(Sept. 25) -- Former U.S. Air Force officers and a former enlisted man are about to break many years of silence about an alarming series of UFO encounters at nuclear weapons sites -- incidents officially kept secret for decades.

When the group appears at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Monday, it will offer testimony about events so chilling, it will seem like a day at a science fiction movie festival.

To put you in the mood for the stories that will soon unfold, we're presenting one here, involving former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, one of the hosts of the Washington event.

Salas, co-author of "Faded Giant" (BookSurge Publishing), was a first lieutenant in 1967, serving as a missile-launch officer while stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

On March 16, 1967, Salas was 60 feet below ground working a 24-hour shift monitoring a launch-control center outfitted with 10 nuclear Minuteman missiles.

"I got a call from the topside guard, telling me they were watching some strange lights flying around in the sky, making odd maneuvers. They didn't think they were airplanes because they were going very fast, turning on a dime and not making a bit of noise," Salas told AOL News.

"A few minutes later, he called back, this time screaming into the phone, scared to death, and he said, 'Sir, I'm looking out my front window and there is a glowing red oval-shaped object hovering right above the front gate, and I've got all the guards out here with their weapons drawn.' "

The guard told Salas the UFO was approximately 30 to 40 feet in diameter with a very bright, pulsating light.

When the guard asked what they should do next, Salas' immediate response was that they had to do whatever was necessary to protect the nuclear missile area, "so basically, I was giving them permission to use whatever force they needed to use to keep anything out."

As Salas started to inform his duty partner and commander about what was going on 60 feet above them, something chilling happened.

"All of a sudden, we started getting bells and whistles going off. As we looked at the display board in front of us, sure enough, the missiles began going into an unlaunchable, or no-go, mode. They couldn't be launched -- it went from green to red.

"We also had a couple of security violations, meaning there were lights indicating some kind of intrusion at the missile sites, where the missiles were actually located, about a mile or two away from the launch control facility."

Salas said they immediately performed a system checklist to see what was wrong and to determine how it was possible that 10 nuclear missiles could suddenly be deactivated.

"We were getting mostly guidance and control systems failure, and when I called the guard again, he told me the UFO just left and took off at high speed. So I ordered the guards to go out to the missile sites, and while they were out there, they saw the object again at one of the launch facilities.

"It scared them to death again, and they actually lost radio contact while they were near the object and then they returned to the base. I later learned they never returned to security guard duty."

Salas said it was extraordinary that they lost so many missiles at the same time. Isolated mishaps had made a single missile go "unlaunchable," but never 10 at once. And never 10 at once during a UFO sighting.

As a result of the incident, the missiles had to be fixed to get them all back into launch mode.
Interesting aftermath to the story: Salas returned to the base and was ordered to report to his squadron commander where he also met with a member of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, or AFOSI. Salas first asked if what they had just been through was some sort of Air Force exercise, and says he was told "absolutely not."

"After we told them our recollection of the incident, the AFOSI captain wanted us to sign papers, saying we'd never talk about this and swear we wouldn't even talk to our wives or any of the other airmen on the base -- nobody.

"I felt a little weird about this because all of us who were launch officers had above top-secret clearance, and I asked, 'If this is classified, what's it classified as?' And he said, 'Secret,' and I said, 'Well, we've got above top secret -- why do we have to sign anymore papers?' "

But further information was denied Salas and his men.

And what does he think would've happened to him had he gone to the press with the story?

"If I went public with this while still in the service, I would've been in Leavenworth [maximum security federal prison], breaking stones into little pebbles."

In 1969, the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, its official program that investigated UFOs. And in 1985, the following information was included in a fact sheet distributed by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and this remains the official attitude about UFOs:

(1) No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; (2) There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and (3) There has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.

That being said, Salas and his colleagues maintain that if enough military eyewitnesses come forward, it can be proved that there's more to UFOs than officials have led the public to believe.

After the extraordinary events at Malmstrom Air Force base where it appears a UFO may have been responsible for shutting down 10 nuclear missiles, Salas wonders if the military has any legal authority to command its subordinates not to talk about something this significant -- something that he maintains represents a technology not known today.

The UFO "had to somehow send a signal to penetrate 60 feet of earth and concrete and also to penetrate the cable system, which is triply shielded cables, and inject some kind of a signal into the system. That's fantastic."

So, why, after so many years of keeping quiet, are former military personnel coming forward to talk about their experiences, as Salas and his Air Force colleagues are doing on Monday? He says the people who will talk in Washington are "just the tip of the iceberg."

"I believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and I think, in this instance, these objects were not constructed on planet Earth."

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