A week or two after Christmas 1978; Mills also described it as late December 1978 or early January 1979Ellsworth AFB Minuteman missile field, South Dakota, South Dakota, United States
John W. Mills III told Hastings that during an RMAD targeting procedure at Delta-3, a low-frequency hum and a large dark four-sided object were present over the site. The site, vehicle and radio then lost function; power later returned and the object was gone. Mills said another Echo targeting team described a similar event, while a wider 12–13 missile outage was learned second-hand.
Claims are displayed with the source wording, locator, relationship and verification state. Competing claims remain separate rather than being averaged into a single answer.
“Mills said a powerful low-frequency hum led him and two others to examine a starless dark area overhead; by walking around the launch site he perceived hard edges and described the object as four-sided, like a parallelogram or rhombus, explicitly not a triangle.”
“Mills reported that while the object remained overhead the site lights failed, the truck stopped, the guard’s radio failed and neither generator nor tertiary site power kept the facility energized; afterward he found the missile/site in a G&C NoGo state.”
SRC-002102 · Mills power/vehicle/radio/G&C NoGo account; uploaded PDF pages 403-405
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CLAIM-530038reported
“Mills said power later returned and the overhead object was gone, but he did not see it depart and could not establish a mechanism connecting the object to the failures.”
SRC-002102 · Mills restoration/object-disappearance sequence; uploaded PDF pages 404-405
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CLAIM-530040unverified
“Mills said two former Combat Targeting officers later told him all of Echo and several Delta missiles, perhaps 12 or 13 total, had gone down. He emphasized that they never used UFO terminology.”
“Mills said another targeting team working in Echo Flight told him they had experienced a similar overhead object, power loss and missile off-alert condition that same night, while a third team had also seen something.”
“Mills said teams were separately debriefed, that his own team intentionally reported seeing nothing, and that personnel who acknowledged anomalies later suffered transfers or career effects. No documentary record in this phase independently verifies those alleged reprisals.”
“Hastings speculates that Mills’s unusual calm near the object might reflect a “mental-conditioning field,” comparing it with another retrospective account. The book presents no independent evidence of such a mechanism.”