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The Kecksburg (Pennsylvania) Incident: 1965

Sanderson seems to have been mostly interested in the path of the meteor. By interviewing witnesses of the object in the sky, he claimed that it travelled at 1000 miles an hour and changed direction.
http://members.aol.com/tprinty/ashes.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be retrieved from the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071213024812/http://members.aol.com/tprinty/ashes.html

Sanderson wasn;t an astronomer, however. Calculations by Chamberlain and Krause, who were, found a completely different trajectory entirely consistent with a meteor.
http://members.aol.com/tprinty/answer.html
Link is dead. No archived version found.
 
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KecksburgZippy.jpg
 
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Despite reminders, I still never received a reply to my various 1998 FOIA requests, including:

I request that a copy of the following documents be provided to me:

Any records pertaining to a series of incidents which occurred on 9 December, 1965, in the area of Lake Erie and other locations to the north and which came to be known as the 'Kecksburg' case.

The incidents ultimately concerned the retrieval of a space object which came to earth near Mount Pleasant, Southwestern Pennsylvania.

For your further information; on 23 November, 1965, a rocket was launched from a remote area deep inside the former Soviet Union. The payload was COSMOS 96, a satellite based on the modified Soyuz spacecraft.

Colonel Rodney S. Lusey, Deputy Chief of Staff, US Space Command, confirmed, "A booster failure caused this satellite to decay after its launch. ...COSMOS 96 was launched on 23 November 1965 and decayed on December 9, 1965, at 51.8 north latitude and 85.2 west longitude".

Specifically, I request any documents relating to the NSA's knowledge of, or participation in, the recovery of the fallen COSMOS 96 satellite.
(End)

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Here's all my Kecksburg links

The Kecksburg, Pennsylvania "UFO Crash" -by Robert Sheaffer

The Kecksburg Index - by Tim Printy
This includes
Chapter 1: A dark December evening.
Chapter 2: Excitement in the woods
Chapter 3: Science has the answer - (this page is missing, but I've reproduced part of it in this post)
Chapter 4: Out of the ashes.
Chapter 5: An earthly source?
Chapter 6: Science FICTION versus Science FACT

Chapter 7: Crash or crock?

Tim Printy's Sunlite 3.6 - includes several articles by Robert Young, including one demonstrating that the object fell in Ontario.

Kecksburg UFO Crash, Tim Printy and Steven Paquette

NASA lawsuit over Kecksburg UFO Documents -after being a proponent of the Kosmos 96 theory, Jim Oberg changes his mind. The Kecksburg object was a meteor(that fell in Ontario).
 
Here's an interesting development that we should be aware of;
In 2005, a NASA spokesman (Dave Steitz) had this to say.
The object appeared to be a Russian satellite that re-entered the atmosphere and broke up. NASA experts studied fragments from the object, but records of what they found were lost in the 1990s, Steitz said.
"As a rule, we don't track UFOs. What we could do, and what we apparently did as experts in spacecraft in the 1960s, was to take a look at whatever it was and give our expert opinion," Steitz said. "We did that, we boxed (the case) up and that was the end of it. Unfortunately, the documents supporting those findings were misplaced."
https://www.post-gazette.com/breaki...s-still-an-alien-concept/stories/200512080509
Around this time Leslie Kean submitted a FOIA request for all details of NASA's records about Kecksburg; embarrassingly, nothing could be found.

What happened? Were the records 'disappeared' in a hurry?

Apparently not. It turns out Dave Steitz was making it up (or 'speculating', as he puts it).
“My speculation in 2005 was inaccurate,” David Steitz told De Void from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
...on Thursday afternoon. “Since then, I’ve learned that was inaccurate,” he said. “I never saw any documents.”
http://not-devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/10379/ixnay-on-the-ebrisday/
Steitz's 'speculation' was reasonable enough, but wrong, and he simply shouldn't have shared it. Note that Jim Oberg believed the same thing at this period, and Steitz might have got the idea from him.

