The Kecksburg UFO

On December 9, 1965, a fireball crossed the sky and witnesses in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, said an object came down in the woods near town. Searchers reported finding nothing; Skeptoid's Brian Dunning says the fireball was a natural meteor.

Witnesses in Kecksburg, a small town some 40 miles from Pittsburgh, to the southeast, said an object crashed into nearby woods. Writing for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at Penn State in 2010, Matthew Dinkel says the US Army treated the reports seriously at the time: the woods were roped off and armed men sent back townspeople who came to look. The Army reported that its search turned up nothing, which witnesses dispute. Dinkel adds that many now think witnesses saw an optical illusion and nothing could have landed there.

Wikipedia says state police and Air Force staff searched the woods and found nothing, and that a later edition of the Tribune-Review carried the headline "Searchers Fail to Find Object".

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid (2019) says a hypersonic bolide crossed the sky on December 9, 1965, late in the day. Professional astronomers observed it, and their reports were gathered into a paper for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. In Dunning's view the evidence points to an ordinary meteor.

In 2007 the Associated Press reported that NASA, after a fight in federal court, had agreed to look through its archives again for records on the Kecksburg incident. The Guardian reported that year that NASA public liaison officer Steve McConnell had conceded that two boxes of records from that time had gone missing.