Kecksburg UFO incident - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Kecksburg UFO incident occurred on December 9, 1965 at Kecksburg

Kecksburg, Pennsylvania

Kecksburg is an unincorporated community in Mount Pleasant Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. It is located along PA Route 982 in a heavily wooded area about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh at an elevation of 1,209 feet.- UFO incident :...

, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. A large, brilliant fireball was seen by thousands in at least six U.S. states and Ontario, Canada. It streaked over the Detroit, Michigan

Detroit, Michigan

Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...

/Windsor, Ontario

Windsor, Ontario

Windsor is the southernmost city in Canada and is located in Southwestern Ontario at the western end of the heavily populated Quebec City – Windsor Corridor. It is within Essex County, Ontario, although administratively separated from the county government. Separated by the Detroit River, Windsor...

area, reportedly dropped hot metal debris over Michigan and northern Ohio, starting some grass fires and caused sonic booms in Western Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania consists of the western third of the state of Pennsylvania in the United States. Pittsburgh is the largest city in the region, with a metropolitan area population of about 2.4 million people, and serves as its economic and cultural center. Erie, Altoona, and Johnstown are its...

. It was generally assumed and reported by the press to be a meteor

METEOR

METEOR is a metric for the evaluation of machine translation output. The metric is based on the harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall, with recall weighted higher than precision...

after authorities discounted other proposed explanations such as a plane crash, errant missile test, or reentering satellite debris.

However, eyewitnesses in the small village of Kecksburg, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, claimed something crashed in the woods. A boy said he saw the object land; his mother saw a wisp of blue smoke arising from the woods and alerted authorities. Another reported feeling a vibration and "a thump" about the time the object reportedly landed. Others from Kecksburg, including local volunteer fire department members, reported finding an object in the shape of an acorn

Acorn

The acorn, or oak nut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives . It usually contains a single seed , enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and borne in a cup-shaped cupule. Acorns vary from 1–6 cm long and 0.8–4 cm broad...

and about as large as a Volkswagen Beetle

Volkswagen Beetle

The Volkswagen Type 1, widely known as the Volkswagen Beetle or Volkswagen Bug, is an economy car produced by the German auto maker Volkswagen from 1938 until 2003...

. Writing resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics was also said to be in a band around the base of the object. Witnesses further reported that intense military presence, most notably the United States Army, secured the area, ordered civilians out, and then removed the object on a flatbed truck

Flatbed truck

A flatbed truck is a type of truck which can be either articulated or rigid. As the name suggests, it has an entirely flat, level 'bed' body with no sides or roof...

. At the time, however, the military claimed they searched the woods and found "absolutely nothing".

The Tribune-Review from nearby Greensburg

Greensburg, Pennsylvania

Greensburg is a city in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States, and a part of the Pittsburgh Metro Area. The city is named after Nathanael Greene, a major general of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War...

had a reporter at the scene; the headline in the newspaper the next morning was "Unidentified Flying Object Falls near Kecksburg — Army Ropes off Area". The article continued with, "The area where the object landed was immediately sealed off on the order of U.S. Army and State Police officials, reportedly in anticipation of a 'close inspection' of whatever may have fallen... State Police officials there ordered the area roped off to await the expected arrival of both U.S. Army engineers and possibly, civilian scientists." However, a later edition of the newspaper stated that nothing reportedly had been found after authorities searched the area.

The official explanation of the widely-seen fireball was that it was a mid-sized meteor. However speculation as to the identity of the Kecksburg object (if there was one — reports vary) also range from it being an alien craft to debris from Cosmos 96, a Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

satellite. (see also Cosmos 96 section below)

Similarities have been drawn between the Kecksburg incident and the Roswell UFO incident

Roswell UFO incident

The Roswell UFO Incident was the recovery of an object that crashed in the general vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico, in June or July 1947, allegedly an extra-terrestrial spacecraft and its alien occupants. Since the late 1970s the incident has been the subject of intense controversy and of...

, leading to the former being referred to as "Pennsylvania's Roswell

Roswell, New Mexico

Roswell is a city in and the county seat of Chaves County in the southeastern quarter of the state of New Mexico, United States. The population was 48,366 at the 2010 census. It is a center for irrigation farming, dairying, ranching, manufacturing, distribution, and petroleum production. It is also...

