FirstToLand

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT UFOS

2006-01-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

(This place handles urls wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.)

Here's the bad news:

The sad and awful truth is, they've mostly been blimps.

Yes, blimps: slow, rotund, squishy blimps, and most of those have
been
WWII Navy surplus. No sex, no sizzle, no ultra-high-tech, no aliens.

Just blimps.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that these blimps belong
to
the Central Intelligence Agency, flown by the US Air Force for the
benefit the CIA, and have, for the past 60 years, been at the center of
the most highly-classified programs of the United States Government.

THE BEGINNINGS

The UFO blitz of 1947

On June 24th, Kenneth Arnold, an Idaho businessman flying his person
plane
around href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=79031&ll=46.716327,-122.141876&spn=0.485695,1.155899&t=h&hl=en">Mt.
Ranier, had an encounter with nine unknown aircraft flying
in formation across the Cascades. His reports to the media
started a UFO "wave" which swept over the entire country within days
and added the term "flying saucer" to the vocabulary. There were
two colaborating sightings of (apparently) the same formation.

However, it all may have started earlier, on June 21st, in
Puget
Sound, Washington, where Harold Dahl and several others reported seeing
six large silver doughnut-shaped objects near href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=79031&ll=47.431803,-122.463913&spn=0.239609,0.577950&t=h&hl=en">Maury
Island. Some recounts have them being pelted with hot slag
from the objects, which Dahl supposedly recanted later, and most
accounts of the incident tell of clouds of chaff (aluminum foil strips)
being released from one of the craft. Dahl and friends did not
immediately report the event to authorities.

Some people also point to href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=79031&ll=35.380093,-118.976440&spn=2.310270,4.623596&t=h&hl=en">Bakersfield,
California, as a starting point, where, on June 23rd veteran pilot
Richard Rankin claims to have seen ten -- and later 7 -- silvery
objects flying in formation over Bakersfield, first to the north, then
to the south. There were other witnesses to the fly-by, by some
accounts dozens or even hundreds.

In any event, the mysterious objects were soon seen over other West
Coast locations, including a July 2nd report by California State
Highway
Patrol Sgt. David Menary, on duty at San
Francisco's href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=79031&ll=37.815141,-122.477753&spn=0.008744,0.018061&t=h&hl=en">Golden
Gate Bridge, who saw a dozen bright football shaped metal objects
flying overhead and across the bay.

But let's go back and ask "What else happened that summer?"

ENTER THE
BLIMPS

There were three major blimp bases on the west coast during World
War
II: href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tillamook,+or&ll=45.417491,-123.809566&spn=0.031079,0.072244&t=h&hl=en">NAS
Tillamook, at Tillamook, Oregon in the north; href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=santa+ana,+ca&ll=33.707741,-117.826180&spn=0.018416,0.036122&t=h&hl=en">NAS
Santa Ana in the south, near San Diego, and href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=moffett+field,+ca&ll=37.414141,-122.050252&spn=0.017583,0.036122&t=h&hl=en">NAS
Moffett Field at Sunnyvale, California, on San Francisco Bay, in
the center. In all, the three bases
hosted around 30 blimps., along with a number of auxilliary fixed-wing
aircraft for ferrying passengers and freight.

Tillamook was deactivated in 1944, its blimps probably moved to
Santa
Ana and
Moffett, which had been designated as storage facilities by that time
(the whereabouts of deactivated blimps from this period have been hard
to determine).

In early 1947 the Navy
announced the reassignment of blimp operations at NAS Moffet Field and
NAS Santa Ana, the last two remaining airship bases on the west coast,
along with the deactivation of their many auxiliary fields.
We know for certain that five of the blimps made their way to NAS
Weeksville, North Carolina, by mid-August, just about the time the
Great Flying Saucer Wave abruptly ended.

