UAPgradeUAPgrade Italiano

Case · C-023

Kecksburg: the fireball of December 9, 1965 and the alleged retrieval

Kecksburg, Pennsylvania · United States · Dec 9, 1965

In flight Civilian witnesses Photos Instruments

Disputed explanation

What happened
In the late afternoon a fireball was seen in several Midwestern and Northeastern states and in Ontario, with 23 reports from pilots to the FAA. In Kecksburg some residents reported seeing something fall into the woods; the area was closed off by state police and military, who after a few hours stated that they had found nothing, and the Project Blue Book file reports unsuccessful searches near Pittsburgh. Accounts of an acorn-shaped object carried away on a truck date from 1990; a FOIA lawsuit by the journalist Leslie Kean led NASA, in 2007, to undertake, by order of the judge, to search for documents that were reported missing.
Proposed explanation
The Air Force and the astronomers of the time attributed it to a meteor; a 1967 study in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, based on seismic and photographic data, reconstructed a steep trajectory that probably ended near the northwestern shore of Lake Erie, close to Windsor. The hypothesis of the Soviet satellite Kosmos 96, proposed by James Oberg in 1991, conflicts with tracking data according to which its orbit had already decayed, although in 2005 NASA had spoken of fragments of a Soviet satellite examined at the time. Supporters of the retrieval rely on testimony that has emerged since 1990.
Official investigation
U.S. Air Force (Project Blue Book), Pennsylvania State Police; NASA (Leslie Kean's FOIA lawsuit)

Official documents

  1. Project Blue Book – fascicolo sul bolide del 9 dicembre 1965 (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania) · U.S. Air Force – Project Blue Book (The Black Vault copy) · 1965

Sources

  1. Wikipedia – Kecksburg UFO incident (other)
  2. Skeptoid #681, Brian Dunning – “Alien Visitation and Kecksburg” (2019) (analysis, skeptical)
  3. The Black Vault – “The Vault Files: The 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania Crash” (analysis)

On this site

People 1

Open in the interactive archive The whole section: Map of UAP and USO cases

UAPgrade's entries are compiled with artificial intelligence (three verifiers with opposing roles) and checked against the sources listed above: how we work. Have a document that changes this entry? Bring it to the Investigations Unit.