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From: Stig Agermose <Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk>
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 02:26:22 +0200
Fwd Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 06:00:03 -0400
Subject: The Kecksburg Files - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Source: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

http://www.post-gazette.com:80/magazine/19980908ufo1.asp

Stig

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The Kecksburg Files

UFO researcher's video explores several theories about 1965
crash in Westmoreland County

Wednesday, September 09, 1998

By David Templeton, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Since the uncertain events of Dec. 9, 1965, debate has raged,
friendships have soured, rumors have waxed, theories have arisen
and Internet stories have proliferated over what crash-landed
that day in the rural village of Kecksburg, Westmoreland County.

(Image: "It's been almost 33 years and we still don't have an
answer," says Stan Gordon, who has studied the Kecksburg crash
since the day it happened. He's sitting in his "command center"
in his Greensburg home. (Matt Freed, Post-Gazette)

The military insisted it was a meteorite that was never
recovered.

UFO skeptics have held that, if not an outright hoax, it was
surely something as explainable as the Soviet Venus probe,
Kosmos 96, or an experimental American spacecraft that went
flip-flop into Kecksburg's midsection only to be recovered by a
quick and secretive military.

But UFO researchers, who say the Kecksburg incident is second
only to the one at Roswell, N.M., in terms of drama and
potential, have suggested with as much imagination as fact that
it was alien visitors who chose Kecksburg as their Sea of
Tranquility.

All of which has transformed the event that happened 33 years
ago into one of America's most intriguing UFO mysteries.

(Image: Sketch by Charles Hanna represents an object that landed
in Kecksburg on Dec. 9, 1965, thought by some to be a UFO. (Matt
Freed, Post-Gazette)=BF

The Kecksburg incident has served as fodder for episodes of
"Unsolved Mysteries" and "Sightings" television broadcasts. The
mock-up spacecraft built for the "Unsolved Mysteries" broadcast
now sits atop the Kecksburg fire hall as the only lasting sign
of the village's controversial claim to fame.

Now, Greensburg UFO researcher Stan Gordon, who has studied the
Kecksburg crash since the day it happened, has produced a
92-minute documentary titled, "Kecksburg: The Untold Story,"
that provides eyewitness accounts and claims that surely will
bolster debate.

As the cover says, "New Mexico has Roswell, but in Pennsylvania,
it was Kecksburg,"

The most persistent Kecksburg researcher, Gordon has long kept
an open mind as to what may have landed, but always has been
intrigued by possibilities of an extraterrestrial visit. He now
adds to the literature, legend and litany with his video that
provides not only overwhelming evidence that something
acorn-shaped landed in Kecksburg's lap that day, but also new
accounts that what landed was extraterrestrial.

Written and narrated by Gordon, 48, the video provides numerous
eyewitness testimonials from people who saw the fireball cruise
at rather low speeds and altitudes across the southwestern
Pennsylvania sky, maneuver, complete some turns and finally put
down in Kecksburg's woods, about 7 miles southeast of
Greensburg.

Others who went rummaging through the woods that early evening
say they saw an acorn-shaped spacecraft half buried in a gully.
Many others, including news reporters, saw Kecksburg crawling
with military personnel from the Air Force, Army and NASA that
evening, while others saw a Volkswagen Beetle-sized craft
removed under a tarpaulin on the back of a military flatbed
truck. Still others say they saw it being hauled to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Swirling with eerie music, subplots, mysteries and theories, the
video builds to a well-orchestrated climax of two men claiming
evidence that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft. One even
claims to have seen what appeared to be a deceased,
lizard-skinned creature partially covered by a sheet inside a
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base hangar.

Gordon comes to no conclusions, except that something definitely
landed in Kecksburg at 4:45 p.m. on that day. While entertaining
the possibility that the craft was American or Soviet, Gordon
provides reasons why those explanations are lacking. He leaves
the viewer with the definite sense that his research points
squarely at something more profound.

"It's an intriguing story," he said in a recent interview. "It's
been almost 33 years and we still don't have an answer. A lot of
key witnesses have passed away, are up in age, or not in the
best of health. This was the best way to have them tell their
story themselves about what they experienced."

His video provides detailed history of the Kecksburg incident
along with a long string of witnesses who provide theories,
surprises and intrigue, yet leave the viewer yearning for some
conclusion. With that in mind, Gordon asks viewers to petition
members of Congress to schedule hearings to collect testimony
and help solve the lingering mystery.

For years, debate has been escalating.

A 1991 article in The Pittsburgh Press described generally what
happened, based on various witnesses accounts that are included
in greater detail in Gordon's video.

Dec. 9, 1965, was a dreary day in Westmoreland County - that is,
until what was described as a roundish fireball appeared. It
reportedly seared the gray sky at low altitude with a jet trail,
then made S-turns and what appeared to be a controlled landing
through the treetops into Kecksburg's woods.

The fireball was seen across the northeastern United States and
was the subject of numerous newscasts that day.

Local residents headed toward the landing site. James Romansky
and others trailed the object into the woods by observing the
arc-wielding flames and bluish sparklers evident through the
trees after the landing.