(RE) ENTER THE 412TH

In February of 1947
a famous number was revived: the USAAF's Fourth Air Force 412th Fighter
Group, deactivated on June 3, 1946, was seemingly revived as the
412th
Control Group at Seattle, Washington. The official USAF history
of the
unit show it to be inactive from 1946 until 1955, but there was
definitely a 412th in Washington State that summer.

The 412th's
sole recorded
duty that summer was to take control of the US's only remaining
long-range radar
sites (at Arlington in Washington State, and Half Moon Bay and
Mill Valley/Mt. Tamalpais in California), operate them for a few
months, then
close two of them down (more on that later). All three radar
sites were/are situated so as to provide 360-degree coverage.

The 412th is
particularly interesting in that it was the first Air Force unit to fly
and test jet aircraft, and eventually morphed into the 412th Test Wing,
whidh is now responsible for host operations at Edwards Air Force Base.

Half Moon Bay, by the
way, is south of San Francisco, less than 10
miles west of NAS Moffett Field. Mill Valley is just
north of San Francisco, about 40 miles from NAS Moffet Field. The
Arlington radar site
is near Puget Sound, north of Seattle, just 30 miles from
Maury Island.

THE AIR FORCE, THE CIA, AND THE GENERAL

Both the United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency
were born together, as part of the same congressional bill, the
National
Security Act of 1947, the CIA being molded from the post-war Central
Intelligence Group (CIG), USAF being forged from the existing Army Air
Forces (USAAF). Before that event, the Chief of the Intelligence
Division of the General Staff, and later Director of the CIG, was a
USAAF officer, Lt. General Hoyt Vandenberg (promoted to full General in
1947). He held that position until USN Captain Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter
was named CIA Director on May 1, 1947.

Vandenberg also served as Deputy Commander and Chief of Staff of
USAAF
in 1946 and 1947. After the formation of the separate Air Force, Gen.
Vandenberg became its first Vice Chief of Staff under General Carl
Spaatz, and succeeded him on April 30, 1948, a post he retained until
his retirement in 1953.

To further demonstrate the close connection between the USAF and the
CIA, it is important to note that the Air Force has always flown
surveillance missions for the CIA, at first using USAF-owned aircraft,
and later operated and maintained the CIA's own U-2 and SR-71
spyplanes. USAF has also launched, operated, and, where appropriate,
recovered all the CIA's surveillance satellites.

One further note: it was Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg who
approached MIT and convinced them to study radar, and develop its
Lincoln Laboratory into the world's leading state-of-the-art radar
program.

THE COMING OF THE UFOS

With all the players in place we can resconstruct the events which
led
to the Great UFO Wave of 1947.

It's early 1947, and there is considerable tension between the
military
services. The Departments of the Navy and Army were resentfui of
the upstart Air Forces and dresisted the idea of a complete
consolidation under a Department of Defense. The nacent
Department of State was trying to gain conttrol of anything which might
affect foreign policy. All the agencies and services were
negotiating and wrestling over a rapidly-shrinking defense
budget. Weapon systems and personnel were the subject of fierce
territorial battles.

Into this fray steps the CIG/CIA, eager to procure the resources it
needs to conduct foreign surveillance and intelligence gathering.
Someone, perhaps even Hoyt Vandenberg himself, hears rumors that sound
amazing: blimps don't show up on radar.

This bears checking out, of course. A cursory investigation reveals
that the Navy already has an aerial photography and reconnasance
airship squadron; some quiet questioning brings out details of their
successes. And best of all, those rumors of radar transparency seem to
be true.

Not only that, but the Navy has lots of unwanted blimps -- over 100
servicable blimps are up for grabs. But if anyone wants them for
clandestine purposes they need to be grabbed quickly, so the records of
their transfer can be "lost" among the material shuffling going on
during the summer of 1947.

An inactive USAAF unit with a history of handling sensitive
technology
is quickly reactivated and assigned a new mission -- test the radar
signatures of blimps. The unit gathers trusted pilots, crew, and
experienced radar operators. The pilots and crew are sent to NAS Moffet
Field and NAS Santa Ana for a crash course in flying airships, and the
radio jockeys are sent out to take over, reactivate, and man the last
remaining long-range radar units on the west coast.