Scientific articles

Several articles were written about the fireball in science journals. The February 1966 issue of Sky & Telescope
Sky & Telescope
Sky & Telescope is a monthly American magazine covering all aspects of amateur astronomy, including the following:*current events in astronomy and space exploration;*events in the amateur astronomy community;...

reported that the fireball was seen over the Detroit-Windsor area at about 4:44 p.m. EST. The Federal Aviation Administration

Federal Aviation Administration

The Federal Aviation Administration is the national aviation authority of the United States. An agency of the United States Department of Transportation, it has authority to regulate and oversee all aspects of civil aviation in the U.S...

had received 23 reports from aircraft pilots, the first starting at 4:44 p.m. A seismograph 25 miles southwest of Detroit had recorded the shock waves created by the fireball as it passed through the atmosphere. The Sky and Telescope article concluded that "the path of the fireball extended roughly from northwest to southeast" and ended "in or near the western part of Lake Erie".

A 1967 article by two astronomers in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (JRASC) used the seismographic record to pinpoint the time of passage over the Detroit area to 4:43 p.m. In addition, they used photographs of the trail taken north of Detroit at two different locations to triangulate

Triangulation

In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline, rather than measuring distances to the point directly...

the trajectory

Trajectory

A trajectory is the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass...

of the object. They concluded that the fireball was descending at a steep angle, moving from the southwest to the northeast, and likely impacted on the northwestern shore of Lake Erie

Lake Erie

Lake Erie is the fourth largest lake of the five Great Lakes in North America, and the tenth largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also has the shortest average water residence time. It is bounded on the north by the...

near Windsor, Ontario

Windsor, Ontario

.

The JRASC trajectory was at nearly right angles to that proposed earlier by Sky and Telescope, or a trajectory that would have taken the fireball in the direction of western Pennsylvania and Kecksburg. Thus, if the calculation was correct, this would rule out the fireball being involved in any way with what may or may not have happened in Kecksburg. The JRASC article is often cited by skeptics to debunk the notion of a UFO crash at Kecksburg.

However, the JRASC article has recently been criticized as lacking any error analysis. Since the triangulation base used by the astronomers in their calculations was very narrow, even very small errors in determination of directions could result in a very different triangulated trajectory. Measurement errors of slightly more than one-half degree would make possible a straight-line trajectory towards the Kecksburg area and a much shallower angle of descent than reported in the JRASC article. It was also pointed out that the photos used actually show the fireball trail becoming progressively thinner, suggesting motion away from the cameras, or in the direction of Pennsylvania. Had the trajectory been sideways to the cameras, as contended in the JRASC article, the trail would likely have remained roughly constant in thickness.

John Murphy's Object in the Woods

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. He took several photographs and conducted interviews with witnesses. His former wife Bonnie Milslagle later reported that all but one roll of the film were confiscated by military personnel. WHJB office manager Mabel Mazza described one of the pictures: "It was very dark and it was with a lot of trees around and everything. And I don't know how far away from the site he was. But I did see a picture of a sort of a cone-like thing. It's the only time I ever saw it."

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 would have aired, he received an unexpected visit at the station from two men in black

Men in Black

Men in Black , in American popular culture and in UFO conspiracy theories, are men dressed in black suits who claim to be government agents who harass or threaten UFO witnesses to keep them quiet about what they have seen. It is sometimes implied that they may be aliens themselves...

suits identifying themselves as government officials. They requested to speak with him in a back room behind closed doors. The meeting lasted about 30 minutes. A WHJB employee, Linda Foschia, recalled the men confiscated some of Murphy's audio tapes from that night, and that no one knows what happened to the remaining photographs. 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 police and Army. The new version contained nothing revealing, and did not mention an object at all. Mazza, and also Murphy's wife, remember the aired documentary was entirely different from what Murphy had originally written. (See pp. 4–5 of CFI

Coalition for Freedom of Information

The Coalition for Freedom of Information is a group which seeks the release of classified governmental UFO files as well as scientific, congressional and media credibility for the study of this subject....

's report in External links for details of the aired documentary.)

After the airing, Murphy became uncharacteristically despondent and completely stopped all investigation on the case and refused to talk to anyone about it again, and never gave clear reasons why. In February 1969, Murphy was struck and killed by an unidentified car in an apparent hit-and-run

Hit and run (vehicular)

Hit-and-run is the act of causing a traffic accident , and failing to stop and identify oneself afterwards...

while crossing a road. The hit-and-run occurred near Ventura, California

Ventura, California

Ventura is the county seat of Ventura County, California, United States, incorporated in 1866. The population was 106,433 at the 2010 census, up from 100,916 at the 2000 census. Ventura is accessible via U.S...

while Murphy was on vacation.

