--------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was taken from the OMNI service on America On-Line. I
thought it was interesting. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Antimatter

(Vol. 15, No. 11, September 1993, p. 75)


UFO UPDATE: UFO buffs may be unwitting pawns in an elaborate government
charade

For decades, UFO buffs have delighted themselves with tales of
crashed saucers and government cover-ups of recovered aliens and
ships. They have dedicated themselves to "digging out the truth" and
"exposing the government's deceptions." Now, in a delicious irony, a
famous UFO case may actually involve a real U. S. government cover-up,
but UFO buffs are on the wrong side. Instead of exposing the truth,
they may be unwitting pawns in the deception.

The case in question involves the alleged crash of the
so-called ``Kecksburg UFO,'' recently featured in magazines and even
reenacted on TV. The acorn- shaped object supposedly fell to the ground
in western Pennsylvania on December 9, 1965. As the story goes, Air
Force search teams cordoned off the wooded area and hauled a large
object away. It was later reportedly seen at the Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

One suggested identity for the mystery intruder was the Soviet Kosmos-96 satellite, which actually did fall back into the atmosphere
that day. but according to Air Force spokesmen, that craft had
plummeted 12 hours earlier over another part of the planet.

It was a shame, of course, because Kosmos-96, a failed Venus
probe whose booster had blown up in parking orbit, would have been a
wonderful UFO. The reentry capsule, incorporating the latest Soviet
missile warhead technology, was shaped like a squashed spheroid with a sliced-off top--in other words, like an acorn.

That's why in May of 1991, the Pittsburgh Press decided to verify the
Air Force claims on its own. Toward that end, reporters obtained
official space-tracking data from the archives of the North American
Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountains, Colorado. The decades-old data
finally arrived in the form of eight "snapshots" of the satellite's
orbital position. The last snapshot, when projected forward in space
and time by a leading amateur satellite watcher who doesn't want his
name revealed, seemed to confirm the official Air Force account.

But going on a hunch and tapping my own expertise in space operation
and satellite sleuthing, I decided to check the data myself. The
released tracking data couldn't be positively identified with specific
pieces of the failed probe. It could have been the jettisoned rocket
stage or a large piece of space junk. The probe itself could have been
headed off toward Kecksburg.

But why in the world would our government lie? In the 1960s, U.S.
military intelligence agencies interested in enemy technology were
eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris they could
find. International law required that debris be returned to the country
of origin. But hardware from Kosmos-96, with its special
missile-warhead shielding, would have been too valuable to give back.

Hard-line skeptics still doubt that anything at all landed in
Pennsylvania. Robert Young, an investigator from Harrisburg, keeps
finding new holes in the claims of alleged witnesses. "I'm now more
convinced than ever that nothing came down in Kecksburg," he says. And
arch skeptic Philip J. Klass attributes the poor NORAD data "to
foul-ups, not cover-ups."

But those of us who've studied the relationship between U.S. military intelligence and the former Soviet Union still wonder. After all, what
better camouflage than to let people think the fallen object was not a
Soviet probe but rather a flying saucer? The Russians would never
suspect, and the Air Force laboratories could examine the specimen at
leisure. And if suspicion lingered, why UFO buffs could be counted on
to maintain the phony cover story, protecting the real truth.--James
Oberg

Editor's note: James Oberg, a veteran space-secrets sleuth, is author
of UNCOVERING SOVIET DISASTERS.

(p. 76)
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