For a few frantic months the blimps are put through their paces with
little regard to hiding the activities. After all, the blimps are
flying around in their own home territory. And just in case, there's a
plausible cover
story ready: the deactivation of Santa Ana and Moffet, and the
transfer of their aircraft to North Carolina.

However, prior to 1947 blimps operated at sea, searching for
submarines
and
other ocean dangers, away from the coast and civilian
populations. And none of the blimps on the west coast were flown
across country to their duty stations -- they were all assembled
on-site. But the new crew from the CIG didn't realize that and
took their tests inland, right across populated areas, not realizing
that most of the citizens below had never seen a blimp over their
heads, much less a whole fleet of them. Then something like this
happens:

src="http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c26/randmcnatt/BlimpFormationSantaClaraValley.jpg"
style="width: 294px; height: 173px;">

Residents of Bakersfield and California's Central Valley probably
didn't realize they lived directly between two major blimp facilities,
and were justifiably
startled by formations of huge silver things
above their heads. The same thing happened in Puget Sound and around
Washington State, and later in Oregon. And that poor Highway
Patrolman on the Golden Gate Bridge probably
didn't realize he was standing just 45 miles from the Navy's primary
blimp pilot training base. A bunch of strange silvery things
appear suddenly, engage in
unexplained activities, then just as quickly disappear.

And the unit conducting the tests probably didn't have any idea of
the
effect their project would have on the residents. After all,
these bases had been active for years. Surely the population was used
to seeing large numbers of blimps in the air?

The actual reaction must have caught Gen. Vandenberg and his staff
utterly dumbfounded. They were ready to account for the sudden
appearance of large numbers of blimps, but instead were confronted with
hundreds of reports of alien spacecraft. They carefully issued a
few non-commital statements and stepped back to asess the
situation.

THE BEGINNINGS OF COVER-UP

Partly in response to questioning from Congress and the media,
partly
out of curiosity, and partly to shut up his own officers, Vandenberg
authorized a study of the phenomenon. Project Sign, as it was
called, was conducted by the Technical Information Division of the Air
Material Command under the command of Lt.General Nathan Twining, who
would one day be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sign was
organized in December 1947, and published its findings one
year later.

The top-secret report, known as the Estimate
of the Situation, expressed
a guarded opinion that UFOs were real, and that they were probably of
extraterrestrial origin. We know that because Gen. Vandenberg (1)
rejected the report, thereby relieving the USAF from having to account
for its findings or having keep it as an official document (2)
declassifed the report, ensuring that the conclusions would be widely
known outside the project, and (3) ordered all copies of the report
destroyed, thus concealing the details of the study, allowing the Air
Force to disavow any information that may appeared in the the
report, and allowing the Air Force to claim any copies which came to
light later to be forgeries.

The newly-minted CIA must have been absolutely overjoyed. They
had their
first surveilance
aircraft, practically for free. Their new spy-craft was virtually
radar-proof, and best of
all,
if anyone did see one they thought it was a spaceship!

AFTERMATH

The unit which relieved the 412th in California had orders to
dismantle
the radar equipment, accompany it to New Mexico, and put it all back
together
near Albequerque. Then they were to man the new station and
provide radar coverage of Los
Alamos and -- you're going to love this -- Roswell AFB. But
that's another stroy.

To Be Continued...

Mystery Facility -- Powell Air Force Station [+ Updates]

2005-12-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

Anyone have any info on Powell AFS, near Lovell, Wyoming? It's supposed to be here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=lovell,+wy&ll=44.769406,-108.311806&spn=0.105357,0.409653&t=k&hl=en
but the only other place that mentions it is on a site advertising pet-care
http://www.alphataxservices.com/military/classifieds/pfc_directory.asp
which has a surprisingly complete US military base listing.

Originally found it on a map here:
http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/fedlands.html

Almost forgot to mention: that area is blacked-out on TerraServer/USGS.

