On December 9, 1965, a brilliant orange light streaked through the Pennsylvania afternoon sky. It was actually so bright and cacophonous that it was reported as seen, and heard, in six states and Canada, but the enduring mystery of this strange light resides solely in the southern Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg. Observers reported that it was flying so low and at such a steep angle that they thought it might land just beyond the tree line, but only those in Kecksburg were right about this. Something landed in Kecksburg that afternoon; what it was has become quite the mystery.
According to eyewitnesses - locals who rushed to the impact site - the crashed object was a smooth-metal capsule that resembled a giant acorn with strange writing around the edges. Before long officials from the Army, Air Force, and possibly even NASA, descended on the crash site and cordoned off the wooded area from the public, carting away whatever it was that had landed. Since that moment speculation has reigned supreme in attempting to determine exactly what that object was, or if it even actually existed.
UFO hunters, some who consider Kecksberg to be the Roswell of Pennsylvania, have conducted in-depth research into the occurrence from the moment it happened up until today. There are interviews with the locals who saw the supposed object in person, one who even claims he saw the scaly appendage of a creature fall out from under a sheeted gurney. Other investigators have brought freedom of information suits against NASA to force them to release records of their investigation into the downed object, something they’ve admitted to doing, but about which they have never surrendered any details. They claim the records of their investigation are missing, something that at first sounds like a cop out, but when considering that the original recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landing are also missing at the hands of our nation’s space agency, isn’t all that surprising.
The most reliable rational explanation for what lit up the sky on that winter afternoon falls firmly into the realm of the Cold War. On November 23 of that year, just a few weeks before the Kecksburg incident, the Soviet Union launched a probe, Kosmos 96, that was intended to travel to Venus and study the barren planet. However, one of the launch boosters failed and the craft never left orbit, eventually crashing somewhere in the western hemisphere. NASA and the Pentagon both claim they tracked the downed probe to Canada, which nicely falls outside US jurisdiction. Had the probe landed in the United States, the government would have been compelled by international agreement to return it to the USSR rather than keeping it and studying their rival’s technology. It is entirely possible that this probe did in fact land in Kecksburg and was quickly retrieved by the Air Force and NASA, who then studied the proprietary Soviet technology as the nation’s space experts. The probe could have even been acorn-shaped and featured cyrillic characters around its edges.
While there are a great many unexplained UFO phenomena on the books throughout recent history, this is not one of them. The idea that it was a downed Soviet probe that was studied for its technology is just so much more plausible as an explanation than lizard people ditching their craft over southern Pennsylvania after traveling many lightyears to get here. It is also no great coincidence that UFO sightings began their major uptick in occurrences once man began to venture into space in the 1950’s and 60’s, which is also when the need for secrecy between the two major space venturing powers was heightened by the Cold War. Something definitely landed in Kecksburg that day, but the strange foreign place form whence it came was an ocean away rather than worlds away.