I know I keep saying this, but it was probably 'an honest mistake'.
 
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"I was a teenager then," said John (not his real name).

"It was in the early part of December and there was a little snow and a little rain, and mud."

He was called to the scene after the 4:44 p.m. crash as a fireman from the Latrobe area, to search for the crashed object.

(...)

"Preliminary searches found no bodies or casualties.

It was shaped like an acorn, laying on its side, like the acorn nut is in its shell when it's on a tree," he explained.

(...)

Although the object was later said to be a meteorite, John doesn't buy that explanation.

"It had writing on it, not like your average writing, but more like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It had sort of a bumper on it, like a ribbon about six to 10 inches wide, and it stood out. It was elliptical the whole way around and the writing was on this bumper".

http://paul.rutgers.edu/~mcgrew/ufo/to-be-merged/kecksburg2

If a meteor, why does that sound like an exact match for the Cosmos 96 satellite, as apparently depicted above?
 
Despite reminders, I still never received a reply to my various 1998 FOIA requests, including:

I request that a copy of the following documents be provided to me:

Any records pertaining to a series of incidents which occurred on 9 December, 1965, in the area of Lake Erie and other locations to the north and which came to be known as the 'Kecksburg' case.

The incidents ultimately concerned the retrieval of a space object which came to earth near Mount Pleasant, Southwestern Pennsylvania.

For your further information; on 23 November, 1965, a rocket was launched from a remote area deep inside the former Soviet Union. The payload was COSMOS 96, a satellite based on the modified Soyuz spacecraft.

Colonel Rodney S. Lusey, Deputy Chief of Staff, US Space Command, confirmed, "A booster failure caused this satellite to decay after its launch. ...COSMOS 96 was launched on 23 November 1965 and decayed on December 9, 1965, at 51.8 north latitude and 85.2 west longitude".

Specifically, I request any documents relating to the NSA's knowledge of, or participation in, the recovery of the fallen COSMOS 96 satellite.
(End)

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Are you a US citizen? If not, that may be why they didn't reply to your requests.

Edit: Yeah, I know, dumb question.
 
I think that was most likely a mundane object. A year or two after my experience I went to the McMinnville UFO Festival for the first time and there was a big presentation by the investigators on it.
 
The orbital parameters don't fit with Kosmos 96. But even if it were that craft, why would NASA feel the need to cover it up, even today? They could justly be proud of recovering this early piece of space hardware.
 
The orbital parameters don't fit with Kosmos 96. But even if it were that craft, why would NASA feel the need to cover it up, even today? They could justly be proud of recovering this early piece of space hardware.
I'm surprised it would be so remarkably intact after re-entering the atmosphere and impacting..
 
Well, some orbiting objects from that time were designed to re-enter, including satellites that carried film from spy missions. I doubt that anything these ancient cameras could reveal would be of strategic interest in the 21st century, though.
 
Are you a US citizen? If not, that may be why they didn't reply to your requests.
No problem submitting a FOIA request from the UK (Scotland), I've done so many times in the past and received responses.

Where this differed though, was the request could now be made online, which was a new initiative.

We're taking over 20 years ago, so goodness knows where it actually ended up.

Probably in someone's spam mail folder!
 
I doubt that anything these ancient cameras could reveal would be of strategic interest in the 21st century, though.
The overall evidence does seem to substantiate a meteor explanation and I'm not sure how trustworthy that testimony I mentioned is, or how long after the incident it originated - hence my query.

It's simply something I recalled from way back, because it seemed such a specific similarly.

As a brief aside, on the subject of US government cover-ups and the lengths they would go to if it meant successfully retreiving Soviet technology, which might provide a valuable insight, I remember this extraordinary undertaking!:

Project Azorian

Project Azorian (also called "Jennifer" by the press after its Top Secret Security Compartment) was a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean floor in 1974, using the purpose-built ship Hughes Glomar Explorer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
 
Some archive material, which has come to light and maybe of interest.

