Belt, Montana: The Truck Driver's Dome Landing and the Dawn Search

March 1967. Central Montana was in the middle of a small wave of sightings, with white lights reported over Great Falls, Vaughn, Fort Benton and Manchester. Beneath those skies lay the Minuteman missile field of Malmstrom Air Force Base. Eight days earlier, on March 16, ten missiles at Echo Flight had dropped off alert.

Friday, March 24, 1967. About 9 p.m. Ken Williams, a truck driver from Laurel, was driving Highway 87 about 5 miles southeast of Belt. Roughly a mile to his left, a dome-shaped object emitting a bright light was keeping pace at 50 to 60 mph. In a letter to NICAP he called it "a large doomed [sic] shaped light or that of a giant headlight."

It hovered briefly, about 600 feet up. Then it sank slowly to "within a very few feet from the ground" in a ravine beside the road. A light flared toward him. Three times. Brighter each time. "I felt something or someone was watching me," he wrote. "As a very bright effecting light emerged from the object it momentarily blinded me."

Williams drove to the top of the hill and stopped a passing car, asking the people inside to call the Highway Patrol. Then he went back. When he approached, the object took off and settled back, hidden from the highway. Minutes later it rose "like a bolt of lightning" and disappeared.

Highway Patrolman Bud Nader saw a light reappear about 2 miles away, travel northeast and seem to drop into deep gullies. Cascade County deputies searched the ravine for about two and a half hours. Deputy Harold Martin: "Some of the trees are 25 feet high, and had limbs broken from them, and some bushes below them were broken. All were fresh breaks."

Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase, the Malmstrom base UFO investigating officer, reached the scene at 01:00 and judged the terrain unsuitable for a night search. "Numerous sightings" followed. Newspapers reported FAA and Malmstrom radar contacts before dawn, one disappearing toward the Belt Mountains. A sabotage alert team reported an object directly over Malmstrom at 4:40 a.m. By about 8:00 a.m., a ground search and helicopter survey had ended with negative results.

Project Blue Book carried the case as Unidentified, Case 1738 in Brad Sparks's Blue Book Unknowns Catalogue. Yet the record lists one witness, and the press accounts and radar interviews are missing from the file. Kevin Randle calls it "a hole in the investigation." Chase also reported to the Condon Committee, noting no equipment malfunctions that night.

Summarising Blue Book, Tim Hebert wrote that despite "around the clock" observation "there was no evidence that anything had actually landed," and "nothing was observed to have left the ravine." Accounts differ on speed, height and even the date. Within days the Great Falls Tribune ran the headline "Belt UFO Authenticity Stirs Lively Argument."

Belt later became entangled with Robert Salas's account of a missile shutdown at Oscar Flight. According to Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, Salas and Jim Klotz found the Belt sighting in old newspapers, and Salas decided that must be the date he remembered. Hebert suggests the March wave may have shaped that story. Chase's letter cuts against it. No malfunctions. Out on Belt Hill, the dome itself was never explained.