Kecksburg incident
The Kecksburg incident took place on December 9, 1965, in the Kecksburg area of Pennsylvania: after a fireball seen in several states, according to locals an acorn-shaped object fell into the woods. The Air Force and astronomers considered it a meteor, and according to the trajectory calculation it ended near Lake Erie; NASA's investigation records were lost.
The Kecksburg incident took place on December 9, 1965, near Kecksburg in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. At around 4:43 p.m. local time a bright fireball was seen in the sky, according to NASA in at least eight U.S. states from Michigan to New York, as well as in Ontario, Canada. In Kecksburg, residents reported blue smoke, vibration and a dull thump, and several believed that something had fallen into the woods.
What the witnesses claim
According to the best-known version, a metallic, acorn-shaped object roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle lay in the woods, with markings resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs on its base. According to this account, the military sealed off the area and carried away a tarp-covered object on a flatbed truck. These details became widely known mainly through the 1990 Unsolved Mysteries TV broadcast; the accounts were recorded decades later, from memory, and they differ from one another on several points. The "acorn" now displayed in the village is a prop from the TV show.
Official and skeptical position
The area was sealed off by the military and the state police. Police officers and Air Force personnel searched it with Geiger counters, and according to the official statement they found nothing. The Air Force concluded it was a meteor, and contemporary astronomers, including George Wetherill and William Bidelman, also considered the phenomenon a meteor. In 1967, Von Del Chamberlain and David Krause calculated the trajectory based on photographs and seismic data: according to this, the meteor arrived steeply from the southwest and probably ended in the Lake Erie area, near Windsor, far from Kecksburg. In 1991, James Oberg suggested that the Soviet Kosmos 96 Venus probe may have crashed, but NASA ruled this out: the probe's orbit had already ceased before the fireball, and the phenomenon arrived too steeply for a reentering satellite.
Later developments
In 2005, NASA stated that its experts had at the time examined pieces of metal and considered them the remains of a reentering Soviet satellite, but the records of the investigation were lost in the 1980s. Journalist Leslie Kean filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act for the records. In October 2007, the court ordered NASA to conduct a search, and at a hearing it emerged that two boxes of records from the period were missing. Following the 2003 documentary The New Roswell: Kecksburg Exposed, the case is also referred to as "Pennsylvania's Roswell."