Mario Anthony Woods Jr. is a retired U.S. Air Force security policeman who reports a November 1977 UAP encounter while assigned to missile-security duty at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota.12 The claim matters because the reported location was part of the 44th Missile Wing's Minuteman field, where launch control facilities supervised groups of unmanned launch facilities spread across western South Dakota.34 Public evidence for the event is uneven: Woods has given detailed first-person accounts, Robert Hastings says he reviewed Woods's DD-214 service record, and no official case file, AARO transcript, medical record, or physical evidence package has been released in the sources used here.1256
Military Context
Woods told Hastings he was stationed at Ellsworth from 1975 to 1979 and assigned to the 44th Security Police Squadron; Hastings added that Woods's DD-214 confirmed his presence there and his missile-security role.12 Official National Park Service history states that Ellsworth's 44th Strategic Missile Wing comprised the 66th, 67th, and 68th Strategic Missile Squadrons, each divided into flights linking one underground launch control center to ten unmanned launch facilities.3 The same NPS history states that all 44th Missile Wing facilities were upgraded from Minuteman IB to Minuteman II between 1971 and 1973.3 An official Ellsworth AFB history describes security police at launch control facilities as topside personnel assigned to protect ICBM resources under strict nuclear security procedures.4
Woods's Account
In Woods's written summary published by Hastings, he placed the incident on a cold, clear night in November 1977 at the November Flight Launch Control Facility, a few miles north of Newell, South Dakota.1 Woods said he noticed a bright, pulsating light, briefly signaled toward it by flashing facility lights, and later responded with his team leader to a Situation-4 alarm at Launch Facility November-5 at about 0130 hours.1 Woods said the object was a silent, reddish-orange sphere hovering over or near November-5, roughly 15 to 20 feet above the ground and very large by his estimate.1 He reported that the air in the truck became difficult to breathe, that his partner became unresponsive, and that Woods tried flashing a large flashlight toward the object before losing awareness.1 Woods later described remembering figures or shadows approaching and hearing repeated mental communication telling him not to fear.15 His next clear memory, in the written account, was a radio call to their November-1 call sign and the discovery that the truck was near Newell Lake or a reservoir area, not at the missile site.1 Woods said he was told nearly four hours had passed and that other security teams had been searching for them.1
Aftermath
Woods said he filled out a UFO sighting report before sleeping, was interviewed the next day by the 44th Missile Wing commander and a civilian-clothed man he thought might be from OSI, and had skin samples taken at the base hospital from areas he described as burned.1 In a 2023 Good Trouble Show interview, Woods said he had not retained the report form or medical documentation and did not know what happened to the skin samples.5 Woods also said his partner visited him about two weeks later, discussed fear and voices from the episode, and was later transferred, but no public statement from that partner is included in the cited record.15 Subsequent interviews and summaries identify the partner as Michael Johnson, while the original Hastings write-up redacted the surname.157
Public Testimony and Interviews
Hastings published Woods's written account on September 10, 2017, and in 2019 described it as the most dramatic abduction-like case among the nuclear-site veterans he had interviewed.12 Woods later discussed the case in long-form public interviews, including The Good Trouble Show in May 2023 and Podcast UFO in June 2023.57 The Good Trouble Show page says Woods had recently testified under oath to AARO about the 1977 incident, and Woods said in that interview that the AARO interview lasted four hours and nineteen minutes.5 The Podcast UFO episode description says Woods discussed how AARO contacted him and what the 4+ hour testimony was like.7 The Department of Defense established AARO in July 2022 to coordinate work on anomalous objects in or near military installations and other areas of interest, so the existence of an AARO interview channel does not itself validate the 1977 account.8
Corroboration and Evidentiary Limits
The strongest public corroboration for Woods's eligibility as a witness is Hastings's statement that he possessed Woods's DD-214 and that it confirmed Ellsworth missile-security service in 1977.12 That service-record claim is secondary in the public record because the DD-214 itself is not reproduced in the cited sources.12 Official NPS and Air Force histories corroborate the operational setting: Ellsworth controlled a large Minuteman missile field with launch control facilities, launch facilities, and dedicated security police during the Cold War.34 The publicly available material does not provide radar data, photographs, radio logs, medical records, the alleged UFO report form, or a first-person public statement from Johnson.157 AARO's 2024 historical review states that it found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation or official review panel confirmed a UAP sighting as extraterrestrial technology, and this dossier treats that broad finding as a limit on public confirmation rather than as a case-specific explanation for Woods's report.6 The most careful reading is therefore that Woods is an important first-person military UAP witness whose account is detailed and persistent, while the case remains unverified by publicly released official records or physical evidence.12576