Today the history of the Keksburg disaster is well known. Meanwhile, American ufologist Stan Gordon aroused interest in this mysterious story that happened almost half a century ago. Having processed and studied a lot of information, he came to the next version of those distant events.
The efficiency of the military
On the evening of December 9, 1965, in the depths of the forest, enclosing the town of Kexburgh, Pennsylvania, in a semicircle, a piercing whistle was heard, which turned into a thunderous rumble and ended with a dull thud. It shook the walls of the houses and swayed the chandeliers.
Soon a crowd of alarmed residents gathered in front of the town hall. The mayor and the sheriff persuaded people to disperse, explaining that a rocket had fallen into the thicket of the Keksburg forest, and military specialists with the necessary equipment should soon arrive.
And indeed, within half an hour, two helicopters with paratroopers arrived and quickly cordoned off the edge of the forest from the city and the adjacent federal highway. Then several trailers and trucks with buses arrived. Thus began the operation to evacuate the mysterious object.
Both Gordon himself and other researchers drew attention to the amazing efficiency with which the territory adjacent to the site of the fall of the unknown object was isolated. However, none of them drew any conclusions from this strange fact.
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Witnesses from the "meteor road"
Stan Gordon began his investigation of the case in Kexburgh with a traditional search for the most reliable eyewitness testimony and immediately ran into disagreement between eyewitness accounts.
For some reason, most of the residents of Keksburg did not see or hear anything, but they learned about the landing of the "air acorn" in the Crooked Ravine (as the UFO crash site was called) the next day from the media.
Newspaper report and eyewitness drawings
Moreover, when reporters from major publications and metropolitan journalists arrived in Keksburg, they were able to obtain testimonies for every taste. The spectrum of opinions was very wide - from statements that nothing had fallen from the sky, to descriptions of the removal of "little green men" from the opened "heavenly acorn."
By the way, the very term "heavenly acorn", apparently, arose somehow by accident, because no one has ever seen what landed in the Crooked ravine. In the materials of the Blue Book project (one of a series of research projects on reports of UFO sightings carried out by the US Air Force in the middle of the 20th century), we only come across the terms “apparatus”, “unit” and “object under study”.
The only thing that most of the inhabitants of Keksburg agreed on was that there was some kind of disaster. Therefore, as soon as the radio news announced that a UFO had landed on the outskirts of Keksburg, the section of the federal highway, which the locals called the “meteor road” (because of the cars rushing like meteorites), was immediately filled with curious people. These were the main witnesses of the Keksburg incident, who saw only a line of military trucks taking something out of the forest.
Conclusions of the "Blue Book"
Gordon believes that the temporary command post of the operation was located in a fire station with a watchtower, on which special communications equipment was installed. His scheme is complemented by the testimony of local farmer Hay, whose plot was located between the edge of the forest and the federal highway. The military set up a radiotelephone station in the farmhouse and, receiving instructions from the fire tower, organized a combing of the surrounding fields and the outskirts of the forest with devices resembling army mine detectors.
Modern UFO monument - acorn
All roads leading to Hay's farm and to Kexburg were blocked by the military police throughout the search operation, but several correspondents saw through binoculars “field operations with mine detectors”. This is strange, because in response to a request from Gordon, the US Engineering and Technical Administration, which includes special-purpose sapper units, denied its participation in such operations.
Then Gordon found retirees among the residents of Keksburg, and they explained that mainly ground forces took part in the operation, but there were also Air Force officers among them.
Meanwhile, in one of the Blue Book reports, there is only a brief reference to a group of three specialists sent to Kexburgh from 662 Radar Reconnaissance Squadron located at Pittsburgh Air Force Base. In a brief report to the project manager, the state police claimed that nothing was found in the forest, but in the sky people saw a meteorite, which probably burned up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.
Fire Drop
Both the expert opinions of the Blue Book and those of later researchers such as UFO author Frank Edwards, conspiracy theorist Gerald Haynes, Internet columnist Leonard David, former White House chief of staff John Podesta and president of the Sony Sci-Fi television channel Bonnie Hammer, are united in the description of the case in Keksburg.
