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People in Kecksburg want to resolve what fell from the sky in 1965
Sunday, March 09, 2003
By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
KECKSBURG, Pa. -- Dec. 9, 1965. A day that will live in incongruity.
That was the late afternoon when something -- or
nothing -- shot from the heavens over this south edge of Westmoreland
County and landed -- or didn't -- in a gully a mile outside of
town.
Really. It came down, an acorn-shaped something a size
up from a Volkswagen Beetle, some insist.
Bunk, say others.
In the intervening 37 years, the dispute busted up a
few friendships. Even now, pair Kecksburg and UFO in a sentence and it
kick-starts a back-and-forth, said Kathy Leeper, bartender at the local
firefighters club.
"They were talking about it just the other night,"
she said.
So, now come UFO sleuths, figuring to settle this by
getting as much of the public behind them as they can and demanding a
look at the record.
Except that key elements of the record, if there is
much of one, may be locked away in government files. And the UFO
sleuths, a coalition of cash, legal expertise and ardor for probing the
supernormal, figure that getting at it will take a major petition drive,
a congressional investigation and maybe some legal muscle.
"This case is so
incredibly fascinating," said Leslie Kean, a San Francisco-area
freelance journalist whose writing on UFOs appeared from opinion pages
of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to news pages of the Boston Globe.
"Even now, the trail is not cold."
For years, retiree Robert Bitner, former Kecksburg
fire chief, a man who believes that something noteworthy fell from the
sky, hasn't spoken with his brother-in-law. He maintains only a
nodding acquaintance with neighbor and fellow ex-fire chief Ed Myers. It's
a cold war born of the UFO dispute.
"I'd love to know
what the government knows about it," Bitner said. "It
might help us end this thing for good."
That's end, not forget.
The Roswell of
Pa.
What looks like a Bunyanesque brown acorn perched on a
platform next to the fire hall is actually a 7-foot replica of what
believers say they saw -- modeled a dozen years ago for the television
show "Unsolved Mysteries," then put on permanent display
here.
North of town, the twisting township route closest to
the purported crash site has been renamed Meteor Road.
The records hunt begins with a newly launched online
petition drive, at
www.signpetition.com, to persuade Congress to put its General
Accounting Office on the case, a gambit that Kean said might shake lose
records that the general public hasn't seen.
Then, through a law firm doing freedom-of-information
work, the coalition would sue where it felt government agencies
shortchanged requests for declassified files on Kecksburg.
The drive is being bankrolled by television's
SciFi Channel, where fare ranges from "The Twilight Zone"
reruns to the ultimate vision of the American melting pot, a serial
about space aliens blending in with the Roswell, N.M., locals.
This isn't about Kecksburg's promotional
value to SciFi, channel Special Projects Director Larry Landsman vowed.
"We're committed to solving this," he said.
Along with reporter Kean, the records hunt includes
Greensburg resident Stan Gordon, 53, an electronics salesman and, since
age 16, gumshoe tracking the unexplained.
Gordon's pursuit of enigmas ranging from UFOs
to Bigfoot, detailed at his Web site,
www.westol.com/~paufo/, brings 200 e-mails a day and "phone
calls at 2, 3, 4 in the morning," he said. His Kecksburg inquiry,
begun when he was a teenager, has yielded reams of files and produced a
92-minute, $25 videotape, "Kecksburg: The Untold Story," a
1998 production bearing the tag line "New Mexico has Roswell, but
in Pennsylvania it was Kecksburg."
Sales, he said, "have been in the hundreds."
"I keep an open mind,"
said Gordon, who recites Kecksburg particulars with edge-of-his-seat
urgency, " ... but something of military importance seems to have
fallen."
He has critics.
Between me and
trees
Ed Myers, fire chief in 1965, complains that Gordon
"turned this into a circus." And Bob Young, an amateur
astronomer who lectures at the state planetarium in Harrisburg and
studied the Kecksburg puzzle, said people who insist that something
slammed down outside town ignored hard evidence that the matter was much
ado about a meteor that came nowhere close.
But the UFO case also has people dropping tantalizing
hints.
Retiree Bob Schmidt, an amateur astronomer in
Pittsburgh's North Hills, tells of a friend, wary of reporters,
who worked with NASA and had associates who said they examined debris
retrieved from Kecksburg.
"They said it looks very
much like a Russian nose cone," Schmidt said.
Around Kecksburg, 300-some people strong, that's
the talk that rumpuses are made of.
On that dreary 1965 afternoon, the episode began in a
flash -- a "brilliant fireball" lighting the dusk sky, according
to the next morning's Post-Gazette.
