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]”
Related posts:
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)
