As you may well know, the SCIFI channel is going to broadcast a program about the alleged Kecksburg UFO crash in the 1960s.
I had not heard much about this incident, although I read about it in Richard Dolan's excellent "UFOs and the National Security State". Having stated my opinion about Dolan's work overall, I have to say that Kecksburg, on the basis of information that Dolan himself provided, is one of the areas on which I disagreed with his approach. I felt that Dolan was a little too even handed on the issue of whether what crashed was the Soviet Satellite Kosmos 96.
When I took a look at the artist's rendering of the Keckburg UFO, and then at a picture of the Cosmos 96, I thought there was really quite a resemblance. I don't have the respective images in front of me now, but I recall that each was reminiscent of the other, with the suggestion of the Acorn shape. While working on this post I did a google image search on the Cosmos 96 and have an image at the link. Clearly one can imagine "acorn" when looking at this.
http://www.ufoworld.co.uk/cosmos96.jpg
Now consider this chronology of events:
1. On November 23, 1965, the Soviet Union launches Cosmos 65. Cosmos was based on the Soyuz, which was in turn based on the diving bell design.
2. "Colonel Rodney S. Lusey, Deputy Chief of Staff, US Space Command, confirmed "A booster failure caused this satellite to decay after its launch. ...COSMOS 96 was launched on 23 November 1965 and decayed on December 9, 1965, at 51.8 north latitude and 85.2 west longitude"." (Ives here, I took this paragraph from another website).
3. In the late afternoon of 9 December, 1965, many people witnessed a large, orange coloured light in the sky above Lake Erie and several other locations to the north.
Small lights were seen breaking away from the larger object and smoke reported as far away as the bordering New York State.
The emergency services had been contacted with reports of an aircraft which was possibly in trouble and a Mrs Jones, from Mount Pleasant, reported that an object had crashed into woods near her home.
(#3 also lifted from another site for speed purposes)
4. Witness later reports the crashed object to resemble an acorn. State police secure area, military takes over, object removed on flatbed with tarp.
So. . . . . realizing that there were discrepancies in time, it seemed to me that human error, in how this satellite would have fallen, or some kind of other human mistake resulted in people thinking this wasn't the Cosmos 96 craft. Because otherwise, aren't we talking about one of the great all time coinicidences of the Universe? That on the same day, at nearly the same time that an acorn shaped Soviet satellite crashes in North America, that an acorn-shaped UFO also crashes in North America? Which is more likely? Human error in calculating how this couldn't be the Soviet craft, or that a UFO similarly shaped to the Soviet craft also happened to crash?
Yet the CFI website, in taking about this program, has the following passage:
""I was able to eliminate that possibility by talking to the chief scientist for orbital debris at the NASA Johnson Space Center. His name is Nicholas Johnson, and he's one of the leading experts in the world on orbital debris and on the Russian space system."
Kean said that Johnson told him there was "no way that any debris from Cosmos 96 could have landed in Pennsylvania" and that "no other man-made object from any country came down that day.""
I went to Confluence.org and punched in the coordinates as given for the Cosmos reentry, and the results describe the location as "78.7 km (48.9 miles) NW of Mammamattawa, ON, Canada". It looks to me like Kecksburg and Mammamattawa are roughly 1000 miles apart.
While a 1000 miles might sound like a great distance, I'm guessing it isn't considering the re-entry speed of a satellite.
So based on all this, it would take some pretty compelling evidence to convince me that the UFO and the Soviet Cosmos aren't one and the same.
Okay, and here's my "but" which I'm hoping some of you science/technical types can answer. What would this soviet craft look like after a fiery re-entry through the atmosphere? The witness found by described "writing" on a bumper like protrusion, that resembled "hieroglyphics". If this indeed was the Russian craft, would markings still be visible?
I ran some of this by James Oberg, who, regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, is an expert on the Soviet space program. I was particularly interested in how this "Nicholas Johnson" could rule out Kosmos 96 as having fallen over Kecksburg. His reply:
The 'elimination' of Kosmos-96 requires the assumption that the tracking data later released by the AF -- years later -- was accurate. The USAF was the very agency that, had it actually recovered Kosmos-96, would want to conceal that fact. If it had recovered the object, then the original authentic tracking data would easily show the satellite could indeed have landed in the right area at the right time, so the USAF obviously would not have released such data. Nobody else was in a position to verify the tracking data (the Soviets never released any data at all).
He also stated:
The tracking data released by the USAF is not consistent with the timing and location of a putative Kecksburg object. Johnson used that tracking data. My point is, if -- say -- the USAF had actually recovered K-96, but wanted the public record to hide that possibility, it would take about fifteen minutes to generate false tracking data and release it.
I'm inclined to agree with Oberg, against my better judgement. It is a letdown that such an allegedly major "investigative" undertaking is going on for an incident with such an obvious prosaic explanation.
