Alien Lore No. 126 - The Kecksburg UFO Episode

On December 9, 1965, a large, fantastically bright fireball was seen by thousands in at least seven states and provinces. [ed's note: I saw a fireball once, about five years ago in Seattle, standing in my front yard. At first I thought, they're here. An eighth of a second later I thought it was a missile, and then I had no idea. It was a light dull green and after it was gone (almost instantly), I stood in my front yard bewildered. The next day, Seattle Post Intelligencer reported a lot of people had seen it and an astronomer posited that it was probably space junk, or a large meteorite burning up as it entered the atmosphere. I can't remember if it made a sound or not, but meteorite researchers say that any sound a meteor might make would occur long after the meteor had vanished--due to the relatively slow speed of sound... Whatever I saw looked a lot like the fireball pictured above, except it was colored a light pea-green, like a 1959 Rambler.]

The fireball (don't you love the word...and the concept?) rocketed over the Detroit, Michigan/Windsor, Ontario area and dropped reported metal debris over Michigan and northern Ohio. It caused sonic booms in western Pennsylvania and was generally reported by the press to be a meteor. However, some eyewitnesses in Kecksburg, a village 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, claimed something crashed in the woods.

One boy said he saw the object land; his mother saw a wisp of blue smoke in the woods and called the police. The local volunteer fire department members reported an object in the shape of an acorn and about as large as a Volkswagen Beetle. Writing resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics ran in a band around the base of the UFO (ed's note: a fairly common occurrence in many sightings). Witnesses said there was an intense army presence that secured the area, ordered the civilians out, and carted the UFO out on a flatbed truck.

The military searched the woods and found "absolutely nothing." Or, so they say.

The nearby Greensburg Tribune-Review's reporter at the scene wrote an article the next day with the headline "Unidentified Flying Object Falls near Kecksburg — Army Ropes off Area."

The government explanation of the fireball was that it was a mid-sized meteor, however, speculation as to what the Kecksburg object was range from it being an alien craft to the remains of an unmanned Soviet Venera 4 atmospheric probe (known as Kosmos-96, originally destined for Venus). Similarities have been drawn between Kecksburg and the Roswell UFO incident, and the Kecksburg event is often referred to as "Pennsylvania's Roswell".

Photograph of a fireball Jan 21 1999 from Czech station No. 16

of the European Fireball Network camera system

The February 1966 issue of Sky & Telescope reported that the fireball was seen over the Detroit-Windsor area at about 4:44 p.m. EST. The Federal Aviation Administration received 23 reports from aircraft pilots, first starting at 4:44 p.m. A seismograph 25 miles southwest of Detroit recorded shock waves created by the fireball as it passed through the atmosphe re.

The FAA concluded that the fireball was descending at a steep angle, from the southwest to the northeast, and probably fell to earth on the northwestern shore of Lake Erie.

A reporter and news director for the local radio station WHJB, John Murphy, arrived on the scene of the event before authorities had arrived, in response to several calls to the station from alarmed citizens, and took several photographs and conducted interviews with witnesses.

His former wife Bonnie Milslagle later reported that all but one roll of the film was confiscated by military personnel. In the following weeks, Murphy became enveloped with the incident and wrote a radio documentary called Object in the Woods, featuring his experiences and interviews he had conducted that night. Shortly before the documentary was to air, he received an unexpected visit at the station from two men in black suits identifying themselves as government officials. A week after the visit, an agitated Murphy aired a censored version of the documentary, which he claimed in its introduction had to be edited due to some interviewees requesting their statements be removed from the broadcast in fear of getting in trouble with the Army. Mazza remembers the aired documentary was entirely different from what Murphy had originally written. In 1969, John Murphy was struck and killed by an unidentified car in an apparent hit-and-run while crossing a road.

In 2003, the Sci Fi Channel sponsored a scientific study of the area and related records done by the Coalition for Freedom of Information. The most significant finding of the scientific team was tree damage dating to around 1965 at the site where some eyewitnesses said they saw the object. Air Force Project Blue Book documents indicate a three-man team was sent from an Air Force radar-installation near Pittsburgh to investigate the Kecksburg crash. They reported back to Blue Book that nothing was found.

In December 2005, just before the Kecksburg crash 40th anniversary, NASA released a statement to the effect that they had examined metallic fragments from the object and now claimed it was from a re-entering "Russian satellite." The spokesman further claimed that the related records had been misplaced. According to the Associated Press story:

The object appeared to be a Russian satellite that re-entered the atmosphere and broke up. NASA experts studied fragments from the object, but records of what they found were lost in the 1990s. This new explanation from NASA contradicts the official Air Force explanation in 1965 of the fireball being from a meteor.

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