‘Meteorites do not make abrupt turns’: When a UFO took aim at Pennsylvania

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There was a lot going on in the U.S. in 1965.

It was the year that those “outraged” by the Vietnam War marched on Washington in what was then the largest peace protest seen in American history, and it was the year people watched in wonder as NASA conducted the first spacewalk. It was the year President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Malcom X was assassinated and “The Sound of Music” hit theaters.

It was also the year in which tons of people saw a fireball streak across the sky before eventually landing with a great “thump” in a wood 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

‘The woods are smoking’

On Friday, Dec. 10, the Beaver County Times detailed how four men “miles apart” each reported the same thing the previous evening: an orange “fireball” gliding over their heads before disappearing out of sight.

Reports of the object flooded police departments in the area. One Beaver Falls woman called the police to let them know how her son had witnessed “a big ball of fire fall into the woods,” something she didn’t believe until she noticed “the woods are smoking.”

But the journey of this fireball didn’t begin in Pennsylvania, although it certainly ended there: The object was spotted above six states plus parts of Canada — leaving debris in its wake that caused fires to break out in several places — before crash landing in a wooded area in the town of Kecksburg.

Despite the strange object and the fires and the sonic booms the crash created, authorities assured the public there was no cause for panic: Newspapers like the Youngstown Vindicator deemed it nothing more than a meteor, which it said wasn’t “completely unexpected because the earth is [currently] being bombarded by one of the more prominent annual showers of meteors — the Geminids.”

Many accepted this explanation with a shrug of their shoulders before going on with their regularly scheduled lives.

Others were, and still are, a bit more skeptical.

‘Meteorites do not make abrupt turns’

“[I] heard this sizzling noise, and then I seen this red fireball coming,” witness Bill Bulebush told the History Channel’s “UFO Hunters” in 2009.

“And I watched it. And it went up towards the mountain, it made the turn, and come back — a perfect turn — and came down. It just seemed like it — it was trying to find a place to land.”

Therein lies one of the strangest themes of the Kecksburg crash and why so many have been unable to accept the official “it-was-just-a-meteor” explanation: Various witness accounts have, like Bulebush’s, described how the object didn’t just simply fall from the sky but appeared to make controlled movements before hitting the ground (“controlled” being a common adjective found within reports of the object’s actions).

In writing for the Vindicator almost a week after the incident, Ivan T. Sanderson — described by the paper as “a widely respected authority on the unexplained phenomena of science” — notes how the object was on an uninterrupted straight trajectory before it “made a 25-degree turn to the east.”

“There is no possible converting this course into any form of geometric curve,” stated Sanderson. “The fall of material on the ground pinpoints the passage. And meteorites do not make abrupt turns in their direction of flight.”

Plus — in keeping with the fireball’s “controlled” movements — this thing was slow: Sanderson points out that the maximum average speed of a meteor is about 144,000 mph (“which is to say…40 miles per second”). This thing was only going about “16 miles per minute,” or 2,400 mph.

There was also the fact there were feds crawling around the place and, therein, lies another strange aspect of the Kecksburg crash.

The Evening News simply reported how “State troopers and Air Force personnel tramped through the area for hours” only to find nothing. The Department of Defense swiftly followed suit with confirmations of the fireball being a “natural phenomenon.” And that, essentially, was that.

But the fact that there was any government presence at the site of the Kecksburg crash drew even more attention to the incident, and certainly hasn’t done much to quell longstanding conspiracy theories.

According to “Forty Years of Secrecy: NASA, the Military, and the 1965 Kecksburg Crash” by Leslie Kean — who later sued the space agency under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for how the records concerning the incident were lost — the crash site was “immediately sealed off” by the army and state police. Engineers and scientists, too, were brought in on the scene, and some civilians claimed to have been forced out of the area at gunpoint upon attempting closer inspection.

“To this day, no one knows what triggered the interest of the U.S. military, or why the Army was so intent on hiding the object that it threatened civilians with weapons,” writes Kean. “The subsequent Air Force denial that anything at all came down is even more perplexing, and has led to heated speculation.”

Those who were able to catch a glimpse of the object described it as being acorn-shaped, “a little bigger than a Volkswagen,” and engraved with strange inscriptions that were not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Whatever it was, PennLive outdoor expert, Marcus Schneck, has previously detailed how it was supposedly carted off on a flatbed truck, never to be seen again.

Many, of course, suspected the whole incident to be a government coverup, but what would they have been trying to conceal? Well, to borrow from a widely beloved meme, one theory isn’t saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.

Schneck explains how many believe this acorn-like structure to have come from another planet. The interest in this alleged Kecksburg UFO is so persistent that the area holds an annual UFO festival — complete with conferences and a hot dog eating contest — as well as a UFO store run by the local volunteer fire company.

But the theories that buzz around the incident aren’t solely alien-related: A 1998 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article said plenty of people believed it was some type of experimental spacecraft or the U.S.S.R.-made Kosmo 96 Venus probe (also acorn-like in shape). Both are entirely of-this-world and plausible, especially given the Kecksburg incident took place during the height of the U.S.- U.S.S.R space race.

“It’s an intriguing story,” stated Stan Gordon — ufologist, paranormal research, and premier expert on the incident — according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998. “It’s been almost 33 years and we still don’t have an answer.”

Will the answer ever come? Who’s to say? Government branches such as the U.S. Navy and Congress have, admittedly, started to be more open about reported sightings of UFOs (or UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as they’re now called). Heck, there’s even the UAP Task Force which was launched by the Defense Department back in 2020 that now more seriously looks into these types of reports.

Whether the truth behind Kecksburg comes to light, there is one fact that remains: Sometimes all it takes is keeping an eye to the sky to spot something that makes life here on Earth a little more interesting.