It was meteor, photographed by at least a couple
earthlings, visible from Chicago to New York State to Virginia,
astronomers Von Del Chamberlain and David Krause of Michigan State
University wrote in a paper published 20 months later by the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada.
The space rock burst and vanished 15 miles southeast
of Windsor, Ontario, but not before fooling spectators as it streaked
into the horizon, Chamberlain wrote.
"Observers in several
states were certain the object landed within a mile from them,"
he wrote in a follow-up paper for the state of Michigan's
Geological Survey.
"Individuals often report: 'It definitely went
between me and the nearby trees.' "
Actually, it did, says Bill Bulebush.
'Big, huge
piece of metal'
Bulebush, 40 then, was home just outside Kecksburg,
tinkering with his 1964 Corvair.
He saw the flaming whatever-it-was fly over, then
double back "just like it was controlled," he said last
week.
And when he watched it go down just north of town,
Bulebush said, he drove off after it, up what's now Meteor Road.
There, maybe a quarter-mile into the woods, lay this
thing -- burnt orange, maybe 10 feet long, shaped like an acorn, he
said.
"It was smoldering and
cracking, sparks coming off it ... no sign of life, with a sour smell,
sort of like sulfur," Bulebush said.
It was half-buried, after tearing a trench into the
ground with a belly-flop landing, he said.
"I went down and stood
behind a tree and watched it ... 10 feet away," he said.
And when he heard people tramping through the woods,
he said, he got scared and hightailed back home -- where wife, Betty
Bulebush, concedes she met the story with enough lack of interest that
"I kept watching TV."
James Romansky, now 57 and a disabled machinist living
near Derry, insists he came upon it, too, as a volunteer firefighter,
called from Lloydsville, 25 miles from Kecksburg, to comb woods for what
was supposed to be a crashed plane.
In the flashlight beams, he said, he and a handful of
searchers saw "one big, huge piece of metal buried in the mud ...
goldish, copperish, yellow, quiet as a church mouse."
The wreckage bore markings Romansky likens to
hieroglyphics. Nobody touched it.
"I'm running
around, looking for bodies and scratching my head and my butt because
there aren't any," Romansky said. "There's
no loose pieces. This thing has no rivets, no portals, no way to get in
and out."
Out of the dark came "two guys with crewcuts
and trench coats," Romansky said. "And they said, 'This
is quarantined. You get the hell out,' very loud and very
adamant."
Then-Fire Chief Ed Myers' response, in a word:
hooey.
"Afterward, there was no
sign of it," he said. "There wasn't so much as a
bird spot."
People who figure that something indeed hit the ground
suggested origins ranging from extraterrestrials to a misfired NIKE
missile to a remnant of Kosmos 96, a Soviet probe that was bound for
Venus but, according to U.S. Space Command, crashed in Canada 14 hours
earlier.
Like to get it
resolved
No matter what the case, reporter Kean said, the case
is ripe for investigation because it has living witnesses who saw
something on the ground and three decades worth of evidence rounded up
by Gordon.
"It's a very good
case," she said.
Except that in Kecksburg, even what happened in plain
sight is open to dispute.
U.S. Air Force documents tell of a three-man team
coming from its Oakdale radar station, finding nothing and heading home
in early morning.
Retired firefighter Bitner recalls seeing "a
dozen" military men.
Carl Porch, whose farmland sits nearby, says there
barely were any.
"There were all kind of
military people," said Robert Gatty, now publishing a trade
magazine in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, then a reporter with the
Tribune-Review in Greensburg. "I couldn't get past them."
"And the government didn't
send all them out because of some shooting star," Bitner said.
By Romansky's account, the military trucked out
its find under tarp, on a flatbed truck, and commandeered the fire hall
as a command post, stationing armed guards who turned him away when he
tried to use the restroom.
Myers' response: More hooey. The firehouse was
open and people jammed the social club, he said.
"We probably sold as much
beer as we ever did because of all the people," he said.
So it goes. Storytellers question each others'
credibility. Critics who turned up a criminal past that included theft
and armed robbery scoff at Romansky's believability. Gordon
defends him for offering corroborated detail. Allegations simmer of
people massaging stories over the years.
If townspeople figure that the new push to open
records will settle this, though, a spokesman for Kecksburg's
congressman offers little hope. If there are files locked away and the
government justified sealing them, said Brad Clemenson, aide to Rep.
John Murtha, D-Johnstown, GAO probably won't find a rationale to
unseal them.
That's not what a lot of people want to hear.
"This thing dies off,
then it comes up," current Fire Chief Duane Hutter said. "Everybody'd
like it if we got it resolved."
Tom Gibb can be reached at
tgibb@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1601
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