Thanks for any info!

Powell AFS -- Update

Susanne at Lovell Chamber of Commerce (4 miles away) has apparently never heard of it. She advised me to contact Powell Chamber of Commerce.

Annette at Powell Chamber of Commerce confirmed that it DID exist, but "has been closed for several years". No other info.

Bob Johnson at USGS had the best response:
Thank you for your request.
Here is some information that might help you.
The USGS has no information on this feature.

I suspect Bob is a bob-bot. Maybe a human will contact me later.

Still waiting to hear from USAF (F.E. Warren AFB), and I have some further avenues to explore.

There's really nothing there except everything a Secret Giant Blimp Base needs:
good highways, dependable water supply, gobs of electrical power, an active rail line, several near-by airfields, population density near zero, and a ditch big enough to stash a 757. Oh, and lots of mines -- there's nothing like a good mining operation to disguise major renovations.

There's a small mountain just to the east, Little Sheep Mountain, owned -- if that's the right word -- by BLM, as is most of the land in that area (in fact, BLM controls just about everything in the county except PAFS). It's ringed by unworked mining claims, and would make a dandy place to put a hidden underground laboratory. Just to the east there are a number of nice deep strip mines, both working and inactive. The biggest ones look deep enough to drop in an aircraft carrier with space left for a few space shuttles.

Powell AFS -- Update

[Note: three posts at abovetopsecret and not a single response...not even a giggle from kiddies. wonder if this is a record?]

(Maybe if I claimed Little Sheep Mountain was connected to Dulce by a tunnel dug by atomic-powered Chrysler minivans...)

Anyway, I heard back from a Real Person at the USGS, cartographer Peg Rawson. Basically, they don't know where the information about Powell AFS came from; they're checking their records and may remove it from maps next spring.

Of course, I already have confirmation that the station was there, from the Powell Chamber of Commerce.

Starting 70 years ago Wyo Ben, a big mining outfit, began filing claims in Big Horn and Hot Springs counties of Wyoming. About 10 years ago they obtained claims all around the base of Little Sheep Mountain. They really started filing in earnest in...1947. From what I can tell most of the claims have never been worked. (Foil hat on) Many of the claims may be there to discourage prospecting in the area and keep other mining companies from having personnel there at, shall we say, awkward times. (Foil hat off) Also, they may have sold or otherwise transferred the claims to some other 3rd party; that's not clear just yet.

The interestring thing is that the claim map* for the Little Sheep area shows a non-mining, non-BLM area which exactly matches the outline of the seeminly non-existant Powell AFS.

*I just rechecked the map site; it's not responding this morning, mayby it's having a lie-in. If I can get a map downlaoded I'll post it later.

On the Ground at Kecksburg

2005-12-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

In late afternoon on December 9, 1965, an object crashed into a wooded creek bed in rural Pennsylvania near the small community of Kecksburg. For 40 years the event has been the subject of wonder and inquiry. Some people think it never happened, some think it was a secret government aircraft, others believe the object was an alien spaceship. I think the object was a nuclear warhead, and invite you to review the events of that December evening with that idea in mind.

If the object WAS a warhead, it would explain many things that happened than night:

