Tuesday 8 January 2019

UFO News Article:
“How a UFO buzzed Loring”


30 September 1982
(Herald, Manchester, Connecticut)

Sources: U.F.O. Newsclipping Service, Plumerville, Arkansas and AFU.se

Quote from the article (Page 1):
“It’s been almost seven years since Steve Eichner saw the glowing craft shaped ‘like an elongated football’ hovering over a nuclear weapons storage area at Loring Air Force Base in Maine.

It’s only within the last year, however, that he has learned that it was not an isolated incident, but one of a series of sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects seen over U.S. Air Force bases in the fall of 1975.

Eichner, now a Coventry resident, found out about the string of sightings from Larry Fawcett, a Coventry police officer and a UFO expert, who is investigating the 1975 sightings and plans to write a book about them.

The men discussed the sightings Wednesday night as part of a presentation about UFOs by Manchester attorney Robert H. Bletchman at Whiton Library. About 40 persons attended the meeting. Bletchman is director of the state branch of the Mutual UFO Network and Fawcett is the assistant director.

ALTHOUGH MANY years have passed since he saw the craft, the memory of that fall night, shortly before Halloween, when the ship broke through stringent security precautions and evaded pursuors with incredible speed, is still vivid in Eichner’s mind.

Eichner was a crew chief on a B-52, working the second shift, when he first saw the red-orange object that looked like ‘a stretched-out football’ hovering over the area where nuclear bombs carried by the B-52s were stored.

The object was only visible for a short time, Eichner said, before the lights on it went out and it disappeared. Within a few minutes, it reappeared over an airstrip, he said, and his crew drove toward it, down a back road into a restricted area where even they should not have been.

The men stopped the truck about 300 feet away from the object, which hovered about five feet off the ground, Eichner said. It appeared to be about the length of four cars, he said, and seemed to be solid no doors or windows were visible. It made no noise, he added.

‘It’s a weird feeling,’ Eichner recalled. ‘You don’t want to talk about it at first. You’re supposed to be brave Gls and you just look at one another and say, ‘I’m not going out there’.’

THE MEN DID get out of the truck to look at the craft, Eichner said. They observed it for about 15 seconds before ‘the base went crazy’ and security forces, with sirens and flashing lights, began to converge on the airstrip and the craft took off.

Eichner said he heard that the craft was pursued by an F-4 airplane. The craft, he said, was reported to travel at speeds in excess of 1,200 miles per hour and pulled away from the F-4 ‘like it was standing still.’

Eichner said he also heard that while the craft was over the base, communications were cut off.

The next day officials called the people on the base together and said that what they saw was a helicopter.

‘We knew it was no helicopter,’ Eichner said. ‘It couldn’t have been.’

FAWCETT AGREES that what Eichner saw at Loring was not a helicopter. Unidentified craft seen in the next few weeks at Stategic Air Command bases in Michigan, North Dakota and Montana were also not helicopters, Fawcett said although that’s what the government would like people to believe.

Fawcett said the incident in Novemeber 1975 at Malmstrom Minuteman ICBM base in Montana was particularly serious. There, a craft ‘the size of a football field’ was observed over underground missile silos. The next day, a check of the computer programs that direct the missles to their targets showed that some of the destinations had been changed.

Fawcett, who got much of his information from the government through Freedom of Information Act requests, said the government has told him that all documentation on the incident has been destroyed. He charged that the government is trying to coverup what went on at Malmstrom and at other bases — in that fall.

Based on interviews with people like Eichner who saw the UFOs and with pilots of pursuit vehicles, Fawcett hopes to write a book about the incident, which he said pertains to national security.”


Wikipedia article: “Loring Air Force Base”:


Quote from the Wikipedia article:
“Loring Air Force Base (IATA: LIZ, ICAO: KLIZ) was a United States Air Force installation in northeastern Maine, near Limestone and Caribou in Aroostook County. It was one of the largest bases of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command during its existence, and was transferred to the newly created Air Combat Command in 1992.

Weapons Storage Area

The Nuclear Weapons Storage Area at Loring once operated as a separate, top secret facility. Originally called the North River Depot, the remote area to the northeast of Loring’s property was the first U.S. operational site specifically constructed for the storage, assembly, and testing of atomic weapons.[19]

In 1951, the Department of Defense (DOD) allocated funds for the construction of an ordnance storage site at Loring AFB. The designs called for a self-sufficient ‘maximum security storage area for the most advanced weapons of mankind’. The mission of the facility would be the protection and maintenance of the weapons used by SAC. The facility was in the northeast corner of the base, and construction began on 4 August 1951. In addition to 28 storage igloos and other weapons storage structures, the facility included weapons maintenance buildings, barracks, recreational facilities, a warehouse, and offices.[19]

A parallel series of four fences, one of which was electrified, surrounded the heart of the storage area. This area was nicknamed the ‘Q’ Area, which denoted the Department of Energy’s Q clearance required to have access to Restricted Data.[19]

In June 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission released its custody and ownership of the weapons to the Air Force. The personnel and property of the later named Caribou Air Force Station were absorbed into the adjacent Loring Air Force Base.[19]”

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Aerial view of Loring Air Force Base, Limestone, Maine
(loringremembers/history-of-loring-afb photo)





Aerial view of the 3080th Aviation Depot Group area
(East Loring), Loring Air Force Base, Limestone, Maine
(loringremembers/history-of-loring-afb photo)