Perhaps there is data of which I'm unaware. Does anyone here wish to defend Kecksburg as a genuine UFO?
I had not heard much about this incident, although I read about it in Richard Dolan's excellent "UFOs and the National Security State". Having stated my opinion about Dolan's work overall, I have to say that Kecksburg, on the basis of information that Dolan himself provided, is one of the areas on which I disagreed with his approach. I felt that Dolan was a little too even handed on the issue of whether what crashed was the Soviet Satellite Kosmos 96.
When I took a look at the artist's rendering of the Keckburg UFO, and then at a picture of the Cosmos 96, I thought there was really quite a resemblance. I don't have the respective images in front of me now, but I recall that each was reminiscent of the other, with the suggestion of the Acorn shape. While working on this post I did a google image search on the Cosmos 96 and have an image at the link. Clearly one can imagine "acorn" when looking at this.
http://www.ufoworld.co.uk/cosmos96.jpg
Now consider this chronology of events:
1. On November 23, 1965, the Soviet Union launches Cosmos 65. Cosmos was based on the Soyuz, which was in turn based on the diving bell design.
2. "Colonel Rodney S. Lusey, Deputy Chief of Staff, US Space Command, confirmed "A booster failure caused this satellite to decay after its launch. ...COSMOS 96 was launched on 23 November 1965 and decayed on December 9, 1965, at 51.8 north latitude and 85.2 west longitude"." (Ives here, I took this paragraph from another website).
3. In the late afternoon of 9 December, 1965, many people witnessed a large, orange coloured light in the sky above Lake Erie and several other locations to the north.
Small lights were seen breaking away from the larger object and smoke reported as far away as the bordering New York State.
The emergency services had been contacted with reports of an aircraft which was possibly in trouble and a Mrs Jones, from Mount Pleasant, reported that an object had crashed into woods near her home.
(#3 also lifted from another site for speed purposes)
4. Witness later reports the crashed object to resemble an acorn. State police secure area, military takes over, object removed on flatbed with tarp.
So. . . . . realizing that there were discrepancies in time, it seemed to me that human error, in how this satellite would have fallen, or some kind of other human mistake resulted in people thinking this wasn't the Cosmos 96 craft. Because otherwise, aren't we talking about one of the great all time coinicidences of the Universe? That on the same day, at nearly the same time that an acorn shaped Soviet satellite crashes in North America, that an acorn-shaped UFO also crashes in North America? Which is more likely? Human error in calculating how this couldn't be the Soviet craft, or that a UFO similarly shaped to the Soviet craft also happened to crash?
Yet the CFI website, in taking about this program, has the following passage:
""I was able to eliminate that possibility by talking to the chief scientist for orbital debris at the NASA Johnson Space Center. His name is Nicholas Johnson, and he's one of the leading experts in the world on orbital debris and on the Russian space system."
Kean said that Johnson told him there was "no way that any debris from Cosmos 96 could have landed in Pennsylvania" and that "no other man-made object from any country came down that day.""
I went to Confluence.org and punched in the coordinates as given for the Cosmos reentry, and the results describe the location as "78.7 km (48.9 miles) NW of Mammamattawa, ON, Canada". It looks to me like Kecksburg and Mammamattawa are roughly 1000 miles apart.
While a 1000 miles might sound like a great distance, I'm guessing it isn't considering the re-entry speed of a satellite.
So based on all this, it would take some pretty compelling evidence to convince me that the UFO and the Soviet Cosmos aren't one and the same.
Okay, and here's my "but" which I'm hoping some of you science/technical types can answer. What would this soviet craft look like after a fiery re-entry through the atmosphere? The witness found by described "writing" on a bumper like protrusion, that resembled "hieroglyphics". If this indeed was the Russian craft, would markings still be visible?
I ran some of this by James Oberg, who, regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, is an expert on the Soviet space program. I was particularly interested in how this "Nicholas Johnson" could rule out Kosmos 96 as having fallen over Kecksburg. His reply:
The 'elimination' of Kosmos-96 requires the assumption that the tracking data later released by the AF -- years later -- was accurate. The USAF was the very agency that, had it actually recovered Kosmos-96, would want to conceal that fact. If it had recovered the object, then the original authentic tracking data would easily show the satellite could indeed have landed in the right area at the right time, so the USAF obviously would not have released such data. Nobody else was in a position to verify the tracking data (the Soviets never released any data at all).
He also stated:
The tracking data released by the USAF is not consistent with the timing and location of a putative Kecksburg object. Johnson used that tracking data. My point is, if -- say -- the USAF had actually recovered K-96, but wanted the public record to hide that possibility, it would take about fifteen minutes to generate false tracking data and release it.
I'm inclined to agree with Oberg, against my better judgement. It is a letdown that such an allegedly major "investigative" undertaking is going on for an incident with such an obvious prosaic explanation.
Perhaps there is data of which I'm unaware. Does anyone here wish to defend Kecksburg as a genuine UFO?