{"it":{"id":"CR-KEC","kind":"crash","sub":"Alleged recovery","name":"Kecksburg incident","place":"Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, USA","lat":40.184,"lon":-79.462,"date":"9 December 1965","rep":"Witnesses described an acorn-shaped object and a military cordon.","off":"Astronomers said it was likely a meteor. In 2005 a NASA spokesperson said fragments traced to a Soviet satellite. A federal court later found NASA had not shown its searches for the records were adequate.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Kecksburg UFO incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kecksburg_UFO_incident"},{"t":"Kean v. NASA, D.D.C. 1:03-cv-02509, memorandum opinion","u":"https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-dcd-1_03-cv-02509/pdf/USCOURTS-dcd-1_03-cv-02509-1.pdf"},{"t":"NASA NSSDC: Cosmos 96 (1965-094A)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033343/http:/nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1965-094A"},{"t":"Pennsylvania Center for the Book: Acorn from Space, the Kecksburg Incident","u":"https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/acorn-space-kecksburg-incident"}],"tags":["Debris","USA"],"sum":"Bill Bulebush said he watched it turn in the sky \"just like it was controlled\" before it came down. He drove out and found it smouldering in the woods: shaped like an acorn, about 10 feet long, glowing, cracking and sparking. A volunteer firefighter, James Romansky, later said it was covered in markings like hieroglyphics, that men in trench coats ordered him away, and that the military carried it off on a flatbed truck.\n\nOn 9 December 1965 a fireball was seen across southwestern Ontario and at least eight US states, from Michigan to New York. People in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, said something came down in their woods and the military sealed the area. The official line was that searchers found nothing.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the gap between those accounts and the record. A Soviet probe, Cosmos 96, re-entered on the same day, and it became the favourite answer. But NASA's own analysis found that the fireball's path was probably too steep for a spacecraft falling from orbit, and that Cosmos 96 had come down earlier. The fireball was more likely a meteor, and probably ended over western Lake Erie, far from Kecksburg.\n\nThat leaves two stories. Astronomers see a bright meteor that excited a village. Many locals see a real object recovered in secret, though sceptical neighbours have long questioned the witnesses. In 2003 the journalist Leslie Kean sued NASA under the Freedom of Information Act to make it search its files. In 2005 a NASA spokesperson told the Associated Press that a Russian satellite had been found at the site, the very answer orbital analysis had ruled out.\n\nA replica acorn, made for a documentary, now stands outside the village fire station. Nothing in the public record yet explains what, if anything, was on that truck.","qs":["NASA's analysis put the fireball's path too steep for a falling spacecraft. Does a meteor explain what Kecksburg witnesses describe on the ground?","NASA said it had lost the original records in 1987. Is losing files on an unexplained event bad luck, or a pattern?","Witnesses describe soldiers and a flatbed truck; officials describe a meteor. Which kind of evidence should weigh more here, and why?"],"yt":"NASA's analysis put the fireball's path too steep for a falling spacecraft. Does a meteor explain what Kecksburg witnesses describe on the ground?","rel":["CR-SHA1967"],"hook":"A firefighter said the military trucked an acorn-shaped object, about 10 feet long, out of a Pennsylvania wood","why":null},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"CR-KEC","src":[{"id":null,"t":"Kean v. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Civil Action No. 03-2509 (EGS), U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, memorandum opinion, filed 27 March 2007 (480 F. Supp. 2d 150).","u":"https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-dcd-1_03-cv-02509/pdf/USCOURTS-dcd-1_03-cv-02509-1.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book case file, 9 December 1965 (Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Canada; Acme/Kecksburg memos of 10 December 1965), NARA microfilm released via The Black Vault.","u":"https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/projectbluebook/projectbluebook-kecksburg.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, “Cosmos 96” (1965-094A), including “The Great Lakes Fireball and Kecksburg Incident.”","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033343/http:/nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1965-094A"},{"id":null,"t":"Robert Sheaffer, “The Kecksburg, Pennsylvania ‘UFO Crash’: actually the Great Lakes Fireball of December 9, 1965” (citing Chamberlain and Krause, JRASC 61:4, 1967, and Wetherill in Sky and Telescope, February 1966).","u":"https://www.debunker.com/Kecksburg.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Matthew Dinkel, “Acorn from Space: The Kecksburg Incident,” Pennsylvania Center for the Book, Fall 2010.","u":"https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/acorn-space-kecksburg-incident"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Kecksburg UFO incident (used last, for the 2005 NASA statement, the October 2007 agreement and the replica).","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kecksburg_UFO_incident"}],"sum":"About two miles east of Pontiac, Michigan, someone raised a camera at the sky and took a picture of a trail of light. It was around 45 seconds after the thing that made it had passed. The time was 4:43 in the afternoon, Eastern time, on 9 December 1965, and a brilliant fireball had just crossed the winter sky above south-western Ontario and at least eight American states, from Michigan to New York. That photograph would help pin down where the fireball went. The mystery itself would unfold hundreds of kilometres away, in a wood in Pennsylvania.\n\nKecksburg is a small village in Westmoreland County, in western Pennsylvania, about 30 miles from Pittsburgh. That evening, residents said, something came down among their trees. The day after, the Greensburg Tribune Review called it a UFO. The Associated Press reported that flaming debris had started small fires in Ohio and Pennsylvania. What the villagers described went far beyond debris.\n\nBill Bulebush said he watched the object turn in the sky \"just like it was controlled\" before it came down. He drove out and found it smouldering in the woods: shaped like an acorn, about 10 feet long, glowing, cracking and sparking. James Romansky, a volunteer firefighter, described a metal object partly buried in the ground and covered in markings that looked like hieroglyphics. Men in trench coats, he said, ordered him away, and later he saw the military carry the object out on a flatbed truck. Other witnesses said they saw that truck leave. The area, according to accounts gathered by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, was roped off, and people were turned back by armed men.