10 Things You Never Knew About The Kecksburg Incident: The Most Mysterious UFO Crash Of The 1960s

By Sarah Norman | June 29, 2023

Let's Just Say It Was A Meteor

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source: wikipedia

After a few days of searching the woods outside of Kecksburg, with the help of of state troopers, the Air Force failed to recover anything that looked like it came out of the sky -- alien or otherwise. Researchers were quick to state it was most likely a meteor, while some astronomers noted that it could have been a satellite.

At the time, officials rallied around the meteor theory because it explained the lack of, well, anything in the woods. But when has a meteor ever created sonic booms and shockwaves like what happened in Kecksburg? Did the Earth come close to an extinction level phenomena, or were researchers just trying to make sense out of a seriously strange night?

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Detail of cover art for 'They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers' by Gray Barker (1956). Source: Amazon.com

The Kecksburg UFO incident that occurred on December 9, 1965, may have happened over Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, but it was seen by people across North America. On that night, a fireball streaked across the sky that was so bright it was seen by people in six states, and in Windsor, Canada. This isn't a story about two people who claim to have seen little green men, it's a real deal close encounter that's never really been explained.

Because of the volume of reports of something in the sky, and the ever-changing story from U.S. government officials, the Kecksburg Incident has lodged in the minds of believers and skeptics alike as ... something. There are simply too many accounts from witnesses on that night for it to be a hoax or hallucination. Whether what fell from the sky was man-made or of a more exotic nature -- that's a matter of debate. But the Kecksburg Incident has inspired such fascination over the years that it's sometimes called the "Roswell of the East," a reference to the site of an alleged 1947 UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico.