Faded Giant

About the Author

Robert L. Salas is a 1964 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy who served roughly seven years of active duty, including as an ICBM launch controller and missile-propulsion engineer at postings in Florida, Montana, and Ohio, before resigning his commission in 1971 over his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was serving as deputy missile combat crew commander at Malmstrom's Oscar Flight on the night of March 24, 1967, the incident this book is built around, alongside crew commander Fred Meiwald. After leaving the Air Force, Salas earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology, briefly worked for Martin-Marietta and Rockwell International, joined the Federal Aviation Administration in 1974 and worked there until roughly 1995, and then taught mathematics from 1999 to 2016. He did not begin speaking publicly about the Oscar Flight incident until decades later, a gap this entry's Historical Context section addresses directly, and has since become one of the most visible on-the-record former military witnesses in the UAP-nuclear research field, appearing at the 2010 and 2021 National Press Club events and, in 2020, running unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives from California's 26th district.

James M. Klotz, Salas's co-author, is an independent researcher rather than a former Malmstrom service member himself; the public documentary record of his own background is comparatively thin, and this entry states that plainly rather than inventing detail the sourcing does not support. What is documented is his working method: beginning around 1996, Klotz partnered with Salas to systematically track down and re-interview surviving Malmstrom missile-crew and security personnel from 1967, including securing Meiwald's own later corroborating statements, and to file Freedom of Information Act requests for the surviving Air Force paperwork on both the Echo and Oscar Flight incidents. That FOIA-driven documentary spine — unit histories, message traffic, and the classified Boeing engineering report this site's own Malmstrom case file also draws on — is Faded Giant's central methodological claim to distinguish itself from a purely anecdotal UFO memoir: Salas supplies the firsthand testimony, and Klotz supplies the paper trail intended to anchor it.

The book itself was self-published in February 2005 through BookSurge, the self-publishing platform Amazon had only just acquired that same year (and would later fold into CreateSpace in 2009) — a modest, 153-page production with no major press behind it, reflecting the same structural reality this site's own UFOs & Nukes entry documents for Robert Hastings's roughly contemporaneous, similarly self-published compilation: no mainstream or academic publisher, then or since, has shown sustained interest in a book built around this specific, institutionally denied claim.

Historical Context & Origins

Faded Giant arrived in 2005, nearly four decades after the events it describes, and its own publication timeline is itself part of the case's evidentiary picture. Salas and Meiwald were formally debriefed by an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent within a day of the incident and required to sign national-security non-disclosure statements, a step this site's own Malmstrom case file documents as standard practice for any anomaly touching operational nuclear-missile security in the 1960s. Salas has said he considered himself bound by that debriefing for years afterward, and it was not until the 1990s — working with Klotz to locate and re-interview surviving colleagues, including Meiwald — that he began building the public case that would become this book, roughly three decades after the underlying event.

The book's publication also predates, and directly fed into, the two events that would do the most to bring Salas's account to a wider audience: Robert Hastings's 2008 compilation UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, which folded Salas's Oscar Flight account into a much broader, 150-plus-witness project, and the September 27, 2010 National Press Club press conference Hastings organized, at which Salas appeared on camera, by name, alongside six other former military witnesses, in an event carried live by CNN. Faded Giant is, in that sense, the source narrative both of those larger, later projects draw on for the Oscar Flight material specifically, even though Hastings's own research into Malmstrom began independently and earlier, rooted in his own teenage presence on the base in 1966–67.

Structurally, the book sits inside the same small, self-published corner of UAP literature this site's library already documents from other angles: alongside Hastings's UFOs & Nukes, it represents a case where no traditional publisher, then or in the two decades since, has taken on a manuscript built around named, on-the-record military testimony of a still-institutionally-denied nuclear-security anomaly — leaving self-publication not an editorial choice so much as the only realistic route to print for either book.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's central argument is narrower and more personal than the broader "UFOs and nukes" literature it helped seed: Salas does not attempt, as Hastings later would, to catalogue a decades-spanning pattern across many bases, but to establish, in as much documented detail as he and Klotz could assemble, that a specific, real encounter occurred at Oscar Flight on a specific night, that it caused a specific, verifiable hardware failure, and that the Air Force's contemporaneous handling of it — debriefing, non-disclosure statements, and a public account minimizing or denying any UFO involvement — amounts to an unacknowledged cover-up of that specific incident rather than proof it never happened.