\n\nThe Air Force had its own view, and its file survives. Project Blue Book, the Air Force's UFO investigation office, logged sightings that day across Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Canada, and its summary card reached a two-word conclusion: \"Astro (Meteor).\" Memos from 10 December show the office fielding calls. One records a search with the State Police that \"ended at about 0200,\" and states plainly: \"They could not find anything.\" They did not plan to go out again. Blue Book's chief, Major Hector Quintanilla, told one caller the event was probably a bolide, a very bright meteor, and mentioned a substance found in Michigan that was probably chaff, the strips of radar-reflecting foil. But the file also kept a newspaper clipping. It said a wooded area near Pittsburgh had been \"sealed off for several hours\" while a radar squadron, state police and volunteers searched, and that officials thought the object moved \"much too slow for a meteorite.\" That was the newspaper's claim, filed away by the Air Force, not the Air Force's finding.\n\nThe scientific case was made early, and it is strong. Two astronomers at Michigan State University's Abrams Planetarium, Von Del Chamberlain and David J. Krause, used photographs from two places, including the one taken near Pontiac, to triangulate the fireball's path, much as a surveyor fixes a point by sighting it from two ends of a line. They published in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada in August 1967. The fireball, they found, ended \"some 15 miles south-east of Windsor,\" in Ontario, more than a hundred miles from Kecksburg. NASA's space science archive agrees: the fireball's path was \"probably too steep\" for a spacecraft falling out of orbit, and it was more likely a meteor from the region of the asteroid belt that probably ended over western Lake Erie. The geophysicist G. W. Wetherill, who studied the event, noted that a great many supposed impact sites had been reported across Pennsylvania and Ohio, and blamed \"the impossibility of estimating the distance of an object in the sky.\" A blazing light that vanishes behind the nearest ridge always seems to have landed just over that ridge.\n\nThe favourite alternative was the Soviet probe Cosmos 96, which came down the same day. But US Air Force tracking showed that its orbit decayed earlier than the fireball, and other analyses, NASA's archive says, \"definitively indicate\" it was not the source. On this reading, a meteor burned out far away, a rural search found nothing, and a story grew. In October 2003 a Sci Fi Channel documentary called Kecksburg \"a second Roswell.\"\n\nThat should have ended it. Instead, the strangest part of the case happened not in the woods but in the filing cabinets.\n\nIn 2003 the journalist Leslie Kean asked NASA, under the Freedom of Information Act, for its records on Kecksburg, on what were called the \"Fragology Files\" for 1962 to 1967, and on Project Moon Dust. A NASA archivist searched the History Office database and found one folder of published accounts about Cosmos 96. She searched the UFO files and found nothing. She recommended sending the request to the Goddard Space Flight Center. The court later found that, \"for reasons that are not clear,\" that never happened. Instead Kean received a \"no records\" letter dated 11 April 2003. In June that year NASA promised a new search across all its centres, including for the missing fragology files, and then, the court found, \"initially failed to properly act\" on that promise, apparently because of poor tracking and an office move. Kean sued.\n\nIn 2005 a NASA spokesperson told the Associated Press that experts had examined metallic fragments from the area and judged them to come from a Soviet satellite, but that the original records had been lost in 1987. It was the very answer that NASA's own orbital analysis had ruled out. In March 2007 Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled that NASA had \"failed to demonstrate that its searches for responsive documents were adequate.\" NASA had already admitted that its first two searches were inadequate. The ruling was narrow, and fairness requires saying so. The judge upheld NASA's decision to withhold two internal emails, did not find that NASA was hiding anything about Kecksburg, and noted that its searches \"may have been adequate, and may only suffer from a lack of documentation.\" He ordered both sides to propose proper search procedures. Later reporting says NASA agreed in October 2007 to search for the records.\n\nThe witnesses have their critics too. Sceptical neighbours have long questioned their credibility. Michael Rambacher, who said he guarded the object, admits he never saw it himself. The acorn-shaped replica that stands outside the village fire station was built as a television prop. None of the accounts has been shown to be a hoax. None has been backed by a document, either.\n\nSo Kecksburg holds two silences, and they are not the same kind. The first is the sky's. A meteor left no crater near the village because it ended more than a hundred miles away, and that silence is physics. The second belongs to the institutions. A filing system, asked about a December evening in 1965, first answered \"no records\" without asking the centre most likely to hold them, then offered an explanation its own scientists had already ruled out, and has never produced in full the fragology files that might settle the matter. Those files have never been shown to exist in full, nor shown to have been destroyed.\n\nEach year the village holds a festival where flying saucers fill the streets. The astronomers can say, with numbers, where the light in the sky went. Nobody has yet said, with documents, what was on the flatbed truck. If it was nothing, why did it take a federal court to find that NASA had never shown it had properly looked?"},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/CR-KEC-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Kecksburg incident, Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, USA — The model of the UFO that residents of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, United States said they saw crash in the nearby woods…","by":"Ryright","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kecksburg_UFO.JPG","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/CR-KEC.webp","by":"Ryright","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kecksburg_UFO.JPG","cap":"Kecksburg UFO.JPG"}]},"hh":[{"v":"6","u":"states","h":"Fireball seen across six US states and Ontario","s":[343]},{"v":"1987","h":"Year NASA said the original records were lost","s":[343]},{"v":"9 December 1965","h":"Date","s":[343]},{"v":"Kecksburg","h":"Location: Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, USA","s":[343]}],"hs":{"343":["Wikipedia: Kecksburg UFO incident","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kecksburg_UFO_incident"]}}