-- The mission controllers would have already known there was a problem and set the recovery process in motion even before the object reached the ground. Recovery teams on the East Coast would have been alerted, and every Air Force commander along the flight path advised to stand by for special orders.
-- It's quite possible that state police and others would be contacted immediately after the event and asked to forward any reports of "meteors" landing in the area.
-- As soon as any reports of strange objects were received, Air Force personnel would have been dispatched from the nearest Air Force facility to verify the sighting.
-- Military security troops would have then been directed to the scene immediately. They would secure the site then hunker down and wait for the experts to arrive. Their orders would be simple: keep EVERYONE away from the site. To witnesses, it would be like they came out of nowhere and took over the whole community.
-- There were reports that the object was "sparking" and there was a strong smell of ozone. "Normal" satellites and space probes are designed for long-haul performance and need steady, stable power supplies, moderate current over long periods; a warhead, in contrast, needs lots of power delivered really fast. The Mk-6 and its associated mounting spacer were jammed with electronic equipment supplied by batteries capable of delivering hundred of amps of current.
-- The first on-scene experts to approach the object would have been a radiological team. As soon as they determined the extent of any radiation hazard, the recovery teams could move in.
-- The recovery teams would be directed by Navy officers.
-- Under normal circumstances, an Mk-6 RV is handled in a special cradle. There were cradles available on the coast, but would have been too bulky to transport to Kecksburg quickly. The recovery team would probably opt to use a standard flat-bed or drop-bed heavy equipment trailer, the type used to transport bulldozers, perhaps borrowed from the National Guard. The RV could then be welded to the metal trailer bed.
-- Since the cradle was not available, it would have been necessary to weld chains or metal hawsers on the RV to allow it to be winched out of the crash site. All this dissimilar metal welding would require arc or plasma welding, accounting for the blue flashes seen through the trees.
-- The winch would have been under enormous strain, as the warhead assembly weighed in at around 10,000 pounds. That alone would account for the "screams" heard from the forest that night.
-- The warhead would have been whisked to the nearest base with nuclear weapon handling capability. Wright-Patterson, Ohio could do the job nicely: they had experience with the W-53 bomb carried by the Titan II.
-- At Wright-Patterson the warhead would have been removed from the RV for transport, possibly to Sandia Labs, and the RV itself packed and shipped out for analysis by the National Labs and General Electric.

This is a theory which can explain the facts well, but the real test of any theory is its power to enable accurate predictions. Unfortunately, the projects surrounding this event have mostly been dismantled (but not completely, wink, wink), so future predictions are difficult to come by. However, as I started researching the Kecksburg event, I made a list of "predictions" which should have come to pass if the theory were a good one.

Here's a list I came up with; perhaps you can add to it:

-- There should be a ballistic missile radar tracking system along the flight path.
-- There should be some reason that Canadian early-warning radar didn't raise alerts. (We can assume American radar systems were compromised, or perhaps 'co-opted' is a better term.)
-- There should be a good reason that satellite-tracking systems didn't raise alerts.
-- There will be a correlation between UFO and/or fireball sightings and these tests that I think were happening.
-- There has to be a place for the warheads to be recovered at the end of the flight path.
-- The desert Southwest should be littered with scrap metal from all those rocket boosters.
-- There should be evidence of undocumented missile tests.
-- There should be evidence of missiles launched from the west coast eastward.
-- There should be discrepancies in the reports of the number of Titan missiles produced.
-- UFO/fireball report distribution along the flight path will not correspond well with population density and/or traffic patterns (ie, highways).
-- There will be strange artificial debris found along the flight path.
-- There will be "torpedo" recovery systems which the US Navy doesn't like to talk about.
-- There would be other incidents like Kecksburg and the Great Lakes Fireball along the flight path.
-- There will be even stranger UFO sightings along the flight path, especailly near or beyond the touch-down point.
-- Evidence will eventually surface of top-secret missile tests which the US could not afford to allow the Soviet Union to witness.
-- There has to be a way to prevent anyone from watching these missiles being fired off.
-- There will be evidence of a an ongoing search for fragments of this missile and others in the test series.

Most of these "post-predictions" have, in fact, happened.

Countdown to Kecksburg: The California Launch

2005-12-15T08:07:00.001-08:00

Vandenberg Air Force Base, December 9, 1965. It's just after one o'clock on a peaceful winter afternoon. A Thor-Agena missile sits near the beach on a launch pad known only as 75-3-5. Suddenly, a terrible roar tears through the quiet and on a tail of fire and smoke the missile rises, carrying a top-secret surveillance satellite skyward.

