The Minot Air Force Base UFO Incident
On 24 October 1968 missile guards at Minot AFB and a B-52 crew reported a glowing object, caught on radar film. Project Blue Book blamed Sirius and plasma.
The Minot UFO incident happened in the early hours of 24 October 1968 at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. From about 2.15 a.m., Air Force security and maintenance teams at Minuteman missile sites reported a large glowing object over the missile field. Around 4 a.m. a B-52H bomber, call sign JAG 31, picked up a strong unknown target on its radar, lost the use of its radio transmitters while the target was close, and filmed the radar screen. On the way in to land, the crew saw a bright orange object on or near the ground. Minutes after the bomber landed, alarms went off at missile site Oscar-7. Project Blue Book closed the case as identified. It blamed the star Sirius and a plasma like ball lightning.
The missile field
Minot was home to the 91st Strategic Missile Wing. Its Minuteman missiles sat in launch facilities scattered across farmland, each watched over from an underground Launch Control Facility. Security teams patrolled them by truck through the night.
The ground sightings
At 2.15 a.m. a security Camper Team guarding a maintenance team at launch facility Oscar-6 radioed Staff Sergeant William Smith, the Oscar Flight Security Controller, about a glowing object. Smith reported seeing it himself at about 2.30 a.m. At about the same time Airmen First Class Robert O’Connor and Lloyd Isley reported it while driving five miles north of Grano. At 3.08 a.m. Staff Sergeant James Bond, the November Flight Security Controller, saw it to the south-southeast, some 10 to 12 miles away. The base’s investigating officer, Lieutenant Colonel Werlich, later logged the duration as 2 hours 15 minutes. Researchers who rebuilt the timeline say reports ran from 2.15 to about 5.20 a.m.
Earlier versions of this page said Isley watched the object from 12.30 a.m. The investigation records his first sighting at about 2.30 a.m.
JAG 31 and the radar target
B-52H JAG 31 was flying practice approaches near the base. The crew were Captain Don Cagle, aircraft commander, Captain Bradford Runyon Jr., co-pilot, Major Charles Richey, radar navigator, Captain Patrick McCaslin, navigator, Captain Thomas Goduto, electronic warfare officer, and Technical Sergeant Arlie Judd Jr., gunner. Major James Partin, an instructor pilot from another crew, was aboard being evaluated by Cagle.
Minot’s radar approach control asked the crew to look for the object. McCaslin saw a weak return, then a strong one about three miles off the right wing. He said it was “as big or bigger than a KC-135”. Werlich’s report said the target first moved about 2.5 miles in 3 seconds, about 3,000 miles per hour. At 3.52 a.m. approach control told the crew that weather radar was also picking up the object about three miles from them. While the target was close, neither of the bomber’s two UHF transmitters worked properly. Both came back when it moved away. The radar navigator’s scope camera caught 14 frames of the target. Staff Sergeant Richard Clark later used them to estimate a minimum average speed of about 3,900 miles per hour.
The object on the ground
At about 4.25 to 4.35 a.m., descending on approach at about 3,200 feet, roughly 1,500 feet above the ground, Partin saw a bright orange light about 15 miles away. In his AF-117 he called it a “bright orange ball of light” and said it looked like a miniature sun on the ground. The bomber passed one to two miles from it. Runyon later described an egg-shaped object with an orange glowing part, a shiny tubular section and a crescent-shaped metallic piece, and drew it at about 200 feet long, 100 feet wide and 50 feet high. Those memories were recorded decades after the event. JAG 31 landed at about 4.40 a.m.
The Oscar-7 alarm
At 4.49 a.m., nine minutes after the landing, outer-zone and inner-zone alarms went off at launch facility Oscar-7. The responding guards found the front gate unlocked and open, a weather cover over the access controls open, and the combination dial on the vault door turned off its setting, which set off the inner alarm. They found no sign of intruders. Blue Book said the lock violation did not seem related to the sightings.
What Project Blue Book decided
Werlich telephoned Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the afternoon of 24 October and sent his report on 28 October. No one from Blue Book went to Minot. Its chief, Lieutenant Colonel Hector Quintanilla, consulted the Foreign Technology Division and sent his final report on 13 November 1968. He wrote that the ground sightings appeared to be the star Sirius and the B-52 itself. The radar contact and radio loss could be a plasma similar to ball lightning. The crew’s sighting could be the star Vega, a light on the ground, or plasma. Blue Book filed the case as “Identified (Other)”. Earlier versions of this page said Blue Book left it unresolved. That was wrong.
The verdict has been heavily criticised. Ball lightning is small, short-lived and usually close to the ground. It does not fit a large radar target that kept pace with a bomber for several minutes. Tulien’s team also points out that Vega was below the horizon and to the side of the B-52’s heading. Defenders of the Air Force view note that bright stars do fool ground observers, that the radar film is hard to interpret, and that the detailed descriptions of a structured craft come from interviews given more than thirty years later.
Blue Book’s last year
The Minot case came at the very end of official Air Force UFO work. The University of Colorado study led by Edward Condon, known as the Condon Report, was published in January 1969 and did not examine Minot. It concluded that further study was unlikely to add to science. On 17 December 1969 Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans announced the end of Project Blue Book, citing that finding.
Later research
Most of what is known in detail comes from Thomas Tulien and the Sign Oral History Project. They pulled together the Blue Book file, the radarscope frames, the dispatcher’s log and interviews with surviving crew and guards, and published the study in 2011 on minotb52ufo.com. Their reconstruction is the basis of this page.