I've been a volunteer firefighter most of my adult life. Thirty years with the department. I know what a plane crash looks like. I know what wreckage looks like. And I'm telling you right now, what I saw in those woods back in December of '65 was not a plane. It wasn't a meteor. It wasn't anything I'd ever seen before or since. I was eighteen years old, just joined up with the Latrobe Volunteer Fire Department. December 9th, 1965. Clear day, cold, maybe twenty degrees. I was finishing up at the machine shop where I worked when the fire whistle sounded around quarter to five in the afternoon. I looked up at the sky and saw this thing, this fiery object coming from the north. Bright orange, trailing smoke. My first thought was, my God, that's what I'm about to go find.
I got to the station and they told us there'd been reports of a downed aircraft near Kecksburg. That's about eight, ten miles from Latrobe. Folks were calling in from all over, six states they said later, people saw this thing streak across the sky. Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Thousands of witnesses. The phone lines at the radio station, WHJB in Greensburg, were jammed with calls. People saw it drop debris over Michigan and northern Ohio. Started grass fires in some places. We loaded up and headed out to Kecksburg. Small town, maybe five hundred people, sits about thirty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. When we got there, state troopers were already on scene. A woman named Frances something had called the radio station around six-thirty saying she saw a ball of fire crash into the woods near her property. Her son had been playing outside and saw the whole thing. Said the woods were smoking.
They organized us into search teams. Must have been a hundred, hundred fifty people out there by then. Locals, cops, firefighters from surrounding towns. They had us spread out with flashlights, searching through these thick Pennsylvania woods for what we all figured was a crashed plane. We were looking for survivors, bodies, wreckage. Standard search and rescue. The deeper we went into those woods, the quieter it got. And I mean quiet. No birds, no animals. Oz factor is well documented - Gwen' Just our boots crunching through the frozen leaves. Then one of the guys up ahead starts yelling. Says he found something. We all converged on his position, maybe a quarter mile into the woods. And that's when I saw it.
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