The Thor is accompanied by a number of smaller missiles, sounding rockets, whose avowed purpose is to gather meteorological data pertaining to the launch. They have another mission, unhidden but somewhat less publicized: to confuse any foreign observers who may be cruising the coastal waters, especially those with radar equiped "fishing" boats. The sounding rockets have yet another purpose, one which is considered top-secret: to help hide the OTHER missile which is rising from another launch site just a mile inland.

This other missile lifts into the sky unnoticed, the thunder of its passing mingling with the scream of the Thor. It is a Titan II, its own flame almost invisible against the open blue sky and it leaves behind no billowing smoke trail to betray its path. Many local residents of nearby Lompoc and Santa Maria turn and look up into the early afternoon sun, shielding their eyes from the glare, to watch these mighty sisters take flight. But all eyes are focused on the bright star which is the Thor; most never notice the Titan at all, and those that do will puzzle for a moment, then consider it, perhaps, a mirage, a mere reflection.

As the Thor arcs southward toward the Channel Islands and Baja, the Titan rises near-vertical, then turns eastward over California's high desert. Just over a minute and a half into the flight and around fifty miles downrange the first stage booster falls away, its momentum carring it back to earth some 200 miles from the launch point, into the junkyard known as China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, where tactical missles are tested and drones are shot from the sky almost daily and an extra piece of metallic debris will not be noticed.

The second stage throttles down to silence about two minutes later. Under other circumstances the second stage and warhead would now be travelling upward about twenty degrees above horizontal, but on this day they leave the atmosphere at a steepeer angle, closer to 50 degrees: this flight is to be shorter than the 9000 nautical miles the Titan is designed to cover. Since the second stage is shut down early nearly half of its fuel is left unburned.

For over twenty minutes the upper half of the Titan coasts. During this time the second stage is supposed separate from its payload, and, using its own manuevering thrusters, move away from the warhead it carries, turning to align itself so that during reentry it will burn up completely. But something is wrong, very wrong.

The payload has failed to separate from the booster. Now, 30 minutes into the flight, the upper stage and warhead enter the atmosphere together north of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Within seconds the strain of reentry ruptures the booster's fuel and oxydizer tanks, and as the missile nears Toledo, Ohio, a tremendous explosion rips it apart. What's left of the booster is blown to the northeast; the more massive warhead is deflected less from its original path but still it misses its target by a few hundred miles, gliding slightly south of east toward the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania.

It's late and I have to work for a living. Next: a fresh look at the Great Lakes Fireball of December 9, 1965, and the events at Kecksburg from a new perspective.

Countdown to kecksburg: The Fireball of December 9, 1965

2005-12-15T08:07:00.000-08:00

This is not the story of the Kecksburg Incident, as such. Instead, it's a fresh look at the Great Lakes Fireball of December 9, 1965, an event which was witnessed by spectators in at least six states, and that has a number of mysteries in its own right. It is still just theory; there are many blanks to fill in, and probably some outright mistakes.

It's around 4:30 PM, a warm Saturday in December. Many people are outside today, enjoying the unseasonably mild afternoon. Others are headed inside, getting ready for dinner: we certainly don't want to miss the premier of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" tonight!

Then, without warning, the sky lights up. Heads turn, eyes open wide: a fantastic fireball has appeared in the sky, for a few seconds becoming the brightest object in the world.

Some early reports have the unknown object going west, others, to the north. Newspapers reported confidently that the falling star appeared over Canada, travelling southeast across Michigan and directly over Detroit. Sky & Telescope would tell its readers the object was flying due east, south of Detroit, possibly plunging into Lake Erie. It seemed like thousands of witnesses each saw this thing going in a different direction.

Almost immediately, astronomers from the US and Canada, realizing the opportunity presented by the sheer number of sightings, began interviewing the populace, and eventually put together a single coherent picture of the event. The direction was primarily to the north, across Lake Erie and southern Ontario, from central Ohio toward -- and possibley into -- Lake St. Clair. The exact bearing wouldn't be known for several years. And although nobody in the scientific community, it seems, bothered to explain it to the population, it became clear that the disparate views of the trajectory were primarily due to a particularly steep entry angle, near 50 degrees.