On that December evening, many residents of Keksburg and its environs saw a fireball in the sky, leaving a trail of smoke. Scattering sparks and burning fragments, he rushed at a height of several kilometers, occasionally stopping and scattering some fragments in different directions. At the same time, the fireball changed its direction of flight, it was engulfed in flames and deaf explosions were heard.
Above the Keksburg forest, an impressive “drop of fire” separated from the car and slid to the ground, and he himself once again changed his trajectory and sped off in a northwest direction. A few seconds later, the earth shook from the impact, and a column of bluish smoke rose from the place of the fall …
A quarter of an hour later, alarmed residents began calling the sheriff's office, the local radio station in Greensburg County downtown, newspaper offices and even the Federal Police Department. Someone reported a collision of two meteors in the sky, someone saw a plane engulfed in flames, and someone even ejected "pilots" on burning parachutes.
Odyssey of "Keksburg acorn"
The next stage of his investigation, Gordon devoted to the route of evacuation of the "heavenly acorn". Here he managed to find a guard from Lockbourne AFB. He well remembered how, late at night on December 10, 1965, an auto-convoy arrived with some massive cargo. After refueling and changing drivers, he drove to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton in the early morning.
It should be noted that the Wright-Patterson base has long been considered by ufologists a center for the study of "alien artifacts", and its former and current employees easily make money on the credulity of UFO seekers. This is probably why Gordon quickly found a certain Myron, who told how, a few days after the Keksburg incident, his building materials plant received an order from the Wright-Patterson base for a batch of "radiation-resistant bricks."
Special double-layer glazed briquettes, according to Myron, were intended to build a protective casing around the object brought in by a special convoy. On the territory of the base, the load of bricks was met by people in white robes, helmets with transparent visors, rubber gloves and boots.
Inside the hangar, Myron saw a bell-shaped object, three by three meters, bathed in bright light. Its charred metal shell looked like dull copper or bronze and was covered with thick soot spots in places. Myron approached a worker with an acetylene burner, who immediately told the curious builder that he could not cut the shell of the "bell" to get inside. They had previously tried diamond drills and acids without success …
Coming out, Myron looked around and suddenly noticed … “a small body covered with a blanket. From under the fabric protruded a brown hand, like a lizard's, with three fingers."
AMC disaster
Meanwhile, many of Gordon's conclusions generally coincide with those of the Blue Book experts. First of all, let us recall the amazing efficiency of the military's actions. One gets the impression that the Air Force confidently "guided" the UFO and knew perfectly well what was flying in the sky of Pennsylvania.
Indeed, it was then that the Soviet spacecraft Kosmos-96 failed in Earth orbit. This massive automatic interplanetary station (AMS) was intended for the exploration of Venus and after the accident entered the dense layers of the atmosphere just over the N American continent, collapsing over southeastern Canada on December 9, 1965. Not only the day and place of the fall of the interplanetary probe coincide, but also the shape of the apparatus, resembling a bell or a giant acorn.
Needless to say, the surviving fragments of the AMS were of great interest to NASA specialists. In addition, the Soviet apparatus was equipped with a new radioisotope energy source and could lead to radioactive contamination of the crash site.
Gordon and ufologists in every possible way deny this version, but astronomer Bob Schmidt from Pittsburgh in a polemic with "independent researchers" cites the fact that his colleagues from NASA at the end of 1965 studied a fragment of the nose cone of a fallen "Russian rocket" obtained from somewhere.
In principle, a certain discrepancy in the time of the fall of "Kosmos-96", which entered the stratosphere over Canada at 3:18 am - 13 hours before the crash near Keksburg, is also understandable. The fact is that the emergency situation with the AMS was accompanied by the separation of the solar batteries and the subsequent bifurcation of the apparatus into large fragments. One of them - a more streamlined bow compartment - managed to make extra turns around the Earth, hitting the Keksburg forest on the evening of October 9.
At the same time, the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, showing through the soot, could well have been mistaken for unknown "hieroglyphs."
Oleg FAIG