Salas's firsthand narrative supplies the book's evidentiary core: waking to Meiwald's report of unusual console activity and perimeter alarms, a Security Alert Team radioing reports of fast-moving lights and then a glowing, silently hovering object at the front gate, and, within minutes, missiles under his own command registering "No-Go" one after another. This site's own Malmstrom AFB Missile Shutdowns case file, built independently from multiple sources rather than from the book alone, corroborates the broad shape of this sequence while noting the specific detail Salas has always centered his account on — the glowing object directly at the gate — is precisely the part Meiwald's own later taped statement to Hastings could not personally confirm, having been resting when the first missiles dropped off alert.

Klotz's documentary contribution runs alongside Salas's narrative rather than standing entirely apart from it: FOIA-obtained unit histories and message traffic are presented to establish that ten missiles genuinely failed within seconds of each other, that a formal Boeing engineering investigation could not identify a definitive conventional cause, and that Air Force message traffic characterized the Echo Flight failure eight days earlier as "cause for grave concern" — establishing the missile hardware anomaly as a documented, undisputed fact independent of what caused it, which the book then argues the UFO testimony is the best available explanation for.

The book's argumentative throughline, consistent with Salas's public statements in the decades since, is less that the object was necessarily extraterrestrial than that the U.S. government's institutional response — debriefing, secrecy, and later shifting or dismissive official explanations — is itself evidence the Air Force took the incident far more seriously, and found it far less easily explained, than its public statements have ever acknowledged. This is the same institutional-secrecy argument Salas has continued to advance in later public advocacy, discussed in this entry's Influence & Legacy section below.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

The book's entire narrative is this site's own Malmstrom AFB Missile Shutdowns (Case File #092, March 1967) told from inside one of its two primary incidents. Readers of this site should treat the two as complementary rather than redundant: the case file is an independently sourced investigation drawing on Salas's account alongside Meiwald's, Figel's, Eric Carlson's, and James Carlson's, the Boeing engineering report, and Project Blue Book files, and explicitly rates the case DISPUTED because of a genuine, still-unresolved contradiction inside the case's own witness pool; Faded Giant is Salas's own, non-neutral, first-person telling of only the Oscar Flight half of that story, written well before some of the case file's later sourcing (including AARO's 2024–2025 statements) existed.

Although Faded Giant predates it by three years, the book's Oscar Flight material was later folded into Robert Hastings's much broader UFOs & Nukes (2008), and this site's own entry for that book documents how Hastings's subsequent research, including Meiwald's 2011 taped interview, both extended and partially tested Salas's original account.

The book only briefly touches the Echo Flight shutdown of March 16, 1967 — the more institutionally documented of the two incidents, and the one at the center of the sharpest dispute in the whole case, discussed in full in this entry's Critical Reception section below and in this site's own James Carlson key-figures entry.

This site's own UFOs and Nukes theory file situates Faded Giant within the broader pattern of claimed UAP interest in nuclear weapons infrastructure it tracks, alongside incidents at Minot, F.E. Warren, Loring, and Vandenberg Air Force Bases that Salas's own book does not cover but that later researchers, including Hastings, have argued belong to the same evidentiary category.

Critical Reception & Controversies

Faded Giant has drawn essentially no attention from mainstream book reviewers or academic sources — unsurprising for a 153-page, self-published title from a small Amazon-owned platform — and its documented reception lives almost entirely in reader reviews and in the same researcher-versus-researcher dispute that surrounds the underlying Malmstrom case as a whole. Reader reception on Goodreads is modest but positive (a 3.83-star average across a small number of ratings); the book's one detailed published reader review calls it "a fascinating read" while also noting it is "technical in nature" and "could use some editing," a fair characterization of a self-published, FOIA-document-heavy first-person account rather than a polished trade title.

