The Kecksburg Incident
A fireball seen across the north-eastern United States ended, some residents said, with an acorn-shaped object in the woods outside a Pennsylvania village and a military cordon that removed it by truck. The official account was a meteor and nothing found.
- Date
- 9 December 1965
- Place
- Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, USA
- Witnesses
- Residents of Kecksburg; fireball seen across six states
- Status
- Disputed
What happened
At about 4:45 p.m. on 9 December 1965, a brilliant fireball crossed the sky from Michigan to Pennsylvania, seen by thousands and captured on film over Detroit. In Kecksburg, south-east of Pittsburgh, residents reported that something fell into the woods, with smoke rising. Several people who walked in said they found a bronze-coloured, acorn-shaped object the size of a small car, partly buried, with a band of markings like hieroglyphics around its base. Within hours, they said, state police and then military personnel sealed the area, and a flatbed truck left carrying something under a tarpaulin.
The object
No occupants were reported. Descriptions of the object rest on a handful of witnesses, some of them children at the time, whose accounts were collected years later.
Aftermath
The Air Force said the fireball was a meteor and that a search of the woods found nothing. A 1990 episode of Unsolved Mysteries revived the story and produced new witnesses. NASA said in 2005 that it had examined fragments of a Soviet satellite, Kosmos 96, which re-entered that day, and then said the records were lost; a journalist's lawsuit forced a search that produced nothing. A model of the acorn, built for the television programme, stands in the village.
Explanations
The fireball was almost certainly a bright meteor; its trajectory, worked out from photographs, ended over Lake Erie rather than Pennsylvania. Kosmos 96 re-entered hours earlier over Canada. Sceptics conclude that nothing landed at Kecksburg and that the acorn grew from a search party, a rumour and a television reconstruction. Supporters point to the number of witnesses to a military presence. The case is disputed.
Sources
- Kecksburg UFO incident
- Stan Gordon, Kecksburg: The Untold Story (2005) Find on Amazon
Book links go to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, XenoAtlas earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Every book the Atlas cites is shelved in the Reading Room.