Encounter Atlas
Important caveat: Kecksburg is an object case. No witness in the 1965 record described beings or occupants. It is included in this section because of its fame as "Pennsylvania's Roswell", and the entry sticks to what people actually reported.
At about 4:44 p.m. on December 9, 1965, a brilliant fireball crossed the sky over the Detroit–Windsor area and was seen from at least six US states and Ontario. Pilots made reports, sonic booms were heard, and small grass fires were blamed on it. In the village of Kecksburg, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, some residents said they heard a thump, saw blue smoke and believed something had come down in the woods.
The Greensburg Tribune-Review reported that the area was sealed off by state police and army officials awaiting experts. State troopers and Air Force personnel searched the woods and said they found nothing, and the paper's next edition ran the headline "Searchers fail to find object". Astronomers and the Department of Defense said the fireball was most likely a meteor. Project Blue Book filed the event under the multi-state fireball of that date and concluded it was a meteor. A 1967 scientific study using photographs and seismograph data put the fireball's end over western Lake Erie, far from Kecksburg.
Years later, some residents said they had seen a bronze, acorn-shaped object the size of a car, with markings like hieroglyphs, being taken away on a flatbed truck. In 2005 NASA said experts had once examined fragments and found them to be from a Soviet satellite, but that the records had been lost; after a Freedom of Information lawsuit, NASA agreed in 2007 under a court order to search again, and testified that boxes of papers from the period were missing. NASA's own satellite data, however, rule out the Soviet probe Kosmos 96, and the meteor explanation remains the mainstream view.
The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1990, and the acorn-shaped prop built for the show is still displayed in the village.