Under these conditions, a viewer in Detroit might think the object was travelling to the northeast. Near Toronto, the same object could appear to be travelling due west. Observers on the north shore of Lake Erie might see the thing glide alomst horizontally northward. In central and southern Ohio, it seemed to drop straight down. A few select citizens of Ontario, directly in the path of the oncoming fireball, would have seen it float almost motionless in the sky.

Witnesses in southwestern Pennsylvania should have seen the object moving from their upper-left, down and to the right, and would most probably have interpreted the path close to its true direction, or perhaps as travelling to the northwest. Still, there were a few reports from that area which didn't fit with the rest. These people insisted they saw a glowing ball travelling to the south, and some even claimed it maneuvered, changing direction several times. Their accounts of the time of the sighting didn't jibe with other reports, either, some saying the incident occured over several minutes; the other hundreds of reports told of an event of just a few seconds, clustering around 4 seconds.

In 1967, astronomers Von Del Chamberlain and David J. Krause published an analysis of the path of the fireball (The Fireball of December 9, 1965 -- Part I) in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (JRASC). Their article put precise numbers on the trajectory of the object, relying particularly on two photographs of the smoke trail by photographers at two different vantage points. Even though there was a glaring typographical error in the article, and several questionable assumptions, it has been gleefully cited by UFO sceptics as a perfect example of science over superstition (even though it seems none of them actually checked the figures independently, because the originally published coordinates had the object shooting UPWARD at Mach 45. For the record, let me be the first sceptic to point out that correct coordinates were published later in the same Journal. The original is available from NASA ADS, the corrections here).

In order to complete their study of the meteor, and to determine a reasonable orbit, Mssrs. Krause and Von Chamberlain had to estimate the velocity of the object. Inexplicably, they chose to ignore their own careful interviews, which had indicated a period of about four seconds, and rely instead on the estimates by the two photographers, which averaged out at two seconds. I say "inexplicable" because the astromomers failed to mention in their article that one of the photographers, Richard Champine, was driving south in afternoon traffic on Interstate 75 during the event. Champine photographed the event with a 4x5 camera, probably a SpeedGraphic, not the easiest of cameras to manage. The other photographer, Lowell Wright, had been photographing sunsets at a nearby lake; I would guess his back was to the fireball when it appeared, and his head down, as he was using a Rolliflex camera. In any case, the estimate of the duration was obtained from two people who definitely had their attention elsewhere at the time of the event.

That same Sky & Telescope article from February 1966 gives Champine's estimate as about ONE second, and quotes Chamberlain as saying "the duration of the meteor was about four seconds". Where did two seconds come from?

If you apply a four-second estimate to the event, you'll get a a velocity under 7 kps (around 14000 mph). That's just at the bottom limit for a low-earth-orbit satellite -- the Shuttle moves at about 7.5 kph (16775 mph) -- and much slower than the normal geocentric velocity of meteors: 10-70 kps (22000-156000 mph). The Air Force said it could not possibly be a satellite, and it was coming down too steeply to be a satellite, so it had to be a meteor; ergo, the velocity had to be closer to 10 kps. In the end, an estimate of two seconds brings the apparent velocity to 14.5 kph, which is a nice number for a meteor and produces an orbit which traces back to just beyond Mars.

If they had stuck to the 4 second estimate, they would have derived a speed which was almost exactly that of an ICBM warhead: the Titan II was designed to reach a maximum velocity of 7.1 kps (16000 mph). And a Titan on a normal 9000 mile flight came down at about 20 degrees; at 3500 miles, the angle would be between 50 and 60 degrees.

There were a couple of other omisions I found uncomfortable, like the exact positions of the photographers. I always wondered why those coordinates were not included, to allow independant confirmation of the figures. (Thanks to the internet, however, I believe I have re-located the exact spots the two gentlemen were standing, and was able to confirm the trajectory to my own satisfaction.)

