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- Visitors from outer space seem to love Kecksburg, Pa.
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- It was about 4:45 in the afternoon and Bill Bulebush
was in his driveway, flat on his back under the dashboard of his Corvair,
his head beneath the steering wheel, the tools he needed to install a CB
radio in his hands, when he was startled by a strange, sizzling noise overhead.
He craned his neck and looked through the windshield and saw a bright light
speeding across the clouds so fast it seemed to set the sky on fire.
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- "I got out of the car and walked out toward the
road where I could watch it," says Bulebush, 74, recalling the afternoon
of Dec. 9, 1965.
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- "I went down over the hill toward the mountain,
then I seen it coming back. It was like it couldn't make up its mind what
it wanted to do. This thing floated and made a U-turn and headed into the
ravine. I got in my car and took off over the back road."
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- That back road - a lightly traveled two-lane stretch
then called Kuhn's Road and later rechristened Meteor Road - winds above
the farmland and woods that make up Kecksburg, Pa., a crossroads community
in Westmoreland County about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
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- Bulebush parked his car, got out and looked down into
the valley to see where the thing had landed. The landscape was familiar.
Bulebush had lived there his entire life.
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- He grabbed a flashlight and walked down the hill into
the woods. The tops of trees had been sheared in the same direction as
the fireball's path. He smelled sulfur. Then he came upon it: an acorn-shaped
object about the size of a Volkswagen bug, burnt orange in color, with
a raised ring around the back and markings that looked like backward letters.
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- Frightened, his heart pounding wildly, Bulebush stood
behind a tree, staring, expecting something to jump out - although he couldn't
see how anything could possibly exit the strange capsule.
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- "There was no doors, no seams, no nothing,"
he says. "It laid there and arced for a while, like it was cooling
down. If I'd had my camera, that picture would be worth a million dollars."
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- When other people started to rush into the woods, Bulebush
decided to leave. He was afraid of being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. "I didn't want to be running around with this light shining
and get shot for no reason," he recalls.
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- In the early darkness he made his way back to his car,
went home and told his wife what he had seen. "She asked me, Did I
stop at the club? Was I drinking? I said, No, no, I wasn't drinking. She
said, You better not say nothing to anybody."
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- Bulebush followed her advice for nearly 25 years. Until
one day when out of the blue Bulebush got a phone call from a man who said
he'd spent decades researching UFOs and the mystery of Kecksburg.
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-
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- Plenty of books have been written about Roswell, N.M.
Hollywood has made movies. There's even a television series about the spot
where an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Pieces of spacecraft were recovered,
bodies were found and for the past half-century the American government
has been covering up the truth. That, of course, is the legend, but it's
a legend that has spurred a healthy tourism industry in the desert town
and fueled a generation of conspiracy theorists.
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- Kecksburg never gained the same notoriety as Roswell.
But for people who believe the government is not telling all it knows about
unidentified flying objects, what happened there ranks just behind Roswell
in American lore. And whether or not a visit from outer space occurred,
one thing is indisputable: What happened in Kecksburg changed the small
community forever.
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- "A lot of people don't talk to each other anymore
on account of it," Bulebush says. "There's two people I went
to school with, they have nothing to do with me. But I don't care at all.
I know what I seen, and I ain't going to change my mind."
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- "You can still get into a fistfight over it to this
day," adds Gene Lisker, 55, a real estate agent who has lived in the
area most of his life.
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- Kecksburg is impossibly rural, farming country. Its up-and-down
terrain is quiet. It has no stoplights, no post office and only about 150
people. It began in the 1800s as Ridgeview. Then the Keck family arrived
and in 1907 opened a bottling plant where 100 people found jobs making
pop.
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- "They had Big Stick ginger ale in a green bottle,"
says Ed Myers, who has spent all of his 74 years in Kecksburg and whose
dad worked the filters at the plant. "It was good ginger ale."
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- There are still some Keck descendants in the area, but
the plant is no more. Pepsi took it over. Then Pepsi left and now the plant
is occupied by a company that makes pop-up tent trailers.
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- Just about the only other spot to work in Kecksburg is
the store at Hutter's Dairy Farm, where you can get a quart of milk and
some lunch meat. For serious grocery shopping you've got to drive four
miles to Mount Pleasant, or seven miles to Latrobe (pronounced LAY-trobe).
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- When the 25th anniversary of the Kecksburg incident rolled
around in 1990, a crew from the television program Unsolved Mysteries arrived.
It spent a week in town re-creating the events of that long-ago Dec. 9,
complete with a model of the mysterious craft. Some would-be entrepreneurs
took a shot at earning a little money off the publicity, but after a few
T-shirts and hats were sold things got back to normal. Which in Kecksburg
means not normal at all.
