The Strange Case of Robert Salas

An account of a recent lecture given by Robert Salas, who contends that he was involved in a UFO incident at Malmstrom AFB in 1967, features a claim by him that I had not heard before, and which casts new light on his alleged UFO experience at Malmstrom and his activities since he began speaking and writing about it in the 1990s.

It turns out that Salas thinks he is an alien abductee. Here is the account as reported in UFO Digest:

After making his case for the cover-up and possible future disclosure, Salas told the story of another personal encounter with the UFO occupants. In 1985, when he lived with his wife Marilyn and their two children in Manhattan Beach, California, he saw a blue light emanating from the living room as he lay in bed. It was an unusual shade of blue and was glowing. He woke up his wife and she also saw the blue light. Salas tried to get up to investigate but suddenly realized he was unable to move.  

"I remember fighting very hard to get my mobility back," he recounted. "I couldn’t move anything. I couldn’t move my arms, my legs. I fought and fought. I fought because I had two small kids in the house and, of course, my wife." 

He tried to get Marilyn to help him but she was now unconscious. He saw someone in the doorway that appeared to be wearing a hood and had no discernible face. He next floated off the bed toward the locked bedroom window, which he felt certain they would be unable to unlock. Nevertheless, he went through the window in an upright position and was taken onboard a craft. He was shown a needle, eight to twelve inches in length, which was inserted into one of his testicles in order to collect semen. The pain was excruciating, and when Salas complained to his abductors, the pain suddenly ceased. This was followed by a physical checkup in which his back seemed to be of primary interest. He next remembers moving through a curved hallway and seeing a bright light before suddenly finding himself back in his bed.  

Salas at first had no conscious recall of most of what happened that night. He was able to piece together the experience after working with three different hypnotherapists. A couple of weeks after his abduction, while it was still submerged in his memory, he recalls working in his yard and thinking to himself, I’ve been in space.  

There are other elements in the aftermath of the experience that feel more like a dream or a vision to Salas. He recalls a large, black, oval, glassy eye with a rim around it; Marilyn in a large room being trained and "working" on a large metal box; a large tabletop screen with some sort of plan for Earth, activities and locations; and a doctor dressed in black who looks into a box containing instruments.  

The experience continues to be very real for Salas and he does not doubt that it actually happened. He said he was speaking about it publicly because he thinks it is important to take alien abduction seriously. 

I have taken some stick from James Carlson and others about Salas and the Malmstrom case over the past couple of years because it appeared in my film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings (view the excerpted video clip for the case here). As I have explained more than once, its inclusion in the film came about not because I thought it was a great case (I did not), but because the UFO researchers I polled thought it was a great case. Subsequent work by Carlson and others has shown that there is no reliable evidence for a UFO encounter at Malmstrom, and I consider the case solved beyond any reasonable doubt.

That leaves us with the question of what to make of Salas. Given that his account of Malmstrom has been debunked, we are are left with only two possibilities. Carlson and others believe Salas has been lying since the beginning, and I concede that this is a possibility. But there is a second possibility: that Salas honestly believes the story he is now telling because he has confabulated events (his confusion caused in part by the hypnosis he underwent in the 1990s), and possibly because he is suffering from some sort of psychological issues. 

Does the "alien abduction" account that he relates above provide further evidence for the psychological angle and the conclusion that Salas, whilst honest, is confused. Or does it indicate that Salas is doubling down on his original story by expanding the lie and looking for a new angle to gin up the audience (a pattern that could be seen with many of the Contactees in the 1950s, for example, or Billy Meier). If I had to choose between the two, Occam's Razor tells me that even though my default position is to believe the best about people, Carlson et al are correct, and Salas is just another genial huckster in a long line of hucksters who present ever-changing stories. But I don't think the alternate possibility can be ruled out, even if it is perhaps less and less likely as his story grows more convoluted.

In the end, however, it doesn't really matter what motivated Robert Salas or what he believes, because the Malmstrom case has been solved (which means that at least in this one case Best Evidence was a success, as its intent was to foster a dialogue and encourage people to investigate the cases further). Robert Salas is now just another act in the never-ending Ufological circus, and the same rule applies to him as it does to the others: caveat emptor.  

Paul Kimball