One further mystery surrounds this article: There are several references to The Fireball of December 9, 1965 -- Part II by authors Dr. J.A.V. Douglas and Henry Lee, which supposedly also appeared in JRASC. But Part II has disappeared completely.

In the end, those few strange reports from Pensylvania were discounted, put down to hysteria and simple misunderstanding -- but the oddball witnesses were actually correct. As pointed out in another thread, there were TWO fireballs that night.

What the folks in and around Kecksburg saw that night was a Mark Six Reentry Vehicle (MK-6 RV), manufactured by General Electric, along with its so-called "mounting spacer", and about eighteen inches of the second-stage and transition ring of a Titan II ICBM. Once that's known, the most fantastic parts of this story are not only believable, but nearly inevitible.

For instance, during the excitement which was triggered by the meteor, several people reported finding strange metal fragments. Aluminum foil was found on the southern shore of Lake St. Clair, and in forested areas north of Detroit. An Air Force spokesman explained that the substance was "just" chaff, used by WWII bombers for jamming enemy radar. The officer was undoubtedly unaware that US nuclear warheads did carry chaff -- it was Top-Secret, Eyes-Only -- and that the US was agressively testing its use for the Minuteman missile series.

As for the insistance of some witnesses in Pensylvania that the the object turned and maneuvered: they must have been mistaken, the skeptics said. Meteors don't maneuver, and neither do falling satellites. (One possiblity, a Russian space probe which reentered earlier that same day over Canada, had been eliminated from the list.) However, it was another closely held secret at the time that the MK-6 COULD maneuver: the warhead itself had alignment thrusters, as did the "spacer" it sat on. Futhermore, the spacer, normally shown in diagrams as a simple ring of alluminum alloy, was packed with electronic equipment and contained sixteen large ejection tubes, like mortars, normally fitted with flares, but capable of holding and explosivly deploying a variety of "penetration aids".

Postscript:

For several years intense searches were performed to locate the fragments of the December 9 Fireball; despite a very good idea of the end-point of the meteor's path, no meteoroic fragments were ever found. That's understandable if there was not a meteor. There were a few metal pieces seen along the same shore where chaff was found, but were dismissed; the area has an industrial history, including two closely-spaced rail lines.

Again, it's too late. Tomorrow, the events on the ground at Kecksburg.

First Post

2005-11-28T08:55:00.000-08:00

Kecksberg Revisited

When the latest Keckberg docudrama hit SciFi Channel I watched it with my wife, waiting in breathless anticipation for The Truth to be Finally Revealed, regailing her with inside information ("Look, look: this is what I told you about!") -- only, they missed it. No great revalation, no Truth At Last. hubris alert: I already knew what it was, of course and have since the first time I heard of the events, back in the late '60s.

However, since Bryant Gumbel didn't confirm my suspeicions, I knew that I couldn't possibly be right. So I started researching, to convince myself I was totally, absolutely wrong and possibly delusional.

Problem is, every time I thought up a new objection, I found evidence that I was wrong about being wrong.

The object that reportedly fell in Kecksberg on December 9, 1965, couldn't have possibly been an atomic bomb. Specifically, it couldn't have been a MK-6 RV carrying a functional W-53 9-megaton, high-yield two-stage thermonuclear warhead. That would be crazy, right?

It's just not the sort of thing the government would keep classified for 40 years, is it? I mean, we've already admitted that we tried (with some success) to steal a Soviet missile sub. We've admitted to eavesdropping on the Soviet Navy. Dropping a nuke on our own citizens is not too bad a thing to admit, is it?

So, what's wrong with the theory? I've been looking into it for two years now, and will be sharing the data as I'm able to get it sorted out and into presentable shape, but for now:

What did I forget?? What piece of evidence could queer the whole deal and prove that we didn't almost fry a sizable piece of the population back in '65?

For starters look at this picture and and compare it to the descriptions of the Kecksberg object. In particular, imagine what would happen if the RV and spacer ring didn't separate cleanly, and the transition ring and part of the second-stage oxidizer tank accompanied the warhead to ground.