Cosmos 96

There had been some speculation (e.g. NASA's James Oberg

James Oberg

James Edward Oberg is an American space journalist and historian, regarded as an expert on the Russian space program.-Biography:...

) that the object in the Kecksburg Incident may have been debris from Cosmos 96, a Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

satellite. Cosmos 96 had a bell- or acorn-like shape similar to the object reported by eyewitnesses (though much smaller than witnesses reported).

However, in a 1991 report, US Space Command concluded that Cosmos 96 crashed in Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

at 3.18am on December 9, 1965, about 13 hours before the fireball thought to be the Kecksburg object undergoing re-entry was recorded at 4.45pm.

In addition, in a 2003 interview Chief Scientist for Orbital Debris at the NASA Johnson Space Center Nicholas L. Johnson stated:

I can tell you categorically, that there is no way that any debris from Cosmos 96 could have landed in Pennsylvania anywhere around 4:45 p.m.[...] That’s an absolute. Orbital mechanics is very strict.

2003: Sci Fi Channel reinvestigates case

In 2003, the Sci Fi Channel

Sci Fi Channel (United States)

Syfy , formerly known as the Sci-Fi Channel and SCI FI, is an American cable television channel featuring science fiction, supernatural, fantasy, reality, paranormal, wrestling, and horror programming. Launched on September 24, 1992, it is part of the entertainment conglomerate NBCUniversal, a...

sponsored a scientific study of the area and related records by the Coalition for Freedom of Information

Coalition for Freedom of Information

. The most significant finding of the scientific team was a line of damaged trees broken at the top leading to the site where some eyewitnesses said they saw the object embedded in the soil along with associated fresh tree damage. Furthermore, tree core

Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...

samples dated the damage to 1965. This provided physical evidence that something airborne may have come crashing through the trees and landed in the woods there at the time, which would contradict the military's official story of nothing being found. (However, one of the scientists instead suggested ice damage to the trees.) Minor soil disturbance was also found at the alleged landing site.

There was also a push for NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

to release pertinent documents on the subject. Some 40 pages of these documents were released on November 1, 2003, but were unrevealing. However, there are Air Force Project Blue Book

Project Blue Book

Project Blue Book was one of a series of systematic studies of unidentified flying objects conducted by the United States Air Force. Started in 1952, it was the second revival of such a study...

documents indicating that a three-man team was sent from an Air Force radar-installation near Pittsburgh to investigate the Kecksburg crash. (This was also reported in some newspaper articles at the time, also that Blue Book was looking into it, but had no comment.) They reported back to Blue Book that nothing was found.

2005: NASA changes story to "Russian satellite"

In December 2005, just before the 40th anniversary of the Kecksburg crash, 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 an Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

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.

Furthermore, the claim contradicts what journalist Leslie Kean was told in 2003 by Nicholas L. Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris. As part of the new Sci Fi investigation, Kean had Johnson recheck orbital paths of all known satellites and other records from the period in 1965. Johnson told Kean that orbital mechanics made it absolutely impossible for any part of the Cosmos 96 Venus probe to have accounted for either the fireball or any object at Kecksburg. Johnson also stated there were no other known man-made satellites or other objects that re-entered the atmosphere on that day.

Kean and others deem it highly questionable that NASA could actually lose such records. (However, this would not be a unique case for NASA; for example, the original tapes recorded during the televised Apollo 11

Apollo 11

In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...

Moon landing

A moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both manned and unmanned missions. The first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2 mission on 13 September 1959. The United States's Apollo 11 was the first manned...

were misplaced or reused.)

In December 2005, a lawsuit was filed to get NASA to search more diligently for the alleged lost records.

On October 26, 2007, NASA agreed to search for those records after being ordered by the court. The judge, who had tried to move NASA along for more than 3 years, angrily referred to NASA's previous search efforts as a "ball of yarn" that never fully answered the request, adding, "I can sense the plaintiff's frustration because I'm frustrated."

During the hearing, Steve McConnell, NASA's public liaison officer, admitted two boxes of papers from the time of the Kecksburg incident were missing. Stan Gordon, principal investigator of the Kecksburg incident for several decades, stated "I have no doubt the government knows a lot more about this than it has revealed to the public."

