Former law officer recalls ’66 UFO sighting

Object spotted near Donnybrook

Sixty years ago on Aug. 19, 1966, a U.S. Border Patrol officer based in Minot sighted an unidentified flying object (UFO) near Donnybrook. Today the government refers to UFOs as UAPS - unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Don Flickinger's sighting and another sighting in the area near the same time brought the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek to Minot to meet with Flickinger.

Hynek, an astronomer and professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, became the nation's foremost expert on UFOs. He served as the scientific adviser for the U.S. Air Force's official UFO investigations Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, and founded a research center for UFOs. He also was technical adviser on Steven Spielberg's 1977 movie, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Recently, many of the UFO files that were kept confidential for years began being released by the U.S. Department of War.

"I think it should have been done a long time ago," Flickinger, who lives in Billings, Montana, told The Minot Daily News in a recent interview.

"They're creating more harm than they are doing any good by holding all that stuff back,” he said. "I'm really convinced in talking to various friends and other people who asked the same thing - why don't they tell us what's going on? We can handle it."

After his UFO sighting in 1966, Flickinger said Hynek contacted him about coming to Minot to see the site near Donnybrook.

"He stayed at my house for a couple days. I took him out to the site where I had this sighting," Flickinger said. "Dr. Hynek was a real fine guy and dedicated to research of these things.

"I took Dr. Hynek out there to view the markings in the ground," Flickinger continued. "Each marking was a round, kind of like a hole in the ground maybe 4 or 5 inches deep. There were three marks in a triangular position. If we connected all the dots in a circular, they were probably about 30 feet in diameter."

In a story published in The Minot Daily News in March 1969, Flickinger, who had been elected chairman of the Dakota Aerial Phenomena Organization in Minot, a subcommittee of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), said in a presentation to the Minot Lions Club that the disc-shaped UFO that he sighted near Donnybrook took off from the ground and hovered for some time a short distance above the ground before it zoomed out of sight. He estimated it measured some 40 feet in width.

He told the group he had two prisoners with him at the time and couldn't stop to investigate the point of take-off of the UFO but said he returned the next day to find a spot where three large "feet" apparently had been on the ground and the grass was bent over as if some large object had been on it.

Flickinger also told the Minot Lions members, according to the newspaper story, about a closeup UFO sighting by four highly reputable witnesses in the Harvey area, which was being checked out by NICAP. He said movies taken of a UFO near Westhope also had been sent to NICAP for careful development.

He told them most people who sight UFOs wish to remain anonymous because of the fear of ridicule by those who don't believe they exist, and contrary to what many might think, most are highly reputable people. He said his subcommittee checks out witnesses as well as the sightings before submitting its report on them to NICAP.

According to the newspaper story, Flickinger told the group the evidence supporting the case that UFOs, in some instances at least, are spacecraft does not come from sightings alone but from odors left behind (like burning brick or soap), by electro-magnetic interference, by heat sensation and, in some instances, by radio activity. They also have been spotted on radar screens.

He told the Minot Lions, according to the newspaper story, it was the sighting he and others made in August 1966 near Donnybrook that convinced him that UFOs were no myth and inspired him to dedicate himself to investigating them.

Flickinger reaffirmed in his recent interview with The Minot Daily News, "I was not a believer before I had this sighting up there near Donnybrook, but after that, you bet I'm a believer."

Numerous UFO sightings were reported in the Minot area during the 1960s, including by military members.

A few days after Flickinger's experience, an incident occurred on Aug. 25, 1966, when an Air Force officer underground at Mike Flight launch control center (LCC), in the Minot missile field, discovered his radio transmission was interrupted by static, according to a story by Hynek published in the Saturday Evening post. Military personnel topside at the LCC reported seeing one UFO in the sky and another UFO as well.

In September 1966, a UFO paid a visit to November Flight launch control center in the Mohall area.

Dave Schindele, a retired Air Force captain from Mukilteo, Washington, who was a Minot Air Force Base Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missile launch officer, said military personnel reported a large object with bright flashing lights hovering near the LCC and all 10 of the nuclear-tipped Minuteman ICBMs controlled at the LCC went off alert, causing them to be unlaunchable. Schindele, a member of the crew changeover, arrived at the LCC the next morning and was told about the incident by the crew on duty at the time. He said this was not just an ordinary crew changeover because the crew they relieved had just been involved in a very critical national security incident. He and those who were at the LCC the night of the incident or knew about the 1966 incident were told by the Air Force to never talk about it and that it never happened, according to Schindele.

Schindele was stationed at Minot AFB from July 1965-May 1968.

"During that time in Minot, many of us experienced unworldly incidents at Minuteman facilities but we were all individually instructed to keep silent. We never realized at the time that others among us were also experiencing incidents, but now the truth is becoming known," Schindele told The Minot Daily News in a 2017 interview.

On Dec. 6, 1966, the front page headline of The Minot Daily News read: "Minot Launch Control Center 'Saucer' Cited As One Indication of Outer Space Visitors." The story told about UFO incidents in the Minot area.

"You (Minot Daily News) actually wrote it up but the other media had no interest in it. They were not going to touch it. The rest of the entire world media did nothing. So The Minot Daily News has a historical place in this," Steve Bassett, UFO lobbyist and executive director of Paradigm Research Center, said in an interview with The Minot Daily News on Dec. 26, 2024.

After discovering in 2010 that other missileers with him at Minot also experienced associated incidents, Schindele decided to conduct extensive research on the Air Force cover-up to find out why the Air Force told them not to talk about what they saw or knew. He wrote a book about the incident, "It Never Happened, Volume I: U.S. Air Force UFO Cover-up Revealed," a six and a half year project published in 2017. Schindele is working on a second volume of the book.

Other incidents were reported, including an incident on Oct. 24, 1968, when military members in the Minot missile field observed one and at times two UFOs and a UFO was observed on a B-52’s radarscope when the plane was returning to base. Pilots also observed a UFO ahead of the plane for a few minutes, according to reports.

Schindele has met with military members with UFO experiences, including Robert Salas, a former Air Force missile officer who was involved in a similar incident at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, missile field in March 1967 when missiles were disabled in the missile field.

An effort has been under way for some time for the federal government to release the UFO files.

Flickinger left the U.S. Border Patrol in 1970 and went to work for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). He retired from the ATF in 1995. He said he's been back to North Dakota once since he worked in Minot.

"I was doing a background check (for his ATF job) on an individual," he said.

He said he doesn't keep up so much with UFO incidents and other related information since he retired.

"If something comes up in this area, I try to look into it a little bit, but I'm not as active in that as much as I was back then," he said.