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- Ed Myers was the town fire chief in December 1965. His
first cousin, Jim Mayes, was the assistant fire chief. Shortly after the
incident, Mayes talked to the press about seeing blue lights in the woods
and told people he escorted the military to the capsule. Myers says Mayes
had no business talking to reporters or anybody else about what happened
that evening. Actually, Myers says, he should have done the talking because
he was the fire chief. And here's what he would have said he saw: nothing.
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- Myers contends the whole crazy thing started when a woman
called police to say her young sons might have seen a crash. There was
a search. A couple of military guys from a nearby base arrived to help.
No one found anything. End of story.
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- But, of course, it turned out to be just the beginning.
The number of military men swarming into Kecksburg kept growing as the
story got told and retold. People swore the soldiers were armed and that
they threatened to shoot folks who got in their way. Some said they saw
flashing lights and smoke in the woods. Some talked about a convoy of military
vehicles and hushed meetings among officials. There were stories of men
in space suits carrying boxes into the woods.
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- "I never saw anything," Myers declares. "And
I was there all night. You had a few that know it didn't happen, and they
talked anyway. See, I wouldn't go along with it."
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- To this day Myers believes people got so carried away
that they started making up tales, thinking they'd get on television, hoping
to cash in.
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- "I know one guy, he got $300 just for driving his
old car in the movie," he says, referring to the Unsolved Mysteries
show. "We was a pretty close-knit area. But it's not anymore."
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- What happened on Dec. 9, 1965 changed lives. It made
enemies of friends. It ruptured families. Jim Mayes died five years ago.
By then he and Myers had long since stopped speaking to one another.
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- The debate has endured because some swear they saw something
and want validation, and because an opposite camp disputes all accounts
of alien arrivals, finding them embarrassing to the community. And because
a man named Stan Gordon will not let it go.
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- Stan Gordon, 50, sells electronics - televisions, radios,
video equipment - but that's just his job. His letterhead identifies him
in this way: "Researching the Unexplained Since 1959."
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- The date points back to the year he got a radio as a
birthday present. It was Halloween eve and he was 10, living in Greensburg,
Pa., in a house around the corner from his home today. He tuned in a program
about ghosts and goblins and was hooked. He dashed to the library, took
notes on the mysteries of unexplained phenomena and started a scrapbook,
embarking on a lifetime of exploring events that seem to defy reason.
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- Though fascinated by mysteries - everything from UFOs
to Bigfoot - Gordon says he is not fanatical. He hunts for rational explanations,
and that's why in 1981 he founded the Pennsylvania Association for the
Study of the Unexplained, a clearinghouse for reports of strange encounters.
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- "The majority of the cases are found to have a natural
or man-made source," Gordon says. But a percentage of cases can't
be easily explained. "And that's what makes it so intriguing."
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- Kecksburg is his biggest research project yet and, he
says, one of the most interesting because so many things remain unknown.
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- Skeptics, Gordon says, need to stop mocking and concentrate
on the information he's gathered over the past 35 years: Hundreds of people
from Canada to Pennsylvania reported a fireball in the sky. Airline pilots
believed a plane was going down that wintry evening. Witnesses said they
found an odd-shaped craft partially buried in the woods. A Soviet space
probe fell out of orbit on the very same day. People claimed they were
told by military personnel not to talk about what they saw.
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- And after considering all that, try, just try, Gordon
says, to believe the government's "official" story that nothing
of significance occurred.
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- "Something did happen that day in Kecksburg and
we still don't know what it is," he insists.
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-
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- For more than two decades Gordon collected dribs and
drabs of information. He located witnesses, some who would talk, some who
would not.
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- In the 1980s one of Gordon's associates obtained a copy
of the Project Blue Book report on Kecksburg. Project Blue Book, which
operated from 1947 to 1969, was headquartered at what is now Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Ohio. It was an official arm of the Air Force charged
with investigating UFOs. Spurred by sightings reported by military pilots,
the investigations were taken seriously for the first few years. But by
the early 1950s - the infancy of the Cold War - the Air Force decided that
looking into every UFO report was taking too much time.
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- Nevertheless, during the project's 22 years, 12,750 sightings
were investigated; 587 were marked "unidentified."
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- To those who believed the government was hiding something
about Kecksburg, the inclusion in the Blue Book gave the Pennsylvania incident
some legitimacy. But the Blue Book report discounted the entire thing.
The records, now in the National Archives in College Park, Md., indicate
that an investigation into the Kecksburg incident was performed, that a
few military personnel assisted local authorities, and that what people
saw was most likely a meteorite disintegrating as it fell toward Earth.
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- Gordon calls the Blue Book finding fiction.