In 2008 space writer James Oberg

James Oberg

James Edward Oberg is an American space journalist and historian, regarded as an expert on the Russian space program.-Biography:...

opined that NASA was unlikely to possess any such documents since, in his view, it was highly likely that the supposed NASA team who investigated the site were in fact Air Force personnel who identified themselves as NASA personnel, something regularly done by military personnel in civilian clothes during the 1960s. He further suggested that Leslie Kean's lawsuit was no more than a "publicity stunt" for the benefit of Kean's employers.

In November 2009, Leslie Kean filed a report on the results of the NASA search. Documents were still missing or reported destroyed and little of interest was turned up relevant to the Kecksburg case. Of particular interest was a missing box of "fragology" files, reported destroyed, related to recovery and examination of space debris. Kean said the missing files could be due to a number of reasons, including a poor filing system, misplaced records or records filed outside of the parameters of the search, deliberately concealed records, perhaps still classified, files removed by NASA employees but never returned (one such individual was named), files that were indeed destroyed as reported, and archivists unfamiliar with what was being searched for. In addition, the plaintiffs had to trust that NASA carried out the search as they reported to the court, since the plaintiffs were not allowed to examine the search materials for themselves. Despite reservations about the thoroughness or accuracy of the search, Kean said they felt they had exhausted their legal remedies and ended the lawsuit against NASA.

Kean noted that some items of interest did turn up, such as NASA's general involvement in collecting space debris and analyzing it, including interest in sightings of lesser meteor fireball seen at about the same time. In addition, NASA sent out press releases to news agencies about these other fireballs. But NASA had nothing on the very widely reported and seen fireball associated with the Kecksburg case and issued no stories on it.

Kean also wrote that she tried to get more information from David Steitz, the NASA spokesperson who issued the surprising statement in 2005 that NASA had indeed examined debris related to Kecksburg, supposedly from a Russian space probe. But Steitz never responded. Kean was particularly interested in Steitz's source of information to make such a statement, since he also indicated there were no surviving records and the court-ordered search also turned up no relevant records.

2008: Discovery Channel looks at Nazi UFO link

The 2008 Discovery Channel

Discovery Channel

Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...

documentary series "Nazi UFO Conspiracy" looked at the links between the Kecksburg object and the alleged Nazi UFO

Nazi UFOs

In science fiction, conspiracy theory, and underground comic books, stories or claims circulate linking UFOs to Nazi Germany. These German UFO theories describe supposedly successful attempts to develop advanced aircraft or spacecraft prior to and during World War II, and further claim the...

, The Bell

Die Glocke

Die Glocke was a purported top secret Nazi scientific technological device, secret weapon, or Wunderwaffe. First described by Polish journalist Igor Witkowski, it was later popularized by military journalist and author Nick Cook as well as by writers such as Joseph P. Farrell...

, claims also made by Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph Patrick Farrell, born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is a theologian, scholar on the East–West Schism and the author of a number of books on alternative history, Pseudohistory, historical revisionism, Pseudoarchaeology, physics, and science....

2009: History Channel reinvestigates Kecksburg

In February 2009, The History Channel's program, UFO Hunters
UFO Hunters
UFO Hunters is an American television series that premiered on January 30, 2008 on The History Channel, produced by Motion Picture Production Inc., and ran for three seasons....

, revisited this incident, along with a similar one that happened in Needles, California

Needles, California

Needles is a city located in the Mojave Desert on the western banks of the Colorado River in San Bernardino County, California. It is located in the Mohave Valley, which straddles the California–Arizona border. The city is accessible via Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 95...

. They interviewed witnesses, used scientific equipment not available in 2003 (Sci-Fi Channel's investigation), but found no further information than had previously been discovered. The main theme of the program was of a major military presence

Military

A military is an organization authorized by its greater society to use lethal force, usually including use of weapons, in defending its country by combating actual or perceived threats. The military may have additional functions of use to its greater society, such as advancing a political agenda e.g...

and cover-up

Cover-up

A cover-up is an attempt, whether successful or not, to conceal evidence of wrong-doing, error, incompetence or other embarrassing information...

2011: Dark Matters - Science (TV channel)

An episode of Dark Matters investigated several well known theories. One theory in particular, was the alleged connection of the Kecksburg incident to Nazi research into antigravity technology, specifically known as Die Glocke

Die Glocke

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.