An eyewitness to the supposed crash-landing of a UFO in a small Pennsylvania town nearly 60 years ago now claims investigators have made new, startling discoveries about the incident.
On December 9, 1965, people in seven US states and Canada reported seeing a giant fiery object lighting up the night sky.
Ronnie Strubel, 82, lived in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, at the time and described it as a ‘fireball with a red rooster tail behind it’.
Contrary to more recent reports where witnesses claim UFOs they saw were unnaturally quick, Strubel told Daily Mail the object he saw was moving about as fast as a commercial airplane.
Then, he said, it came down in a wooded area in the unincorporated town of Kecksburg, which lies in Westmoreland County.
‘It only took like 15 or 20 minutes for us to get out to the site, and the military was already there,’ he said.
But in the decades since, this strange event likely seen by thousands of people has largely been erased from the collective memory.
That is, until the History Channel aired a documentary on the subject earlier this month, where a mix of experts used modern technology to uncover what may have happened all those years ago in Kecksburg.
Many locals who claim to have seen the UFO pass over Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, say it looked like an acorn (Pictured: A model of the UFO is seen displayed in town)
Pictured: The History Channel team, alongside first-hand UFO witnesses Bill Weaver (second from right) and Ronnie Strubel (right), stand in the woods near the supposed crash site
Kecksburg is a small, unincorporated town in Westmoreland County. The nearest big city is Pittsburgh
The 42-minute long episode, titled ‘Pennsylvania’s Roswell’, was part of reality TV series Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, a show that focuses on sites around the country where there has been supposed paranormal activity.
Strubel and another local, Bill Weaver, were featured in the episode. During a shot near the crash site, Strubel told the same story, but Weaver added some more context about the government response.
‘The police and the military, they were all over the place. And there were guys out there in dark suits. They were the ones that seemed to be in charge,’ Weaver said.
‘While we were standing there watching what was going on, the state police and the military came up to us and they told us, “If you don’t move, we’re going to confiscate your car.” And I figured I better move,’ he added.
Hosts Andy Bustamante, an ex-CIA officer, and Paul Beban, an award-winning journalist, unpacked much of the lore surrounding the UFO sighting and crash.
This included the persisting claim from longtime residents that the object they saw was shaped like an acorn.
An acorn-like model of the alleged UFO has been sitting outside the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Station since the 1990, when it was created as a prop for the NBC show ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’
They also discussed many of the explanations that were thrown out by the federal government in the days, months and years after the incident.
Pictured: The very first Greensburg Tribune-Review article on the Kecksburg UFO incident, dated December 10, 1965
Pictured: The History Channel team did a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scan of the ground near where the UFO was thought to have crashed. Technologist Pete Kelsey claimed that this blue area was abnormally flat compared to the rest of the surrounding topography
The team then returned to that exact spot with handheld spectrum analyzers to measure the radio waves. The reading on the left was taken from the flat area discovered by the LiDAR, while the reading on the right was taken just 20 feet away
Very early reports quoted astronomers claiming it was merely a meteor, but this didn’t hold much credibility because of the unprecedented military presence documented by witnesses and local media.
NASA still maintains that it was likely a meteor, but also acknowledges speculation that it could have been Soviet satellite.
Beban said the strangest thing about the case was that it got plenty of media attention at the time before it ‘faded from view’ under ‘a cloak of secrecy’.
Bustamante and Beban turned to the expertise of technologist Pete Kelsey in hopes that he would be able to uncover the exact site of the UFO crash.
Kelsey used LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) imaging from a drone and slam scanner to get a topographic map of the ground, which would reveal possible impact points.
Later, the team gathered to look at the results of the scan and found what Kelsey called a patch of ‘man-made earth work’.
‘It’s level against this otherwise very steep slope. Straight lines, right angles. Those kinds of things do not occur in nature,’ he said.
They then returned to that exact spot with handheld spectrum analyzers to measure the radio waves.
Strubel revealed the findings at this past weekend’s 20th annual Kecksburg UFO Festival, an event he founded with permission from the fire department in 2005
Pictured: An alien themed parade at the 2013 Kecksburg UFO Festival
The alleged crash site had a vastly different radio signature than a spot just 20 feet away, which had a flat frequency.
‘This doesn’t make any sense. How is there a radio signal in one place that doesn’t exist just a few feet away? That’s not how radio energy works,’ Bustamante said.
‘We’re getting even more evidence that suggests that there really was something strange that happened on this spot, in this ravine, in Kecksburg,’ he added. ‘We might have actually found the real crash site.’
Strubel revealed these findings at this past weekend’s 20th annual Kecksburg UFO Festival, an event he founded with permission from the fire department in 2005.
Strubel himself is a 50-year veteran of the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department, once serving as chief.
The three-day festival routinely attracts thousands of visitors from all over the United States and the world as a whole, he told Daily Mail.
‘We’ve had people from Japan, from Germany, from England with this little town event that we have,’ he said.
The first two days of the festival were not solely dedicated to the extraterrestrial, with attendees enjoying a cornhole competition, a parade, fireworks and even a hotdog eating contest.
A visitor enjoying a previous Kecksburg UFO Festival in 2012
‘Years ago, we used to have a street fair, and that went to the wayside. And this was our idea for some kind of event to draw a little bit of money into the community. So we started the UFO Fest,’ Strubel said.
It remains unclear what truly happened in Kecksburg six decades ago, but the mythos surrounding the UFO crash is clearly buoying the area to this day.