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- "Blue Book said there were three Air Force personnel
involved," Gordon says. "Well, we know there were more than three
from all the eyewitness accounts. Blue Book said the search continued to
2 a.m. and nothing was found. People have told us there were military people
down there the next day.
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- "The question is, where did these military people
come from? You can't find any of the records for it. We've been searching
for years."
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- In 1987 Gordon and some assistants set up a display about
UFOs in a local shopping mall. One of those who passed the exhibit was
Jim Romansky. He overheard a couple of people chatting, walked over and
interrupted them.
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- "Excuse me," he said. "You're talking
about Kecksburg, aren't you?"
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- That's right, he was told.
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- "Well," Romansky said, "I was there that
night."
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- "I was just turning 18 and I was with the Lloydsville
Volunteer Fire Department," Romansky, 54, says, retelling the story
from his home in Derry, Pa. "I had seen something in the sky earlier
that day and I thought in my mind, `Wow, a meteorite.' But I didn't pay
it no attention.
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- "Not long after that the fire whistle went off,
so I run up there. We received a report it was a downed aircraft. Myself
and four or five other guys jumped into a truck and took off to Kecksburg,
about 18 miles away."
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- When Romansky and his crew arrived at the Kecksburg fire
station on Water Street, dozens of other volunteers were already on the
scene, he says. One man laid out a large grid map and assigned teams to
search different areas. Romansky was driven out to a field.
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- "We was into our grid area and we heard on our walkie-talkies
that another team found where the object was and it wasn't so far from
where we were, so we hightailed it over into a hollow and came upon the
object.
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- "There were eight, nine, 10 guys there, standing
around looking at this thing. I stopped and looked and said, `Whoa, this
is no aircraft. What the hell is it?'
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- "It looked like a giant acorn. It was oblong and
had a bumper around it and in back it was perfectly flat. I saw no doors,
no motor, no windows, no seams, no rivets.
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- "But there were two unique things: one was the color,
a golden bronze. It was a weird color. And the other thing was on this
bumper . . . it looked like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rectangles,
lines and circles."
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- Soon afterward, Romansky says, a couple of guys came
and ordered everyone out. One carried a small device that Romansky thought
was a Geiger counter. They were followed by a contingent of military men
who announced the area was being quarantined. Romansky and the others went
back to the Kecksburg fire station. There, he says, it was "wall-to-wall
military."
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- By this time the roads were jammed with news media, onlookers
and state police, Romansky says. But no one was allowed back into the woods.
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- "We just hung around, and then we saw this big flatbed
truck go into the woods and it's there an hour, hour and a half. And then
it comes out, hell-bent for leather, and on the back of that truck was
the object, covered by a tarpaulin, maybe 15 foot long, eight to 10 foot
in diameter, big enough for a man to stand in."
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- The next day, Dec. 10, the newspapers were filled with
the story. "Unidentified Flying Object Falls Near Kecksburg"
read the headline in the Greensburg Tribune-Review. The article told how
a fiery object was seen streaking across the sky by people in Canada and
seven American states. A pilot from Ohio watched a fireball. A reporter
from Erie said it left a trail of smoke. Coast Guard officials reported
the object over Detroit.
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- Officials, the paper said, searched a 15-square mile
area. Capt. Joseph Dussia of the state police at Greensburg was quoted
as saying the search "uncovered absolutely nothing." He attributed
the story of a crash to the "imagination" of two young boys.
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- "About the only thing that wasn't reported during
the excitement," Dussia added, was "little green men getting
out of a spaceship."
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- A spokesman for the 662d Radar Squadron at Oakdale, Allegheny
County, which was called into the investigation, said no object was found.
And Don Hays, who was at his farmhouse and about as close as anyone to
the area where the object was supposed to have come down, told the newspaper
he saw nothing.
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- On Dec. 11, two days after the event, the investigation
was officially closed. Scientists and astronomers opined that the object
was a disintegrated meteor and that, because it fell at sunset, observers
could have been fooled into thinking it was close by when it was likely
hundreds of miles away.
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- That's one reason Jim Romansky, like Bulebush, decided
to stop talking about it. "I felt if you came out and said something,
they'd send for the white wagon and put you away," he says. "But
I know something happened."
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- So he kept his mouth shut for almost 25 years. Until
that day he decided to go to the mall.
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- The Unsolved Mysteries episode aired in September 1990,
despite an attempt to stop the broadcast by about 50 local residents who
signed a petition addressed to the network.
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- After the show Gordon got a lot of calls. A truck driver
said he remembered numerous conversations with other truckers over CB radios
about a large military convoy on the highway heading toward Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base. And a man Gordon identifies only as Myron piped up with
what is perhaps the most unusual tale.