The object was 12 feet long and 6 to 7 feet in diameter, and
shaped like an acorn. It had a ring around the base, just like
an acorn, that bore what Romansky described as backward letters,
like a backward J or K. Some have described the lettering as
resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics - lines, stars, circles and
shapes. The craft had no doors or windows. The metal was
seamless, with a dent, but bearing no rivets or welds.

The local men soon were chased away by U.S. military officials
who announced that the landing site was off-limits to all
civilians.

As the writer of the 1991 article, this reporter explored
whether the spacecraft could have been the Soviet Venus probe
known as Kosmos 96. The U.S. Space Command reported that Kosmos
96 crash-landed in Canada shortly after 3 a.m. - more than 12
hours before the Kecksburg crash at 4:45 p.m.

To this day, Kosmos 96 cannot be discounted as a possibility.

Kosmos 96 was shaped like an acorn and may have had the ability
to maneuver to land on Venus. As a Venus probe, it also was
equipped with state-of-the-art heat shield technology that could
have allowed the craft to survive the long, heated ride through
Earth's atmosphere before landing in Kecksburg.

But there are discrepancies. Eyewitnesses, including Romansky,
insist the writing on the girth was not Russian. Others claim
that while the right shape, it was not the right size, and did
not bear the seams and rivets that characterized Soviet and U.S.
spacecraft of that era.

In 1991, I obtained the ordinants from the Goddard Space Center
for the flight of Kosmos 96. I had James Oberg, an expert on
Soviet spacecraft who also is a UFO skeptic, review the
ordinants to see if it could have been Kosmos 96. Oberg
concluded that, based on the ordinants provided by the Goddard
Space Center, it could not be Kosmos 96 - a point that, to
Oberg's dismay, buoyed UFO advocates and has continued to be a
hot topic on the Internet.

But Oberg amended his theories in an article published in
September 1993 on the OMNI service on America On Line. There, he
suggested that the Kosmos 96 theory could account for U.S. Space
Command's conclusions that it landed in Canada and also in
Kecksburg.

Oberg says the failed Soviet probe "whose booster had blown up
in parking orbit, would have been a wonderful UFO."

Oberg acknowledges that the ordinants, which have been reviewed
by a leading amateur satellite watcher who didn't want his name
revealed, seemed to confirm the official Air Force account that
Kosmos 96 crashed in Canada more than 12 hours earlier than the
Kecksburg crash. But Oberg checked the data further. The
released tracking data, he said, couldn't be positively
identified with specific pieces of the failed probe.

"It could have been jettisoned rocket stage of a large piece of
space junk," he wrote. "The probe itself could have headed off
toward Kecksburg."

Oberg proceeds to explain why the U.S. military would lie, or at
least decide not to divulge everything it knew about the
Kecksburg crash.

"In the 1960s, U.S. military intelligence agencies interested in
enemy technology were eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile
and space debris they could find. International law required
that debris be returned to the country of origin. But hardware
from Kosmos 96, with its special missile-warhead shielding,
would have been too valuable to give back."

After all, he concluded, what better camouflage than to let
people think the fallen object was not a Soviet probe, but a
flying saucer?

"The Russians would never suspect, and the Air Force
laboratories could examine the specimen at leisure. And if
suspicion lingered, UFO buffs would be counted on to maintain
the phony cover story, protecting the real truth."

For that reason, Oberg concluded, the Kecksburg scenario
produced "delicious irony."

"A famous UFO case may actually involve a real U.S. government
cover-up, but UFO buffs are on the wrong side. Instead of
exposing the truth, they may be unwitting pawns in deception."

The other unexplored avenue to solve the Kecksburg mystery was
to approach Soviet, now Russian, authorities to provide
information on what truly happened to Kosmos 96. But in 1991,
the Soviet Embassy would only speculate that anything that
crash-landed in American turf was probably American technology
that the U.S. was too embarrassed to acknowledge.

That's similar to the response that Gordon got from the Russian
government when he posed the same question.

In May, during an interview of a Russian Cosmonaut Viktor P.
Savinykh, who now serves as rector of Moscow State University of
Geodesy and Cartography, I took the opportunity through an
interpreter to ask him whether he could help solve the Kecksburg
mystery. He, too, suggested rather emphatically, and with some
laughter, that whatever plunged into Kecksburg surely was some
faulty American technology.

But extraterrestrial claims cannot be entertained until the
Kosmos 96 theory is put to rest.

In 1962, the United States and Soviet Union forged a gentleman's
agreement that any spacecraft that landed within the other's
borders would be returned. However, the United States had
fast-acting military units that traveled the globe at moment's
notice to recover American and Soviet space hardware wherever it
fell.

The Kecksburg crash occurred in the middle of the Cold War and
the space race, and America was especially interested in
heat-shield technology. So, if Kosmos 96 had landed in
Kecksburg, there's no doubt that the U.S. military would have
been interested in finding it.

Gordon's video provides plenty of evidence that the military
would not have responded so quickly, and declared what could
only be described as martial law in Kecksburg, if it was
responding only to a meteorite.

Whether you adhere to theories of a hoax, Kosmos 96 or
extraterrestrial spacecraft, Gordon's video provides a thorough
account of the crash-landing, and the many explanations of what
happened.

To obtain a copy of "Kecksburg: The Untold Story" call
888-UFO-VIEW (888-836-8439). The video costs $29.95 plus $5.95
for shipping and handling and state sales tax.