Causes of False Missile Alerts: The Sun, the Moon and a 46-Cent Chip
Us Die said that Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself —
Preparing for his regular Saturday afternoon radio broadcast, President Ronald Reagan quipped in a live microphone
that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever" and that "we begin bombing in five minutes." Months later, The Times reported that two days after President Reagan’s joke, a low-level Soviet military official ordered an alert of troops in the Far East.
The report thrust Norad to its maximum alert level, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, but officials later determined
that the radar had been fooled by the "moonrise over Norway." Computers at Norad indicated that the United States was under attack by missiles launched by a Soviet submarine.
"The tape simulated a missile attack on North America, and by mechanical error,
that information was transmitted into the highly sensitive early warning system, which read it as a ‘live launch’ and thus initiated a sequence of events to determine whether the United States was actually under attack," The Times reported.
Ten jet interceptors from three bases in the United States
and Canada were scrambled, and missile bases went on "low‐level alert," The New York Times reported.
Here is a look at a few cases when it did: A false alarm came when an early warning radar in Greenland reported to North American Air Defense Command headquarters
that it had detected dozens of inbound Soviet missiles.