘ministry graveyard' for churches for years. They began six months of fervent prayer and research.

Muthee's story was held up as a case study in the 1999 pseudo-documentary Transformations the first in a series that its producers assert has brought to tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, the doctrine that Christians can create a utopia on Earth by driving out territorial demon spirits and alleged witches with the power of massed prayer. The exposure brought Thomas Muthee global fame.

Transformations I was released in 1999. The same year, it reached the members of a Mat-Su Valley, Alaska, church network (the Valley Pastors Prayer Network) whose pastors were so gripped by the video that they made contact with most of the religious figures shown in George Otis Jr.'s production. And they were so especially taken with Thomas Muthee's story they brought him to Alaska in 1999 and raised $30,000 so Muthee could buy land in Kenya to build his church.

As detailed in a late October 2008 Associated Press story by Garance Burke and an AP investigative team, Sarah Palin's Wasilla mayoral records show that she borrowed the Transformations I video from her former Wasilla Assembly of God pastor in 2000.

The Numbers Don't Lie

In Radical Holiness For Radical Living (Wagner Publications, 2002) C. Peter Wagner states:

A process that began after World War II has now resulted in a newfound recognition of the gifts and offices of apostle and prophet in our churches today. The movement called the New Apostolic Reformation has been bringing about a most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant reformation. It is currently the most rapidly-growing segment of Christianity in every continent of the world.

Evidence suggests Wagner isn't exaggerating. According to the evangelical missionary reference book, World Christian Trends AD 30 -- AD 2200, by the year 2000, a category of Christianity known as postdenominationalism encompassed 385 million Christians, nearly 20% of the faith.

World Christian Trends lists 280 dichotomies that distinguish denominational from postdenominational Christianity -- which, according to the book, has "no connection with historic Christianity." The Third Wave represents an even more radical break.

Erupting within postdenominationalism starting in the 1980s, Third Wave Christianity claimed, by 2000, some 295 million adherents. World Christian Trends calls the Third Wave a "new and disturbingly different kind of Christian renewal." One very distinctive characteristic of Third Wave Christianity is its emphasis that average Christians can perform the same magnitude of healing miracles described in the New Testament to have been performed by Jesus Christ -- including raising the dead.

Within two decades, Third Wave Christianity encompassed over four percent of humanity. It is a seismic change.

In his book Churchquake!: A Look at the Dramatic New Movement That Will Affect the Future of the Church, C. Peter Wagner states that the editor of World Christian Trends, David Barrett, told Wagner that by 1996 Barrett had over a thousand apostolic networks in his global research database, representing well over 100 million Christians. How many Christians are in apostolic networks over a decade later? We can only guess. C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation has pulled together those apostolic networks, into what might be, for all we know, the biggest Protestant "nondenominational" (or postdenominational) denomination on the planet.

The Wagner Leadership Institute is currently offering, for free, a one-hour lecture by Wagner, session number 4 of WLI course AP825 (the "AP" stands for "Apostles and Prophets"). For getting a basic understanding of the movement Wagner refers to, and has played a key role in catalyzing, one probably couldn't do much better than to watch this lecture. C. Peter Wagner is a seasoned, professional educator... who aims to transform the biggest religion on Earth. (It probably doesn't hurt that Wagner bears a considerable resemblance to former fried-chicken mogul ‘Colonel' Harlan Sanders.)

Kicking off his lecture, Wagner tells the class:

OK, first of all, I want to repeat something. You don't have to write it down, because you already have it in your notes. But I want to remind you that the New Apostolic Reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation. That's what we're dealing with.

X number of megablocks of Christianity, each with Y millions of Christians. Categories of Christianity zoom from the left onto Peter Wagner's huge blue WLI classroom screen, bouncing slightly for effect as they hit the right edge of the screen before rebounding to center. There's one little block of 20 million or so, explains Wagner, which includes Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. He typically just ignores this block in his presentations, explains Wagner, because they're "cultic."

The biggest megablock outside of the Catholic Church, and the fastest growing of all? The postdenominational block, 385 million strong by 2000. Wagner calls this block "neo-Apostolic." It's bigger now than in 2000, he says, and Wagner notes that it's the only megablock growing faster than the earth's population and faster than Islam.

Wagner's cell phone rings mid-lecture; a Hank Williams ringtone. The class laughs. In fact, it's probably an act designed to loosen them up. A pro with five decades of public speaking under his belt, C. Peter Wagner is the "convening apostle" of the International Coalition of Apostles. He's also the presiding Apostle over a prayer network originally formed, in 1990, as the "Spiritual Warfare Network," now called the Global Apostolic Prayer Network. Sarah Palin joined Wagner's new network the year it was formed, in 1990.

How many Christians worldwide are in Wagner's various networks? Few know, and Peter Wagner doesn't seem to be forthcoming with the information. He doesn't like to boast. But one thing is clear: Christianity is changing.

Editor's Note: This article was reprinted from Religion Dispatches.