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- Myron told Gordon he'd delivered a load of bricks to
Wright-Patterson a few days after the incident, and while at the base had
looked into a large building. Inside, he said, he saw an acorn-shaped object
with unusual markings partially covered by a curtain. On a table nearby,
covered by a sheet, was a body with a hand sticking out. He described its
skin as "lizard-like."
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- Myron said he was told to keep his mouth shut by a man
he assumed to be from the military, and he did for more than 25 years.
But because he suffers from a bad heart and other ailments, he told Gordon,
he came forward so the story wouldn't die with him.
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- "Look," Gordon says, "you're dealing with
different intellects, different backgrounds of people, and I'm sure that
after all these years certain little details have been changed slightly
or gotten mixed up.
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- "But when you talk to these people, most of whom
don't know each other, they're pretty much staying with the same story.
And they're pretty much in the same ballpark."
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- Bob Young says they're full of beans.
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- Young is an amateur astronomer who gives shows and lectures
at the state planetarium in Harrisburg. He, too, saw the Unsolved Mysteries
episode and afterward asked a colleague at the planetarium if he had heard
of Kecksburg. The answer was no. Young decided to dig for answers. His
conclusion:
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- "It's an urban rumor. If you isolate the stories
of the people who actually say they saw objects on the ground and armed
troops and an armed convoy, there are really only a handful. And the stories
get better as time goes on."
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- Young talked to Von Del Chamberlain, who was working
at Michigan State University when the fireball appeared and later became
director of the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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- Chamberlain wrote an article about the Kecksburg event
for the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. He plotted
the object's track and its speed - nearly 9 miles per second, much too
fast for a man-made craft entering Earth's atmosphere - and speculated
that its orbit suggested it had come from an asteroid belt between Mars
and Jupiter.
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- "It was clearly a meteorite event," says Chamberlain
from Salt Lake City, where he's semiretired and teaching a college course
in astronomy. "It's also a very typical event in many ways. The fireball,
the trail that was left in the sky afterward, the sonic booms. And the
confusion that results is also typical."
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- What happened in Kecksburg, he says, was this: People
saw the fireball low in the sky, and the debris trail was lit up by the
sunset, making everything appear extraordinarily bright and very close.
The meteorite was traveling over Canada, to the east of Detroit, and its
end point was somewhere over Lake Erie. "We're positive about that,"
Chamberlain says.
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- As for reports that people saw lights flashing in the
woods, Bob Young says he has a statement from someone who was in high school
at the time who says he ran through the woods with friends setting off
a camera strobe light. Other flashes might have been made by news photographers.
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- And to those who say the object floated, slowed down
or changed direction, there's this explanation: People were watching the
bright vapor trail, which was likely buffeted by winds.
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- "But it's a good story," Young says.
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- Just a story?
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- Is it possible a craft really did fall out of the sky?
Is it possible the military recovered it? Is it possible the government
had a good reason to lie?
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- Yes, yes and yes.
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- On Dec. 9, 1965, Cosmos 96, a Soviet space probe headed
toward Venus, failed. The U.S. Space Command said it crashed in Canada
at 3:18 a.m. - nearly 14 hours before the Kecksburg incident. But this
was in the middle of the Cold War, and it isn't farfetched to think the
government might have recovered a piece of Soviet space debris in Kecksburg
and wanted to keep it under wraps.
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- That would explain the supposed secrecy and military
presence. It could also explain the markings on the craft that Bulebush,
Romansky and others claim to have seen: The Russian alphabet can look like
hieroglyphics.
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- In 1991 in yet another revisiting of the Kecksburg incident,
James Oberg, an author, expert on Soviet spacecraft and oft-quoted UFO
skeptic, concluded that the probe could not have landed in Kecksburg. But
two years later in an article for Omni magazine, he suggested that perhaps
only the rocket booster landed in Canada, leaving the possibility that
the probe could have come down elsewhere.
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- "In the 1960s," he wrote, "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 Cosmos 96, with it special missile warhead shielding, would have been
too valuable to give back."
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- He suggests the government might have encouraged belief
in an extraterrestrial visit as a convenient cover-up for its operation.
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- "Had such a thing happened, I hope they would have
lied about it," Oberg says from his home in Texas, "because analyzing
the weight of the heat shield materials on this spacecraft would have been
crucial in determining the power of their nuclear missiles."
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- Stan Gordon wrote to the Russian space agency in 1995.
He says he received a reply denying any connection between Kecksburg and
Cosmos 96.
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- "So what was it?" Gordon asks. "What would
cause people to react so emotionally over this for all these years? Is
there more to this than we understand? These people have been living with
this for years. They deserve answers."
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- And the truth is, he's not sure they'll ever get them.
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