Spodnik states that one summer night in 1966, he and a fellow Electro-Mechanical Team technician were dispatched to Launch Facility (silo) Juliet-3 to correct an electrical malfunction. For some reason, both the commercial power supply to the site and the emergency power systems had simultaneously failed, rendering the Minuteman I missile temporarily inoperable. In Air Force parlance, the ICBM had “gone off alert status”.
After restoring power to the launch facility, Spodnik and his partner began an automated start-up procedure which would return the missile to normal operational status. When they left the underground silo to take a break, the technicians’ security escort alerted them to a sudden, excited exchange over the Crew Cab’s two-way radio. As the three men listened, they learned that an armed Air Force Security Alert Team had been ordered to investigate a triggered security alarm at nearby Launch Facility Juliet-5. Furthermore, the missile there had abruptly dropped off alert status. As with Juliet-3, the site had lost commercial electrical power and its diesel-powered generator, designed to charge back-up batteries, had failed to start.
When the Security Alert Team arrived at Juliet-5, they reported that a strange object was sitting on the ground inside the security fence that surrounded the missile silo. As Spodnik and his companions eavesdropped, they heard the Flight Security Controller order the SAT to approach
Just before midnight on October 27, 1992, two members of the 44th FMMS, Airman 1st Class Michael R-----, a vehicle controller, and Airman 1st Class Jason B-----, a Minuteman Electro-Mechanical Team technician, were approaching the squadron’s operations hangar when they saw a group of bright, white lights moving rapidly in rigid formation. While no solid object was actually visible, the fact that the lights did not vary in their positions relative to one another led the witnesses to concluded that they were arranged across the surface of a very large but unseen craft.
As R----- and B----- watched, the light formation moved directly toward the Minuteman missile maintenance hangar, hovered over it momentarily, and then moved away, disappearing behind a bank of low clouds. Both of the observers estimated that at its closest approach, the object was approximately a quarter-mile from them.
Upon arriving at work, the startled eyewitnesses excitedly told those present about the sighting. At that time of night, there wasn't much happening at the hangar and it was relatively empty except for a handful of people in the vehicles and equipment sections.
The next day, another missile maintenance technician, Jeff Goodrich, also learned of the incident. Goodrich had a long-standing interest in UFOs, and was a certified field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network. Using that organization’s standard sighting questionnaire, he had R----- and B----- independently record the details of their experience less than two days later.
R----- wrote, “It was kind of foggy out...When I first saw it, I thought it was an airplane, but it moved too smooth and swiftly without noise. I couldn’t believe it. I was totally amazed. It was an awesome sight. It seemed to hover about three-to-five hundred feet over the ground and [then] it just sort of disappeared in the air.”
In his report, B----- wrote, “I noticed it when I looked out over the hangar where I work. I pointed it out to Mike, who was driving. At first I thought it was an airplane but it was way too big. There were no flashing lights like on most planes and [its] shape was like no plane I’ve ever seen. I was freaked out [and] Mike almost ran off the road, trying to get a better look at it...It disappeared behind the clouds above the base.”
Each airman made drawings of the UFO itself, as well as its position in the sky, relative to the hangar. In R-----’s picture, the lights appear similar to a string of pearls, delineating the presumed boundary of an unseen kidney bean-shaped object. B----- drew essentially the same picture, but with some of the lights positioned away from object’s edge. He also depicted it as having more of a boomerang shape.
R----- drew the UFO hovering directly over the missile maintenance hangar, whereas B----- depicted the object approaching the facility from the north, and (as indicated by an arrow) moving into the cloud bank.
Elsewhere on the questionnaire, in the section titled, Object Description, R----- wrote that the UFO’s apparent width had been “2-3 times the size of a full moon”. B----- instead described the lights, writing that each one appeared “2-3 times the size of a star.” However, in the Personal Account section, he wrote that the object itself had been much larger than an airplane and, in one of his drawings of the entire cluster of lights, he added the caption, “Approx. 300 ft. long”.
Neither sighting witness was officially debriefed. It is unknown whether the UFO appeared on radar.