It’s the bewitching time of year and Western Pennsylvanians know the region has seen its share of supposed UFOs and Bigfoot sightings for decades to add to the ghostly mix of the season.
UFOs
Independent film director Cody Knotts premiered “Kecksburg” Sept. 12 to a crowd of more than 1,000 at Uniontown’s State Theater. Often called Pennsylvania’s Roswell, the Dec. 12, 1965, mystery when an acorn-shaped object allegedly crashed has never been made into a full-length film.
Kecksburg locals never exploited that incident, a far cry from Roswell, N.M., where a reputed 1946 UFO crash became a multimillion-dollar business and an international believer’s nirvana.
Southwestern Pennsylvania underwent what UFO researchers call a “flap” in 1973 and 1974. Hundreds of objects that did not match anything man-made were reported seen flying low over communities. It was the shape and its movement that residents say startled them, and the fact that the objects made no sound at all.
Recall that the federal government at that time claimed it was no longer interested in UFO reports after the Air Force’s Project Blue Book closed in 1969. Fast forward to December 2017 when The New York Times published a story by reporter Ralph Blumenthal, Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper and author Leslie Kean. Featured in the piece was Luis Elizondo, former Pentagon director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Elizondo claimed the federal government was funding UFO research all along and he supervised it.
“We made a point of citing only fully identified and authoritative on-the-record sources, which is why our story changed the paradigm,” Blumenthal says. “We went through a lot of vetting by editors at the Times, so that part wasn’t easy, but it paid off in credibility for our reporting, including a follow-up in May 2019 that revealed new encounters between UFOs and Navy pilots.”
Elizondo left the Pentagon in 2017 after “excessive secrecy and internal opposition” and joined guitarist-rocker Tom DeLonge of Blink 182 band fame to form To The Stars Academy. Their message? “UFOs are real and we’re after the proof.”
History Channel recently aired the first season of DeLonge’s series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.” Season two is coming soon.
BIGFOOT
Longtime Pennsylvania UFO researcher Stan Gordon of Greensburg recalled the point in Pennsylvania’s history when the impossible met the insane — UFOs meet Bigfoot.
“At that time,” Gordon says, “UFO researchers did not want to associate UFO sightings with Bigfoot encounters and vice versa.”
However, continuing over the years and even in recent months these strange cases continue to be reported. Researchers from both fields are now showing more interest in these unusual accounts and some are asking the same question that Gordon did so many years ago: “Where are the bodies?”
“It wasn’t enough that we were receiving UFO reports,” Gordon says. “(There were) hundreds of them in 1973 and 1974. Many of those were detailed observations of large structured objects that were low to the ground and, in some cases, pacing cars and hovering over roadways.”
Detailed in his 2010 book, “Silent Invasion,” Gordon recounted in great detail those many reports of both UFOs moving low over Pennsylvania and the Bigfoot creatures seen on the ground.
GHOSTS
Pennsylvania has no shortcomings with haunted locations. Every community has a story or two or three. Local writer Ed Kelemen has published numerous books on regional ghostly accounts, including “Pennsylvania’s Haunted Route 30,” “The Haunting of Pennsylvania’s Churches and Cemeteries” and “Pennsylvania’s Haunted Railroads.”
“Central and Western Pennsylvania have a rich and varied history,” Kelemen says. “The strong emotions experienced by the Native Americans, farmers, railroaders, those who worked in industry building this country, and those who perished in the many wars that took place on Pennsylvania soil all contribute to both reports of hauntings as well as folklore. For these reasons, the region is rife with reports of hauntings.
“As far as themes go, I have noticed that roughly 95 percent of verified instances of hauntings are residual in nature and only about 5 percent are active or intelligent hauntings where you can interact with the spirit.”
