F.E. WARREN AFB

Opening

Early on 23 October 2010, launch control officers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, lost normal communication with 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, one-ninth of the US Minuteman fleet, for roughly 45 minutes to an hour. Intrusion and warhead-separation alarms were reported offline, and the missiles could have been launched only from an airborne command post, not by their own crews.

President Obama was briefed, and the story broke three days later in The Atlantic. Months later UFO researcher Robert Hastings said three missile maintenance technicians had seen an unidentified object above the missile field that weekend, and that the disruption lasted far longer than reported. The Air Force traced the outage to a specific and mundane fault: one loose circuit card.

Timeline

23 October 2010, about 1:35 a.mThe 319th Missile Squadron's 50 missiles go into "Launch Facility Down" status: the five underground launch control centers can no longer communicate normally with or monitor them. Combat crews work through checklists to isolate the fault.

Same morningThe crews trace the problem to one launch control center, isolate it and hand all 50 missiles to another center. Normal monitoring returns within about 45 to 59 minutes, depending on which official figure is used. Crews check the sites by camera and in person and find no tampering, intrusion or damage.

26 October 2010Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic breaks the story, quoting a briefed officer: "we've never lost complete command and control and functionality of 50 ICBMs."

27 October 2010Lieutenant Colonel John Thomas, spokesman for Air Force Global Strike Command, confirms "a disruption of communications", says evidence points to a mechanical part failure, and stresses there was never any danger of unauthorized launch. Early press reports had described a power failure; Thomas says there was no outright outage of communications or power, and that the problem resembled ones seen at Malmstrom and Minot in the late 1990s.

9 November 2010Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz, head of Global Strike Command, calls it an equipment malfunction in one launch control center and says an operational review board is looking for the root cause.

November 2010John Noonan, a former captain who served with F.E. Warren's 321st Missile Squadron, tells a Heritage Foundation panel that the incident was "a big deal, no matter what the Administration says". In some 300 24-hour alerts, he says, he lost contact with an individual missile "maybe three or four times".

15 November 2010The review report identifies the cause: a single replacement circuit card in a Minuteman III computer slot connector sat one-eighth of an inch short of full seating, enough to jam communications between the missiles and the five launch control centers over buried cable. Air Force Times later reported the card had not been locked in place after maintenance and was worked loose by heat and vibration.

Same report, the 1998 precedentThe report notes the same fault had happened in 1998, and that a recommendation made then, running a straightedge across replacement cards to check they were seated, had never been put in place.

September 2010, earlier contextA month before the outage, six former Air Force officers and one former enlisted man had held a Washington press conference, organized by Hastings, describing UFO sightings at nuclear missile sites from the early Cold War through the 1970s and saying they had been discouraged from talking or made to sign secrecy agreements.

June and July 2011Hastings reports that three missile maintenance technicians, speaking anonymously, saw a large, cigar-shaped object above the missile field throughout that weekend. They said it "was not a commercial blimp": no passenger gondola, no advertising, and a long, thin shape like a World War I zeppelin. Hastings says two of them, still on active duty, were pressured not to speak to the media.

Same reports, the duration disputeHastings says the disruption "actually lasted the better part of 26 hours", intermittently, with the five launch control centers going on and offline in a specific sequence. Thomas replies that the main problem was contained within the first hour, but that the affected launch control center stayed offline "for some number of days" while the Air Force made sure the fault would not recur.

January 2025Cowboy State Daily reports that Cheyenne has logged more UFO reports than anywhere else in Wyoming, 50 in the National UFO Reporting Center database since 1995. Richard Beckwith, the Mutual UFO Network's Wyoming director, says many sightings in the state happen near the base and its missile silos.

2019 onward, separatelyFurther reports describe drone-like objects near F.E. Warren and other US missile bases, a pattern sometimes discussed alongside the 2010 outage but distinct from it.

Key figures

Thomas was the official voice. He confirmed the basic facts, stressed there was no danger, and later answered Hastings directly, a position consistent with the review's mechanical finding.

The review board produced the key document: a measurable physical fault, and the admission that the same fault had occurred in 1998 with its fix never applied. That is a damning finding about maintenance follow-through, not about anything anomalous.

Hastings is the UFO investigator. Anonymous sourcing from active-duty and former personnel gives the sighting more weight than rumor, but his 26-hour figure conflicts with the investigated timeline, partly explained by the days one launch control center spent offline.

Noonan is a credentialed middle voice: a former Warren missileer who accepted the mechanical cause but treated the scale of the failure as a reliability problem worth public scrutiny.

Physical and documentary trail

The record holds a dated Air Force review identifying a specific physical fault, contemporary coverage in The Atlantic, Air Force Magazine, Air Force Times and the Associated Press tracking how the official explanation developed, on-record statements from a named former missileer and from the Global Strike Command spokesman, and Hastings's anonymous witness accounts of both the sighting and the longer disruption.

Nothing independent corroborates the 26-hour claim beyond Hastings's sources. For it to be true in the sense he means, the investigated timeline would have to be falsified or badly wrong, and no document has surfaced to show that.

One little circuit board going bad caused us to lose control of 50 nuclear missiles. I look at that and I see a very serious reliability issue.

Things you might not know

• The missiles phone home constantly. Thomas likened the link between launch centers and missiles to a BlackBerry always checking its server, with temperature, alert status and security data updated continuously. The bad card made the line "like if your cell phone was breaking up".
• One center can run all fifty. Each launch control center normally handles 10 missiles, but each can take over the whole squadron, which is how the crews restored control.
• Warren has a Blue Book past. In 1965 people at the base, including the base commander, reported a run of unknown objects to Project Blue Book, among them a large white oval. Hynek included the case in his 1972 book The UFO Experience.
• Nobody claimed the object caused it. Even in Hastings's 2011 account, his witnesses said only that the object was there; they did not say it caused the outage.
• The spokesman invoked the Constitution. Answering Hastings's claim that witnesses were silenced, Thomas said: "When people join the military, they don't give up their First Amendment rights."

Competing explanations

A specific, measurable hardware fault, as the review found: a card one-eighth of an inch out of its seat, repeating a 1998 failure whose fix was never applied. This needs no unconventional cause and rests on a dated technical report, not just institutional assertion. The days the faulty center spent offline may account for witnesses remembering a much longer disruption.

A genuine sighting near the base that weekend, coincidental and unconnected to the outage. This does not require rejecting the circuit card; it treats the two as separate events, which is also how Hastings's witnesses described them.

A UFO-caused disruption. Some researchers favor this reading, but it would require the review report to be fabricated or fundamentally incomplete, and no document, test or demonstrated interference mechanism has been produced to link the object to the fault.

Later life of the case

The F.E. Warren outage is a staple of the "UFOs over nukes" literature because of its scale and the presidential briefing. Its circuit-card finding also gives it an unusually concrete conventional explanation for the central event, separate from the sighting reported months later.

Finding

The communications failure has a confirmed, documented cause: a circuit card one-eighth of an inch out of its seat, a repeat of a 1998 fault whose fix had been recommended and never applied. Separately, three anonymous technicians, relayed through one UFO researcher, describe a long, thin object over the missile field that weekend and a disruption lasting far longer than the official timeline, a gap at least partly explained by the faulty launch center staying offline for days.

What still will not resolve: independent confirmation of the technicians' sighting beyond Hastings's sourcing, and any mechanism linking it to the outage. The circuit card and the sighting are separately evidenced threads, not one causal story.