The Kecksburg Incident (1965): Pennsylvania's Roswell

In the late afternoon of December 9, 1965, a brilliant fireball was seen across at least six U.S. states and Ontario, dropping metallic debris and starting grass fires along its path. Astronomers tracked it as a meteor. But in the village of Kecksburg, southeast of Pittsburgh, residents reported something else: a controlled-seeming descent, blue smoke rising from the woods, and, for those who walked in before the authorities arrived, a large acorn-shaped object half buried in the ground, bronze in color, with a band of raised markings around its base "like hieroglyphics."

By evening the woods were sealed off. Witnesses described state police, then Army personnel, then a flatbed truck leaving under tarpaulin with something large on it. The official line was that a search had found nothing. Witness accounts of soldiers, a cordon, and the truck have been consistent for sixty years, and a local fire chief and a young boy at the time, among others, have told them on camera repeatedly.

The leading non-alien explanation is the Soviet Venus probe Kosmos 96, which re-entered the atmosphere that same day. Its descent capsule was acorn-shaped and bore Cyrillic markings. The problem is timing and place: U.S. Space Command records put the Kosmos 96 re-entry over Canada that morning, hours before the fireball, and NASA has said so. In 2005 a NASA spokesman said the agency had examined fragments from Kecksburg and identified them as a Russian satellite, then said the records had been lost.

Journalist Leslie Kean and the Sci Fi Channel sued NASA under the Freedom of Information Act in 2003, and a judge ordered a further search of records in 2007; the search turned up nothing that settled the case. Kecksburg has embraced the mystery, with an annual festival and a replica of the acorn, built for an Unsolved Mysteries episode, on permanent display. It is the standard "second Roswell," a crash-retrieval story with a natural fireball at its root and a set of witnesses that a fireball does not explain.