The specific, substantive critical response to the book comes not from an outside skeptic but, as with the broader case, from inside its own subject's crew: James Carlson, son of Echo Flight commander Eric Carlson, has argued at length — in a self-published work variously titled Americans, Credulous and "Echo Flights of Fantasy" — that both Salas and Klotz's book and Hastings's later UFOs & Nukes misrepresent his father's and 1st Lt. Walt Figel's actual recollections. In correspondence Carlson has published, Figel is reported to have said directly of the two books: "I have read both of their books. There are many inaccurate statements and events in the books. I have told them both that." Eric Carlson has separately told researchers, including Hastings, "there is no doubt in my mind that there were no reports of UFO's and no incident at Oscar flight" — a claim that, notably, extends even to denying the Oscar Flight incident occurred at all, which is difficult to square with the Boeing-documented, undisputed fact that missiles at both flights genuinely failed. This site's own Malmstrom case file treats this dispute as genuinely unresolved rather than siding with either party, noting that Figel's own earlier, dated, pre-controversy taped interviews with Hastings describe hovering-object reports in considerable independent detail — a direct tension with his later statement to Carlson that this entry does not attempt to resolve on the book's behalf.

A second, more general skeptical line, represented in podcaster and Skeptoid host Brian Dunning's published commentary on the case, holds that Salas's account, when checked against the surviving 341st Strategic Missile Wing unit history and other contemporaneous Air Force paperwork, is not independently corroborated by those documents to the degree the book's framing implies, and that decades of retelling have allowed genuine memory drift and conflation between the separately documented Echo and Oscar Flight incidents — a conflation problem this site's own case file confirms is real and had to be carefully untangled in its own research. This site treats that critique as a serious and legitimate one worth stating plainly to readers of Faded Giant: the book's central causal claim, that an unidentified craft specifically caused the Oscar Flight shutdown, rests on witness testimony collected and published decades after the fact, and no declassified engineering report — including the Boeing investigation of the separate Echo Flight incident that the book also cites — has ever definitively attributed a missile shutdown to an external, UAP-generated cause rather than to an unidentified but presumably conventional electrical or hardware fault.

Set against those limitations, it is also true that the book's central factual claim about the hardware itself — that missiles at Oscar Flight, like Echo Flight eight days earlier, genuinely dropped to "No-Go" status in a manner Air Force investigators could not fully explain — is not seriously disputed by any party to the controversy, including Eric Carlson and Figel. What remains genuinely contested, and what this entry declines to resolve on the book's behalf, is narrower and more specific: not whether the missiles failed, but whether the object Salas describes at Oscar Flight's front gate was reported by anyone besides Salas himself in terms as vivid and specific as his own, and whether Klotz's FOIA-obtained documentation independently confirms that detail or only the underlying, UFO-independent hardware anomaly.

Influence & Legacy

Faded Giant's most concrete documented legacy is Salas's own subsequent public career: since its 2005 publication he has become one of the most consistently visible named military witnesses in the UAP-nuclear research field, appearing at Robert Hastings's September 27, 2010 National Press Club press conference (carried live by CNN) and a follow-up October 19, 2021 event, on programs including Coast to Coast AM and ABC News, and in numerous later podcast and documentary interviews revisiting the Oscar Flight case in his own words. His account, first laid out at book length here, became one of the seven notarized affidavits distributed at the 2010 press kit and one of the most frequently cited individual testimonies in the broader nuclear-UAP research literature that followed, including Hastings's own UFOs & Nukes.

Salas's advocacy work extended into electoral politics in 2020, when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives from California's 26th congressional district, campaigning in part on greater government transparency regarding UAP research — an unusual instance, within this site's own Essential Reading library, of a book's author later seeking elected office substantially on the strength of the claims his book first documented.

The book's specific Oscar Flight account also became one of the cases the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) addressed directly in its March 2024 Historical Record Report and subsequent 2024–2025 public statements, discussed in full in this site's own Malmstrom AFB case file: AARO's shifting explanations — a "cascading transformer failure" per Deputy Director Timothy Phillips's public remarks, and separately, per 2025 reporting, an unannounced electromagnetic-pulse device test — represent the U.S. government's most recent, and still mutually inconsistent, attempt to close the case Salas's book first argued the Air Force had never adequately investigated.

Within the smaller, self-published corner of UAP-nuclear literature this site's library documents, Faded Giant functions as the primary-source foundation beneath several later, more widely read works, including Hastings's UFOs & Nukes and the broader documentary and journalistic treatments of Malmstrom that followed the 2010 press conference; its influence is less in its own limited readership than in supplying the firsthand testimony that every later Malmstrom-nuclear account, including this site's own case file, has had to engage with directly.

The Book

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