Firstly, for a background explanation, see:

Post in thread 'The Good Stuff Online Thread' https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-good-stuff-online-thread.40345/post-2122475

Click on the link therein and select my 2003 and 2004 archives.

Next, simply search for 'kecksburg".

Although I haven't read through it all, looks like perhaps worthwhile?

I recall it being a fiesty discussion!
 
Interesting but not really getting anywhere. The major person posting has a contemptuous attitude towards the residents who claimed to have seen the object landing, and is more concerned with rubbishing the whole affair. Bearing in mind that Witkowski didn't get access to the Polish info about the Bell until decades after the incident, the correspondence between the Kecksburg thing and the descriptions of the Bell seem very convincing. I think it was Henry Stevens who first noticed the connection. (Witkowski and Stevens have done more research into the exotic Nazi research programmes than anyone else. Even the less dramatic findings are quite eye-opening. Witkowski has a photo of one of the Nazis' miniature tape recorders, almost identical to the models brought out by the Japanese in the 1980s. Stevens has evidence that the US govt. sat on a whole lot of material of this kind and slowly passed it onto US manufacturers over subsequent years.)
 
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Interesting but not really getting anywhere. The major person posting has a contemptuous attitude towards the residents who claimed to have seen the object landing, and is more concerned with rubbishing the whole affair. Bearing in mind that Witkowski didn't get access to the Polish info about the Bell until decades after the incident, the correspondence between the Kecksburg thing and the descriptions of the Bell seem very convincing. I think it was Henry Stevens who first noticed the connection. (Witkowski and Stevens have done more research into the exotic Nazi research programmes than anyone else. Even the less dramatic findings are quite eye-opening. Witkowski has a photo of one of the Nazis' miniature tape recorders, almost identical to the models brought out by the Japanese in the 1980s. Stevens has evidence that the US govt. sat on a whole lot of material of this kind and slowly passed it onto US manufacturers over subsequent years.)
Could you provide an image of the 'Nazi tape recorder' Or a link to an image...?

I'm skeptical but willing to be proven wrong.
 
Could you provide an image of the 'Nazi tape recorder' Or a link to an image...?

I'm skeptical but willing to be proven wrong.
This is all in Witkowski's book The Truth about the Wunderwaffe, available on Abe or Amazon. I got it because of my interest in the Bell but (as is the case with Stevens' work) I'm astounded by how far the Nazis were ahead in so many areas. I shall try to scan some pics for you tomorrow, am having Blue Screens of death every five minutes! There's certainly no reason to be sceptical about this, Witkowski (arguably the best known and most productive historian in Poland) always lists all his sources. When I was last in touch with him he was writing four or five new books on a variety of subjects simultaneously (or nearly so). Get Stevens' books as well, interesting how the US slowly over the decades released certain German findings to selected companies to present as their own products.
 
OK, between Blue Screens I have managed to get some close-ups of random interesting pics from Witkowski's book. The miniature tape recorder actually looks a bit smaller than the Japanese ones that came out in the 80s, also it is reel-to-reel rather than cassette. Quality not good but gives you an idea. Interestingly Witkowski was rather unsure about the A bomb work, but the recent book by Reuter et al notes that the German sub that surrendered to the US en route to Japan with the purified uranium had on board a relation of Kammler's, implying that he had planned the surrender in an agreement with the US (via his Portuguese channel). No wonder the two Japanese on board killed themselves. It was presumably supposed to be going to the Japanese A Bomb research centre said to be in occupied N. Korea. Instead it ended up in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima!
 

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After two years being canceled by covid, this weekend is the UFO Kecksburg Festival.

Trying to get the townspeople interested again, the Kecksburg Fire Department will receive any profits from the UFO Festival to buy much needed equipment.
 
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