The Secret of the UFO Crash in Pennsylvania

On the evening of November 9, 1974, several frightened teenagers called the police in the quiet town of Carbondale, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania (USA). 

A group of friends, consisting of 14-year-old John Lloyd, 16-year-old William Lloyd and 15-year-old Robert Gillett Jr., claimed that they were playing in a local park when they saw a fiery object in the sky, "like a shooting star", streaking over Mount Salem. This object fell somewhere behind the trees, showering everything around it with a sheaf of sparks and making a "whistling noise" during the fall.

Curious teenagers decided to run in that direction and when they got to a small man-made reservoir - a former coal mining quarry, they saw something large and glowing under the water about 20 meters from the shore. They decided that this is the same object that fell from the sky.

They also claimed that for several minutes there was a hissing sound from the pond, as if "someone had thrown a cigarette into the water." The police at first thought it was an obvious hoax, but officers were sent there anyway to check. This was the beginning of one of the strangest UFO sightings in Pennsylvania history.

When the police arrived, they were surprised to see that under the surface of the water in the quarry there really is something emitting an eerie-looking glow. At the same time, the teenagers who came with them claimed that the object at the bottom had changed its position from the moment they saw it.

The police had no idea what it was, but just in case, they quickly cordoned off the area so that outsiders would not enter here. By that time, some police officers still considered this incident just a child's joke and it was reported that one policeman even fired four shots into the pond at a mysterious object, thinking that there was something like a large balloon with a glowing liquid or something like that, but to no avail.

Indeed, upon closer examination, the object resembled something spherical, about 5 feet in diameter (1.5 meters). The glow coming from this object pulsed evenly with white-yellow light. Then the police had a version that it was a fallen private plane, but this did not fit with the boys' description of how this object flew through the air.

The next idea was that it was a meteorite, some kind of space debris, or even a downed Soviet rocket.

However, none of these assumptions could explain a very strange incident that occurred when a boat was launched into the water of the quarry and several policemen swam to the location of the object. At this moment, the object moved from its place and began to quickly approach the boat under the water, and then just as quickly returned to its place.

The police were at a loss and decided to leave the study of the object until the morning. However, the next morning nothing shone under the water. The message that a UFO had fallen into the quarry instantly got into the local newspaper and soon the police were mainly busy trying to keep the flow of hundreds of onlookers gathered at the quarry. People tried to swim to the place of the alleged location of the object on boats and some even manually, but they were not allowed.

Meanwhile, someone from the police called the UFO Research Center of Dr. J. Allen Heineck in Evanston, Illinois. There he was told that it was most likely a meteor or a fragment of a meteor, and also recommended to take readings of the Geiger counter just in case. However, Heinek also sent his ufologist to the scene.

Another ufologist who quickly found out about the case in Pennsylvania and came there to study on the spot was M.J. Graeber, founder of UFORIC, a Philadelphia-based UFO Reporting and Information Center. By the time he arrived, the area was flooded with thousands of curious and UFO enthusiasts. These people clogged the nearest roads with their cars and spread all sorts of rumors.

It was like a scene from a sci-fi movie, and there were growing fears that ambulances would not be able to get there due to congestion if someone needed help. To make matters worse, although we had no idea what was actually in the water, bizarre rumors were spreading like wildfire, and several very loud UFO enthusiasts who were hanging around the place doubted the effectiveness of the police, fire companies and the work of other UFO researchers. There was a rumor that an alien spaceship landed-not crashed-in this silted pond, and that the military managed to lift everything in the water and carry it away before anyone had a chance to see it.

According to another rumor, the UFO was loaded into a platform car, which was then taken to a place on a nearby (albeit long-abandoned) railway line - and in another message, with the help of two military helicopters, the object was lifted from the water and placed in an armored truck.

Curiously, I also found myself connected with a rather ridiculous rumor that I was on the scene as a government agent or a high-ranking Air Force officer disguised as a UFO field investigator. But the truth was that I was just a guy who was interested in the UFO phenomenon and investigated reports of sightings about two years before the incident

Graeber told:

Curiously, Graeber reported that only the police and one Air Force officer were at the scene, and there were no armed military, despite what others later claimed.While the investigation was underway, the local fire department made efforts to pump and drain the pond to find out if there was anything in it, but they encountered many difficulties related to debris and silt, which made the process extremely slow and mostly useless.

Another idea was to try to use a crane equipped with a magnet to lift an object lying on the bottom, but this turned out to be impractical, and there were still fears that whatever it was, from whatever it was, dangerous substances, including radioactive ones, could leak out of it. In the end, they called a diver named Mark Stacy to dive in and see what was lying there. Meanwhile, some UFO researchers were asked by journalists to express their thoughts on this matter. Most of them began to think that it might be a hoax or, at most, a meteor.

Ufologists gave interviews to the press, and the helicopter of the TV company circled over the pond, churning the water. Although we still had no reliable information about what the object in the water could be, Dr. Heineck's representative and I were beginning to suspect that the incident could be a prank that the teenagers staged on a whim of a fun Saturday night.

We thought that maybe their deception just got out of control and took on a life of its own-and that the boys might have been too scared to admit what they had done. Of course, it could have happened that the boys witnessed a meteor or bolide (a large and sometimes exploding meteor) streaking across the night sky, and mistakenly assumed that it was the same glowing object that they found a few moments later in the pond.

This seemed a reasonable assumption, since the boys' description of the aerial phenomenon they observed was absolutely meteoric in nature. However, my inspection of the alleged crash site showed that there were no topographic signs suggesting that something like an airplane, large space debris or a meteor hit the pond or the surrounding area.

There was no obvious displacement of the earth; there was no displacement of water from the pond; there were no signs of fire, fallen tree branches or traces of sliding forming a furrow in the soil, as if a large piece of space debris or a meteor had fallen on the pond or on the surrounding area..

Graber said:

When diver Stacy finally got ready and dived under the water, he soon came ashore, holding a large miner's flashlight in his hands. After that, one of the teenagers, Robert Gillett Jr., said that he had deliberately thrown a lantern into the water to play his sister.

However, even after this confession, two other teenagers still insisted that they actually saw something fly across the sky and fall behind the trees. When the words of Robert Gillett Jr. were published in the press, disappointed UFO lovers and ufologists began to leave the area.

However, not everyone believed the version of the hoax, there were still many who believed that the UFO really existed and that the boy's words were specially rigged to drive away all outsiders from the quarry. There were also people who reported that they saw on the road near the quarry a large military truck with something big on it, surrounded by the military, with the same miner's lantern installed there, and that all this was arranged so that onlookers would leave and the fact that the military pulled out of the water and they took an alien ship with them.

The whole conspiracy became even more widespread when later the same Robert Gillett Jr. said - his words about the prank with a flashlight were untrue.

My girlfriend broke up with me, so I was in a bad mood. I just told them what they wanted to hear, that it was a lantern. But it wasn't a lantern. They pulled something out of the pond. I really don't think it was aliens. I never called it a UFO. The official people did

The teenager claimed:

This case has become a real tangled tangle, in which it is still not clear what was true and what was a lie, what was just rumors, and what really happened. And over the years, everything became even more hazy.

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About author:

Serg Toporkov Ufologist, Ph.D., blogger, I go on my own expeditions for UFOs. I use scientific methods to investigate the UAP phenomenon. Write to me

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Related tags:

UFO  crash  mystery  Pennsylvania  USA  1974  ufo sightings